By Way of Introduction…

Into the light, Paris, 2024 ©Doug Bruns

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Let’s get started…

I am a photographer. But then the world is full of photographers. Well, perhaps the world is full of people who take pictures, not all of them, indeed, most of them, are not photographers. They are people who take pictures. I applaud that. We are visual animals living in a visual world and we are sharing our personal visions at an unprecedented rate in world history. By some accounts there are more than 3 billion images uploaded daily. And that does not include video. As a means of expression, the pictures we take and share are little artifacts of our existence, shards of our being. Every photograph is something of an autobiography, an idea I will explore in a future post.

But I am, as I said, a photographer. By definition, that means that I too take pictures. So how is it that I call myself a photographer when I am simply doing what untold millions of other people are also doing, people who don’t, by the way, call themselves photographers. And that, friends, is what I want to explore going forward.

And secondly…

You may already call yourself a photographer. Great, we have that in common. A self-label give us a place of reference. It says we have come to a degree of self knowledge. That is helpful. A poet knows that he or she is a poet and the practice of the craft follows accordingly. So let’s just keep it simple. We are photographers and as photographers we have a craft that we practice. Some of us have become so proficient at our craft that others call us artists. Perhaps we even call ourselves and artist. This too is a notion I want to explore going forward. How that happens is a mixture of magic and very hard consistent work. We’re going to talk about that too.

Where to go from here, the introduction?

I’ll be feeling my way along, figuring it out as I go, but here’s my game plan. With each post (maybe 2 or 3 a month) I will select an image, maybe one of my images, maybe not, or perhaps a piece of art, maybe even the occasional line of poetry and write a little about it, perhaps discover a grain of wisdom or knowledge that we can try out in our own practice.

Perhaps with enough effort and time, even I will figure out what I do and why I do it!

Thanks for reading.