Verbs

One of the long-standing debates on the periphery of photography is whether a photograph is "taken" or "made". The connotations include the amount of intentionality in the act, whether it's passive or creative, and the role of authorship, among other issues, including a certain level of pretension. I cared about this for a while, before my concern about this kind of concern faded out.

So it's with a certain amount of surprise that I find my language choices changing after all these years. Increasingly I'm just skipping the word "photographed" completely. Instead I've shifted to saying "recorded" – it's device-agnostic, so it works whether I'm using a camera, scanner, or microphone. It emphasizes that the initial capture is a matter of selecting parts of the world that I want to work with later, and just the beginning of the creative process that doesn't really end until the work is finalized and published.

I haven't yet tried saying "recorded" instead of "photographed" in conversation with a photographer, but eventually I'll be brave enough.


Comments, questions, thoughts? You can find me on Twitter or via e-mail.