Finding Your Own Voice in Your Photographic Practice

NOTE: The following article is a reflective answer to a question I've been asking about my photographic practice. I wrote it as an introduction to Suka Suka, an eclectic photo blog of mine which I recently lauched (see the side bar link). The question is:

What kind of photographs will you be making if you had no audience in mind?

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There aren't many things that I can say as convincingly as this: "Photography is my passion."

I have been taking pictures since I had my first camera, when I was twelve years old. The fascination with the visual world and the passion to explore it felt so strongly then. It still does today. I'm still taking pictures as 'ferociously' as - if not more than - I was back then.

After all these years, my understanding of the visual world has of course evolved. The curiosity-driven and carefree approach of the beginning years of my love affair with photography have since then been interspersed with serious efforts in understanding it. I began to let the technical nooks and crannies of photography take hold of me. They even at one time had taken the best part of my relationship with photography. My knowledge and skills improved significantly. But I was also beginning to get estranged from the carefree exploratory spirit I once had. My approach to photography became stifled with technical concerns.

I became restless and questioning. I could make technically fine photographs, but I was not happy. They looked good but didn't feel as good. I gave birth to them, with my eyes and hands, but they looked like orphans. I missed the technically imperfect pictures that I made with joy and felt right.

Then I began to explore some more. Taking pictures that I like, some. Taking assignments from others, some. Doing ideal projects so that I could find meanings in my photographic practice, some.

Over the course of doing these things, I began to realize that it was in making the instinctual pictures - pictures that I mentally, emotionally, and spiritually had connection with - that I found joy with. And it was pictures that I made in this way that felt right. They spoke 'me'. There's me in them.

I was ecstatic in this realization. I had eventually rediscovered 'the voice', my photographic voice, that I had forgotten and silenced in the name of technical perfection!

The right pictures that I make are varied in subject matters, diverse in their technical considerations, and may or may not be of interest to others. In these concerns, they are eclectic. But they do have one thing in common: they were made instinctually, often at the spur of the moment in response to a visual stimuli. It is this kind of pictures that I share with you here.

SUKA SUKA is an Indonesian word that means more or less 'the way one likes it'. It is the name I have chosen for this photo blog of mine.

Types of Photo Blogs

Written by Eki Qushay Akhwan

In the previous post, I hinted that there were photo blogs that, in my opinion, did not qualify as photo blogs because they contained too few photographs and were saturated instead by ads. The namesake and the few photos contained in this kind of “photo blog” are, in my opinion, just a masquarade for the real thing, which is to host ads.

Anyone who are well-acquited with blogging of course know that the internet is not a pristine place where only good things can be found. There are junks, recycles, and second hand items, just like in the real world. Everything is eventually up to us, users and consumers, to pick and choose what we want to have – stone or gold, junks or things of value.

Intelligent choice, of course, can only be made if we know how to filter out the bad from the good. This article is trying to highlight the different types of photo blogs to help you make the choice about which type(s) of photo blogs to look for to satisfy your needs, which can be of serious purposes – like finding inspirations for your budding interests in photography or satifying your thirst for aesthetically stimulating visuals – or less serious aims like making connections and just browsing for fun.

Personal and casual-sharing photo blogs
The personal and casual-sharing photo blogs are photo blogs whose aim is to share photos with those you know, e.g. family members, friends, and colleagues. The subjects of the photos in this kind of photo blogs are usually the person(s) who owns the blog, those who close to them (family, friends, colleagues), and anything related to threir activities. The theme of this kind of photo blog is usually documentary. The picture quality, technically and aesthetically, is generally not of the main concern as the pictures are meant to be shared with those who are related to the pictures.

Serious/Professional Photo Blogs
Serious/professional photo blogs lies at the other end of the continuum of the personal and casual-sharing photo blogs. The owners of this kind of photo blogs are usually professional photographers or those who have keen interests in photography (i.e. photo enthusiasts). Their purposes for creating the blogs are usually to display or exhibit their portfolio, share their works with those who have similar interests, and/or offer/sell their works. Pictures in this kind of blog are generally of high quality both technically and aesthetically. Most of the time, they are also inpirational in the choice of their subjects, angles, and other techical and non-technical aspects. I love to stop by this kind of photo blogs to get some inspirations, and this is the kind of photo blogs you should be looking for if you are serious about your photography.

There are a number of sites that collect photo blogs like this, such as photocommunity, photobloggit, coolphotoblogs, etc. Places like this are a good point to start a photo blog walk and find serious photo blogs.

Documentary, information, and news photo blogs
Photos have undoubtedly become inseparable part in the dissemination of news and information. This kind of photo blogs does not present photos for the exclusive sake visual enjoyment, but also present information. World class magazines and news organizations like the National Geographic, TIME, Magnum Photo Agency have photo blogs or photo related pages of this kind. They have not only pictures of great quality, but also pictures that do tell stories. This kind of photo blogs are very useful to visit both for the visual insight and inspiration they give and the information content.

There are of course other kinds of photo blogs. Their varieties and number are growing substantially day by day. But the last two types I mentioned above should be a great place to start your photo blog walks and get your visual inspiration.

What's A Photo Blog For?

A photo blog is of course a blog to display (or whose main content are) photos. That’s obvious. But that’s not the answer I want to discuss here.

A few days ago, I received a comment from a fellow Indonesian “photo blogger” requesting an exchange of link with my BANDUNG DAILY PHOTO (BDP) blog. I would usually respond positively to such a request. Being a new kid on the block (or blog?), BDP would certainly benefit a lot from links of similar blogs. But not this time.

The reason was that, after checking the link the owner gave, I found that the so-called photo blog contained fewer than a dozen of photos of poor quality, which apparently had not been updated for a long time. But that’s not the only reason why I rejected the request. In addition of not qualifying as a proper photo blog, the said blog appeared to have been made for the sole purpose of hosting advertisements.

I don’t mind advertisments, which could help a blog owner to pay for the cost of maintaining a blog, and perhaps make a little profit. But if a blog has virtually no useful content and has a lot of ads, then it’s rubbish! And I don’t want to deal with that kind of stinky stuff that only makes the internet a litter bin of useless things.

I feel sad (and disgusted!) that there are people out there who think that a photo blog is just a convenient way of making a blog which can host ads (AdSense friendly?). They make a “photo blog” because they can’t write properly in English (which is a requisite for AdSense), but their photos are also junk because they don’t have the slighest idea about what a photo blog is supposed to be.

The kind of bloggers I just mentioned are just lazy, mindless, and “immoral” people who, out of desperation for money, would do just about anything: claiming what they are not (read: lie), stealing others’ works and claim them as their own, or even outrightly throwing a bunch of garbage on your face. The blogs they make are not worth peeping even with your eyes shut.

Introducing BANDUNG DAILY PHOTO

Written by Eki Qushay Akhwan

My appology for having neglected you for quite some time. I know you’ve been waiting for the new postings and probably wondering if this blog is still alive. I’d like to assure you, it is. I still keep notes of what I want to write and share with you, and you are still on my thoughts. Busy schedules at work, however, have somehow prevented me from seriously setting aside time to write. There are also a couple of new blogging projects which have pretty much occupied my spare time (not much, but yes, I still do have spare time): The first one is BANDUNG DAILY PHOTO, and the second a virtual gallery of my own – which I’d rather not reveal at this time as I’m still working on and tweaking it, but you’ll be the first to know when I eventually launch it.

Honestly speaking, the BANDUNG DAILY PHOTO project was inspired first and mostly by Santy’s JAKARTA DAILY PHOTO (JDP) whose success in rating and consistency of publishing one photo per day over a long stretch of time really deserve a salute. Not many Indonesian photo bloggers I know can do that. Then I also found that JDP is part of an international network of daily city blog aggregated in a portal called citydailyphoto, where I found that there were only a handful of Indonesian cities that were represented: Semarang (Semarang Daily Photo), Yogyakarta (Jogja Portrait), Palembang (Palembang Daily Photo), Medan (Medan Daily Photo), Bogor (Bogor Daily Photo), Bali (2 blogs), Cibubur, Bekasi, and of course Bandung.

Bandung had actually had three daily photo blogs when I was considering to start mine: one seems to be dormant, and the other two were spasmodic (not posting regularly). Of these latter two, Bunyamin Najmi’s Bandung Raya blog was spasmodic, posting only about one or two photos a month, and the pictures posted were not consistently about Bandung (some of the pictures were about Jogja, for example). The other, Harry Makertia’s Imagi Bandung, had also seemed to be in a long slumber. I thought this was not good. As one of Indonesia’s biggest and most prominent cities, Bandung deserves a better representation within the international community of daily city photo bloggers, and as a photographer (well, self-proclaimed photographer) and resident of Bandung I naturally have a good number of Bandung-related photo collections. Armed with a conviction that I could post one decent picture a day for years ahead, I launched the the project.

The project is now almost one-month old and, I can confidently say, has had good reactions from other daily city photo bloggers around the world. (My great thanks to those who have stopped by my BANDUNG DAILY PHOTO, left encouraging comments, and provided generous links to their blogs.) There has also been some positive side effects of my blog’s presence. Imagi Bandung has since been reawakened and posting daily as it is supposed to be. Within this past month, I’ve also seen new citydaily photobloggers emerging from the other parts of the country: Hendrawan’s Riau Daily Photo is one of those that I think will be a serious new comer, having not missed a posting a day since it was launched.

I sincerely hope that more and more Indonesian cities will participate in the city daily photo blogs in the future. Big cities like Jakarta and Bandung certainly can have more than one blog representing them as many other cities do. Although there are already three active city daily photo bloggers covering Bandung, I believe each of us is unique in our perspectives and complement one another in giving a better overall picture of the city.

More story on city daily photo blog later.

Enjoy your day!