I am a hobbyist photographer and have thought about attempting a Philosophy of Photography blog for a while. I think I may simply try to write for a while here in order to develop my thoughts and see if it generates enough thought for a more specific blog.

One of my photographic specialization is a kind of photojournalism of the local parties, especially in the electronic music scene. I just got back from a night of photos.

Bias is a sensitive issue in photojournalism because, as most people have internalized and understand, photographs are small slices in time aimed at a narrow field from a single perspective. Although most know this, deep in the collective gut still lives a weird little feeling that there is an objective truth within an image. It isn't something to dismiss because photos can become stronger than memories, or at least color and shape those memories. If we gain a lot of our own identity through our own memories that means that photographs have the power to alter who we are. I'm not saying anything very radical here, and most who have spent a fair amount of time in the contemporary, photo-splurging world are aware of these issues.

Yet, I am often amazed at how easy it is for a bias, a world view, to be spread by the process of selection. For example, although just about every club has a vastly disproportionate male/female ratio, photographs produced from these events would lead one to believe otherwise. Look at any photo set and count how many times a female is the focalpoint. These sets distort reality in a way that is obvious, but what about the biases that aren't so? What biases are represented in the photo set that I published and made available publically? The full set can be accessed by clicking the following image.

I don't post every photo I take. It's been a matter of personal discipline to pay a lot of attention to editing down, especially to ease the suffering of viewers who might otherwise be met with blurry swarms of photographs and hordes of repetitions. However, as a goal, I attempt to represent - through 50-odd photographic perspectives - a kind of summary or approximation for what I felt encompassed the "vibe" of the night. By doing so, I may be removing images that did represent the night but did not represent what I wanted the night to have meant. Take the following two images:



The first images was selected for the set. The other was eliminated and would never have made it to the glow of lcd screens if not for this particular digression. The photos are similar in composition and split-seconds apart, but the meanings are radically different. In the selected image, the focus is on camaraderie, whereas the other takes on a sexual tinge (by freezing time, there is no way to know how long this hug lasted; it may have only been a moment, but the impression is that it could last forever). If I was a club owner who wanted to portray a place as sexual dynamite or a phenomenal paradise (as many do), my selection would probably have been inverted. By examining both, the case could probably be made easily for my selection being the "truer" in representing the actual relationship of the two females, that they are indeed good friends and not overtly into one another. But does the trueness of their relationship reflect the truness of the party?

The image was selected because it captures a rare, semi-intimate moment of joy between two people. Was the night completely filled with these kinds of moments as a viewer might be led to believe? I've heard people say that my photo sets made a shitty party look like it was great. So where is the truth? If photographs aim to be some sort of anthropological record at all, I think these questions must constantly be asked. My set could have easily been shaped to give another impression. Any photo set anywhere is produced from the biases of the photographer and a reality - or a desire for a reality - that existed in their head.