I’ve always been drawn to photographs that don’t tell you everything.
Heavy shadows.
Obscured faces.
Reflections.
People moving through a frame just long enough to become a blur.
There’s something about not being able to see everything that makes me want to look a little longer.
And I think that’s what I enjoy most about certain photographs.
The mystery.
Not necessarily knowing what’s happening, but feeling something anyway.
Sometimes I’ll take a photograph before I even understand why I stopped for it.
Something about the light, the movement, or the way everything came together for that one moment.
And a lot of those are still some of my favorite photographs.
I’ve noticed that when an image tells me everything right away, I don’t always spend much time with it.
But when something is hidden, I start wondering.
Who is that person?
Where are they going?
What’s happening outside the frame?
And the interesting thing is, somebody else might look at that exact same photograph and see something completely different.
Maybe something I never even considered when I took it.
I think that’s part of why I enjoy working with shadows and motion blur so much.
Not because I’m trying to make things difficult to understand.
But because I don’t always want the photograph to explain itself.
I like leaving something for the person looking at it.
And sometimes, even though I was the one standing there with the camera, I’ll look back at a photograph years later and feel something different than I did when I made it.
Which makes me wonder…
How much of what we see in a photograph was actually there?
And how much of it did we bring with us?