Tag: imagination

Hello — this is a quick post to capture a few thoughts before they get blown away by the winter winds.

One of life’s great joys for me is visiting exhibitions, especially art exhibitions. I was thrilled recently to visit Cartwright Hall in Bradford to see the four shows from this year’s Turner Prize shortlist. Then, of course, there’s the annual Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy — always a highlight — and closer to home, one of my favourite places is the Mercer Gallery in Harrogate.

I mention all this because I believe art can be deeply inspiring for photographers — and not just the visual arts.

Recently, I was listening to an interview with Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials. He said something that stayed with me: that it’s important to see with the imagination. There are things we can’t see with the naked eye — whole worlds that exist only when we engage our imagination. And those worlds, he said, are no less real.

When you talk to artists, you quickly sense what moves and excites them — what drives them to create. Their work comes from the imagination, is expressed through imagination, and ultimately, it takes imagination to interpret it.

Something I’ve noticed over time is that for many artists, the subject itself is often less important than the feeling the work creates — what it evokes in the viewer. They think in terms of colour, shape, line, and texture: the visual elements that carry emotion. Often, the subject is subtle, even withdrawn from the scene, inviting the viewer to work a little to uncover its meaning.

Photographers, on the other hand, often take a different approach. We tend to focus on clarity — on the placement of the subject, the focal point, and where the viewer’s eye is being directed. Painters seem far less concerned with such precision. They work more through intuition and mystery, treating patterns, shapes, lines, colours, and textures as subjects in their own right. These elements are often what the work is really about — more so than simply depicting an object and placing it neatly within a frame.

That’s not to say a clear subject isn’t important in photography, but perhaps the starting point could be the design — or even the feeling — rather than just the object itself. The subject might just as easily be light, atmosphere, or emotion.

This is only a brief reflection, but it raises a question: do our familiar photographic formulas — with their emphasis on clarity and defined subjects — sometimes limit our imagination? Could the unseen elements in an image be just as important as the ones we include?

As Philip Pullman suggested, can we “see through” a picture with the imagination? Perhaps what we leave out is every bit as significant as what we show.