We must look at our surroundings with a keen eye otherwise every day just becomes transactional in nature.
Writes Susan Sontag in On Photography: “Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating in public event comes more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in photographed form.”
At the same time, we must ration our shots. Infinite digital film can turn a photographer into a visual hoarder of half-truths.
Photographs also lie
Images are a kind of confidence trick lacking truth serum. “The camera is just as capable of lying as the typewriter,” wrote Bertolt Brecht in War Primer.
The paradox of photography is that copying reality excuses the inspection of its meaning. All context gets reserved in the process of life, unfrozen from the stillness of the lens.