Photography: To see - and to do justice to what one sees...

all photographs in this blog entry by Pentti Sammallathi

In the preface to his Photo-publication ARCHIPELAGO Finnish photographer Pentti Sammallathi said:

...the most important thing in a photographers work is not creation or imagination

but the desire to see and to do justice to what one sees.

It doesn't happen so often that a successful photographer de-emphasizes such popular concepts as creation and imagination. When Photography is reverently presented as an art and the photographer as an artist, usually words like creation and imagination buzz about. Pentti Sammallathi directs attention instead to the more pedestrian notions of seeing  and responding to the seen.

Just thinking about seeing  can instill a slight sense of discomfort in us, who are active within photography. We are well aware of the demanding challenges of seeing.  We know that it is never easy to grasp all relevant details and factors in a scenery or situation we face. And our camera faces. We know it's never easy to realize the full potential of what we see. To transform what we see into good photographic composition. Even if we are on an assignment purely of our own design, there is always the apprehension of not living up to the demands. So to respond competently is a major challenge. At crucial moments our know-how and experience must shine forth, sit in backbone and fingertips. Falling short is certainly common, failing badly not unheard of. It's not only criticism, or worse, lack of interest in our "creations" we fear: often our own hindsight judgment will turn thumbs down on the outcome of our pictorial efforts. Disappointing, but often a necessary sobering. And of course a prerequisite for further development.

When Sammallathi leads our attention away from concepts like imagination and creation (which I take to include even more outworn derivatives like creativity, creative  and creativeness) he may be reacting to the devaluation these terms undergo today. Even mindless application of prefab image processing effects can be celebrated as creativeness  in photo-literature and magazines. Excessive color sweetening or cloudscapes manipulated into sheer apocalyptic drama can get you enthusiastic acclaim.  Sammallathi reminds us instead of the significance - maybe even of the dignity - of what we see.  And - remarkably - he points out the importance of  doing justice  to that we see! Just what could he mean by that?

Surely, "doing justice" must vary according to photographers' individual traits and preferences!? But I suspect that Sammallathi is after something like "quality", where the subjective response does not overpower the objective visual reality. Or vice versa. The quality approach would try to combine the subjective and the objective to a happy union. Images in this spirit reflect a search. They state the photographers opinion on how the scene or scenery itself  "wants" to be portrayed - if there could be such a thing. I sometimes find myself meditating on this "doing justice" when I'm on one of my photographic outings (without any clear-cut conclusions so far).

One word is at the heart of Sammallathi's notion on what is most important in a photographer's work: desire.

Hard work, technical skill, accumulated experience, artistic sensibility, mental alertness and flexibility: they all have their role. But the desire  to see and the desire  to do justice to the seen are the motor of Sammallathi's approach. Desire implies a state far from mastery and includes a humble acceptance of this being so. But desire is also the urge to press on. And desire to do justice  implies care and sensitivity, maybe a willingness to avoid certain exploitive or exaggerating modes of photography. In today's published nature- and landscape-photography, for instance, one can find both: Images that overwhelm for the moment and those with a subtle, but likely more lasting impact.