January 6, 2014

Photography, What Art Means to You

Through My Lens: A Photographer’s Journey

by By Sai Pradhan, Hong Kong, China

Art is often a nebulous concept – wide in scope yet often specific in appeal, and usually open to discussions about its very definition and being. What it means to you may well be different from what it means to me.

To me, it is anything that moves me in some way. It is about taking something I perceive and making it personal, to me. And yes, often, things that fall into that category might resonate with a group of people beyond me.

I recently learned how to use my fairly complicated camera properly, and started delving into photography. I take photographs of things that appeal to me – aesthetically, symbolically, and emotionally.

Reading Joshua Rothman’s article in the New Yorker recently on a new book, Art as Therapy, I found the idea obvious, but appealing. If something moves me, it naturally has the capacity to be therapeutic and make a difference to my state of mind.

Alain de Botton, the subject of Rothman’s article and author of Art as Therapy, is a bit of a catch-all: a philosopher, a writer, a presenter, an entrepreneur, a documentarian. In his book, he discusses art as a form of therapy. “How could this find a place in my heart?” he asks, of anything to qualify as art. “What are you supposed to do if you love art?” he asked. “Do you become a scholar of art? Do you become an art critic? Do you write about art? Our answer is that one should try to take the values that one admires in works of art and enact them, and make them more vivid in the world. It’s too easy to ‘love art,’ and to not love the things that art actually loves. But the point is to try and love the things that the artists we love loved. Don’t just love the artist,” he said, in his interview with Rothman. “Don’t just love the work they produced. Love what they loved.”

While the subject matter of the book is more extensive and deserves more analysis, I do find it rather easy to agree to the above. If anyone were to look at any of the photographs I take, it would be useful for them to try and see it as I may have when I took the photo. What is the mood? Why did I focus on a particular object? Why did I shoot in a particular light? Why then, why that, what compelled me? If those questions can lead to something, whether or not it is what actually drove me to take the picture, I imagine the photograph would become more personal, more relevant, more close to ‘art’ to the beholder.