Visual intimacy

“If you want to feel intimate, the first thing you and your partner need to do is stop all the other things you are doing and give each other your undivided, undistracted attention.” – Helene Brenner

Lately I feel my photography practice is coming in full circle. With my recent work, I notice there has been a thread surfacing. It is not a completely new way of seeing for me, but its voice is getting more profound, and it has become a dominant force of perception in recent weeks.

I recently exchanged emails with a friend explaining what I liked to do with my photography. After a few back-and-forth exchanges, it suddenly dawned on me what attracted me to photography in the first place, and what my visual voice has been all along despite my effort being sidetracked for those years when I focused my effort in landscape photography. I told my friend I liked to establish “visual intimacy” with my subjects. Once I coined the term, it became crystal clear as what I have been doing with my photography in the last couple of years.

The reason I got into digital photography back in 2007 was to make my own images for a graphic design class I took. I was frustrated for not being able to gather images that fit my visual design, I therefore bought my first DSLR and decided to take matters into my hands. I didn’t know much back then, but I remembered the moment when I discovered what changing the aperture would do to an image. The moment I saw one of flower images I took using a very shallow depth of field, separating the subject beautifully away from the background, I was hooked. I remember saying to myself “Wow! I don’t know you can do that!” I wondered what more I could do with changing all those technical attributes of a camera. Not long after that discovery, I bought myself a macro lens as I knew it was an area that interested me the most at the time. I was a fanatic about the genre back then. I went out to look for things to shoot all the time, flowers and insects in my backyard, debris in old buildings or junkyards. It fascinated me to no end how dramatically my perspective could change when I got very close to any subjects. Suddenly things were no longer as they seemed. By focusing on the tiny details of a subject, even mundane subjects can take on a whole different dimension and meaning. I want to put my viewers in the same position, sharing the same intimate moment as I get to know my subjects.

I find my interest in moving in close and getting to know the subject in an intimate level is in keeping with my personality. When it comes to my establishing relationships with other people, I much prefer having a close-knit circle of friends than spending time with a big group of people that I hardly know. I like to establish emotional intimacy, it means cultivating a sense of closeness relating to how I, my partner, and my friends feel via empathy, respect, and communication. I like to extend the same courtesy to my subjects for photography despite most of them being inanimate objects. I would like to spend time getting to know them and instill my personality into how I interpret their presence. To me, that is important as I like to think my photography is beyond capturing the appearance of a subject.

When we start learning photography, there is a natural tendency to fill the frame with the entire subject that interests us, be it a person, a building, or a scenic landscape. However, we can make things more interesting if we move in closer, look beyond the obvious and find out what is the most compelling about a subject and discard everything that doesn’t add to the story. Moving in closer allows us to focus on design elements such as lines, shapes, and textures that we frequently overlook by seeing things only in a large scale. While I have my macro lens that enables me to focus closely to my subjects, we can also do the same by physically moving our bodies closer to our subjects with any lens. When on occasions I don’t have my macro lens in tow, I use my long focal length zoom lens to zoom in and find interesting tidbits to shoot.

I like to think of my photography as a process to dissect a crime scene. Initially I will photograph the most obvious observations of the scene I encounter, making a general recording of the conditions. Then I will move in close to digest all those minute details that interest me, those little extras that add more depth and personal interests to the stories. By focusing on the details, we can also push our composition to abstraction which allows us different forms of personal expressions too.

In conclusion, it is fun to get to know your subjects and letting your viewers see from different perspectives.