Why Photography?
Updated: Oct 3
I can still remember the weight of my dad’s Minolta film camera in my hands when I was just six years old. Remarkably, I still have some of those very first photographs.
At the time, photography wasn’t a career path or even something I thought of as a serious pursuit. It was fun. It was a way to explore the world around me, and it gave me a meaningful connection with my father.
So I kept taking pictures.
I photographed things at school, on field trips, during family outings—anything that caught my attention. Long before I understood composition, light, shutter speed or any of the technical aspects of photography, I was learning something much more important:
I was learning to notice.
One photograph from those early years has stayed with me.
During a trip to Philadelphia in 1983, I was looking down from a hotel window when I noticed a figure on the sidewalk below. I remember staring at the scene, trying to determine whether I was even looking at a person.
But what fascinated me just as much was everyone else.
People continued walking. No one seemed to stop. No one appeared to look down. Life simply moved around this solitary figure while I remained fixed on that one moment from several stories above.
I took the picture.
At the time, I certainly wasn't thinking about what the photograph might mean or why the scene held my attention. I was a kid with a camera.
Looking back now, though, I recognize something in that photograph that has followed me throughout my life as an artist: the instinct to stop and look a little longer.
To notice what other people might walk past.
I continued taking photographs for years, but the deeper why behind photography didn't fully click until my late twenties, when I rediscovered several photographs I had first encountered as a child.
I remembered being fascinated by them then. What surprised me was discovering that, nearly two decades later, they still had exactly the same power over me. Among them were W. Eugene Smith’s Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath from his Minamata series and Nick Ut’s The Terror of War, commonly known as Napalm Girl.
These weren't simply records of something that had happened years before. They made the past present again. That, to me, is one of the extraordinary things about photography. A fraction of a second can be preserved long after the moment itself has disappeared. People change. Places change. Sometimes entire worlds disappear.
But the photograph remains.
Seeing those images again made me begin thinking seriously about what I wanted my own photography to do.
I kept coming back to one question:
Will someone look at my work and feel something?
That's what I hope for—not fame or recognition, but a moment of connection. I want someone to pause.
Maybe a photograph encourages someone to look beneath the surface. Maybe it makes them explore their own town with the curiosity of a tourist. Maybe they notice a texture, a shadow, a building, a landscape or a tiny detail they would normally pass without a second thought. Or maybe an image simply makes them stop for a moment and look. That's enough.
There is another reason I've stayed with photography for so much of my life, though, and it has nothing to do with the finished photograph. It's what happens to me behind the camera.
When I'm truly in the zone, there is a sense of presence I haven't found anywhere else. Everything else gets quiet. I'm watching the light, the movement, the details. I'm waiting. And I can wait a very, very long time.
I'll wait for the light to hit something exactly the way I want it. I'll wait for the wind to settle. I'll wait for someone to move out of the frame—or into it. Anyone brave enough to travel with me should probably bring a book. If you don't have a camera in your hand, you're going to need a healthy dose of patience.
So if you ever see someone standing perfectly still on a street corner for twenty minutes staring at a shadow, don't worry. It's probably just me.
I'm waiting to see what happens.
And more than fifty years after I first picked up my dad's Minolta, I'm still looking.
Until next time—keep finding the beauty in the details.
All images Copyright © Janet Davis. All rights reserved. Artwork may not be reproduced or resold without the express permission of the artist.
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