This arrived in my inbox tonight. Welcome back, JPG.
© Danielle ScruggsIt's something that I don't think I ask myself often enough. Sometimes I get so caught up in trying to "make it" that I don't slow down and ask myself why I do what I do.
So, why take photos? A few months ago, I wrote: "...I hope to make myself more vulnerable with my photography. To give people insight into how I see myself, how I see my world, and hopefully inspire other people to become a little more vulnerable and to let their guard down a little."
That still holds true now, but I'd like to make an addendum: I also realize that I take photos to explore. To explore the world around me, the people in it, the strange, sad, tragic, thrilling happenstances. To explore myself, why I think the way I do, why certain things catch my eye.
I take photos to answer questions, to ask questions, to think out loud, to respond to a piece of music, to lyrics that make me hit "rewind" so I can make sure I really got it, to a moment in a film, to a painting in a museum, to a passage in a novel that I dog-ear and read again and again, to a roadside memorial, to the graffiti that plasters the abandoned warehouses I see on my way to work.
That's what this is all really about. I don't take photos solely to get into exhibitions and certain publications and the like. (Although, it would be nice to share my work on a broader scale because I really do believe that art has the power to elevate and move people. Or even make them just be still, as an ambitious painter told me last year during one of those epic, all-night conversations that's de rigeur when you're in college.)
I surely don't take photos to become rich (ha!) or famous (double ha!). I take photos to try to make sense of why this world is the way that it is, and to try to make sense of my reactions to it.
Everything else comes in due time.
