Ordinary–the dictionary definition is: with no special or distinguishing features; normal; uninteresting; commonplace. As photographers we often spend our lives seeking to make images that are extraordinary. Either in or out of the studio we are trying to make a picture that captures the more than ordinary. As a landscape photographer, I’ve traveled to places (recently Washington Pass) that make my heart sing with their extraordinary beauty so that I can take photographs and share the awe I feel in the presence of such majestic mountains. Many photographers do this; we are art tourists in the pursuit of natural beauty traveling to locations renowned for their exceptional features. Namibia, Greenland, Arches — the list of places to which photographers travel to get that great shot is nearly endless. Sometimes alone, sometimes in packs. There is nothing wrong with this pursuit of beauty (carbon cost aside). Artists have been doing this for centuries.
But what about the ordinary? And what is that, exactly? For me this question has an added layer of complication. For years I lived in one of the world’s most extraordinary places, Longyearbyen, Svalbard. Many photos I took there were “ordinary” but the very nature of where I was living made them “extraordinary.” So was my lived experience of place ordinary, or not? People paid thousands of dollars to come and see my “ordinary”, or did they ignore the ordinary around them in favor of the tourists gaze and their own preconceptions of the Arctic Imaginary? Does that effect what was ordinary for me, or not? I’m still working through that question.
Now, I live in a small rural town. Here I’m taking photographs of what seems ordinary to this place. Beaches, farms, forests, estuaries. I think some of these images are as extraordinary as any I took on Svalbard, but this landscape is a more common experience. Does that commonality make them ordinary? Or does the photographers gaze elevate them out of the ordinary?
The artist’s or photographer’s gaze can’t be discounted. There’s an expectation that artists will see things differently, that we bring to view the hidden or overlooked. That we’ll elevate, through our act of seeing, the ordinary into the extraordinary. While I clung to a documentarian’s viewpoint in Svalbard, here I’m interested in engaging viewer emotions to the extent of making what changes to an image are necessary to give it the feeling I want. This is a different kind of photography from journalistic, and to me those choices move it away from the ordinary. I choose the image I make, and then I make the changes I choose to give it an emotional impact I want. Therefore those photographs are no longer “ordinary.”
I recently engaged with Tomasz Trzebiatowski, founder of Frames magazine, in a slow conversation about the concept of the ordinary as he is working through his own ideas. While his path is not mine, it did cause me to reflect on the ordinary in my photography. I keep hiccuping at the idea that the artist’s gaze transforms an image of the ordinary into something not ordinary. But maybe I’m wrong. Here are three photographs of the ordinary in my life this week. Taken with that most ordinary of cameras, an iPhone, and untouched, barely even composed. Are they ordinary? Or has the act of paying attention caused them to become extra-ordinary? I recognize that this is a Schödinger’s cat question. If you have thoughts, I’d love to hear them.
