Easel – © John Neel

Images are everywhere. Everyone you know is making images for all kinds of reasons. At this point in photographic history, it is reasonable to assume that nearly every manner of thing on this planet has been recorded in some way or another by a camera.

The camera has allowed us to record billions and perhaps trillions of images each and every day. It is an ever growing, sea-sized archive of all we have witnessed during the century and a half since its invention.

There are endless images of everything from what we eat to the things that would eat us. The world is full of images showing our activities, where we have gone and what we like to do. In most cases, the images are a redundant archive of a human interaction with the world. They are redundant because we all tend to take them. Millons of people take similar images of the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the Eiffel Tower, along with billions of birthdays, holiday images weddings and every other destination or event in their lives.

While they have importance on a personal level and perhaps a social usefulness, they tend to be very focused as intimate memory and evidence of our lives as we live them. As common images, they function on a personal scale, and to a much larger extent as a resource for our common history. For the most part, they are considered to be the typical recordings of commonplace subjects. They are simply souvenirs of a past we all wish to remember or hope to share with the future. They are our personal keepsakes, which have been recorded as billions of now moments.

For the majority of them, they are simply ordinary photographic records of people, places and things.

What is rare, is the image that has substance.

Substance is that thing that transforms the ordinary into something else. It is the thing, which opens your eyes to something new. It is something that alters the thing in the image in a such a way that it becomes something different. It gives new life to that object or subject in that it becomes symbolic of something else. The subject becomes an analogy for a heightened reality and a new signification. It represents a deeper concept, a higher meaning, and a richer experience.

It brings a new significance to what you see. The thing acts as a conveyer of meaning. The object is both itself, and something new. That newness is the key to understanding what the image is really about.

It is the why and what we seek to find as photographers. As photographers we are visual poets. We write poems with our vision. Our subjects are the actors we use to tell our story. The subjects are transformed by their signification (suggestion of something else), which produces a more profound interpretation within the viewer.

It is the story of the image. It is the thing we must read. It is the substance, the heart and the message. It goes beyond the surface and beyond the subject. Like a puzzle, it is the thing we must decipher in order to realize the truer meaning of a great image. It is the heightened awareness of something we need to know about the work. It is in fact, the work itself. It is what makes the work and what gives it its value.

That substance of a photograph is called – Metaphor.

Metaphor is the truer intention of a great image-maker and the potential power of any photograph. It is the use of images to say what can’t be expressed in the same way with words.

Metaphor is the language of the arts. It is the way artists speak. It is the discourse of photography. In photography, it is what separates the ordinary from the profound and the common from the extraordinary.

Rethinking Digital Photography – John Neel

I cover many photographic topics and techniques in my book.  – Great Photography book for any creative Photographer.

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