Personal Essays
The Semantic Photographer
--One of the qualities I admire most in other people is eloquence and the ability to string together words that can keep me spell bound.
I left my country of birth (Denmark) in my late teens and settled in UK and although I now even dream in English, I have never achieved the mastery of language that I admire in other people. However, neither is my native language particularly well developed since I stopped speaking Danish regularly to anyone other than my mother well over 25 years ago.
My progression of laterality, which is necessary for a small child to process vast amounts of visual as well as linguistic information, must have stopped lopsidedly at some point, missing most of my left brain development. Through my formative years, words, music and sounds appeared so much more interesting and appealing than visual stimulation.
Taking photographs is exercising the left side of my brain and imagine how thrilling it is to discover eloquence in imagery. I continue to be amazed at the pictures in my brain. Where I used to have imaginary conversations I now ‘see’ images and it’s pretty mind-blowing.
I do continue to struggle putting my feelings about images into words. When I describe my own photographs I often do so by describing the circumstances that led me to take the photograph rather the emotional context that I intended the viewer to experience. “I went for a walk… “, for example, rather than “I wanted you to see anger…”. I find it equally difficult to put into words my emotional response to images created by others. Hence I resort to the “ wow, ohhh, ahh, fantastic” one- word comments I so often leave when I view photos.--
I left my country of birth (Denmark) in my late teens and settled in UK and although I now even dream in English, I have never achieved the mastery of language that I admire in other people. However, neither is my native language particularly well developed since I stopped speaking Danish regularly to anyone other than my mother well over 25 years ago.
My progression of laterality, which is necessary for a small child to process vast amounts of visual as well as linguistic information, must have stopped lopsidedly at some point, missing most of my left brain development. Through my formative years, words, music and sounds appeared so much more interesting and appealing than visual stimulation.
Taking photographs is exercising the left side of my brain and imagine how thrilling it is to discover eloquence in imagery. I continue to be amazed at the pictures in my brain. Where I used to have imaginary conversations I now ‘see’ images and it’s pretty mind-blowing.
I do continue to struggle putting my feelings about images into words. When I describe my own photographs I often do so by describing the circumstances that led me to take the photograph rather the emotional context that I intended the viewer to experience. “I went for a walk… “, for example, rather than “I wanted you to see anger…”. I find it equally difficult to put into words my emotional response to images created by others. Hence I resort to the “ wow, ohhh, ahh, fantastic” one- word comments I so often leave when I view photos.--