Cameras. Why? What is it that makes us pick one up in the first place? For me, a camera isn’t just a nice object to own. It’s a tool, a box with a lens, letting light hit film or a sensor and turn into an image. Doesn’t matter if the box is a hundred years old or fresh out of the factory, the principle doesn’t change. Even the phone in your pocket is just the latest version of that same box. But the mechanics aren’t really the question. What actually drives someone to lift the thing to their eye and press the button?
Kodak had an answer ready made: “capturing that Kodak moment.” Clever, that. First it was marketing genius, tying a photograph to something personal and meaningful. Second, it gave people a reason to buy film and take pictures to show off to everyone else, which if you squint is an early version of the FOMO we’re all drowning in now thanks to social media. Kodak linked photographs to the memories that mattered and got us reaching for our wallets in the process. Very kind of them.
But let me be clear, it’s not a cure for FOMO, whatever Kodak or Instagram would have you believe. Not entirely, anyway. I use my camera to document the world as I find it, at a particular moment. Photography is the one art form that lets you, the person looking at the picture, see something exactly as I saw it. Photojournalists document the world for a living, sure, but that’s not the whole story of why the rest of us do it.
It’s storytelling. A single photograph can hold a whole narrative inside its frame, hinting at more than what’s actually in the shot. Often, though, I need several images to tell the story properly. When I write a piece for this blog, I’m trying to tell it in both words and pictures, walking you through a curated handful of images and hoping you connect with them the way I did when I took them. That connection between photographer and viewer is, to me, one of the best things about photography. Through the lens, we hand someone else a small window into our world, our experience, our mood at the time. Storytelling isn’t just documentation. It’s building a shared space where someone else gets to feel something too.
Beauty matters too, obviously. There’s something deeply satisfying about nailing a composition, about a scene coming together the way you pictured it. I like to think I can build a pleasing image, using whatever tricks and techniques get me there. The aim is always the same: show the scene the way I saw it, and hope it makes you feel something. Photography might be the only medium that lets someone else see what only I saw, at a moment that, thanks to time passing, no longer exists anywhere except in that frame.
Sometimes it really is just art for art’s sake. In a world that wants everything to be productive and monetised, making something purely because it pleases you feels almost like rebellion.
Then there’s the meditative side of it. For me the camera isn’t only a tool for making pictures, it’s a kind of therapy. When I’m in a low mood, or my head’s too full, stepping outside and looking at the world through a viewfinder usually calms things down. Looking through the lens lets me step back from whatever’s nagging at me and get curious instead of anxious. That small shift, from being a participant to being an observer, changes a place that felt overwhelming into something I actually want to explore. The frame becomes a safe little space where nobody’s judging what I do with it. Call it mindfulness if you like the word, I just call it useful.
The process itself matters more than people give it credit for. I keep coming back to Vivian Maier, who left behind rolls and rolls of undeveloped film. Born in 1926, she spent her life photographing without ever showing the work to anyone. Of the roughly 140,000 shots she took, only about 5% were ever developed, a whole body of work that even she never fully saw. That fact still stops me in my tracks. Maybe she was shooting purely for herself, completely wrapped up in the act of it with no need for anyone else’s approval. Her archive is proof that the process can matter as much as the result, and that a photograph has value even if nobody, including the photographer, ever sees it.
In a world where everyone’s told to share, edit and curate their whole life, it’s worth asking whether you’d still take the photo knowing nobody would ever see it. For me, the answer’s a flat yes. Photography isn’t just about impressing people, documenting things, or sharing them. It’s how I make sense of my own head half the time. Every photograph is a small act of noticing, helping me see something more clearly or spot beauty I’d have walked straight past otherwise.
At bottom, photography is a language, one that gets past culture, past language itself, past time. A single photograph can hold something timeless, an unfiltered second of a life that someone on the other side of the planet can look at and understand. That’s a shared visual language, and it’s one of the few ways we get to connect with each other without saying a word.
So why do we photograph? Maybe the answer’s as different as the people asking it, shaped by whatever they’ve lived through. But whether you’re documenting, creating, or just messing about with a camera because it feels good, the act itself tends to make you look at the world, and yourself, a bit harder than you would otherwise. That’s reason enough for me.
Also in this series: Part I — An Introduction · Part II — Why Do We Photograph? · Part III — The Emotions of Photography · Part IV — The Art of Storytelling · Part V — Identity & Self-Expression · Part VI — Connection Through Photography · Part VII — The Philosophy of Impermanence · Conclusion
