Do you use your camera as a passport or a magnifying glass?

Wednesday 12 March 2025, 20:10 by Elvira Smit | 1,854 views | 0 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Something I have been thinking about more and more: how do I use my camera? Do I use it as an excuse to explore a new world, or as a magnifying glass to examine my immediate surroundings?

Such a contrast forces you to look at your own work in a different light. And perhaps to do something other than what you always do. Nice to ponder for a while.

I am an observer

First of all, photography is a contemplative activity. You literally put something between yourself and the world. That contemplative side suits me like a comfortable coat.

In the past, when we still had parties with lots of people and I had had enough of all the chatter, I would pick up my camera. The social break was at least as important to me as capturing moments that would never happen again.

Here is something else that confirms my contemplative nature: I have been writing in a diary since I was eleven, another medium in which you can grasp time by the scruff of the neck. I do it out of a twofold need: I am afraid of forgetting moments, and I need to shape what happened into a logical story.

I also like to tell that (apparently) logical story with photographs. I believe that, within autonomous photography, all photographs can be divided into two types. Put another way, two ways of using your camera as an excuse.

The camera as a passport

With your camera, you can do more than take photographs. You can also use it as a passport to a world that remains closed to others. Two examples:

Yann Mingard photographed atomic bunkers filled with seeds, cultural heritage. In case a nuclear war breaks out.

Murray Ballard looked into cryonics, people who pay around 200,000 dollars to have themselves frozen after their death. Obviously in the hope that, in the future, people will be able to thaw them out properly.

In these cases, the camera gives you the official role of photographer, allowing you to enter a world that is not your own. To do that, you have to make contact, earn trust and follow the guidelines.

The camera as a magnifying glass

And then there is the other excuse. Here, your camera is a magnifying glass that you point at yourself or at subjects in your immediate surroundings. Because you want to examine something, such as your own emotional life, or enlarge something, such as tears, or expose a phenomenon that others overlook, such as crooked posts.

In that case, the possibilities in your immediate surroundings are enough, and you do not have to put pen to paper to take a photograph.

How do I use my camera?

I usually lean towards the camera as a magnifying glass. I photograph urban landscapes and do not need permission for that.

And yet...

Lately, I have been thinking more and more about using my camera as a passport. There are countless subjects within urban planning that I would like to know more about. So here is my challenge: to switch on the passport function of my camera over the coming months.

It is nice to consider how you use your camera, and whether you feel like switching to a different excuse.

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