What Our Photographs Reveal About Us

Edge of Humanity Magazine

3 weeks ago

Why Did I Photograph the Crow?

It was late on a Friday afternoon. The streets were unusually quiet as people made their way home before the Sabbath. Some walked along the light rail tracks while others hurried past. Then I noticed a crow perched on electrical wires. Almost instinctively, I raised my camera.

The photograph was part of an assignment for a photography course, where we had been asked to focus on composition. My attention was on the composition: the lines, the balance, the quiet.

During the following class, we presented our photographs for a group critique. One of my fellow students looked at the image and said simply, “It makes me feel lonely.”

That comment stayed with me, not because I had intended to photograph loneliness, but because it made me wonder what that loneliness belonged to. For the first time, I wondered whether my photograph had revealed something about me that I had never intended to reveal.

I couldn’t answer that feeling immediately. But it stayed with me. As I continued photographing and looking back at my work, I began to recognize a recurring thread connecting photographs I had once thought were unrelated.

Only then did I give the photograph its title: Wires of Solitude.

It also led me to a question that has stayed with me ever since: What is the relationship between psychology and photography? Why are we drawn to photograph certain moments and not others? Why did my eyes stop at the crow on the wires instead of the street beneath it? How many other scenes did I overlook because they did not resonate with something within me?

I began to wonder whether photography has its own unconsciousness. Freud believed that much of our inner life remains hidden from us, revealing itself indirectly through dreams, slips of the tongue, symbols, and seemingly insignificant choices. Could photographs work in a similar way? Every time we raise a camera, we make countless decisions without fully realizing it. We decide where to stand, when to press the shutter, what to include within the frame and, just as importantly, what to leave outside it. We like to think these are conscious choices. Yet perhaps they are quietly shaped by memories, emotions, longings, fears, and experiences that lie beneath our awareness.

Those questions took me back to the way I had learned to read literature. A poem is rarely exhausted by its first reading. We return to it because each encounter reveals something we had overlooked before. I began to wonder whether photographs ask the same of us. Perhaps they, too, reveal their deepest meanings only when we return to them.

Perhaps the photographs we make reveal us before we are ready to reveal ourselves.

Looking back, I wasn’t photographing loneliness. I was photographing the world as I saw it.

Only later did I begin to ask a different question: not what I had photographed, but why that was what caught my attention.

Sometimes, awareness arrives only later.

Image and Text © Sivan Swisa