"what's a photograph?"

Idah, Christina, and friends review pictures of themselves and the school in Ben Chambers' office. PGSS, Chisitu, Malawi.

I've been thinking a lot about recently about the difference between how I relate to my pictures and how the people here relate to pictures. For me a picture is a side effect of something else, the event would have happened with or without the picture. To me the photograph is simple one of the many durable consequences of a particular moment, the photograph does not in anyway create the moment and, as much as possible, it should not effect the moment. Here, with the people I've met in my few weeks here, the picture is something more than that. The act of taking the picture, the fact that a particular moment is recorded, is as important as the moment itself.

Today, in my part of the world, with the advent of ever smaller digital cameras, photographs have become ubiquitous. Everyone I know owns a camera, be it a DSLR, a point 'n shoot or a camera phone. Pictures are taken almost constantly and everything and anything has been photographed. Between the ubiquity of cameras, and the computers required for viewing them, the value of a single photograph is almost nil.

In Malawi, especially in rural Malawi, cameras are a rarity, and pictures a precious resource. Here if you never print the picture you'll never see it, and that means that the the moment never really happened, getting a copy of the picture becomes much more important than I had would have thought. Generally if I ask someone if I can take their picture it's assumed, by myself and the subject, that they don't get a tangible copy. What I've run up against here is that people care almost exclusively about having a copy of the picture, and the quality of the image itself is almost irrelevant. Since I can't provide a copy of the picture to the people I'm photographing a number of them do not understand why I'm taking the picture at all. My normal response to a request for a picture, "give me your email address and i'll send you a link" doesn't work either. Next time I'm bringing a Polaroid, assuming I can still find film for it...

ps - lost another piece of gear today. one of the vivitar flashes was on the tripod with an umbrella and a gust of wind knocked it over. I thought I'd dug the feet of the tripod deep enough into the ground to prevent that from happening, guess not...I shouldn't complain though, that flash has been knocked around so many times I'm surprised it's lasted as long as it has.

this picture was published on thursday, may 07 2009. there is a full size version available. this picture was taken with a 24-70mm f/2.8 on a nikon d700. the settings when this was taken were: focal length: 24.0 mm; shutter speed: 1/60; iso: 800. this image has the following tags: malawi.