The University of Chicago’s Independent Student Newspaper since 1892

Chicago Maroon

The University of Chicago’s Independent Student Newspaper since 1892

Chicago Maroon

The University of Chicago’s Independent Student Newspaper since 1892

Chicago Maroon

It will never quite be this way again

“There is something immediately nostalgic about a photograph.”
Students in dimly lit hallway.

I do not usually consider myself a photographer. In matters of straightforward representation, I often favor a paintbrush or a stick of charcoal over a camera. I generally prefer my media tactile, organic, fallible. A quick sketch of a field or forest, with all of its imperfections, interests me more than its minutely detailed photographic counterpart. I admire the exaggerated features and inexact proportions born of an artist’s whim. Each stroke in a painting indicates some degree of consideration followed by an action. Each line in a drawing remembers the artist’s hand: all slow and deliberate processes, the result of a sequence of aesthetic decisions, and as Bob Ross so nicely put it, “happy accidents.”

Photography is increasingly precise, effectively instantaneous, and mediated by a machine. However, these are the very qualities that make it perfectly suited to representing what I find so difficult to depict in any other medium: namely, the passage of time. There is something immediately nostalgic about a photograph. Unlike a painting, which is an entity in itself, separate from both the model and the artist’s initial vision, a photograph is, instead, forever entwined with the scene it depicts. When I look at a photograph, it says something like, “Here is the way things once were.” An especially good photograph will add, “And it will never quite be this way again.”

When I turn my attention away from my brushes and to my camera, it is because I want to say precisely that: “It will never quite be this way again.” Not all of my photos succeed, of course. I have taken my fair share of kitschy pictures of my friends, my bedroom, my cat. The photos I like best, however, are the ones that are the most difficult to describe. When I paint and draw and etch, I am inspired by fantasy. When I photograph, I am inspired by mundanity. Nothing photographs as beautifully as streetlights in fog.

Leave a Comment
Donate to Chicago Maroon
$670
$2000
Contributed
Our Goal

Your donation makes the work of student journalists of University of Chicago possible and allows us to continue serving the UChicago and Hyde Park community.

More to Discover
Donate to Chicago Maroon
$670
$2000
Contributed
Our Goal

Comments (0)

All Chicago Maroon Picks Reader Picks Sort: Newest

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *