About Me
For twenty some years, the better part of my adult life, I’ve had a camera nearby. Pursuing a creative outlet, photography has enabled me to see and tell stories that mattered to me — how I felt and responded to the world around me.
There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment
— Robert Frank
It is often suggested, to the nod of heads wiser than myself, that photography is “all about light” — a story must be told amidst the complex interplay of light and shadows. In the ephemeral world of social media, this is indeed the case. Carefully curated colorful photographs of far away places, devoid of any pesky tourists, bring on a cascade of likes and hearts.
It is easy to understand why. Such images — and plenty of my travel photographs are guilty of such compositions — are easy to digest when swiping past a busy news feed. They provide a momentary dopamine hit to the visual pleasure centers of the brain, but much like my favorite bowl of pistachio gelato, leave behind little in the way of nutritional value. Seconds after swiping past, I honestly can’t tell you how I felt or what my reaction was to the picture.
Lately, I’ve found increasing satisfaction in exploring beyond the carefully crafted photographic image of a beautiful sunset. Photography at its best is not about seeing and capturing the moment, but rather in expressing the reaction to what we’ve seen. Much like painting is not about recording a slice of time on a canvas and music is more than arranging notes, photography should transcend merely documenting a fraction of a second.
After the selection, tagging and sorting of images, comes the critical editing process. This is where the photography really begins — the raw image is filtered through my biases and world view and the resulting image is my reaction to what they I’ve seen and how I felt.
The best art is about life and death, spirit and matter, suffering and pain, the natural world and the cosmic prisons in it, love or love denied, the eternal quest for the meaning of life, our relationship to the world and beyond
— Brooks Jensen
So, what does it mean to photograph meaningful things then? I find that universal topics that relate to the condition of human life find great resonance amongst the viewing public. Topics that have meaning to me include, delving into what it is like to be alive now, feeling the tenuousness of beauty and life, exploring a place, its culture and the reflection of universal human emotions.
Photo Essays
Years ago I was greatly moved by the works of W. Eugene Smith. His seminal photo essays, Country Doctor and Japan Minamata Bay Series for Life magazine were a masterclass in story telling. It would define for me, what it meant to use the visual medium to convey a humanistic approach to reportage.
Get Shourya Ray’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Traveling for weeks, or years as in the case for the Minamata series, Eugene Smith doggedly stuck to the story. His tenacity paid off with photo essays that brought to life the grueling life of country doctors and the societal impact of chemical dumping. Photojournalism would never be the same again.
From lessons learnt from the masters, I’ve gravitated towards a greater focus on publishing photo essays over singular images. A collection of images — an expression on a single topic — held together by a stylistic theme, deliver an impact greater than a single image.
A photo is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph or a group of them can lure our senses into awareness.
— W. Eugene Smith
A grouping of similar images can be a powerful tool for story telling by itself. When paired with words — compelling text — I find that it expands the viewing experience. Words can set the context of the world in which the photographs lives. They can tease out insight, understanding, empathy and stories of the human bonds that make up the images.
This new found freedom to pair text with images has opened up opportunities that I never foresaw: the ability to tell the story of a cat’s plaintive meowing that led me to a muted, yet colorful, side street of San Juan; a passed by architectural detail on the streets of Charleston; and the story of a 20 minute Uber ride that led to my first published photo essay.
The text and the images come together as a cohesive story that allows me to express not what the subject did, but who they are. The photo essay then moves from simple narrative, toward interpretive comment.
It has taken many years of casual photography to move beyond taking individual pictures to being able to tell stories across a longer arc. Where to next? That remains to be seen, but I am reminded of the sage advice of Gene Smith that every personal frontier in photography is a beckoning to deeper understanding.
Never have I found the limits of the photographic potential. Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another…Always, I’m on the threshold.
— W. Eugene Smith
Shourya is based in the greater Washington, D.C. area. Apart from a few years where he taught photography as an adjunct professor at the Northern Virginia Community College, he has pursued photography as an amateur for over twenty years. Follow him on Instagram and see more articles like this on Medium at ShouryaRay.com.
