Why Writing About Photography Matters (or: The Importance of Re-inventing the Wheel)

This is the second of my series of short essays on photography – the first can be found here.

The title might sounds like a pre-emptive justification for clogging the Internet with yet another personal babbling about what photography is supposed to be, how photos should be taken, and so on. Actually, indeed, if one changes the names accordingly in T.S. Eliot’s quote (Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third) it become clear that there is little left to say about photography (with the exception of boring technical reports on cameras and lenses’ arcane features or performance essentially part of the industry marketing spins to fuel people’s  GAS.)

So, where is the point in keeping on writing about topics already explored by people with far more experience and knowledge?

The first and immediate answer is: because we live in a free country so there is no reason no to.

Kidding apart, there is another answer supporting this choice: the need to develop a deeper understanding of what photography means to each of us and where our journey is leading to.

A complementary concept to a Bergson’s aphorism I often quote (the eyes see what the mind is ready to comprehend) comes from Marcus Porcius Cato: rem tene, verba sequentur. The ancient Roman sage stated a simple yet often overlooked truth: you must first understand a topic before you can talk about it. Applying this rule to public discourse and media news immediately allows us to tell whether the anchor or guest is familiar with the topic they are discussing. Intuitively, we can also tell whether the speaker is an authority or a fake expert. However, I am digressing from the main topic of this post.

Coming back to the point, Cato’s rule only solves part of the problem. He was (and still is) right to say that you need to know what you are going to talk about before you do it, but he doesn’t explain how you can acquire this knowledge. This is where Richard Feynman comes to the rescue.

Among his many brilliant achievements, Feynman devised the golden rule of learning: to master something you need to be able to teach it. The act of teaching, indeed, implies taking knowledge out from the depths of instinct, automatically applied rules, non-rationalised experiences. Give it a try by yourself. Pick something you are very familiar with and try preparing a lecture for someone who knows nothing about it. You will probably be surprised by the amount of things you actually knew and didn’t know about.

Although this advice is sound, we still need to take one more step before we can reach our goal: we need to write down what we know.

Studying (Cato’s Law) and teaching (Feynman’s Law) are difficult to practise effectively without writing things down.

As the late Giancarlo Livraghi taught me, when you write, you must organise your ideas, check for consistency, and refine the logic of your argument. This process reveals gaps in your understanding of a topic and enables you to fill them. Mind, though, none of these three ‘laws’ works alone; they must be applied together with a feedback-based approach. You learn something, try to teach it by writing it down, encounter hurdles and then go back to the learning phase, restarting the iterative process until the work is done.

That said, we can finally answer the question that originated this post: why reinvent the wheel by writing about photography?

Because it is a way to practise the three golden rules of knowledge to improve one’s understanding of how photography works for oneself.

And because we live in a free country.

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