The Value of opinionated Photography

My first camera was a little soap box point-and-shoot, which took three shots, and then the AA batteries had to be removed. I used it to shoot horses at a summer camp when I was twelve. Then I shot bees and friends in an overly saturated manner. Then I was cropping pictures with no regard to standard formats. Then I underexposed, then I made some pics that were way too orange. Fast forward, my style is still not fully developed (if that’s even a thing), but I am starting to dip my toes into a purpose. 

An underwater photo of my friend I shot in 2011 (I was 13). A bit too much ey?

How do you develop a specific style? Well, you follow a bunch of role models, combine what you like about their work with your liking, and then over time, you add and subtract one thing or another until you’re somewhat happy. At the end of this process, your photos should be recognizable even if your name isn’t listed in the photo credit. But sometimes, it’s easy to get lost in the spiral of tons of different ways of approaching your visuals, and a bit of narrowing down can be helpful. 

I have recently been awarded a grant in the Slovak Press Photo contest, which assigns me to photograph Bratislava for the next year, with 30 of my best shots going into the city archive. There is a catch to this however, the city expects me to shoot them in a style that my contest images were delivered. That is a deep black, contrasty monochrome. At first, I was worried. What if my best images had been better in color? But then I realized having your style options narrowed down for you is really freeing you of the burden of unlimited choice. 

A leading photo from the series I have entered into the contest.

It helps because you can focus on photographs that would fit your visual style instead of focusing on all the good images that could be made at any given scene. Also, since you don’t have to worry about how your photograph is going to look after you’ve edited it, as you already have a pretty good idea, you can focus on what really matters even more than before. And what really matters is the content of the photograph and what it actually stands for.

If you are like me, you often see great images on Instagram that are technically perfect, but they just don’t seem to have any added value. They look stunning, but they somehow…. lack a point. And I’m not saying doing art for the sake of art is bad, I mean, I love modern art. In photography, however, I often feel that an idea or a point to an image is a spice that makes you remember an image. 

Once I knew my style and the topic of my long-term project, which was to capture the public space, and how people interact with it, I realized I didn’t want to completely stay out of the picture. No, I’m not gonna just snap a bunch of selfies now. But I started to approach this project less as a news story and more as an opinion piece.

A good opinion piece doesn’t just describe an individual position but uses components of the real world and analytically connects them to formulate a point. In other words, it’s looking at the real world from a certain angle. That means I’m trying to make a point based on my real observation of the public space but articulating it through my perception of what is dominant in the environment and adding a little normative point about how I think it should be. 

I always tried to make my stories to be contentful, absorbing the atmosphere and the main information the story is enveloped in. However, the power of opinion in photography has truly opened my eyes to how I can self-express through imagery in more or less subtle ways to give out an idea of how I see the world every day. 

Let me walk you through one or two images so you understand.

I have spent a lot of time traveling across this god-forsaken country, and I’ve realized that the fundamental problem of our public spaces is that people understand it as being a no-mans land instead of a place for everybody. That, in my opinion, is the reason why we litter public spaces with so much visual smog and effectively ruin architecture, ruin the sense of the public, and ruin the idea that the streets are not there just so a shop has somewhere to hang its banner. The streets are supposed to fulfill two roles - being a means of communication and making us feel human. 

Okay, so let’s get back to the title photo of this article - Obchodná street is one of the most important communications in Bratislava. It’s, in my opinion, also the worst-looking street I have ever seen. There is strong competition in smaller Slovak towns, but the fact that this is the center of our Capital city adds to the horror of its appearance. It’s covered in all kinds of incoherent visual material. Originally, when you look down the street, it should lead you toward the city’s landmark - the castle. However, kebab signs and others are competing for your attention. As any beginner photographer knows, the human eye tends to be dragged toward the lightest spot in the frame. By exposing my image, not to the whole image, but the sushi banner, I have manifested which object is the lightest - therefore, the visually most dominant object of the street view (hint, it’s not the castle).

Alright, moving forward. In the following image, I’m using irony as a way of expressing an opinion. A developer has decided to demolish a socialist architecture monument and has crushed the hearts of everybody who understands that continuity is important for societal development and that you should just start from scratch every time there is a paradigm shift. I mean, there are lessons to be learned, and there are objects to be saved. Just a reminder, the neoclassical building we adore so much today have been roughly the same age when the communists were replacing them as the socialist or modernist buildings are today. Just think about how much of a shame we consider it to have lost such cultural heritage.

Anyway, the writing on the fence says - we uncover the city's potential. One has just to stop and think that Bratislava’s potential has to be hidden really deep underground when they had to bring baggers to dig it up.  

Ok! You figure out the rest of these! 

And go out! Have your voice heard!