Your Pleasures and Dislikes

What delights you? What irritates you? Choose one of these questions and answer it with photographs today. Sure you can write about your likes and dislikes, make lists, even analyze why one particular thing gives you joy and another makes you mad. But the camera, especially the phone camera, always close at hand, gives you a far more accessible tool to quickly and easily express even your deepest feelings about the world in which you live. Without saying anything out loud, you can eloquently articulate what you feel about your own habits and choices, both pleasing to you and not, and those of the people with whom you share your life.

I find that making photographs about things that irritate me in my own household is a great way for me to deal with my displeasure without having to follow my first instinct, which is to nag or complain. I pull out my cell, shoot a picture or two and I’m done. No, I’m not saying done with the problem, but with my anger about it. I objectify it and that thing loses some of its power to make me unhappy. When I photograph things that make me happy, even if I haven’t made a ‘special’ photograph, I simply feel happier. Focusing in on something that gives me pleasure, even comfort, reinforces those pleasant feelings. When I am making a photograph of something I find interesting or beautiful, I am saying, thank you. That thank you, as you know, for me is a prayer.