The World Through a Viewfinder

It doesn’t have to be remarkable.

Lately I’ve found myself really missing photography, which is something I actively stepped away from sometime during the lockdown. I was feeling stuck in a loop that wasn’t quite photo-centric—maybe more like photo-tangential. I had spent six years doing a weekly podcast about photography, another less frequent one talking mostly with photographers, and I even wrote a book about photography. But that time away allowed me to miss it and a couple weeks ago I took my beloved Fujifilm X-Pro 1 out for a spin. It only took taking a few photos to realize how much I love seeing the world through a viewfinder. None of the photos I took were remarkable in any way, and I think that’s what I love most about photography. It doesn’t have to be remarkable to be interesting. If you don’t believe me, I encourage you to take a look at this brilliant BBC documentary about one of my favorite photographers, William Eggleston. I know a lot of photographers find him massively overrated but for me, he is a master of making the mundane compelling and sits comfortably alongside some of my other favorites, including Saul Leiter, Stephen Shore, and Ernst Haas.

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