Do I Take Photographs or Do I Create Art?

I have been a professional photographer for more than 55 years and I am still not entirely sure how to answer this question. Which probably means it is a good question.

For most of my career I would have said without hesitation that I take photographs. That is what photographers do. The world presents itself and we respond to it. There is something honest and grounded about that way of thinking and I still believe in it.

But when I look at the work I am making now, the wave series, the Dorset shoreline images, the work that came out of Hokkaido, I am not sure that taking photographs quite describes what is happening. Something else seems to be going on.

These images are not records of places I visited. They are records of something more interior than that. The stillness in them is not the stillness of a calm sea on a quiet morning. It is the stillness I was looking for when I made them. The images are shaped by that search in ways that go beyond what the camera simply recorded.

I think what I have come to believe is that photography becomes art at the point where the photographer stops trying to capture what is there and starts trying to express what it means to be there. That shift in intention changes everything. The camera is the same. The light is the same. But the relationship between the photographer and the subject becomes something richer and more personal.

I don't think this makes documentary photography or technically precise landscape work any less valuable. It is just a different conversation. What I find exciting is that photography is wide enough to hold all of it.

If you are somewhere in the middle of this question yourself, wondering whether what you are doing is taking pictures or making art, I would say don't worry too much about the label. Just keep asking yourself what you are really trying to say. The answer to that question will tell you everything you need to know.