Work That Matters (Nobody Cares)

I've been watching a series of You Tube videos about photography. They have been generally interesting and helpful. Until now. The latest video in the series is titled "Nobody Cares About Your Photography." That title didn't bother me as much as something the producer of the series said about half-way in. He said, "you need to be of your time and you need to make work that matters."
Work that matters? Matters to who? What if it matters only to me? Is that enough? Yes. For me that's enough. If someone else gets some enjoyment or inspiration from it, or if it conjours up some emotion or memory, or just makes someone smile (or cry), that's a bonus. And that bit about being of your time...bullshit. Some of my most favorite images have been created with unsophisticated technology from another time. That doesn't mean they aren't relevant in this time.
If you would care to indulge me for a moment, I'll illustrate what I mean with a few photographs -

A simple Polaroid picture of an old car sitting in an alley of a very small town. I took the picture because the scene appealed to me visually. So it mattered to me. I was to find out later during a gallery exhibit in which the photo was featured that it also mattered to someone else. A woman approached me and told a very personal story about the car and it's relationship to her family. I wonder if I would have even taken the picture if, on that day, I was only looking to take photographs of  "things that matter."

Another example is a picture that is very simple but contains more visual elements in a single image than almost anything else in my personal collection.

Color, shadows, texture, shapes, perspective, rule of thirds, lines and angles...it's all there. It's one that has received very little thought or attention from anyone who has seen it, but it matters to me. 

Simple, real, raw and flawed Polaroids of some people who are important to me. People whom I met in the course of business and became friends with, one who I met by chance out hiking and have developed a new friendship, and friends who I grew up with and have influenced me in different but meaningful ways. These photographs matter to me.

These two matter because they won awards -

This one because it's about a secret that I wish I knew - 

This one because it's about sharing a Zen moment with a friend who is gone now -

Or this one because it looks like a place in a dream but it's real -

And this one because it's...well...because it's a bear sleeping while sitting up like a human  - 

Sometimes that's all it takes to matter. Just a bear sitting in a field. 

So I'm not going to stop taking pictures because nobody cares. Every photograph I take means something to me. And, if it's true that nobody cares now, one of them might mean something to somebody some day. Then I guess I will have done work that matters.

Roger O'Dea     3/4/2018