Developing the Self: Lessons from the History of Photography
There is something both audacious and quietly revolutionary about enrolling in a photography course. It stands as a declaration—not just to others but primarily to oneself—that you intend to alter the trajectory of your existence through the deliberate act of seeing. In my case, it was less grandiose: I simply wanted to liberate my fingers from their timid dance around the camera's automatic settings, those technological safeguards against both disaster and discovery.
I arrived on the first day of photography school clutching expectations like talismans—surely we would immediately begin the pilgrimage toward hands-on technical expertise.
Instead, our instructor escorted us backward through time with a history of photography.
As I sat there, with only the glow of PowerPoints to light the room, being introduced to new words like ‘daguerreotypes’—silver ghostly images featuring solemn gazes and imperfect edges—an unexpected revelation crystallized within me. These weren't merely historical artifacts to be cataloged and respected from a distance. No, with every slide transition, these images, in their technical evolution from obscurity toward precision, revealed themselves as profound metaphors for feminine becoming. Each chemical-burned plate charted the journey I’d taken: from the blurred impressions of girlhood toward the sharper resolution of womanhood. From living within prescribed boundaries toward claiming creative agency. From struggling with the mechanics of my existence towards (or at least closer to) mastery. Toward finding focus. Toward developing a gaze that is uniquely our own in this world where we perpetually exist as both the ones who see and the ones who are seen.
The history that unfolded before me in that classroom wasn't merely chronological; it was deeply metaphorical. As our instructor guided us through photography's formative periods, I found myself traveling simultaneously through the phases of female identity formation—a journey I continue to navigate. And it begins, as all journeys must, with those first tentative impressions, when both the photographic image and the developing self hover between invisibility and emergence.
The Early Impressions: Photography's Dawn and Girlhood
The First Fragile Images
Here's a marvel to consider: in 1826 (although there’s some debate if it’s a year later), Joseph Nicéphore Niépce created what is now popularly considered as the oldest surviving photographic image—"View from the Window at Le Gras."
The oldest surviving photographic image: "View from the Window at Le Gras”
The word "photograph" hadn't even been coined yet; Niépce called his process "heliography," literally "sun writing," because light itself was the medium's ink. This revolutionary process demanded an extraordinarily long exposure—historians estimate anywhere from eight hours to possibly several days, as Niépce left no exact record of the time required. Imagine the sunlight slowly burning an image onto a pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea, a type of asphalt that hardened when exposed to light.
What emerged was an image that seemed to hover between existence and nothingness.
Looking at it today—this grainy, barely discernible view of rooftops and angular light—we're confronted not by technical perfection but by profound vulnerability. The impression was there, but just barely fixed, like a whisper that might fade if you didn't listen carefully enough. This wasn't the crisp certainty of our digital age but rather a tentative first conversation between light and chemistry, susceptible to disappearing with time and handling. In its fragility lies its power—a reminder that all beginnings, even revolutionary ones, start not with confidence but with tenuous possibility.
In some ways, isn’t girlhood remarkably similar? It represents our first tentative impressions of the world—those fuzzy, indistinct beginnings not yet fully developed into sharp clarity. A young person's earliest sense of self forms with the same gradual patience as those first photographic images that required such painstaking exposure to light. We don't wake up one morning suddenly ourselves; instead, identity accumulates almost imperceptibly, moment by moment, in the slow exposure of daily experience.
Like Niépce's pioneering image, these early impressions carry a fascinating duality—they are both monumental and fragile, literally foundational yet so easily erased.
Then along came Louis Daguerre, building on Niépce's work. In 1839, he introduced the daguerreotype—a process that produced a single, non-reproducible image on a polished silver-plated copper sheet. I find it poetic that each daguerreotype was unique and unrepeatable, much like childhood itself. Hold one in your hands and tilt it under the light—the image shifts between positive and negative, appearing and disappearing like a ghost caught between worlds. This is perhaps the daguerreotype's most intriguing feature: its mercurial nature when viewed from different angles. From one perspective, you see a detailed positive image; shift slightly, and it transforms into its negative counterpart, the light areas becoming shadows and shadows turning to light.
What better metaphor for the experience of girlhood? In my own coming-of-age, I existed as multiple versions of myself—conformist daughter from one angle, rebellious spirit from another, scholar, dreamer, friend, stranger—each identity emerging or receding depending on who was looking and how they chose to see me.
We learn early that we are many things at once, our sense of self constantly toggling between positive and negative space, visible from certain angles, invisible from others, and always, always dependent on the quality of light surrounding us and the perspective of the observer.
Like those silver images, we too are reflections caught in particular moments, simultaneously substantial and ethereal, fixed yet surprisingly changeable.
The Vulnerability of Early Exposure
Those first photographic materials were astonishingly hypersensitive to light—capturing impressions with remarkable fidelity for their time—yet they lacked robust mechanisms for control or preservation. Left unprotected, they would continue to darken indiscriminately or fade away entirely. There was a precarious beauty to this sensitivity, a kind of openness that was both miraculous and transformative.
This sensitivity in early photographic processes reveals an interesting parallel to the developmental stage of girlhood. Young girls can absorb impressions from their environment with heightened awareness, registering emotional currents and social cues that shape their understanding of the world. Yet this receptivity, while sometimes framed as vulnerability, equally represents a profound form of strength and adaptability—an openness to becoming that contains tremendous potential energy.
What's frequently overlooked, however, is the tremendous cultural and economic power wielded by girls, particularly in early adolescence. Far from passive recipients of cultural messages, tween and teenage girls have repeatedly proven themselves to be global trendsetters and cultural catalysts. The Beatles' early success was driven largely by their appeal to teenage girls, whose collective enthusiasm launched the band to international fame. More recently, teenage girls have propelled entire industries and cultural movements, from the rise of young adult literature as a dominant publishing category to the global K-pop phenomenon.
This ability to shape culture despite being marginalized within it echoes the artistic journey of Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, who embraced the technical imperfections of her process, producing portraits with soft focus and emotional intensity rather than sharp detail. I'm drawn to how she refused to apologize for what others called mistakes. Working primarily in the 1860s and '70s, she photographed some of the most prominent figures of the era—scientists, poets, and artists—but often turned her lens toward women, children, and domestic subjects, casting them in allegorical or mythological roles. Her work whispers a profound truth: that clarity is not always the goal—that something essential about humanity might be better captured through impression than precision. Studying her photographs reveals their deliberate blurring and atmospheric depth, I see not technical failure but philosophical insight. In deliberately rejecting the crisp, clinical style favoured by her contemporaries, Cameron pioneered a more expressive, almost painterly approach to photography that challenged the medium's presumed objectivity. For young women developing their sense of self, this acceptance of ambiguity, of indefinition, can be a form of creative power rather than weakness—a recognition that complex identities resist simple categorisation, that perhaps we are most authentically ourselves in those moments of beautiful imprecision that escape rigid definition.
This tension between definition and ambiguity, between being precisely seen and preserving one's multidimensional complexity, remains central to both photographic practice and development. To be in process, to exist in the beautiful blur of becoming, is not a failure of definition but rather an expression of potential. Like early photographic processes that captured light in new and revolutionary ways, girls' receptivity to the world around them represents not just vulnerability but a remarkable capacity for perception, adaptation, and ultimately, cultural transformation.
Early Adulthood and Photographic Development
William Henry Fox Talbot's frustration with his inability to draw well during his honeymoon in Italy led to his experimentation with what he called "photogenic drawings."
I find myself returning to this story again and again—this moment when human limitation collided with stubborn desire.
Talbot’s yearning to capture the beauty he saw but couldn't render by hand speaks to the universal human desire to preserve impressions and experiences—to hold onto fleeting moments before they change. There's something wonderfully human about this impulse—this refusal to let beauty slip away without somehow marking its passage through our lives. It reminds me that technology often emerges not from abstract scientific pursuit but from our most intimate frustrations.
He initially used a camera lucida—a prism device that projects an image onto paper for tracing—but found his artistic skills inadequate to the task. How many of us have felt that same gap between what we perceive and what we can express? That exquisite pain of seeing clearly but reproducing poorly? His frustration became the catalyst for innovation; what he couldn't capture through skill, he would capture through chemistry and light. This quest led him to develop the calotype process—the first negative-positive photographic method that allowed multiple prints from a single exposure, fundamentally changing how images could be shared and distributed.
While Daguerre created singular treasures, Talbot invented photography's capacity for reproduction—a distinction that would ultimately shape everything from family albums to mass media.
His paper negatives, unlike the daguerreotype's metal plates, made way for the democratization of images, transforming photography from precious object to communicative medium.
I'm struck by how this narrative complicates our understanding of creativity itself—how it emerges not just from talent but from its absence. This transformation of limitation into possibility mirrors a central aspect of adolescent development—the discovery that perceived inadequacies can become pathways to new forms of expression.
Perhaps we are never more inventive than when confronted with our own insufficiency, never more resourceful than when standing at the edge of what we cannot do.
In Talbot's case, what began as personal shortcoming flowered into a technology that would forever alter humanity's relationship with memory, time, and truth.
For adolescent girls, this desire to preserve and understand their rapidly changing selves often manifests in diaries, collections, photographs, and increasingly, social media documentation. The journals kept by teenage girls throughout history reveal attempts to document not just events but emerging selfhood—to create a record of becoming that can be revisited, reinterpreted, and integrated into an evolving identity.
Talbot's early photogenic drawings required objects to be placed directly on light-sensitive paper, creating silhouettes rather than representations with depth. This direct contact method—where the object itself touches the surface that records it—produced images of striking simplicity and directness. There is something touchingly literal about this process, something unmediated about the relationship between object and image. When I look at these early works—ferns and lace captured as white shadows against dark backgrounds—I see not just scientific specimens but poetry made visible, the essential nature of things revealed through their absence.
This direct contact method mirrors how early identity formation often happens through direct imitation—trying on roles, behaviors, and appearances directly from available models before developing the capacity for more nuanced self-creation. An adolescent might adopt the exact phrases, gestures, or aesthetic preferences of an admired figure—whether parent, teacher, celebrity, or peer—as a way of exploring possible selves. Like Talbot's photogenic drawings, these imitations begin as simple silhouettes of identity, lacking the complexity and depth that will develop later. They are, in their way, a form of contact printing—the self taking direct impressions from the world around it.
Yet within these seemingly superficial imitations lies the foundation for deeper self-creation. Each borrowed gesture or adopted viewpoint becomes part of an expanding repertoire of possible ways of being. What begins as direct imprint gradually evolves into more sophisticated integration and reinterpretation—just as photography itself evolved from simple contact prints to complex representations with depth, perspective, and nuance. The evolution from Talbot's early photogenic drawings to his later calotypes parallels this journey from imitation to integration, from simple impression to layered expression.
The adolescent's impulse to document, collect, and preserve—whether through journals, photographs, or social media—represents not just a response to external pressure but a fundamental aspect of self-creation. In capturing moments of their evolving selves, young people are not merely performing for others but creating an archive of becoming that will inform who they might yet be. Like Talbot's negatives, these records contain the potential for infinite variations, each new print of the self building upon but never replacing what came before.
The Revolutionary Concept of the Negative
Have you ever considered what a radical concept the photographic negative was? When William Henry Fox Talbot developed the calotype process in 1840, he introduced something that would transform not just photography but our entire relationship to images.
For the first time, a single exposure could generate multiple prints—but to reach that multiplication, one had to pass through the strange inverted world of the negative.
I find myself lingering on this thought: to create something that can be shared widely, we must first create its opposite.
The negative—with its reversed tones and seemingly distorted reality—wasn't the endpoint but a necessary intermediate stage containing all the information needed for subsequent development. Dark becomes light, light becomes dark, and familiar forms appear alien. Yet within this inversion lies tremendous potential: from one negative, countless positive prints could emerge.
The rivalry between Daguerre and Talbot created a fascinating division in early photography that went beyond mere technical differences. Daguerreotypes offered detailed, three-dimensional-appearing images—each one unique and unreproducible. They were precious objects, sealed behind glass, demanding to be handled with care and viewed at precise angles. By contast, Talbot's salted paper prints from calotype negatives could be endlessly reproduced. This technical difference sparked a philosophical debate that critics framed as "information versus artistry."
Which was more valuable—the perfect but singular image or the imperfect but reproducible one?
The question itself contains assumptions worth examining.
Perfection and reproduction were positioned as mutually exclusive paths, as though one must sacrifice either uniqueness or distribution. The daguerreotype's admirers praised its clarity and detail—how it seemed to capture reality with a precision previously unimaginable. Talbot's supporters recognized something more revolutionary: that meaning might flourish through dissemination rather than preservation, that ideas gain power not through perfection but through sharing.
This tension between precision and expressiveness, between exact documentation and subjective interpretation, became a fundamental artistic dialogue that extended far beyond photography's early days. It continues in our digital era, where the perfect high-resolution image competes with the deliberately degraded aesthetic of filters and vintage effects. We seem drawn equally to technological precision and to the human warmth of imperfection.
My adult years presented similar tensions—do I aspire toward a singular, coherent identity or embrace multiplicity and contradiction? Perhaps photography's history suggests I need not have been worried about the choice. After all, both Daguerre's and Talbot's processes eventually gave way to methods that incorporated aspects of each. The either/or proposition—singularity versus reproduction, precision versus expressiveness—evolved into approaches that recognized the value of both.
Maybe that's what maturity offers: not the resolution of contradictions but the capacity to hold them in productive tension, to recognize that opposing impulses need not be reconciled to be valuable.
Portability and New Perspectives
When George Eastman introduced the Kodak camera in 1888 with its revolutionary slogan, "You press the button, we do the rest," he transformed photography from specialized expertise into accessible everyday practice.
I find myself returning to the elegant simplicity of that promise—how it collapsed the distance between desire and fulfillment, between seeing and preserving.
With that beautifully simple box camera came an invitation: the world is yours to capture.
What Eastman understood was that most people cared less about the process than the result—the image itself, the moment preserved.
Then, nearly four decades later, the announcement of the Leica camera in 1924, and public release in 1925, brought another revolution in photographic mobility. Suddenly, photographers could move through the world with unprecedented freedom, capturing moments as they unfolded rather than carefully staging static scenes. The camera became an extension of the eye rather than an elaborate apparatus demanding its own space and attention. The Leica's compact design—able to slip into a pocket, always ready—created a new relationship between photographer and world. This wasn't just a technological shift but an epistemological one: it changed what could be known and seen, how reality could be engaged and interpreted.
In our twenties, many of us experience a similar liberation from apparatus and prescription. After the structured pathways of education and the limited horizons of adolescence, early adulthood brings an exhilarating mobility. We move through cities, change relationships, try careers, cross borders—each experience developing our capacity for seeing and interpreting the world. Like Henri Cartier-Bresson with his Leica, capturing what he called "the decisive moment," we develop a heightened awareness of pivotal choices and fleeting opportunities. There's a kinetic quality to this period—restless, searching, hungry for experience.
Yet, newfound portability brings its own contradictions.
The social expectations placed on young adults—particularly women—often conflict with this very spirit of exploration. The freedom to define oneself exists alongside increasingly insistent questions about marriage, career, etc. The portable camera didn't eliminate conventions about what constituted a "good" photograph; if anything, it multiplied them. Similarly, mobility in early adulthood doesn't erase social prescriptions about what constitutes a "successful" life trajectory. Sometimes it simply makes deviation from those expectations more visible, more consequential.
What fascinates me about these parallel histories—of photographic technology and human development—is how they both involve an expansion of possibilities coupled with the challenge of finding meaningful focus amidst those expanded options. Both require navigating between formula and innovation, between cultural conventions and personal vision.
The Kodak democratized image-making; the Leica freed the photographer to move through the world with new agility.
Yet the truly significant question remains unchanged across technologies and generations: not just what we are able to capture, but what we choose to see.
Developing and Fixing the Image
After exposure, a photographic film contains an invisible image—what’s known as a latent image. It exists, but we can't see it until it undergoes chemical development. Only then does the hidden impression become visible.
There is something instructive in this process when considering how meaning emerges throughout out lives.
Years accumulate experiences—relationships, achievements, failures—that create impressions within us. We carry these moments as latent images, their significance often unintelligible until subsequent development brings them into focus. The meaning was always there, waiting in a state of suspended potential for the necessary conditions of revelation.
After development reveals the image, it requires "fixing" to prevent further reaction to light. Without fixing, photographs would continue darkening until they became entirely black, consumed by excess light—destroyed by the very element that created them. The irony is inescapable: the medium's generative force becomes, without intervention, its destructive agent.
Early adulthood may similarly involve a process of stabilizing certain aspects of identity while allowing others to remain responsive. Values crystallize, priorities clarify, patterns establish themselves—not everything becomes fixed, but fundamental aspects of who we are typically find their form during this period. The experiences that challenge us most profoundly—relationships that demand more than we can give, work that aligns or misaligns with our deeper purpose—are quietly establishing what will remain constant and what will continue evolving.
Without selective fixing, we risk becoming hypersensitive to every new influence, every shifting social context.
The darkroom process demands both precise knowledge and intuitive judgment. As photographers like Ansel Adams and Minor White emphasized throughout the mid-20th century, developing film is both science and art—technical understanding of chemistry and timing combined with instinctive feeling for when an image has reached its optimal expression. It demands patience, attention to subtle shifts, and comfort with periods of uncertainty when the image is partially formed but incomplete.
These same qualities serve us in developing adult identities—creating enough stability to move forward without sacrificing potential for continued growth.
The photographers who have most inspired me aren't those who mastered a single technique and repeated it flawlessly, but those who maintained willingness to experiment, to risk failure, to continue developing new approaches throughout their lives.
In this regard, I think of Imogen Cunningham, whose career embodies the long arc of creative evolution. She began in the early 1900s with soft-focus pictorialism, a style then aligned with photography’s ambition to be accepted as fine art. Influenced by the aesthetic movements of the time, her early work often featured dreamlike portraits and romantic compositions. But she did not remain in that mode. By the 1920s, she had pivoted to a radically different approach—her now-iconic botanical studies rendered in sharp focus, revealing the architectural intricacy of magnolia blossoms and agave leaves. These images were crisp, sensual, and utterly modern, aligning her with the f/64 group, alongside Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, who championed clarity and detail over impressionism.
Yet even then, Cunningham resisted being fixed in one aesthetic frame. She turned her lens to industrial scenes, nudes, street photography, and some of the most compelling portraits of artists, dancers, and everyday people throughout the 1930s and beyond. In her later years—well into her 80s and 90s—she continued to photograph with vigour and curiosity, often working with a handheld camera, capturing the elderly with the same attention and dignity she had once given to flowers. When asked in her 90s what kind of photographer she was, she simply replied, "I photograph anything that can be exposed to light."
Cunningham’s life reminds us that identity, like a photographic image, is never entirely finished.
Even the most "developed" version of ourselves retains the capacity for reinterpretation. What we fix today may shift tomorrow—not because it was false, but because growth demanded a new composition. Her legacy suggests that longevity in creative or personal life doesn’t come from rigidity, but from sustained responsiveness: to light, to time, to one’s evolving sense of form and meaning.
This dance between exposure, development, and fixing offers us a vocabulary for understanding how experiences transform into meaning, how impressions become identity. It reminds us that what appears to be nothing happening may in fact be the most profound development of all — the chemical miracle of becoming, working silently beneath the surface, waiting for the right conditions to reveal itself.
Mid-Life Clarity: Documentary Vision and the Ethics of Seeing
By the 1930s, photography had evolved beyond personal documentation and artistic expression to serve powerful social functions. Think of Jacob Riis exposing the brutal conditions of New York tenements, or Dorothea Lange's iconic "Migrant Mother" photograph crystallizing the human cost of the Great Depression. These images didn't just record reality—they interpreted it, framed it, and placed it before the public conscience.
Something similar often happens in the third and fourth decades of life. The focus shifts from self-definition to engagement with broader social contexts and responsibilities. The question becomes not just "Who am I?" but "What is my relationship to the communities and systems I inhabit?" Just as documentary photographers developed ethical frameworks for witnessing and representing others' stories, mid-life can bring a more nuanced ethical awareness of our interconnection with others.
This evolution doesn't mean abandoning personal vision but rather directing it outward—developing what might be called a documentary consciousness about social reality.
The capacity for observation developed in earlier stages of our lives now expand beyond personal boundaries. We begin to see not just our own story but its placement within a complex web of other stories, other lives, other possibilities.
For me, this shift corresponded with a growing resistance to conventional frames—both photographic and social. There's a recognition that dominant narratives about success, beauty, value, and purpose may obscure rather than illuminate lived experience. Like documentary photographers who frame their subjects to reveal what mainstream culture has rendered invisible, women in mid-life often begin to reframe aspects of experience that have been culturally marginalized. This resistance isn't necessarily loud or confrontational. It can be as quiet as redirecting attention, as subtle as changing the frame to include what has been excluded.
Technical Mastery and Creative Control
By mid-century, photographers had achieved unprecedented technical control over their medium. Photographers could manipulate contrast, tone, and texture with increasing sophistication, creating images that expressed personal vision rather than simply recording what appeared before the lens.
Women in their thirties and forties often achieve a similar level of technical mastery in their chosen domains.
What fascinates me about this parallel is that technical mastery, in both photography and life development, doesn't eliminate constraints but rather allows for more creative engagement with them. The skilled photographer doesn't transcend the limitations of the medium but works within them with greater intentionality and precision. Similarly, mid-life mastery doesn't eliminate life's constraints but allows for more creative response to them.
This period brings recognition of inherent limitations. No photograph, however technically perfect, can capture the full reality of its subject. There is always something outside the frame, always detail lost in shadow or highlight.
Maturity in an Age of Image Proliferation
The transition from film to digital photography represents one of the most profound transformations in the medium's history (at least in my opinion). Where once photographs were relatively scarce and costly to produce—each exposure representing a significant investment of materials and labor—digital technology has created unprecedented abundance. The constraints that once forced careful consideration before pressing the shutter have largely disappeared. We can now take thousands of images without significant cost, delete what we don't want, and endlessly manipulate what remains.
This shift from scarcity to abundance finds its parallel in the later stages of life development. The careful conservation of limited resources—whether material, emotional, or creative—that often characterizes earlier phases can give way to a more generous approach. There is time and space to explore paths not taken, to document aspects of experience previously deemed unworthy of attention, to experiment without the pressure of immediate results.
Yet this abundance comes with its own challenges.
In a world saturated with images, photographs can lose their singular power; when everything is documented, nothing seems particularly significant.
Similarly, the expansion of possibilities in later life can sometimes dilute focus and diminish the intensity of engagement. Finding meaningful patterns amidst abundance becomes a central challenge of both digital photography and mature development.
What interests me about this parallel is that both domains call for new forms of curation.
The digital photographer, faced with thousands of images, must develop more sophisticated approaches to selection and organization. The woman in later life, faced with expanded possibilities, must develop more nuanced criteria for determining where to invest her energy and attention.
Manipulation and Authenticity
Digital photography introduced unprecedented capabilities for image manipulation. The photograph is no longer necessarily an indexical trace of a moment that actually existed but can be a complete construction. This has intensified long-standing questions about photographic truth and authenticity that have accompanied the medium since its inception.
Women in their later years often navigate similar questions about authenticity and construction. How much of the self is authentic expression and how much is social construction? If identity is partly performative, what constitutes an "authentic" self? The recognition that all self-representation involves some degree of curation and editing need not undermine authenticity but can reframe it as conscious, intentional creation rather than mere discovery.
I'm reminded of photographers like Andreas Gursky, who creates images that are simultaneously hyperreal and impossible—landscapes and interiors that appear factual but have been extensively manipulated to express a particular vision. Mature identity can involve a similar integration of seemingly contradictory aspects of self into a coherent but complex whole. The goal becomes not personal "truth" in some absolute sense, but coherence, intention, and meaningful engagement with both limitations and possibilities.
This recognition—that authenticity isn't about some pure, unmediated expression but rather about intentional integration—liberates us from simplistic notions of "finding our true selves." Instead, it invites us to approach identity as an ongoing creative project, one that involves both discovery and construction, both interpretation and invention.
The Return to Slowness
Perhaps,one of the most fascinating developments in contemporary photography has been the revival of interest in historical photographic processes alongside the digital revolution. Alternative process photography—including tintype, cyanotype, platinum printing, and other 19th-century techniques—has gained popularity precisely as digital photography has become ubiquitous.
These processes require slowing down, working with physical materials, embracing imperfection, and accepting the contingency of results. They involve a different relationship to time and materiality than digital photography, with its instant results and non-physical images.
In my later years I’ve similarly found value in returning to slower, more tactile forms of engagement with the world. This isn't mere nostalgia but a reclamation of embodied knowledge and material practice. After decades of acceleration and increasing abstraction, there can be profound satisfaction in concrete, sensory engagement—whether with traditional crafts, physical movement, or the natural world.
What's particularly interesting about this return to slowness is that it often incorporates rather than rejects newer technologies. Alternative process photographers frequently use digital tools to create negatives for historical printing processes, combining contemporary and historical techniques. Similarly, women in later life often integrate newer and older approaches rather than choosing between them.
This integration of multiple temporalities—moving at different speeds in different domains, combining instant communication with slow crafting, rapid consumption with patient creation—characterizes both contemporary photographic practice and mature engagement with life. It suggests not a linear progression from old to new, slow to fast, but a more complex navigation of multiple rhythms and approaches.
Photography as a Practice of Becoming
The key takeaway from my first photography lesson is that, throughout its history, photography has never been merely a technology for recording visual information. It has been a way of seeing, a method of engagement with the world, and a process of becoming.
Similarly, womanhood is not a static identity but a continual process of becoming.
The stages described above—from the early impressions of girlhood to the digital transformations of maturity—are not discrete categories but flowing phases in an ongoing development. Just as each photographic technology contained the seeds of the next innovation, each phase of a woman's life contains both the integration of what came before and the potential for what comes next.
he parallel development of photography and female identity offers more than convenient metaphors. It suggests fundamental connections between how we see and how we become—between image-making as a technological and artistic practice and self-making as a personal and social process.
Throughout photographic history, the roles of photographer and subject have been distinct and often gendered. Men have predominantly operated the camera while women have frequently been its subject. Yet in the development of the self, every woman is simultaneously photographer and subject—both the seer and the seen, both the maker of images and the image made.
This dual position creates unique tensions but also unique possibilities. The photographer must simultaneously engage with technical constraints, artistic vision, and ethical responsibilities. The subject must navigate visibility, representation, and the politics of being seen. When these roles converge in one person, a special kind of awareness becomes possible—an awareness that is neither purely objective nor purely subjective but consciously inhabits the space between.
As both photography and female identity continue to evolve in the digital age, this convergence of roles offers promising directions for development. Digital tools have democratized image-making while challenging simple notions of photographic truth. Similarly, evolving understandings of gender have opened new possibilities for female identity while questioning essentialist definitions of womanhood.
To find focus, in both photography and life, is not to reach a fixed endpoint but to engage in continuous adjustment to changing conditions.
Between Class Reflections
After three hours attending my first photography class, I left with something entirely unexpected. I'd arrived with my camera and my impatience, ready for someone to finally explain which dial did what, which buttons would unlock which technical mysteries. I'd been seeking formulas, settings, the access to a photographer's code that would transform my fumbling attempts into something more intentional.
Instead, I walked out with my head swimming with facts about silver plates and paper negatives, with stories of inventors and artists who waited hours for light to leave its mark.
What a beautiful surprise to discover that photography isn't just about mastering equipment but about joining a lineage of people who found different ways to see and be seen.
Next week's class promises to cover "exposure"—a word that sounds both technical and likely to elicit giggles from a more youthful student cohort. I have only the vaguest notion of what awaits me in this lesson, but whatever it entails, I'll approach it with different eyes now.
Whatever I learn, I'll carry with me the awareness that I'm participating in something much larger than just learning to make better photos. I'm joining a tradition of people who found ways to see differently, to preserve moments, to transform the fleeting into the permanent.
Sometimes the most valuable lessons aren't the ones we came for.
Until next time,
Bron
xx
