How 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" Changed My Perception of Photography
I watched this movie for the first time last night and I really enjoyed it, but as a photographer it's completely changing the way I think about photography.
No spoilers, but for context the movie is about a man Walter, who works for Life Magazine. He manages the photos sent in by field photographers. One day he receives a roll of film from a revered independent photographer named Sean O'Connell, which contains his magnum opus, the problem being that the shot is missing from the film roll and so Walter goes on an adventure to find the missing negative.
The movie establishes a dichotomy between film and digital. Walter's coworker says in the beginning of the movie "Sean O'Connell still shoots on film and that results for me in a man crush" which is paid off when the negative goes missing. This can't really happen with digital. Film can be lost and damaged. Film isn't just an image, it's an object. Film is finite like life, and if the negative goes missing, it's gone forever, no back-ups, no recoveries, just like life. That idea changed how I viewed photography. Rather than a composition of elements, arranged to be visually appealing to a viewer, photographs can also be an attempt to capture, as Sean puts it, "The quintessence of life". The ultimate goal of photography can be more than just the utility of 'I went to the Himalayas, this is a nice sunrise over the peaks' and instead become 'I went to the Himalayas and this is what it meant to experience that moment'. The idea of photography as a transmission of experience instead of a transmission of sight is hugely transformative to me. I think it is also the thing that differentiates photography from other mediums of visual artistry like painting. Paintings can be very beautiful and meaningful in their own way, but photos are much better at conveying the experience of life as it is lived.
It also got me thinking a lot about gear and how gear interacts with and affects the life of the photographer that uses it. I conceived of it this way:
If photography is a major part of your life and how you spend your time, it makes sense that the design philosophy of the gear you use alters the way you live your life. If you're using large format glass plates for example, that will be a very different experience of photography than using the camera on your phone. This combined with the re-framing of photography as transmission of experience leads to a very interesting conclusion; that the gear you use changes your experience of life and has me evaluating if my gear lends itself to the kind of life I want to have.
Sorry for the wall of text, but I wanted to share this with people who might understand what I'm getting at. Also the bit about the dichotomy of film vs digital was just the thought process by which I had the realization, I don't intend to say that digital has 'less soul' or anything like that.
One of my favourite movies. I wish I could see it for the first time again! I'm happy you enjoyed it 🙂
Wise interesting thoughts, recognise much of it. Short responsive thoughts: For me photography can sometimes be about geeking about gear, sometimes about wanting to take a good picture. And the looking at images can sometimes be just "that's a nice sunset", but sometimes looking makes you physically remember the effort you went through to get to that place.Â
