John Enman – New Year’s ideas on images

John Enman – New Year’s ideas on images

Published 5:30 am Saturday, January 17, 2026

It’s a snowy day on this primary week of 2026 and I made a decision to look over a few of my outdated images to file away. There have been some outdated household images that I used to be as soon as employed to do restoration on that made me take into consideration how precious historic images are to future generations. Our historical past (private and worldwide) is so depending on images.

My old-guy reminiscence isn’t all the time too good lately however I did keep in mind an article from some years in the past and after some looking out I discovered the title “There is nothing like photography.”

In that I started with a quote by American Photographer Richard Avedon, “In visual terms there has been nothing like photography in the history of the world. There is no vocabulary for it. Photography literally stops something dead. It’s the death of the moment. The second a picture is taken that life is held, stopped and over. That moment is over.”

Photography is highly effective that approach. When it grew to become common again within the 1800s I’m certain nobody might have envisioned how essential to the world and to our private lives images would grow to be.

In Canada that started with a British chemist named Hugh Pattinson on a enterprise journey in 1840 that’s considered the primary identified Canadian {photograph}. He was a scholar of an early type of images perfected by a Frenchman named Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre and had stopped on the Canadian facet of Niagara Falls to make the historic Daguerreotype {photograph}.

His Daguerreotype would have taken greater than 20 minutes for the scene to reveal on a silver-coated plate inside his digital camera. Later he would encompass the plate with heat mercury fumes that may slowly make the picture seen. (Mercury fumes which can be extremely poisonous when inhaled and are absorbed by our lungs, all through our our bodies and into our brains).

Another of my favorite early photographers, Eliot Porter, well-known for his images of New Mexico and Utah, wrote, “The natural world has always attracted my eye: associations of living and inanimate phenomena, from the tropics to the poles and from rain forests to deserts, have been favourite photographic subjects for almost half a century. Grasses and sedges, especially, appeal to me – an appeal like disordered hair across a face, or a windblown field of hay before the mowing…”

I do suppose photographic concepts and alternatives generally occur in a second that after handed won’t ever be the identical and the reminiscence is well misplaced. With that I’ll embody one other quote from Porter for these of us that love images. Porter says, “I do not photograph for ulterior purposes. I photograph for the thing itself – for the photograph…”

Photography on this digital age has grow to be so very straightforward. New digital cameras and up to date cellphone cameras are superb. I do know that these of us devoted to the pastime of images attempt to create significant images that is perhaps as time consuming as Mr. Pattinson’s was. And these images will certainly be owned by future members of the family for so long as his has been on show.

If you might have a second, do try panorama photographer Eliot Porter in your native library, or on-line, and hopefully his images will encourage you as he does me. You may also search for Richard Avedon.

Stay protected and be inventive. These are my ideas for this week. Contact me at www.enmanscamera.com or emcam@telus.web.