Yesterday I attended Through Each Other’s Eyes: Behind the Lens at Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West. A photography friend Don H. also attended and I also had a chance to sit down and talk to Kim. I went expecting an interesting photography seminar. I came away thinking about something much larger: what it actually means to become an artist with a camera.
The setting itself seemed appropriate. Before the program even began, I found myself photographing the museum—the rust-colored metal architecture against an intensely blue Arizona sky, Western sculptures tucked into the landscape, patterns etched into the concrete, and long geometric shadows stretching across the walkways.
It was one of those places where architecture, sculpture, light, and landscape seem designed to make a photographer slow down and look.
Three Photographers, Three Very Different Paths
The seminar brought together photographers Scott Baxter, Joel Grimes, and Jeff Kida. What made the conversation particularly valuable was that they did not represent one prescribed way of being a photographer.
Their careers and approaches are different, yet several common ideas kept emerging.
One was the importance of reinvention.
A photography career—or an artistic life—isn’t necessarily a straight line. Styles change. Technology changes. Clients change. More importantly, photographers themselves change.
There can be a point when simply making technically good photographs is no longer enough. You begin asking different questions:
What am I trying to say?
Why am I photographing this?
What makes this image mine?
That distinction between photographer and artist stayed with me.
The Long Story Matters
Another idea that resonated with me was the value of committing to a subject over time.
Some photographs are discoveries. You encounter something wonderful, recognize the opportunity, and make the picture.
But a body of work is different.
You return.
You research.
You photograph again.
You begin noticing things you didn’t see the first time.
Eventually, the individual photographs stop being isolated images and begin speaking to one another. Together they become a story.
That idea feels especially relevant to the work I am creating now. I have been thinking increasingly in terms of series rather than individual photographs—images connected by place, memory, history, or experience.
A single photograph can be beautiful.
A collection can say something.
The Discipline Behind the Photograph
There was also an important reminder that photography isn’t only about inspiration.
Long-term documentary work requires patience and discipline. Editorial photography requires the ability to understand a place and determine which details actually communicate its character. Fine-art photography requires making decisions that go beyond simply recording what was in front of the camera.
All of those approaches require intention.
That may have been one of my biggest takeaways from the afternoon:
Don’t just photograph what something looks like. Decide what you want the viewer to understand or feel about it.
That changes everything.
And Then There Was the Light
Walking around Western Spirit reinforced the lesson.
I photographed the obvious subjects—the Western sculptures and the architecture—but I was equally interested in things that might easily have been overlooked.
The decorative patterns embedded in the concrete.
The repetition of architectural lines.
The relationship between weathered steel and desert vegetation.
And especially the shadows.
At one point, the structural columns cast enormous diagonal shadows across the walkway. Nothing dramatic was happening there. No grand Western landscape. No elaborate subject.
Just sunlight, architecture, and concrete.
Yet it may have been one of the most photographic scenes I encountered.
It was a good reminder that seeing is often more important than searching.
A Question I’m Taking Home
Photography seminars can easily become discussions about cameras, lenses, lighting equipment, software, and technique. Those things matter, of course.
But this conversation went somewhere more interesting.
It made me think about voice.
After years of taking photographs, what subjects do I repeatedly return to? What stories am I uniquely positioned to tell? Which images belong together? And when does a collection of photographs become something more—a coherent body of artwork?
Those questions are particularly meaningful to me right now as I continue exploring photography alongside painterly image-making and creating work for exhibitions.
I don’t think an artist necessarily wakes up one morning having “found” a style.
I think you recognize it gradually.
You make photographs.
You experiment.
You revisit old work.
You notice what keeps pulling you back.
And eventually, you realize there has been a thread running through the work all along.
Through Each Other’s Eyes
The title of the program turned out to be wonderfully appropriate.
We may stand in the same place, photograph the same landscape, or even point our cameras toward the same subject—but we don’t necessarily make the same photograph.
We bring our histories with us.
Our curiosity.
Our experiences.
Our memories.
Our sense of beauty.
And our own way of seeing.
That is probably what I appreciated most about spending an afternoon listening to three accomplished photographers talk about their work.
I didn’t leave wanting to photograph like any of them.
I left wanting to understand more clearly how I photograph like me.
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