The Heart of the Photograph

We must shift the language away from what is or is not good and instead talk about whether an image expresses our vision, satisfies us creatively, and creates a desired experience for the reader, and—importantly—we must talk about how it does this. There are many ways for an image to be “good,” just as there are many ways an image might be “bad.” If we can learn to talk about those things, we will be much closer to a conversation that is both meaningful and helpful, at least in terms of getting us to the second and much larger conversation in this book, which addresses this question: What are the things to which we respond in a photograph? If we can know that, then we are closer to being able to put those things into our photographs and choose ...