You're Programming Your Future Self
Photography is self manipulation
Every photograph exists in two phases: the taking and the revisiting. Most photographers never consciously separate them. That's part of why so many pictures feel flat on second viewing.
I care about the process of making pictures as much as the pictures themselves. If not more. Aperture, shutter speed, how a particular lens renders a scene. I think about composition the way a carpenter thinks about joints: structurally, in terms of what it does to a frame rather than how it looks. I also care about the message, the feeling, and the purpose of the images I create. This newsletter exists because of that obsession.
The revisiting doesn’t begin when you open your photo library six months later. It begins the moment you press the shutter. Every decision you make during the taking programmes how the image will be experienced again. Choose a wide aperture and you’ve already decided that the future version of that scene will have its subject isolated against softness. Move three steps left and you’ve determined what anyone who looks at that frame will notice first. Wait for the light to change and you’ve engineered the emotional temperature of a moment that hasn’t been remembered yet.
Whether you’re thinking about it or not doesn’t change any of this. The person shooting holidays on automatic is still making these decisions, just ceding them to the phone or camera. The algorithm decides which faces to prioritise, how much to lift the shadows, whether to smooth skin or push saturation. Those choices shape the revisiting just as much as any deliberate technical decision, and the fact that most people never notice the trade-off doesn’t make it less real.
Real agency over how a moment will be felt comes from understanding what the camera is actually doing. Where composition sends the eye, how exposure sets the mood, what timing decides about the story being told: none of these are abstractions. They’re direct manipulations of future emotional response, made at the moment of capture, with no opportunity for revision.
Most photographs fail not because the moment wasn’t worth capturing but because the photographer never considered what they wanted the image to do later. They pointed and shot without thinking about the future self who would encounter this picture years down the line, after memory has shifted and context has dissolved. Without asking: what do I want this to feel like when I’m no longer the person who took it?
Obsessing over technique and seeing is taking the revisiting seriously. It’s giving the future version of yourself something worth encountering. Every photograph is a message sent forward in time, and the quality of the message is determined long before you press send.
Hi Cedric, not sure I agree with this one. I believe you make a photograph in the moment. Not for the future, not for someone else. If it works later, great. If it doesn't that's OK, because it will still let you travel back to the time, the place, and the moment you made it. That is the beauty of photography. At least it is to me.
Good article, Cedric. You’re talking about the moment one takes a photograph. What about the moment after? The one where we revisit it and we remember (I mostly do) how the situation was and why we wanted to make that particular moment? Is post-editing only a helping tool to make a photo better aesthetically or something more than this, such as a kind of help to bring exactly forward what we have seen?