Capture the World in Raw Format
In the photography world, you will often hear one photographer say to another, “Do you shoot in raw?” I may have blushed from the roots of my hairline down to my nipples when first asked this question as a novice photographer. My answer may have been, “That’s personal.” (For my friends with visual media backgrounds, please note that I’m taking some liberties with terminologies to suit the subject as it pertains to writers.) Shoot, in this context, refers to taking a picture with your digital camera or phone. Raw refers to raw format, meaning that your digital camera records everything it sees without applying filters, transformations, cropping, etc.
Raw format allows the artist to absorb every detail, good, bad, and ugly, before creating the art. Once the artist uploads the image to Lightroom or Photoshop, they can begin applying the prejudice, the conceit, the interpretation, the lie, the suspended disbelief, and the focus of a subject, its story, and theme. They can sharpen or blur, saturate or desaturate, add luminance or flatten colors all for the purpose of directing the attention, manipulating the consumer, and sending a message. Raw format allows the artist to take any possible direction because no possibility has been denied outside of the picture’s composure (what’s in the frame and how it’s positioned).
As writers, what we write about doesn’t come from nothing. It comes from literally everything, each of the five senses. As children, before we apply lenses, neutral density filters, depolarizers, and color gels, we absorb every detail. Quickly, however, we begin to interpret, allow, and reject the input before recording to our conscious mind and memories. We apply a bias, a slippery term in visual media. In photography, a “bias” can be a slice or duplicate of the image recorded in a specific way as a comparison to other biases or the raw image. When paired with the original image or other biases, it can help us better understand the subject. Note that bias is useful when we know that it is a bias compared to the unbiased image.
“Bias” in digital photography can also refer to the technological development of the medium itself, such that the faces of white people are favored in determining exposure and white balance over people of color. Did you know that? Engineers and programmers of this digital medium exercised implicit bias in making sure that the best portraits of people favored one skin color over another. I’m told, but I am unconvinced, that newer digital cameras are compensating for this. (As a photographer father of a half-black son, this will need to be a topic for another rage-post later.)
As writers, I encourage us to “shoot in raw” when we participate in the world. Unlike the digital camera, this is more than a setting; it’s a way of observing, being, living. It’s recognizing implicit bias, overcoming the resistance of ugly truth over cherished belief, and opening an unconditional space to store it. We may not like or “agree” with what we see, but it is no less valid as a thing that exists. As we consume the world, filling our Inkwell of Ideas from which all great stories are scratched onto paper, let it all in, every texture, full color spectrums, the beauty, the horrors. If we etch into our skulls the inconvenient truth of life and living, the raw image, we will have the best authentic content from which to write our stories. I feel that we cannot create authentically if our source material is already formatted, biased, cropped, vignetted, and noise-reduced.
Go forth, creatives and reset your cameras to Childlike Curiosity and Raw Format. And when we finally sit down with our paper or keyboard, create art knowing that every filter may introduce bias and deflate the authenticity of our voices, story, and message. But that, my friends, is a topic for another day. Today, see the world as it is.
"Once the artist uploads the image to Lightroom or Photoshop, they can begin applying the prejudice, the conceit, the interpretation, the lie, the suspended disbelief, and the focus of a subject, its story, and theme" -- I love this sentence so much, and all these sentences. A beautiful metaphor from a helluva guy. Thank you for sharing 💜