Photos aren't "real" and also they are

My journey with rope and photography are deeply intertwined. I got into photography because I wanted to be able to show people the world the way I saw it. This core tends to add a journalistic aspect to my photography. Even the fully staged and editorial work I do feels like a diary to me. My camera is so deeply a tool of my expression.

When I first started tying something that was often parroted was the sentiment that rope photos aren't "real" representations of what rope is. The way people spoke about rope photos was as if they were all staged productions with multiple people helping and the person in rope only there long enough to take a photo. To say the quiet part out loud, the general attitude was that rope done for photos was somehow lesser rope. This is certainly true in some instances, but at the time it really frustrated me. I found the general attitude around photos really disheartening when I was getting into rope.

Then I started following DWL. DWL posted full sets, a story of a scene seen through his lens. He was also shooting film at a point in my life where I was shifting from digital to film. Viewing his art felt like being let in on a secret and it deeply informed both my rope and how I shoot it. I even had the pleasure of taking a photorigging class he and EbiBex taught at Snowbound back in 2020 (It was Jan, we didn't know what was coming) and I still use things from that class to this day. I let go of worrying that I was less for including a camera. I focused on capturing the moment the way I would outside of rope.

Sometimes I feel like I get that really right. I look at my photos and I feel like I'm there again. Sometimes, I miss the mark. When it's a technical issue that makes photos not good I simply through them out and move on. It's strange though when I take photos that I feel are lovely to look at but entirely unrepresentative of what happened.

I can't even really pinpoint what about these is wrong. They feel too gentle maybe? Too warm?

When I sent these to Honey and expressed my strangeness around them he said "it feels like a different scene than it was in my head." I think they hit the nail on the head.

I feel like these photos miss all the cruelty this scene contained. Part of that is that being meaner pulls me in closer and I miss the chance to capture those moments. Part of it is luck. I take photos with my heart in the scene and edit them like a critic so a lot of photos never see the light of day for one technical reason or another. For contrast though, consider this photo from a few weeks prior:

This is the only photo I took from this scene and it feels so shockingly honest. The tension in the hands gives pressure and the framing of this with the table and frame in the foreground feels deeply voyeuristic. Somehow this single photo is a better representation of this entire scene than any or all of the edited photos from the other one.