Type in ‘Documentary Photography’ into Google Images and immediately a world highly saturated with extreme violence and despair fills the screen. Is this really a true representation of the world that we live in? In Photography (and everything else for that matter) we seem fixated on the extreme. Our vision is constantly bombarded with images of war and famine to the point that we begin to believe that there is little else. But we are only shown so many of these pictures because we have this craving for negative stimuli. We can never get enough.
The most beautiful things are often right under our noses. To me at least, the local cheese rolling festival can provide photo opportunities that are just as revealing about the human condition as a scene of domestic violence can. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that these things require focus…
but so does the cheese festival.
