Compulsion
Photography has become a compulsion - an instantaneous dopamine hit since the advent of the camera phone. This compulsion can be seen when watching people interact with art at a gallery.
It goes something like this: See art piece in a gallery, read the blurb, spend a couple of seconds looking at said art piece, take a photograph, move onto next art piece and repeat.
As a photographer I am acutely aware of this compulsion and do my best to avoid it - that’s one reason I now shoot all my personal work on film. The image below is of the Great Stupa of Universal compassion - just outside of Bendigo. I had a compulsion to capture it with no real purpose. As it is on film it wasn’t instantaneous, or for my phone, it wasn’t to share, it was just for me. The compulsion to make a photograph was there however. Perhaps it was a way to try and understand what I was feeling? Or something along the lines of this quote I love from Gary Winogrand - ‘I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.’
© Christian Pearson - The stupa
Bendigo, Australia 2025: Film; Kodak Gold 200