I have often seen things that would make a good photograph, yet I did not make one. It could have been a subject that interested me, a special moment in time or an arresting visual. Perhaps it was an imagined photograph where I could not find an existing reality to photograph that echoed my inner vision. When one choses photography as a vocation or a passion, the entire world becomes available as subject matter. There are opportunities for photographs literally everywhere. Some are made, but most are not. 

There are innumerable reasons why those photos were not made. I didn’t have a camera on hand (now with cameras disguised as phones that doesn’t happen as often) or it is impossible at the moment, such as when I’m driving down a busy highway. It might have been a technical error where even though I made an attempt, the image was lost. Or, as occasionally happens, I didn’t get around to it and when I returned, it wasn’t there. Perhaps the situation had changed or perhaps I had changed.  Sometimes, in hind sight, it’s the wish that I had recognized a moment for its important singularity and had made an image to document its meaningfulness - but, alas, too late. As I matured as a photographer, I would often see what would make a good photograph but realized I was seeing through another photographer’s eyes. Usually it was a photographer whose work I had studied and I would start to photographically interpret the world in the same way they did. But those images were theirs, not mine. So I didn’t make them. These are a few of the reasons for not making images and many more exist.

There are unmade images that remain with me, remembered, in a kind of private photo gallery of the mind. Each one remained not as an actual photograph, but as a memory of a photograph, even though none exists. They are often as vivid and “real” to me as images I’ve actually made. I sometimes see them quite clearly with precise and accurate detail. At other times they are mere cyphers, illusive forms escaping into a dream-like haze. I call up these images from time to time and remember them as clearly as I would remember a photograph I had seen in an album, a book, or in a museum.

I figured if this experience happened to me it happened to other photographers too. I decided to ask them. The form I used for their response was a blank piece of photo paper. I went into the darkroom, ran photo paper through the chemistry to fix it and make it safe in the light, but without projecting an image unto it. Each photographer was sent a blank piece of this processed photo paper to use for their response. Their answers, while words instead of images, have a tangible reality and resemble the artifact of a photograph, personalized with their own handwriting.

Getting photographers to do this usually meant getting together to explain the idea, often over a cup of coffee and talks about the photos we were each making. I would introduce the project and ask them to take part. My request called on them to remember, to dig through their own history for the memory of an un-made image. Photography is often a device for recalling and bringing back memories of specific times, places, people or experiences. This was working in reverse - asking them to call up a memory to create an image. I also called on their willingness to admit, if not to failure, at least defeat as they had to share where they had not succeeded as photographers, something most of us in the arts don’t like to admit. Consequently, there would be an element of vulnerability and personal risk in taking part in this project. To my surprise, almost everyone agreed to do it. I would then send them a packet with the piece of photo paper, a brief instruction letter and a means of returning their “One That Got Away.” There are many other photographers I would have liked to ask, but for one reason or another, I regretfully never did. A few of the photographers never returned theirs but most of them did, at times needing just a little on-line cajoling to get them to finish up. The answers kept arriving; a testament to the generosity of the photographic community and their willingness to be encouraging and supportive of other photographers’ projects. I am sincerely grateful to each and every one of them for taking the time to respond in such a personal and thoughtful manner.

As I read their responses, I saw what they wrote. I became the photographer creating an image from their words; I became the photo, the gallery wall, the photo album. I was both the viewer and the creator, the photographer and the audience. As I received more and more responses, I noticed they fell into categories - the hoped for but not found, specific moments in time either humorous or poignant, the regret for not recording a loved one who died, technical errors, a missed opportunity, or musings on the nature of photographic seeing and its relationship to actual life.

It also brought to mind the relationship between words and photographs. One is an arrangement of letters to create meaning, the other an arrangement of contrasting black and white or colored dots to create meaning. Perhaps the two are not as different as we usually like to suppose. Photographs are often paired with captions that explain what is in the image. The images and the words give definition to each other, enhancing meaning by being combined. Together they provide a means of seeing that is different from each one alone. It is a mingled form of seeing. And it is seeing that is at the heart of photography.

Seeing takes many forms. Ansel Adams would pre-visualize by choosing what exposure and development combination would give him the desired photograph. Jerry Uelsmann would post-visualize by combining photographs in the darkroom to create a new image. Henri Cartier-Bresson saw time and chose the “decisive moment.” With prompts from other photographers, I was seeing with my mind’s eye. These images remain out of time and outside of place as they are created by the person viewing them at the time of being read. They defy the specificity that is photography’s usual nature. Instead, each viewer designs their own images, their own gallery of the mind.

This project is called “One That Got Away” because I asked photographers to respond with one image that they didn’t get. But it could also be thought of as photographers working together, each in their own unique style, to create a new way of seeing, a new way of being in relationship to memory and images.  They provide the prompts and the viewer provides the internalized image. Each viewer becoming a photographer, photographing with the mind’s eye.