Who is the audience of this photo?

Icy feet, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

There appeared an excellent and thought-provoking essay at Lumious Landscape by Alain Briot, titled Of Audiences and Best Sellers. The essay is written by a professional photographer, but I found that some of the points were relevant to a novice amateur like myself.

Here is a quote: "In a nutshell, your audience are people who are interested in the subject that you photograph, in your approach to this subject, or in both. [...] From this interest in your work, and from devoting the necessary time to fuel this interest, comes what Barry Lopez calls indebtedness to our audience. This indebtedness goes like this: we are indebted to the audience because our audience gives time, effort and attention to us and to our work. In turn, we must repay our audience by giving this audience our very best effort at creating our work. If we do so, we will repay the debt we owe to our audience and the process will continue. The audience will give us their time and attention in return for work that continues to further our vision and meet our highest standards. If we break what is most often an unspoken contract, we will leave this debt unpaid and we will face the possibility that our audience loses interest in our work."

This was just one of the several deep observations in the essay, but this one resonated most with me. I have every so often wondered for whom I'm taking photos. For myself - a common explanation, as noted by Briot - or for someone else? Is there an audience?

As I don't have an answer to this, I'm falling back to another of my passions, writing.

I started to develop my writing skills when I was 15 or 16 or so. At that point I didn't have an audience, except for teachers who graded my essays. And they did not usually appreciate the kind of writing I did for myself - amply demonstrated those few times I submitted "my" writings for grading. (There was an exception in high school, a teacher of the Finnish language who encouraged "doing your own stuff".)

For several years I tried to emulate various authors, such as Hemingway, Hamsun, Steinbeck, Dostoyevsky etc. I wonder who my audience was at that point - probably a hypothetical reader of those authors I tried to emulate. I didn't seem to develop much, although I did get quite good grades whenever there was some writing to do in my studies.

At some point I started to write more and more non-fiction instead of fiction - articles, instructions, columns, essays etc. I didn't really see this as "writing" in the same way as my long-lasting struggles with fiction. But then I got things published, including books, and after a while I was referred to as a "writer", and even became a member of the Finnish Association of Non-fiction Writers. And somehow this kind of writing turned out to be fun - much more so than the struggles I had with fiction.

Returning to photography, I guess I'm in that phase that there really isn't an audience for my photos, and no real content to the photos, except as pieces of exercise in photography. But perhaps over the next years or decades something similar happens as with my writing. I don't mean being published, but instead finding a form and a voice - frames for those things I need to do with photography. (And a reason to have fun with taking photos.)