Just in case you’re wondering… I’ve more or less kicked the Facebook habit.  The Twitter-like update thingy is becoming more interesting and the frantic friend-finding less so, but I think overall I’m able to admit that I’m a recovering Facebooker.  Now that I have that off my chest…

While getting myself ready for Halloween, I started to reread Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, a story about two young friends and the terrifying adventure they have when a magical carnival comes to town.  Ray Bradbury is one of the few authors who knows how to push my buttons, and so I’m crawling through the book, constantly wondering if I should dare to get to the next chapter.  But what keeps me reading is the humanity of the characters and the way Bradbury deals with life, death, youth and old age.

Last week’s Flickr Photo Challenge, Old Faces, has felt like the illustrations for what I was reading: faces etched deeply by the pen of time, telling stories of love lost and found, families that stay close or fall apart, dreams deferred and realized.  And what I realized was that I was writing my own story into the wrinkles on each face and the glimmer in each eye.  I was treating each photo as a reflection of my own fears and desires, as characters in my own novel.  Which is of course what I’ve been doing with Will and Jim and Misters Cooger and Dark and all of the people who wander through Bradbury’s book.

I think what Bradbury understands about his fiction is the need to allow his audience into his story.  As photographers, we tend to want to do the opposite.  We want to force our vision, the picture we have in our heads, into the brains of our viewers.  How many times have you heard a photographer explain a photo by saying, “What I was trying to do here…” as opposed to, “What I was hoping you’d do…?”  We get tripped up in the indulgence of the process or the technique or the “art” and forget that photography is best when it has an audience – even an audience of only one friend who can share in the moment.

So as you shoot this week and post your photos, think about asking your viewers what THEY see and how they imagine themselves as part of the photo.  To quote Mr. Bradubury, “That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other.”