To take a picture

Why do we "take" pictures? Why is the action of photography described by a word that really describes the act of claiming possession of something? We don't create a picture nor do we simply "photograph" something. We take them, the way a hunter takes the hunted. In this sense, to take a photograph couldn't be more right. As photographers, we don't make up or create photographs from the thin air, but rather we discover them. Photography is the search for something that is already there. As Robert Capa put it, "the pictures are there, and you just take them."

And you take them, but does the event and the subject then become yours? I would say so in the sense that your photography is a part of you, the photographer, and thus the subjects of your photographs become a part of you as well. I remember one instance when I ran into a familiar face. His faced seemed familiar enough to be a friend of mine, but I couldn't put a name to it or even remember where I had met him. I spent a lot of time running my memory in rewind, trying to figure out where I had met him. He turned out to just be a face in the crowd of one of my photographs. I don't know who he is really and he definitely doesn't either, but his face became a part of my conscious. This is what makes photography such a personal activity. It is an interaction between two strangers. Pointing a camera at the subject and taking their picture seems almost an intimate interaction. This is the beauty in taking a photograph. It is the mutual existence of two, the subject and photographer, where the subject gives and the photographer takes.