The most important part of photography

But, is that the most important part of photography?

There is a particular kind of confidence that comes from knowing, before the shutter even fires, exactly where an image is going. 

The photographer sees the print on the wall, the client’s nod, the gallery label, the entire downstream life of a single frame, compressed into the instant before the click. This is what photographers mean when they talk about intention. It is the discipline of working backward from outcome, and it is, in its way, a kind of mastery.

But there is a second, quieter kind of intention, and it is the one that tends to get overlooked, because it produces nothing you can point to. It has no destination. It does not begin with a question about where the image will end up, because that question hasn’t been asked yet, and crucially, doesn’t need to be.

Picture the scene: fog settling over a landscape, a camera slung over one shoulder, in my case on this day, a Leica Q2 Monochrom, a tool built for exactly this kind of looking and no plan whatsoever. No print run waiting to be filled, no client brief to satisfy. Just a person, walking into low visibility, making photographs because the making is the thing.

It would be easy to dismiss this as the opposite of intention. A kind of aimlessness dressed up in nicer language. But that reading misses something important.

The intention hasn’t disappeared. It has simply relocated.

It no longer lives in the outcome; it lives in the act.

The goal isn’t a photograph that sells or impresses or circulates. The goal is the walking, the looking, the noticing of how fog softens a tree line or swallows a horizon.

The camera, in this mode, isn’t a means to an end. It’s a permission slip; an excuse to pay closer attention to any given Tuesday morning than you otherwise might.

This distinction matters more than it first appears to. We tend to measure creative work by its artefacts: the photograph framed, the post that performs, the print that sells. But artefacts are lagging indicators.

They tell you what happened after the fact; they say nothing about what it felt like to be there, fog on your face, doing the work of seeing.

And there’s a real argument, backed by what some photographers describe as the most honest part of their practice, that the experience of making is not secondary to the image.

It is, often, the more important half of the equation. The photograph is what’s left over. The walk is what mattered. The most important part of photography is often the act of making it.

This isn’t a call to abandon ambition, or to pretend that selling prints and building a body of work don’t matter.

It’s a suggestion that intention is not one thing, but two.

And that the version without a destination deserves just as much respect as the version that knows exactly where it’s headed.

Some mornings call for strategy. Others simply call for fog, a camera, and someone willing to walk into it without asking why.

So: take the photograph. Or don’t. Either way, go outside. Bring someone you like. See what the fog is doing today. Go enjoy what very well might be the most important part of photography.