What Makes a Photograph Have Soul?

You know it the moment you see it. Explaining it is another matter entirely.

There is a quality in certain photographs that stops you. Not because the technical execution is flawless. Not because the subject is inherently dramatic or the composition is textbook perfect. Something else is happening. Something that reaches through the frame and makes you feel like you are in the presence of something true. You look at the image and something in you recognizes it and responds to it before you have had time to think about why.

We are calling it soul. And we want to try to understand what it actually is.

What it’s not

Before we get to what soul in a photograph might be it is worth clearing away what it definitely is not.

It is not technical quality. Some of the most soulful photographs ever made are technically imperfect. Grainy. Slightly blurred. Poorly exposed. The imperfection is sometimes part of what gives them their feeling. A perfectly exposed technically immaculate image can be completely empty. A scratched underexposed photograph made on expired film can stop you cold and keep you there.

It is not subject matter. A grand landscape photographed without genuine feeling is just a description of a grand landscape. A mundane street corner photographed by someone who was genuinely paying attention can be one of the most compelling images you have ever seen. The subject does not carry the soul. The photographer does.

It is not age or nostalgia. Old photographs are not automatically soulful. The passage of time adds a kind of melancholy to almost any image but that is not the same thing. New photographs can have enormous soul. The quality has nothing to do with when the image was made.

And it is not black and white. We say this because we are a monochrome community and the temptation to conflate monochrome with seriousness and seriousness with soul is real. Converting to black and white does not add soul any more than it adds meaning. The soul has to be there before the conversion.

What it might actually be

This is harder and more interesting.

Soul in a photograph seems to have something to do with the presence of genuine feeling in the frame. Not manufactured feeling. Not the feeling that comes from choosing the right subject or applying the right aesthetic or making the technically correct decisions. The feeling that comes from a photographer who was genuinely moved by something and found a way to translate that into the frame so that the viewer can feel it too.

The key word is genuine. Genuine feeling is different from performed feeling. You can feel the difference even when you cannot articulate it. The photograph that was made because the photographer needed to make it feels different from the photograph that was made because the photographer wanted to make a good photograph. Both intentions can produce technically accomplished work. Only one of them consistently produces work with soul.

Soul seems to have something to do with specificity. The photograph that could only have been made by this specific photographer at this specific moment in this specific relationship with this specific subject feels different from the photograph that could have been made by anyone with the right equipment in the right place. The generic passes through you. The specific connects with something and stays.

This is why the photographs that move us most are often the ones that feel most personal to the person who made them. Not personal in a self-indulgent way. Personal in the sense that the photographer's genuine and specific way of seeing the world is present in the frame. You can feel a person behind the image. Someone was there and they cared about what they were looking at and that caring made it into the photograph somehow.

Soul seems to have something to do with what is withheld as much as what is shown. The photograph that leaves something unresolved, that raises a question it does not answer, that keeps the viewer inside it trying to complete something, has a quality that the photograph which explains itself completely does not. The gap between what is shown and what is implied is where the viewer's imagination enters the frame. And when the viewer's imagination enters the frame they bring themselves with them. The image becomes partly theirs. That co-creation is part of what soul feels like from the viewing side.

And soul seems to have something to do with presence. Whether the photographer was truly there. Not just physically at the location but mentally and emotionally present with what was in front of them. The photographs that feel most alive are almost always the ones where you sense that the person behind the camera was paying the fullest possible attention. Not to the settings or the histogram or the composition rules but to the thing itself. The person or the place or the light or the moment. Whatever it was they were there with it completely.

Why it cannot be taught

You can teach composition. You can teach exposure. You can teach the mechanics of light and the principles of editing. You cannot teach someone to be genuinely moved by what they are photographing. You cannot teach presence or specificity or the particular way one person sees the world differently from every other person. These things develop through living and paying attention and caring about things outside of photography as much as inside it.

This is why the photographers whose work has the most soul are almost always the ones who are most fully themselves. Not the ones who have most successfully imitated the photographers they admire. Not the ones who have most thoroughly mastered the technical and compositional conventions of the medium. The ones whose specific and genuine way of being in the world has found its way into their photographs.

You cannot manufacture that. You can only make the conditions for it by showing up honestly and paying genuine attention and caring about what is in front of you.

We want to know what you think

We have given you our attempt at a definition. But soul is one of those qualities where everyone has a slightly different understanding and all of those understandings are worth hearing.

So we are asking you directly. What do you think makes a photograph have soul. Not in general terms. Specifically. Think of an image, from your own work or from a photographer you love, that you feel has it. Share it in the comments and tell us what you think is producing that quality. What is it doing that other images are not.

We are genuinely curious. This is the kind of conversation the Collective exists for and we think the collective answer that emerges from all of you thinking about this together will be more interesting and more true than anything any one of us could arrive at alone.