Culture as an Important Factor in Narrating Your Photograph

In my last blog, I talked about the importance of photography education. I wrote that:

“Visual appeal alone does not necessarily create meaningful photography. To truly understand a photograph, you need to look beyond the frame—to its cultural context, history, aesthetics, visual language, and the ideas that shaped it.”

In this blog, I want to look at one of those factors more closely: how cultural context shapes the way we create and understand photographs.

Education gives us knowledge, but there is another kind of education that happens long before we consciously decide to become artists: the culture we grow up in.

Every person is shaped by the environment around them. Family, traditions, values, beliefs, relationships, social behaviour, political changes, places, and everyday life all leave an impression. We may not notice these influences while we are growing up, but they become part of how we see the world.

As artists, we eventually bring some of these experiences into our work.

Culture Shapes How We See

An artist does not create from an empty space. Our experiences become references.

The way we understand beauty, people, intimacy, clothing, space, colour, and even the way we behave around a camera can be influenced by our cultural environment.

Sometimes this influence is obvious. Sometimes it is so familiar that we don't recognise it at all.

This is why two photographers can be given the same person and the same outfit and still produce completely different photographs. They may photograph the same clothing, but their understanding and representation of it can be very different.

That is where culture begins to shape visual identity.

When I talk about culture, I don't mean only religion or the geographical place we come from. Cultural context can include family values, upbringing, social behaviour, personal experiences, political movements, historical changes, fashion, and the people and environments we grow up around.

All of these things can influence what we notice and, eventually, what we choose to photograph.

When Visual Appeal Wasn't Enough

I understood this much better after being accepted onto my BA Hons in Photography in the UK.

Before university, I was creating what I thought were visually appealing photographs. My main source of inspiration was Vogue and its covers. I was technically confident, and I thought that creating a strong-looking image was enough.

On the first day of university, we had a portfolio review. I saw the work of my peers and immediately compared it with mine. I honestly thought my photographs were more visually compelling and that I was more experienced than everyone around me.

Then my tutor gave me a reality check.

Looking through my portfolio, he simply said:

“Stop doing what you used to do and learn what we are teaching here.”

That was almost all the feedback I received.

What confused me was that when my peers showed their work, there were discussions, interpretations, observations, and questions. Even when I didn't find their photographs as visually attractive as mine, there seemed to be something for my tutor to engage with.

At first, I couldn't understand why.

After a year of studying and observing my British peers, I began to understand what I had been missing.

Many of their photographs came from things they had grown up with, experienced, questioned, or simply understood. Their cultural environment gave them references that were familiar to them. My tutor, sharing some of that cultural background, could recognise and engage with those references.

I realised that I was doing something very different.

I was taking visual inspiration from Western fashion magazines and trying to achieve a similar visual result without understanding the cultural context behind those images. I was coming from a different cultural background, and I had very little understanding of the context I was borrowing from.

I had learned the appearance, but not the meaning.

My photographs could look good, but there was little for me—or my audience—to relate to beyond the surface.

That made me question something I had previously taken for granted:

If Vogue was the kind of photography I wanted to make, why weren't my photographs creating the same kind of interaction?

Culture Shapes the Interpretation of an Image

Another experience at university made this even clearer to me.

Some of my peers were making photographs involving nudity. They created self-portraits or photographed friends, using the body as part of their narrative.

In the environment I was studying in, I encountered nudity being used to explore ideas such as freedom, the body, vulnerability, empowerment, breaking social barriers, or simply normalising the human body.

My immediate reaction was very different.

Coming from my own cultural background, I had learned to associate nudity with shame, sin, social judgement, and unacceptable behaviour. In particular, women could face serious judgement when their bodies were exposed.

So when I looked at the same subject, I wasn't starting from the same place as my peers.

I was interested in making work around nudity, but I realised that my own cultural conditioning was also limiting what I felt comfortable creating.

This was an important lesson for me.

It showed me that culture doesn't only influence what we photograph. It can influence what we are able to imagine, question, accept, or communicate through an image.

Of course, artists can break away from the boundaries of the culture they grew up in. But first, we need to recognise that those boundaries exist.

When We Photograph Another Culture

I didn't want to stop photographing Western fashion simply because it wasn't my cultural background.

Instead, I started trying to understand it.

I began asking questions about everything around me.

Why do people live the way they live?

Why do they eat the way they eat?

Why are certain fabrics, silhouettes, or colours important?

Why do people dress in particular ways?

Why are houses and spaces designed in certain ways?

What values influence these choices?

What is the history behind them?

The more I learned, the more context I had.

And that context began to change my photography.

I was no longer simply trying to make a photograph that looked like the fashion images I admired. I was beginning to understand the people, clothing, environment, and culture that I was photographing.

My images started to have more context. They became more relative to the audience, and people could read them more easily.

This is how the culture around me began to shape my work—even though it wasn't the culture I had grown up in.

When We Photograph Our Own Culture

The opposite can also be true.

When we photograph something that comes from our own cultural experience, we already carry many of the references with us. We have experienced the context personally, so creating a narrative can feel more natural.

An audience from the same cultural background may also understand the photograph without much explanation because they share some of those references.

But when we present the same work to an audience from another culture, those references may not be obvious.

This is where context becomes important.

A contextual statement, an exhibition text, or simply an explanation of the work can help an audience understand what they are looking at and why it matters.

The goal isn't to explain every photograph. It is to recognise when an important part of the meaning exists outside the frame.

Understanding What We See

My experience at university taught me that photography is not only about learning how to use a camera, control light, compose a frame, or create a visually appealing image.

It is also about understanding what we are looking at.

We don't simply photograph what we see. We photograph what we understand, and our cultural experiences influence that understanding.

For me, learning another culture gave me a new way of seeing. It helped me move beyond borrowing a visual style and start developing a narrative of my own.

Culture is one of the things that teaches us how to see.

And sometimes, the narrative we are looking for in a photograph has been around us all along. We just have to learn how to recognise it.