George Carlin: "Don't take any of mine, I only have three left and the weekend's coming up."
Regarding "taking" a photograph, there's something interesting about the idea of ownership in photography, like when a photog "takes" a shot (i.e. exposes an image) there's immediately the issue of intellectual property and ownership: does the photog now "own" what he's "taken"? Does the subject (assuming the subject is a person) have any ownership in this transaction, too? Yes, depending. This gets into that whole can of worms around privacy and photographer's rights, etc.
Sidestepping the controversial, at the very least there remains the fact that, in order for a photograph to be recorded, something has to be "taken", the photographer takes an image with him when he departs from the scene of the crime; he's taken a few photons-worth of visual information, recorded on film or silicon, representing what the camera "saw" at a particular spot in space-time. The word "take" is replete with meaning. It implies a transaction, as if there is a winner and a loser. There can be, sometimes, but it depends, it's situational.
I like the thought experiment of what happens to all of those photons that bounce off of objects and don't get recorded as photographs at all, ever. There's countless billions of potential photographs being lost every second. So what if someone interjects a camera into that process, capturing a few of them? Once we think about that process, it seems the presence of the camera (and by implication the photographer, even if the camera is remotely controlled, i.e. surveillance) has more to do with what we think about the photographic process, after the fact. No one cares, at the time the image was captured, if it happens in the middle of the wilderness; it's only afterwords, hanging on a gallery's walls, that we care. It's all about context, the process of photography, that we fill with meaning through words like "take". Without the camera, those photons are lost.
~Joe
