What is photography?

[RichC]

What is a photograph?

Two things to bear in mind:

(1) Ignore the image: generalise the answer so it applies to all photographs - from a passport photo or a family snap to a CCTV still from an airport to a fine-art portrait or street photograph? I'm most definitely not asking what makes a good image. Also arguments about film vs digital or even frames extracted from movies are disallowed - assume that all still images created by the capture of light by any camera-like device are photographs.

(2) Let's take mechanical definitions as a given (a method of recording light etc, etc.), and ignore everything that's associated with the physical creation of a photograph (film, digital, Photoshopped images - these are all photographs).

So, I'm really asking about the nature of photography. What is the essence of photography?

An example of the type of thing I'm concerned with. Consider "Migrant mother" by Dorothea Lang (http://worldsfamousphotos.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/migrant_mother.jpg). If this had been painting and the photograph never existed, would the differences in how we relate to the painting compared with how we relate to the photograph arise due to the properties that are unique to each of the two mediums? If so, what can these differences tell us about the essential nature of photography?

What is it that is specific to photography that another medium, say painting, does not have?

 

[Nomad Z]

The difference is that we generally perceieve a photograph as being an image direct from reality. A painting always has a painter's interpretation, skill, technique, choice of colour, etc, in every single brushstroke.

In photography, we can look at a picture, and look at the thing photographed, and make an assoication betwen the two - we can see how a visual scene can be focussed by a lens/pinhole and create a representation of that scene on a light sensitive surface. From familiarity with this association, we can look at a photo without seeing the thing photographed, and draw an inference about what that thing would look like if we did go and look at it. We would feel reasonably confident about our inference because of the mechanical nature of photography.

With painting, it's different - you have an individual painter's ideas to contend with, and the image created may be nothing like the thing that the image is supposedly of. Consider early drawings of Stonehenge - they are shown with human figures, and appear to be massive, towering structures. Go and visit Stonehenge, and while they are indeed big lumps of stone, their height is rather less than is shown in those early portrayals.

There is a 'reality' in photographs that paintings don't posses, no matter how realistic the rendering is in a painting - a painting doesn't capture an instant (be it a short or a long instant) through a mechanical system, it's created, stroke by stroke, by a painter.

 

[nikon_sam]

It's a moment in time that's been recorded somehow, that can be shown from one second after to 200 years later...it is not necessarily reality being recorded but a moment...
The "Migrant Mother" image could have been staged and who would have known...that would put it on equal grounds with a painting of the same image...
What is specific to photography that other mediums don't have is that it's been recorded at the exact time that it actually happened...

 

[acheyj]

Illusion of reality.

ron

 

[Sparrow]

Oddly I was just musing about a statement for something I'm working on, I got ...

The accumulation of points and an exploration of the voids that separate them in both space and over time … images of shape and form in their homeland the birthplace of geometry, trapped by the genius of photography into thin wafers, planes of reality, time held forever on the printed page. The incongruity of dimensions compressed, constrained yet still conceived … time and shape recognised as a reality of sorts, portrayed by shade and light, shadow and violent sunlight as a mirage of an alternative reality

... but it's mostly bollocks 🙂

 

[acheyj]

Oddly I was just musing about a statement for something I'm working on, I got ...

The accumulation of points and an exploration of the voids that separate them in both space and over time … images of shape and form in their homeland the birthplace of geometry, trapped by the genius of photography into thin wafers, planes of reality, time held forever on the printed page. The incongruity of dimensions compressed, constrained yet still conceived … time and shape recognised as a reality of sorts, portrayed by shade and light, shadow and violent sunlight as a mirage of an alternative reality

... but it's mostly bollocks 🙂

Hmmm what I just said.

ron

 

[Sparrow]

Hmmm what I just said.

ron

yep, I know, but I need to fill half a page ... and there's a limit to how big one can make the text before it looks like a children's book

 

[shadowfox]

A photograph is a two-dimensional interpretation of reality at one specific location within a duration of time.

 

[maddoc]

Photography is a printing process of a virtual image, captured within a limited amount of time.

 

[claacct]

The difference between Migrant Mother photographed and painted would have been that the painter would have not (hopefully) wanted to crop her other children from the frame and thus make her look appealing to the typical two-child middle class families who were the target for propaganda through Farm Securities project...

But to answer the question, a painter cannot be a paparazzo and there the distinction becomes clear.

 

[RichC]

I see my thread isn't very popular!

No one's mentioned the word "ontology" yet... Photography means different things to different people and cultures, and its meaning also varies over time.

So, for example, the belief that a photograph is an accurate representation of reality is based on Western cultural values and expectations of how "traditional" pre-20th-century visual art should appear. (Painting, in contrast, largely flung off the shackles of realism in the 20th century, and embraced Modernism. Something that largely passed photography by, which stuck firmly to its pictorial roots. If you look at 20th-century Japanese photography, you'll see a massive divergence from Western photography - there's a huge canon of images (mostly late 20th century) in which the blurred and abstract is celebrated.)

That said, the connection of photography with the "real" has weakened over the past century. Recall the "Cottingley Fairies", photographed in 1917? At the time, the photographs were believed by many to truly depict fairies (even by such luminaries as Conan Doyle): "The camera never lies". Looking at the photos today, it is hard to credit that so many were taken in: they are so just paper cut-outs!

And today, with the advent of digital and ever-increasing computing power, the belief in the truth of a photograph is even weaker: convincing "photographs" can be created entirely from scratch on a computer - images that have never seen a photon.

Thus, when responding to the question "What is photography", the glib answer "A depiction of reality" becomes suspect and only a part-answer.

Apart from issues surrounding the depiction of reality, there are plenty of other considerations to address when answering "What is photography".

Does anyone want to answer the question from an ontological perspective, which I believe is the only way forward...?

 

[acheyj]

I thought Stewart just did ?

ron

 

[Pablito]

The difference between Migrant Mother photographed and painted would have been that the painter would have not (hopefully) wanted to crop her other children from the frame and thus make her look appealing to the typical two-child middle class families who were the target for propaganda through Farm Securities project...

and the punch line is?

 

[Steve M.]

RichC, those are some very good questions indeed.

I'm not sure what a photograph is anymore (nor does it matter to me). Yes, we definitely relate to a painting differently than a photograph, and a drawing is different from either in how we think about it or view it. Tell someone that you have a print. Fine, but later you find that they mean a silkscreen. That will push some buttons too. In the end, it's about the image. And for that sort of thing I refer to my hometown guy, Louis Armstrong. He was once asked if he listened to country music. "Sure" he said, "but it depends on if it's good country music. To me man, there's only two kinds of music, good music and bad music". Same w/ images, in my mind. "Well, how do you know if it's good" one may ask? For that I lean on Clement Greenberg's "It's good because I say it is"

 

[Richard G]

A moment in time. Real. Frames from the Zapruder film. Ontological exploration of the fate of the mind of a president. A hideous fact.

 

[retnull]

Susan Sontag "On Photography"
Roland Barthes "Camera Lucida"
Vilem Flusser "Towards a Philosophy of Photography"

 

[RichC]

Susan Sontag "On Photography"
Roland Barthes "Camera Lucida"
Vilem Flusser "Towards a Philosophy of Photography"

It annoys me when someone answers with a reading list and no explanation - seems to always be these authors too!

Yes, well... Influential? Absolutely. But they're decades old - our culture and society has changed hugely since they were written, as has the technology and use of photography.

People always cite these works, but how much of what they say is still relevant (assuming it was valid in the first place). Sontag, for one, repudiated some of her earlier thoughts in her final essay, "Regarding the Pain of Others".

 

[rbiemer]

An apparently realistic section or representation of a 4 dimensional reality rendered on a two dimensional surface.
Maybe?
Rob