Practical Photography Theory

We live in a visual culture so laden with camera images they are sewn into the very fabric of our lives. The average person in North America typically encounters more than a thousand a day. From pictures that bombard us daily on city streets, to those in print and broadcast media, to the ones we ourselves make. Their ubiquity seems to render them virtually transparent, posing a challenge to those who want to understand how photography both reflects and shapes our world.

When photography emerged some 175 years ago, it joined painting, which had for centuries dominated Western visual art practice. With the inclusion of photography into a growing visual culture, painting became seen in a more subjective light, and photography became understood as a literal transcription of reality, an objective way of seeing the world, a mechanical eye. The shutter opened, and then it closed, a neutral action that left little room for inflection. The camera not only did not lie, it could not lie, it was literally incapable.

But over the years we have come to understand that photography, as an extension of the human eye, is not neutral. Like the human eye, the camera discriminates. In the hands of people, it pictures some things, and excludes others. And what it pictures, it does so in certain ways; for example lovingly, or with contempt, etc. And thus, photography, in the hands of individuals, is an active participant in culture, rather than a neutral observer of it. Long before the digital image or the sandwiched negative the camera privileged some things and sidelined others. Over time this has had broad impact on society. It has affected our views on everything from history to psychology to science to politics to art.

And so, while photographs may seem entirely neutral, behind every camera, behind every photograph, is a photographer. A photographer with a point of view, with attitudes and beliefs, with fears, hates, needs, wants and desires, of which viewers may be unaware, of which the photographer her or himself may not be entirely conscious. The photographer’s eye is contingent upon experience, upbringing, lifestyle, and social values. In written history, as in art museums, as in the mainstream media, photography today is inconspicuously intertwined with normative value judgments. Images are always inflected by culture and personality. A camera marginalizes as well as it institutionalizes.

Consider the act of taking versus making pictures, a dichotomy that underscores a larger assumption about their intention and function, i.e. where meaning is located. How we feel about images affects not only how we see them, but how we use, interpret, and judge them. Their omnipresence in our visual culture suggests their affect on us is deep and lasting, if subtle, and perhaps insidious. “In America”, wrote Susan Sontag, “the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.”

Indeed, photography both reflects and shapes our world, in an ongoing dialogue between what authentically originates from within a culture, and what is then fed back to that culture in the form of images; images that are acted upon, and beget still more images, in an endless cycle of creation and dissolution. The further removed we become in the process, the closer we get to what Jean Baudrillard called the hyperreal, where representation gives way to simulation. Eventually we altogether lose sight of where we began and we realize that what we once considered uninflected, objective, mechanical, a tool for documenting nature, has become partial, emotional, subjective, an extension of the human eye literally constructing culture. The camera as both reporter and engineer? Observer and participant? Taker and maker of photographs? These are intriguing, if contradictory ideas. A camera that simultaneously captures what we see and what we want to see? From a critical perspective this is an alluring paradox. For contemporary artists consciously inflecting images, it opens up a world of possibility.

Since the mid-1980s digital photography has been expanding at a rapid pace. The digital darkroom has quickly freed itself from the bonds of servitude to its conventional wet-process cousin, carving out fresh territory as a contemporary visual practice. Along with its widespread use has developed an emerging visual vernacular that differs from film-based photography; its immediacy mirrors the pace of contemporary life, it challenges our expectations of photographic truth in ways that conventional photography never could, and it is environmentally safe, sustainable into the 21st century. It has also created a growing market for chemical prints, seen more as hand-crafted, one-off works of art then ever before. If there is a loss of romance associated with the latent image and the wet darkroom, the possibilities for contemporary photographers loom large. As a nonlinear process, it is truly postmodern, providing a multitude of vantage points from which to converge upon photographic intention and interpretation.

Further Reading
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
Walter Benjamin, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
Susan Sontag, On Photography
Martha Rosler, On Documentary Photography
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Inside/Out
Clive Scott, The Spoken Image
Andy Grundberg, The Crisis of the Real
Bertrand Russell, Appearance and Reality
Raghubir Singh, River of Color