This is not a post about taking photographs, but about looking at them, reading them, and understanding what they are and are not. If you want to know about taking photos, there’s a ton of good literature out there. There is a whole subset of phototographers who think that the techniques of photography (exposure, sharpness, depth, grain/noise, etc) are an end unto themselves, but this is a false path. But the fact that they exist and are there to tell us what the rules are so we can break them effectively is a good thing.




The idea of “New Liberal Arts” comes from Snarkmarket and their interesting if incomplete book New Liberal Arts, which is based around the idea that to function intelligently in society today, there is a new skillset outside of the traditional lines of the liberal arts. The main point of learning liberal arts is to learn how to think critically about the world. Since it’s my area, and since the chapter in the book is one of the areas that comes up short, I thought some expansion was called for in the area of thinking critically about photographs. These are all just starting points, ideas, and not rules forever.

The first most important consideration when looking at a photograph is the content of the picture. A photo is a two-d simulacra of the 4-d world; It takes a cone of space (the angle of view) and a slice of time (the shutter speed) and reduces that to an image on a piece of paper, or more commonly now, a screen. There are parts in and out of focus, there is a limit to the detail that can be seen (and no software, no matter what CSI tells you, can bring back detail from a pixelated image). There is a perspective, and by this I mean a camera position, high or low, close to the subject or far away.




What does this mean to us, the viewer? Any rendering of a scene is only a partial rendering; at any given time there are an infinite number of perspectives and the same infinite gradation of moments that the camera can have, and we are seeing only one. I am categorically opposed to the idea that all of these perspectives are equal (relativism be damned, it’s solipsism with a coat of postmodern paint). Some moments are better than others, and if that weren’t the case, there would be no art in photography.




A photo can be evidence, it can tell a (short) story, but through selection of moments and perspectives, the photograph can tell a lie, too. It is impossible to tell by looking at a photograph if it is true or false. The only thing that can be determined is if it has been altered after the fact. This is why people are always so aghast when someone is caught photoshopping news pictures, because it disturbs their questionable belief in the veracity of the medium of photography. It’s a religious belief, one which has no grounding in fact; you’d see similar responses if you went in front of a church congregation and gave them a logical proof of atheism (ask a Jesuit, they really do exist, but reality is not wholly logical anyway).




So, a photo can’t be true or false from the perspective of a viewer, and here I’m only talking of candid pictures, not staged or manipulated after the fact. I can walk into a party and make 300 pictures, and just in the selection of what to show, make it look like the best party ever or the worst time anybody has ever had outside of torture chambers. Neither is true. Or they both might be.




Ok, that’s all the lesson I have in me today. The important takeaway: a photo is never the whole story. Sometimes it’s enough.

Posted by Matt on 2009-07-28T00:00:00Z GMT