Wupatki National Monument Backcountry No. 2 ~ Winter 2010
Photography is a human act and therefore subjective, a selective act and there interpretive. This makes it possible for photography to be an art, for photographers to achieve a personal style – and for the camera to lie.
Arthur Goldsmith
On one count, and one count only, Goldsmith, while not entirely wrong, is far too bombastic for my taste. The camera does not lie, the camera is the photographer’s tool for re-presenting that which conforms to the vision to his or her vision. Much like memos that bear the slogan, From the Desk of…, (I cannot think of a time when a desk wrote a memo) placing blame on the camera is a bit much.
Having written on the idea of interpretation, of re-presenting, of selection, and at the risk of some degree of repetition, what makes the photographic image potentially something we label as art is the input of the photographer and not the photographer’s equipment. First and foremost, the photographer brings a point of view to that which is being photographed. Choices that conform to the photographer’s vision are made that no other photographer can or would make at any given moment in time. Post exposure processing also contributes to the character of the final image presented as a finished product, an artifact of place that discloses something of the photographer to a viewer.
I do not wish to suggest that every viewer of a photographic image will take away the same experience as other viewers of the same image. To the contrary, viewing an image is as potentially creative as making the image in the first instance. Meaning is constructed by the viewer based on an entire set of experiences from the lived experience. Every viewer, therefore, carries an entire set of ideas about what to look for in an image. If one is unaware of the photographer’s ideas, if one comes to an image fresh, ideas about the meaning of the work may be all over the place. If, on the other hand, the life and ideas of the photographer are well known, the chances that viewers will be able to find correspondence between their own interpretative ideas and the ideas of the image maker. That is one reason I undertook the task of not only posting an image a day for a year but to write about my ideas about the nature of photography itself and where it stands as an art form. Learning more about me is one way to see my images more clearly.
The Wupatki National Monument Backcountry No. 2 ~ Winter 2010 by Roger Passman, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
