Photography is a form of expression created based on the artistic realities of life. Due to its documentary nature, it represents a nostalgic approach. It is the transformation of an imaginary world into an image, whether fictional or experimental. In this respect, photography is a visual art that can produce both realistic and surreal images.
What makes photography a peculiar invention with unpredictable results is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
The reason early photographs were considered miracles was that they carried the image of something absent in a much more direct way than any other visual form. They preserved the appearance of things and enabled these appearances to be transported to distant places. Therefore, the miracle was not solely technical.
Like other technical images, photographs encode certain concepts and situations within the photographer’s intention and the camera’s program. This indicates that photographic criticism should focus on decoding the coding process within each photograph. By realizing their concepts through photographs, photographers immortalize memories, causing a transformation that serves as a model for others. The camera encodes the concepts within its program and, through the images it creates, programs society to continuously evolve its own program via feedback. When photographic criticism reveals these intentions in the photograph, it effectively deciphers the photographic communication.
The surprising power of photography far surpasses that of writing. A written text rarely conveys the simultaneousness, concreteness, and enchantment of photographic objects such as shadow, light, or material.
What happens when we take a photograph? You see nothing; the lens sees. Within the reality of the photographer, we are never truly in a real relationship with the object. Photography, from its perspective, is a pure question directed at reality—a question posed to the "other" without expecting an answer.
In photography, things are connected through technical processes that overlap their ordinariness. This creates the dizziness of constantly detailed objects—the magical decentering of detail. The desire to take a photograph perhaps stems from this realization: from the perspective of meaning, the world viewed as a whole can be quite disappointing, but when seen in detail and suddenly, it always appears with clarity.
The act of photographing can be likened to a form of hunting, where the photographer and the camera merge into a single and indivisible function.
The outcomes of photographic behavior are photographs that surround us from all directions. Therefore, understanding the act of photographing serves as an introduction to these surfaces that exist simultaneously on different levels.
Photographs continue their existence on diverse levels such as albums, magazines, books, shop windows, posters, tin cans, paper packaging, and postcards. All these images are concepts within a program and aim to program society’s magical behaviors.
Photographs are silent leaflets distributed through mass distribution channels within a vast program. Their real value lies not in their materiality but in the fleeting information they carry that can be re-presented. Distribution channels and media are the true encoders of photographs’ meanings.
In 1907, Lichtwark said, “In our time, there is no work of art that is viewed with as much attention as a portrait photograph of oneself, one’s closest relatives, or one’s lover.” This statement, which pulls photography into the realm of social functions, remains relevant today.
To collect photographs is to accumulate the world. Films and television programs illuminate walls and screens, their reflected lights flicker, and then they disappear. In contrast, the image we encounter in still photographs is a lightweight object, inexpensively produced and easily transported, collected, and preserved.
A photograph is irrefutable evidence that a particular event has occurred. While the photograph may be distorted, it always convinces us of the existence or nonexistence of something similar to what is shown in the photo. Apart from the limitations in front of a photographer or exaggerated interpretations driven by artistic concerns, a photograph’s relationship with visible reality is more innocent—and thus more truthful—than other imitative objects.
In the early decades of photography, people expected photographs to present idealized images. For most amateur photographers who equate beauty with subjects like a beautiful woman or a sunset, this remains the purpose. While no one has discovered ugliness through photography, many have discovered beauty through it. Aside from documenting or demonstrating social rituals, the impulse driving people to take photographs is the desire to capture something beautiful.
While most people taking photographs merely sustain a commonly accepted notion of beauty, ambitious professionals often believe their work challenges such notions.
To photograph something is to capture it. In other words, to photograph something is to engage with the world in a way that evokes a sense of knowledge—and therefore power.
Photographs serve as proof. Something you hear about but doubt becomes validated when a photograph is shown. Images may tell us little, but what they tell is undeniably true.
Because photography does not have its own language and merely quotes instead of translating, it is said the camera does not lie. A photograph cannot lie because it directly prints what it captures. To make a photograph lie, one must manipulate it extensively, collage it, or take new photos. At that point, one is no longer practicing photography. Photographs lack an inherent language to lead in another direction. Yet they are often used to deceive or misinform—and still are today.
Photography has recently become as widespread an activity as sex or dancing. Like any mass art form, photography is rarely practiced as art. Essentially, photography is a social ritual, a defense against anxieties, and a means of showcasing power.
What photography copies forever has, in reality, only occurred once. Photography mechanically replicates the unrepeatable in terms of existence. Events in photographs lead us back to the body we need to see as a whole, but never beyond that.
A photograph halts the flow of time in which the photographed event exists. All photographs belong to the past, yet they capture a slice of the past in such a way that there is no means of bringing it to the present. Every photograph carries two messages: one about the photographed event and another reflecting the shock of discontinuity. There is a chasm between the moment captured and the current moment viewing the photograph.
Beyond the clarity of the idea that arises in our minds from the photographed event, we are also affected by the photograph’s representation of an expectation that dominates the act of viewing. The camera completes the semi-language of appearances and reveals an obvious meaning. When this happens, we suddenly feel at home among the appearances.
A photograph does not need to tell us what is no longer there; it simply and definitively tells us what has been. This distinction determines everything. Our consciousness before a photograph does not follow the nostalgic path of memory but the path of certainty for every photograph in this world. The essence of photography is its confirmation of the object it represents. Unlike any other medium, photography does not invent; it is itself a confirmation. Any skill it occasionally permits does not constitute evidence; on the contrary, such images are deceptive.
What photographs provide us with direct access to is not reality itself but its images. For example, this allows all adults to learn how they, their parents, and their grandparents looked as children. Through photographs, every family creates a portrait history of its lineage, forming a portable box of images testifying to the connection among family members. As long as they are captured on various occasions and preserved as cherished memories, what is photographed is of little importance. A family photo album often concerns the extended family and is frequently the only thing left of it.
Photographs have become indisputable proof of trips taken, plans followed, and desired enjoyments experienced. Every photograph is a certificate of presence. Photography’s evidential power is tied not to the object but to time. From a scientific perspective, the truth of photography—its power of proof—transcends its representational capacity.
While taking photographs has become almost obligatory for travelers, passionately collecting photographs has turned into a particular fascination for those who, by choice, necessity, or circumstance, confine themselves to indoor living. Through photo collections, people can create a substitute world dedicated to elevating, consoling, or generating hollow hopes with images.
Photography is often employed to facilitate an understanding and tolerant attitude. In humanistic jargon, photography’s highest duty is to explain humanity to humanity. However, photographs offer no explanations; they merely state facts. As Arbus said, “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.” Everything captured by the camera is a revelation.
A photograph is a marker of both a false presence and an absence. Photographs, especially of people, distant landscapes, cities, or the lost past, can make people daydream. A married woman’s wallet holding her lover’s photo, a rock star’s poster above a teenager’s bed, a campaign button bearing a politician’s face, or quick snapshots stuck on a taxi driver’s visor—all express a mix of emotional and magical feelings. Such photographs aim to establish contact with or possess another reality.
When we find a photograph meaningful, we attribute to it a past and a future. Professional photographers, when taking a photo, strive to select a compelling moment that the unknown viewer can imbue with an appropriate past and future. The photographer’s intelligence or empathy for the subject determines what seems suitable. However, the photographer can only make one decisive choice: selecting the moment to be photographed. Therefore, in terms of intentionality, photography falls short compared to other means of communication.
Because photographs reflect a fixed moment rather than a flow, they may be more memorable than moving images. Television is a stream where each new image erases the previous one. But every photographic frame represents a privileged moment transformed into a tangible object that can be preserved and revisited.
Photographs are the opposite of films. Photographs are backward-looking and perceived as such, while films are rooted in events yet to occur. When looking at a photograph, we seek answers about its purpose. In cinema, we anticipate what will happen next. All film narratives, in this sense, are adventures: they progress and arrive. The term “flashback” acknowledges cinema’s irrepressible forward momentum.
The silence of photographs—their ability to express without fully explaining—is their most valuable and unique trait, contrasting with cinema and television, which always attempt silence but fail.
Taking a photograph is fundamentally an act of non-interference. In some instances of modern photojournalism, such as the unforgettable images of a Vietnamese person reaching for a gas can, a Buddhist monk, or a Bengali guerrilla stabbing a collaborator, the horror conveyed partly stems from the awareness that the photographer chose to take the picture rather than intervene in the event. Someone intervening in an event cannot record it photographically, and someone photographing it cannot intervene.
The need to photograph everything can be rooted in the logic of consumption. To consume means to burn, exhaust, and require renewal. As we produce and consume images, we crave more. Yet images are not treasures worth overturning the world to obtain; they are readily available wherever the eye looks. Owning a camera can evoke a feeling akin to desire, and like all compelling forms of desire, it cannot be fully satisfied—partly because the possibilities of a photograph are infinite and partly because the project itself ultimately undermines itself.
Photographs are objects that can be created by anyone and encountered by everyone at will. However, photographs encounter us and program us into a set of ritualized behaviors that feed back into the device’s evolution. Photographs suppress critical awareness to make us forget the absurdity of processing them. Thus, photographs form a magical circle around us in the shape of a photographic universe. It is this circle that must be broken.
