The Photograph vs. Photography

In John Berger’s essay “Understanding a Photograph,” he says “painting interprets the world, translating it into its own language.  But photography has no language of its own.”  Here Berger addresses the distance that frequently exists in photography between the artwork and the medium – namely that the photographic medium is often forgotten.  Photographs can be read by anyone, they have no immediate “language” that must be learned.  They become windows through which we look but seldom at which we look.  Ralph Waldo Emerson describes himself in a particularly transcendental moment as “[becoming] a transparent eyeball – I am nothing; I see all.”  This is similar to a phenomenon of photography.  It is unusual to view a painting for its subject matter alone – the handling of paint, representation, and other elements appear alongside content.  But we seldom see photographs as objects themselves – we forget “the photograph” in light of “photography”.  Recent advancements in digital technology have only compounded this focus away from the medium.  Many photographs now exist only as binary code, a series of ones and zeros.  Gone is the original physical object, the negative or transparency from which all other reproductions flow.

I am particularly interested in photographs as objects, and though it is somewhat natural for photographs to forget their medium, I believe we can gain much by paying more attention to the language of photography itself.  My favorite images often confront the medium of photography head on.  Hiroshi Sugimoto’s movie theater photographs draw me immediately to imagine their moment of conception – the photographic act in their creation is easily accessible.  And the size of subjects in a fixed photographic print, especially when compared in scale to the world in which we view them, can create powerful connections between viewer and object often lost to digital ambiguity.  Photography conducted with “the photograph” in mind is distinct next to photography conducted disregarding the medium.  Photographers make powerful images with both methods in mind, but as the trend towards more digital and less photograph-focused images continues, it is important to remember the photograph as object.

TMW

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