Photography is a deceptive art. We have a tendency to take the contents of a photograph for a faithful rendering of reality at a moment in time. Indeed, photography is used explicitly for this purpose in some areas of life - anyone who has watched a legal drama is familiar with the trope of crime scene photography. But the idea that a photograph is simply a faithful representation of reality does not stand up to scrutiny. Photographers can use cameras to capture images which give our minds a sense of three-dimensional reality, but in the end photographers have a lot of control over the degree to which the representation captured in a photograph aligns with the way we normally perceive the world. To be sure, there are limitations to what a camera can represent — the final image has its origins in the light which exists in the environment at the time the sensor or film is exposed. Yet making a photograph is in and of itself an act of selection, emphasis, and even distortion. The photographer must make choices of subject, composition, focus, depth of field, and exposure, among others. And between the time the camera is aimed and the time the final print or digital image is produced, there is a great deal of leeway for creative decision-making.
Making a photograph involves elements of both art and physics. At its core, a camera is a device which absorbs rays of light from a three-dimensional world and projects them onto a two-dimensional plane in the form of film or a digital sensor. Although the eye is from a mechanical perspective very roughly similar to a camera, visual perception taken as a whole differs markedly from the internal processing which occurs in a modern camera. The human brain stitches together a steady stream of input taken from the constantly scanning eyes and the other sense organs to construct a three-dimensional understanding of the world. Although a camera can capture aspects of a scene which, when one subsequently views the finished photograph, trigger some of the same neural circuits which construct this sense of three-dimensional reality, in the end the two-dimensional rendering of a photograph is quite different from the three-dimensional world constructed by the eyes and the brain.
The eyes and the brain were refined by evolution to render a highly practical and utilitarian representation of the world, but this representation is limited by its very practicality. Space and the relationship between objects are rendered fairly consistently in our visual conception of the world for obvious reasons — a person may need, for instance, to estimate whether they can jump far enough to clear a fast-moving stream or river. Unlike the eye, the camera presents the skilled photographer with a much wider range of options for representing spatial relationships. A photographer can take advantage of the rules of geometrical optics (which govern the process of translating light from a three-dimensional world through a lens onto a plane) to freely distort the dimensional relationships between the objects which fall within the picture frame. One of the simplest examples of this capacity for distortion is the effect of focal length on the perceived distance between objects in the foreground and the background in a photograph.
To understand this sort of distortion, one needs to think about the relationship between the focal length of a lens — the distance between the lens and the sensor or film — and the angular field of view of the lens. The angular field of view is essentially the widest angle that the lens can capture. This angle is formed by the farthest rays of light from opposite edges of the frame that land on the edges of the film or sensor after passing through the lens. Lenses with shorter focal lengths command wider angular fields of view, which is why they are often referred to as “wide-angle lenses.” Those with longer focal lengths command narrower angular fields of view and are often referred to as “telephoto lenses” because of their capacity to make distant objects appear closer in the resultant photograph than they would appear to the naked eye. The angular field of view has a direct effect on how much of the picture frame an object takes up as it recedes into the background. For a telephoto lens with a narrow angular field of view (see the upper image above), a tree continues to take up a significant portion of the frame as it moves away from the camera. Conversely, for a wide-angle lens, the amount of the frame taken up by the tree diminishes quickly as the object moves away from the camera. In other words, wide-angle lenses make distant objects look comparatively much smaller than objects in the foreground. Because our brains are programmed to perceive smaller objects as farther away, wide-angle lenses in effect produce images which warp perceived distances, making objects in the background look farther away than they would appear to the naked eye. Telephoto lenses, on the other hand truncate the perceived distance between objects in the foreground and the background, making this distance appear smaller than it would to the naked eye. Of course, somewhere between wide-angle lenses and telephoto lenses there is a focal length which will produce photos that visually approximate the practical representation of distance which our eyes and brains produce. But a camera should not be taken for a device that simply faithfully renders reality. Through photographic choices such as focal length, a photographer can generate a wide variety of representations, some of which significantly distort the perceived space in the finished photograph.
I didn’t quite nail the right depth of field for the flowers here, but I still like the overall effect.
One could name other aspects of photography that belie our false perception that the photograph is a faithful rendering of reality. Depth of field — the range of distances from the photographer in which objects in the picture frame appear in acceptable focus — can be manipulated to create a variety of visual effects, including representations which differ substantially from our normal perception of the world. And the very act of choosing what falls within the frame—and perhaps more importantly what doesn’t—means that the photograph is always an act of interpretation of reality and not an objective rendering. But rather than cataloging the ways in which photography is not so straight forward as it might seem, I would like to discuss the somewhat unfortunate legacy of the misconception that the photograph is a facsimile of reality.
The idea that the camera faithfully captures reality has been the source of controversy within the world of art since the inception of photography. The photograph was for a long time disparaged and dismissed in artistic circles, and it has yet to entirely free itself from the stigma attached to its supposed artlessness. Detractors have often claimed that making a photograph is a mechanical process requiring little or no artistic talent or thought. A camera can, for instance, effortlessly capture the linear perspective that a traditional visual artists spend many hours perfecting. Such attacks might be doubly leveled at modern digital cameras, which have advanced remarkably in the past decade, significantly easing the process of taking photographs. Yet I am still inclined to give photography more artistic credit than its detractors. As someone actively experimenting with fully manual settings on a digital camera, I can say from experience that producing a pleasing photograph is not an easy task. Even if we accept the fundamental limitation that the camera can only gather the light which exists in a given scene, and even if we acknowledge that modern technology does some extraordinary heavy lifting in the rendering of photographs, the avenues for creativity presented by the process of making a photograph more than justify the inclusion of photography among the visual arts. I would argue that the constraints which govern photography no more deprive it of its potential for artistic merit than the constraints which govern icon painting in the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition, where the subject matter and technique are quite restricted. No one questions the inclusion of icons in art museums. Nor should they categorically reject the inclusion of photographs.
None of this is to say, of course, that all photographs constitute art. Just as a kindergartner’s drawings may not rise to the level of true art or merit museum exhibition, grainy photographs of a restaurant meal are not likely to move anyone emotionally or spiritually. Our world does seem to be oversaturated with uninteresting and mindlessly taken photos, a fact which is perhaps a natural outgrowth of the proliferation of cellphone cameras. But for me, photography is only as interesting as the motivation, thought, and emotion that goes into the process of making a photograph. When these elements are absent, the resulting photograph may be admirable from a technical perspective, even aesthetically pleasing in color and composition, but it will lack something ineffable that raises it to the level of true art. The difference between a technically admirable photograph taken without thought and emotional engagement and one made with purpose and deep engagement in an experience of a place and time is the difference between a Bach cello suite played by a computer that rigidly standardizes the timing and duration of the notes and the same suite interpreted by a great cellist such as Yo Yo Ma. When I look at the photographs of photographers like André Kertész or Fan Ho, I am simply overcome by what they have managed to capture through a medium that often feels frustratingly dead by comparison in my own hands. I would challenge anyone who rejects photography as an artistic medium to look at the work of either of these artists and repeat their claim.
In my own photography I have not yet risen to the level of this deeper engagement, and the task seems monumental. But I do not find this discouraging. Like anything worth doing, photography requires a great deal of practice, and at present I derive real pleasure and interest from experimenting with the medium — playing with technical settings and composition to see what works and what doesn’t. For me, the very deceptive nature of photographic representation is appealing on a philosophical level. To become aware of the ways in which photographic choices manipulate and change the rendering of the final image is to be reminded that our visual perception of the world is itself no more objective than the camera’s representation, that the world we perceive is an interpreted rather than an objective reality. In photography I embrace my subjectivity and my pursuit of beauty and meaning. I can only hope that by continuing to practice, I will eventually be able to make photographs that merit the label of art.