Photography vs reality

One common misconception when discussing photography, is the idea that a photograph would somehow be equivalent of reality.

It cannot be.

Why, you might wonder. Clearly, photography represents reality in the most natural way out of all art forms!?

Sure. In one sense, yes. A camera reflects what’s in front of it, according to whatever technical qualities it has. What needs to be remembered here is that different lenses gives different effects, and trust me when I tell you this; a photographer makes endless micro decisions and choices that effects how a photograph looks to a viewer.

Therefore; a photograph can never reflect reality the way it “is”, because reality is nothing without anyone functioning as a mirror, and through that mirror we filter what we see through previous experiences, everything we know/think we know, our personal preferences, political convictions, religious ideas, and so on.

But there’s another perspective of photography vs reality I would like to adress today.

The frame.

Reality is endless. Photography is not.

This is one of the first choices a photographer makes. What to put inside the frame, and what to exclude. The frame is what makes a photograph. A photograph is 2-dimensional – and flat. We can’t go into it, we cannot stick our head in and look at what’s outside the frame. We can never know what was there, at the very moment the photographer chose to make this specific exposure.

All we can do, is look at the flat image of something that to a very large degree resembles reality, and wonder.

When we look at the phenomena of photography this way, it’s easy to understand it as make-believe. In a sense, it is. In another, not at all. After all, something was there, in front of the camera, who recorded it according to choices made by the person who operated the technique.

But the question about the frame is an interesting one. It raises the question of what the photographer chose to include, and even more importantly, what was left out. When we look at a specific photographer’s entire body of work, we can find out what choices seem to be repeated over and over again, regardless of what these choices are.

Why is all this important?

First of all, it’s interesting. Second of all, anyone who looks at a photograph should remember it’s not real. It’s a representation created by various choices filtered through the photographer’s skill set, the way s/he sees, whatever belief system s/he has, what s/he knows about the world, about this specific situation, what s/he find important, et cetera.

And the frame is what very effectively makes the difference between a photograph and the endless, always shifting reality. A photography stands still, it does not move, it was chosen to be in a certain way. Reality is everything but that.

This goes for all types of photography. The frame creates a single moment, an image which purpose is to create some sort of emotional response – as images do. It doesn’t matter if it is seen in a news paper, art magazine, in a commercial, in a private photo album, or somewhere else. The frame itself makes it something else but reality. Reality always moves on, where the photograph ends.

/Malinka