My Approach to Photography

Photographic standards and styles change just like any other art form. That's interesting because photography is the epitome of objective observation. Look at photos in National Geographic issues from the 60's and 70's (skip the topless women shots for now), for instance, and compare those to the photos you see in recent issues. The older ones are much less sharp, more grainy. Which photos are more realistic - more accurate? But if you're asking this question, then right away, whether you like it or not, or you realize it or not, you're denying the statement in the second sentence of this paragraph - photography is the epitome of objective observation. Why is this? Because if photography is more objective than subjective human perception, then our judgments about which photo is more realistic/objective are irrelevant - and actually, bring into question that very claim of objectivity.

So what does this have to do with my approach to photography? Well, I don't think I've ever considered the camera as objective. Objectivity, paradoxically, can only be attributed to a human being - a subject. The camera is an instrument, with which you can do things. What it does is produce images. Images, as such, are very susceptible to - perhaps only make sense to - the imagination.

For the sake of context: some people - even some photographers - say that cropping a photo is distorting the objective record. That's obviously ridiculous - the camera itself performs the most radical and fundamental crop, since it limits my view of the world to the scope of whatever lens I have on the camera. The camera/lens not only crops a tiny square out of the whole visual field, it completely ignores - is blind to - the aural, tactile, and olfactory perceptual fields. How is cropping the visual abstraction that is the photo, from 1000x2000 pixels to 500x1000 pixels, compromising the objectivity?

So, I have no qualms about cropping - or sharpening, saturating, contrasting, inverting - the images I capture, because I don't think that there is some minimum reality out there that the camera objectively records.

If there is no minimum reality out there, then what AM I doing with the images?