All of the above.
Expression. Whatever I photograph, I am trying to convey it as I see it. Sometimes it borders on documentation, but it always expresses my own bias.
Photography documents, it is a factive medium, and the expressive consequences of that documentation have a native intensity and authenticity not matched by fictive media like painting or drawing or electronic picture-making.
From the earliest days of photography, it has had a loose relationship with the truth. While yes, a thing must be present in front of the lens to be described by the lens, beyond that it is no more truthful than painting. The mere presence of a thing in front of the lens does not enable us to determine truth beyond that. In 1842, Hippolyte Bayard took a photograph of himself posing as if drowned, and captioned it as such to make a commentary upon a legal decision about the uniqueness of the method of photography he had invented. He was not dead, but he depicted a scene of a drowned man. Or later, the infamous "Sharpshooter, Devil's Den, Gettysburg" photo by Alexander Gardner. The image was said to show a Rebel sharpshooter, killed in action at his post. In fact, the body was not that of a sharpshooter at all, and he had not been killed at that location. Rather, Alexander Gardner and his assistant had moved the body and placed the rifle for photogenic effect. And Roger Fenton's cannonballs are another example of photography showing reality but not being factual. The cannonballs were not in the location where they fell, and not at the time of day they were alleged to have been fired. The only thing we can say for sure is that the cannonballs were in front of Fenton's lens when he made the exposures. Did they show that Fenton came under fire? We can't know. Did they show a before and after? We don't know. Did Fenton manipulate the cannonballs for photogenic effect? We don't know.
Yes! TheFlyingCamera eloquently unpacks the difference between deceptive subject matter and the inherent incapacity of the photographic process to corrupt what it depicts. I've led a relatively sheltered life but even I have been fooled by photographs of things arranged so as to deceive. I've also fooled myself by misinterpreting photographs showing things as they naturally are. I've heard lies on the telephone. But in no case do I accuse photographs or telephones of lying. Both are factive media and the agents contriving deceit are elsewhere.
Yes! TheFlyingCamera eloquently unpacks the difference between deceptive subject matter and the inherent incapacity of the photographic process to corrupt what it depicts. I've led a relatively sheltered life but even I have been fooled by photographs of things arranged so as to deceive. I've also fooled myself by misinterpreting photographs showing things as they naturally are. I've heard lies on the telephone. But in no case do I accuse photographs or telephones of lying. Both are factive media and the agents contriving deceit are elsewhere.
a photograph can not lie by itself
Well, the telephone is transient- it merely opens a conveyance between two points to allow communication to occur. Because it has no presence before or after the act of communication, it can't "lie". But a bad connection or a defective phone can alter meaning by distorting the audio we hear, so we hear something other than what was intended. The telephone itself is not a medium, it's a device. The medium is conversation, which is inherently unreliable.
A photograph can be manipulated during or after production to also distort. As can a painting. Paintings can be as factual as photographs if they are made with factual intent. I think the difference is that with painting, the intent and the effort to create take longer, so we see the intent, or at least intuit it. Because a photograph happens in 1/60th of a second, we believe the intent is impossible, therefore we assume there is "truth" there.
But take for example the photo postcards of a giant grasshopper eating a giant vegetable about to crush the wagon hauling it. All those things, the grasshopper, the cucumber, the wagon, the startled onlookers, all were in front of the camera individually. They were then assembled to tell a lie, and re-photographed together. So is the photograph of the assemblage the truth, or is it a lie? All those things were in front of the camera individually and collectively.
And a photograph is a lie by its existence - it may be a very precise (or not so precise) representation of the physical objects placed in front of it at the time the shutter was opened, but they are no more the objects than the words we use to represent objects are. A photograph of a rock is not the rock itself, and in that sense is even more of a lie than the words used to describe the rock, since when we use words to describe a rock, no matter how precisely we describe it, we know we are talking about the rock, representing it in absentia. The heightened verisimilitude of a photograph creates the illusion that we are looking at THE rock, when in fact we are looking at a two-dimensional manipulated representation of the rock. If I photograph the rock out of focus, or with a shallow depth of field, it will look very different than if I use precise focusing and great depth of field, or if I photograph it in black and white vs. in color.
This shows the dichotomy of good versus evil for any invention. For example atomic energy can be used for radiation treatment for cancer and it can be used to make a bomb. So this thread was rightly placed in the Ethics & Philosophy forum by markbarendt. Mark by starting this thread pointed to this dichotomy and hence my comment in post #2.
I think this story is a reasonable example of how the content of a photo should be considered before it is held up as some form of truth. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-history-billythekid-idUSKCN0SA19R20151016#XcFTjBvCeQ583Bb7.97
I actually lean toward the thought that they can.
Again, you are mixing what an emulsion photograph is (an objective recorder of light), with what that photograph does (records patterns of light that may be interpreted after the fact as biased subject matter). I fear this misunderstanding is just too deeply ingrained to ever be overcome.
I picked 'Something else' because most of all, photography is therapy for me.
The solitary act of photography and the total involvement and focus on one objective - the photograph - helps me focus on what's important and gives me time for 'just me'.
i agree mark, its an experience-thing.
but that is an external thing, isn't it,
not the actual image on paper or film .. ?
I fully understand the difference Ken. I have even considered the implications of that difference. I even agree that "a photograph" like the one I linked to is a record of the light the lens collected for it; plus or minus any post shot edits or manipulations of course.
"Photography" though is a human endeavor that eventually results in a "photograph". "Photography" includes much more than just the resulting "photo". Like most human endeavors and interactions, the motivations and expectations and norms and biases and uses and tools and choices and possible manipulations within "photography" to produce a "photograph", are myriad.
Your point is worth consideration but for me it needs to be weighted properly within the context of "photography" as a whole.
..."Photography" though is a human endeavor that eventually results in a "photograph". "Photography" includes much more than just the resulting "photo". Like most human endeavors and interactions, the motivations and expectations and norms and biases and uses and tools and choices and possible manipulations within "photography" to produce a "photograph", are myriad ...
This is a subtle but welcome shift...
Ken
No! This is wrong. It is a miscast idea that a purely technical process, namely photography, includes among its characteristics all the human anxieties, foibles, and misreadings that may plague its practitioners and consumers. A good test of a mistaken notion is that it leads to confusion, contradiction, and misunderstanding rather than clarity, understanding, and concensus. Witness this very thread as a sharp example.
If for my RB I choose my 150SF (soft focus) lens at f/4 to hide (lie about) a subject's facial wrinkles, haven't I used photography to misrepresent the truth?
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