What is it that makes images so emotive? Is it the fact that we can embellish our own feelings and emotions as we view them; that we can use our own perspective, our own lens and our own frame of reference to give them meaning? Or is it that unlike the hard often factual written word they are softer and easier to read?
Photography for the most part requires little effort. In a photograph everything is there (or appears to be there); the facts are presented and don’t have to be unscrambled or decoded to find meaning. Yet, we know this can’t really be the whole truth. Think of yourself as the photographer and the tendency we all have to rearrange or manipulate our subject in our quest for a better image, (this can be as innocent as asking the person or people you are photographing to say smile or move a little closer). And how often do you stumble on the right setting, weather conditions and perfect view, or settle for the one spontaneous shot?
However, knowing this we still often overlook the implicit nature of photographs and believe that what we see is genuine or an authentic experience. Photographs speak to us, but they also speak about us. They often tell a story that’s not 100% accurate, yet “seeing is believing”, so we accept the distortions because we are caught up in the skewed representation that photography presents.
In 1859 during an era of technological advancement, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote three seminal essays on the new technology of photography. Holmes held the belief that photography would change our perception, understanding, experience and reality of the world. It was Holmes’ contention that photography would displace the object as the image became more accessible to us and therefor more important. The form of an object Holmes felt would become more pertinent to us, making its matter of secondary importance. Holmes qualified this by asserting that every time we take a photograph and create an image, we shed the skin of the object we are photographing and leave the essential element, the core behind. Holmes felt that “Every conceivable object of nature and art will soon scale off its surface for us”
Almost 150 years after Holmes wrote these essays, we live in a time when image proliferation surrounds us and we are bombarded by a constant stream of images often by refocusing our vision. Because of these images, we feel we have had authentic experiences when in reality all we have witnessed is the outer shell devoid of the senses of touch, smell, taste, sound and scale. For example, I can say I have seen the Pyramids when really all I’ve seen is some text book or glossy magazine photograph of them which has in theory totally distorted my understanding and experience.
No one can ignore the existence of our visual world and the impact that images have on our sensibilities, reality, perception, comprehension and lived experience. With the onset of digital imaging, the ‘skins’ Holmes sees as the ‘trophies’ of acquisition are now skinned again, as we have the capabilities to enhance, transform and reconfigure images in computer programs. This serves to distance us from our understanding of reality, it negates true experience, and in theory places us in a false world where the outer shell the skins of our existence becomes all we know.
