The cultural dominance and ubiquity of the photographic image invites an uncritical acceptance of its impact and our unconscious absorption of its information.
Knowing that it is literally a ‘trick of the light’ does little to dent our sense of its veracity – after all, our vision functions by a similar trick. The traditional problems of sense-belief apply doubly to photographs, reality is dimensionally translated and reduced, then extrapolated from the photograph by our visual and imaginative conception.
We read and imbue significance in an image, in order to make emotional and visual statements for it, without being quite aware of how we do so. Neither are we aware of what we do when we create images- selected representations of our world, isolated outside time and space – or of their violence upon us – capturing and reproducing a part of ourselves that acts as a whole, suspended in limbo; changing the way we react and perform, changing the world they are meant to mirror.
Vilém Flusser’s ‘Philosophy of Photography’, Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’, Roland Barthes’ ‘Camera Lucida’, and various works by Tagg, Elkins, Benjamin and others, explore the truth and utility of the semiotic and ontological interrelation, and the effect of its assumption, as well as the processes of communication of abstract meaning and emotion. By these processes, the apparatus of photography can become a social power without a master, which we feed and sacrifice for, forgetting that such systems, as with money, information, or legislation, are self-interested powers that ought to act for us.