Nature: November 2005 Archives
When we take photographs are we changing what we see to suit our view or extraction of reality? A photograph is capturing what we see we capture not the reality but the reality as we see or interpret it the photographer is both observer and interpreter. Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle could equally be applied to photography.
We also can photograph what we cannot see with the naked eye to capture in our memory photography is beyond that as we can capture different chunks of time that we see in continuous motion. We capture with infrared and ultraviolet and the light emissions of subjects due to light or other radiation. As we use more and more digital capture devices so the time has shortened between the moment of capture and seeing what we have captured. We like video cameramen before us have become slaves not to our viewfinder and imagination but to our LCD screens.
Photographers had to wait for gratification till after processing and printing. We waited in anticipation or dread to see the final result; now we can see it as soon as the file has saved onto disk and know we have what we want or not and either keep it or delete it. The negative does not reach the neg sleeve or the cutting room floor instead it is deleted or downloaded then awaits its fate in hard drive failure or some eventual digital graveyard along with betamax and laser disks.
Going closer to a subject we see what we would otherwise never see unless extremely shortsighted the unseen made visible has been an enduring chase for photographers looking at things through different lenses. This is still the goal of photographers whatever they photograph to reveal their personal vision of the world to the world. In many ways the only need is for capture and print to reveal all the use of further editing might be seen as superfluous or the task undertaken to reveal even more from the perfect print in the darkroom to the PhotoShop editors mouse but at what point does that artistic or scientific extraction or abstraction become the reality or further and further removed from "reality".
If proof were ever needed, we are in danger of editing out the truth behind the natural beauty of the photographic image. But, how much alteration is too much? How much reinterpretation can we undertake before we are distorting through the unreality of our personal perceptions.
