[SEM2] Site Week 4 02/09/2022

The ontology of photography and its relationship with realism

Since 1839, photography has been understood as a physical consequence of light falling into a light-sensitive surface; it’s a natural form of realism that makes an authentic copy of the world. The photograph functions as a metaphor for seeing and as a mirror to the world, which results in recurring debates concerning the photograph’s apparent transparency and its capacity to document truth or to be expressive. The dominant faculty of vision, which the photographic process embodies, provides an extended metaphor for understanding, which is commonly expressed by “I see what you mean” or “seeing is believing.” Photographs confront the activity of looking because they appear to confirm what we see in front of us, and looking at the world contributes to our construction of what is seen as “reality.” And because “looking” is conceived as providing verifiable documentation of the world, the photograph establishes its association with one of Western philosophy’s fundamental preoccupations – that of naming and categorizing things. The function of naming derives from our fundamental desire to make sense of the world by defining objects in relation to ourselves. We assume that an interior psychological subjectivity centers our perceptual experience. Experience appears to be direct and simple when I use reason to make sense of objects outside myself and to bring them into alignment with own framework of understanding. In this way, experience is translated into a logical activity that unifies the world so that it fits with my existing conception of the world. Similarly, in responding to images, unfamiliar objects are made familiar by naming and categorizing, and in the course of this process a number of assumptions are made. Thus, how we interpret an image purely depends on the context and the spectator’s knowledge.

Realism, as a system of representation in general terms, refers to the desire to describe “real” events of the everyday. The “everyday” suggests that what is truly meaningful is available to everyone and not just the privileged few, which is why I chose to shoot my new project on the streets. The “everyday” photographs have a capacity to see what the eye fails to discern and to expend our understanding of the ordinary everyday objects from different angles. It shows us familiar things in a way that forces us to ponder them more deeply. The ordinary in photography metaphorically represents what is essential to life; it demonstrates our desire to recognize the value in the everyday using the camera as a magnifier to amplify this phenomenological desire. The phenomenological method, which aims to understand our experience through self-reflection, is echoed in photography’s concern to reveal what is hidden or neglected in ordinary things and thereby reveal what is beyond appearance.

Source: Photographic Realism: Late Twentieth-century Aesthetic by Jane Tormey