THE ART OF COLLECTING THE WORLD

hotographs are magic. As stated by Susan Sontag, photographs are a grammar, an ethics of seeing- “to collect photographs is to collect the world.” They are “experience captured,” a snapshot in time of the human condition. Photography teaches us how to take the world and hold it in the palms of our hands. It is seen as

the most accurate way to capture reality and tell stories; photographs are souvenirs of existing, they are a journal of the world. In the words of photojournalist Renee Byer, “in this fast paced world, where the emphasis is on immediacy, a still photograph stops time.” Photography immortalizes tiny moments in time that we wish to keep in our pockets forever, “emulat[ing] the way that our mind freezes a significant moment,” in the words of National Geographic’s director of photography, David Griffin.

Sontag explains to us that in the beginning, taking photographs had no distinct social use, no clear impact or purpose; photography was simply an artistic activity “though with few pretensions to being an art.” With the industrialization and further digitalization of photography, photography has fallen into the welcoming and unwelcoming hands of every single person with a smartphone in their pocket. The industrialization of camera technology has democratized experience by rendering it into a series of images. Photography stirs up nostalgia through “giv[ing] people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal;” it also assuages insecurity, offering people evidence for the things they go about and do in the world. More importantly, whatever happens in a photograph is an event deemed worthy enough to be immortalized; photographs are tiny pieces of eternity, memoirs for the otherwise forgotten.

ABANDONED PLACES|SIMON YEUNG

Photography is our teacher: it informs us about the past, and applies pedagogy to the present; we see because of it, and it sees because we beg it to. According to writer Jonathan Jones; in a world of over-refined art, photography is “the art of real life [...] and real life creates true art.” Photographs wake the human conscience, enlivening our political consciousness and connecting humanity across the world. They also teach us to feel. In the words of Sontag, “photograph is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.” To take a photograph is to partake in mortality, to establish the vulnerability of space and time. In the words of Sontag, “precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

A concern of photography is its ability to both strengthen conscience and corrupt it. Through seeing photographs of political events and struggling lives, we are changed; but if we are repeatedly exposed to wrenching imagery, we become numb to it all; the purpose of the image is corrupted and lost. Now that the digital nature of things promotes an even more “image-choked” world through its thrusting of cameras into the hands of every person who owns a smartphone, it is easy to feel like the emotionality of photography has been numbed. Sontag states that today, “everything exists to end in a photograph” now that photography is so much more accessible.

Considering the rapid promotion and circulation of photography in the digital age, where do we think it is headed in the future? According to Stephen Mayes, who writes for The Guardian, the potential of computational imagery might blow our minds. He references our newfound accessibility to photography, telling us that revolutionary change in the world of photography will likely not be led by photographers or camera manufacturers but by telephone engineers. It is believed that the continued digitalization of the camera (and merging of photography with app-based software) will catapult us into “a very different visual culture with expectations far beyond simple documentation.” It is believed that reliance on computational photography will help photographers “make images of what they know, rather than only what they see,” and that technology will continue to make photography more and more accessible and all-encompassing. Mayes posits that photographs will no longer just be straight images, but “amalgams;” where camerawork will be more focused on interpretation, enhancement, and the construction of variations of reality versus direct representation. It seems like the future will bestow upon us a vast departure from our current conceptions of the magic of photography.