Fabricating Images

Photography is a medium in which reality is captured in one of the rawest senses. Strictly speaking it can tell a truth that no other interpretation really can. In this retrospect, it becomes questionable as to whether it is based in creation or description. Although it leaves room for the practice of expression or deception it still stems from an actual physical moment as opposed to a solely abstract idea or process of the mind. Coleman states in The Directional Mode, “The most important photography is emphatically not Art.” Like other artistic mediums such as sculpture or painting, photography can fit into many categories like abstraction or realism for example. But unlike other forms of art, photography takes the viewers experience to a new level by not only describing and translating a moment or feeling, but sometimes tricking the viewer into obscuring reality from design.

Take Rene Magritte’s painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe. A painting of a pipe, where underneath it states in French “This is not a pipe.” It concentrates on the idea, that although there is a depiction of a pipe, that pipe does not exist in reality. I feel the controversy over photography as an artistic medium hovers around the notion that if we were to look at a picture of a pipe, we know that it once existed. Even with abstractions we can see that although we may not be able to decipher the element itself, we are seeing reality in a new light. The beauty of this is that we can take this instinctual knowledge of reality and twist it to convince viewers of a false reality, allow them to see deeper into the physical world, or portray a feeling or mindset to either identify with or discover.

Taking these tools and utilizing them to communicate in a visual language is the nature of art. Les Krims stated in 1969“I am not a Historian. I create history. These images are anti-decisive movement. It is possible to create any image one might think of; this possibility, of course is contingent with being able to think and create. The greatest potential source of photographic imagery is the mind.” Such as drawing becomes merely the division of space, and how music becomes merely the difference between a noise and silence, photography becomes the absolute between substance and seclusion.