Welcome! I’ve decided to formally add my take on a vast sea of literature on this medium. This series of posts is not meant to shed fresh light on anything. Rather it’s to share what i’ve learned so far with you.

For me, photography was born out of a sense of escapism and perhaps some intuitive therapy. Escaping my daily life by, ironically, trying to record it as accurately as possible proved to be a cathartic process. At least initially. I didn’t have any formal training in it. Rather I purchased my first mirrorless interchangeable lens camera almost out of spite. A bonus cheque from a job I hated turned me into a photographer! That relationship would become more complex later as consumerism and capitalism started to creep into my mind. But we can start as I did. Naive and ready to simply experience photography in its purest form. A box that records light on a shareable medium.

What better way to contextualize than spending time debating where I am in a frame?

Like all art forms the actual evolution of the process is complex and dominated by art narratives: technology versus product; saleability; genres; purist and naturalism; etc. It’s like any other human endeavour - susceptible to debate, faith, argumentation. But what we can all agree on is that a process is called photography when we record light. Unlike painting, sculpture, literature, theatre, etc… it requires light and a medium with which to record it. chemicals, plates, film, digital sensors, etc - there’s light. and there’s a tool to capture it. And the rest is art!

Humans have a very important relationship with light. For the vast majority of us it literally defines reality. (When we meet our sight impaired peers we cannot comprehend how they process information without it. Yet, like so many of our biases, these humans lead enriched lives without it.) Visual arts are interpretations of light. Until the invention of the camera this recording was figurative. There was, of course, the Camera Obscura (rooms or boxes where light was focused usually through a small hole or opening without a lens) which fascinated people and artists with the ability to reflect, refract, and control light. Famously 17th Century painter Johannes Vermeer used a camera obsura to shape his paintings and their observational shape of light. But they were still paintings. Still figurative. Still open to interpretation. We relied on light but could not do more than to mimic it.

Unimaginably, at turn of the 19th century technology started to make the idea of capturing that light itself possible.

The idea that light itself - reality itself - could be frozen onto a plate or physical object and then transferred elsewhere to share a moment… what a marvel. The 2 main names we associate with the first photographs and first cameras that developed them are Joseph Nicephore Niepce and Louis Daguerre. For me, their work exploring a medium to capture light, and then to refining that concept into a commercially viable process effectively changed the idea of reality itself. Culturally and perhaps even literally. Over the next 200 years, to present day, we have been iterating on these ideas, technologies, and dialogue. The power of the photograph has become a cultural and political language. The discourse on art evolved from technical mastery to the debate of what constitutes reality itself. It held the power to tell stories, engage or create biases, alter definitions of norms, with AI it has a phenomenological weight - is there anything real anymore? Or is everything just projections of something else? Who knows?!

So much rhetoric, but that’s how my brain seems to work. With the birth of photography, did reality die? Do we record light to learn more about it? Control it? Share it?

My plan is to get into how the machines work before getting back to this thought. But if you’ve read to here, I’d ask for your perspectives. There’s no right answer but perhaps keeping this in mind can help define our work. Or break it. I don’t know. What I do know is that I can’t seem to stop participating in it. So there’s meaning buried in here. There has to be.

Thoughts

Photography is Born