Old barn near Collegedale, Tennessee.
The distinctive thing about photography, the feature that distinguishes it from all the other arts, is its direct and essential connection to reality. Simply put, you can't photograph something unless it exists. Photography is about what is.
A painter can make a painting that may or may not resemble reality, but it will have no intrinsic connection to reality. Someone can use AI to make a creation that looks like a photograph in every detail. It may be very well done, but it is not a photograph.
A photograph is a picture made by light rays. The word "photograph" is made from two Greek words: "photos,"which means "light," and 'graphos," which means "to write." So, to photograph means "to write with light."
A photograph is a picture made by the action of light reflected from something that really exists onto a sensitized surface. Light rays bouncing off something that has objective reality are recorded onto film, a sensor of some kind, or something not yet invented, but whatever it is, it is "writing with light." The unique power of photography is derived from this direct connection to reality.
The unique purpose of photography is to show what things look like in the real world. As distinguished from other visual media, the art of photography is primarily the art of seeing. The great photographer Dorothea Lange kept a quotation by the English essayist Francis Bacon on her darkroom door: “The contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention."
Painters, those who alter and/or combine photographs, and those who use AI to create "photographs" will tell you that they are only limited by their imaginations. And that's precisely the point -- they are limited by their imaginations. They can only do what they can imagine. But photography goes beyond human imagination. AI can never replace photography, because photography is the art of wonder.
Who could have imagined a laughing horse?
The magic of photography is that life holds so many amazing and wonderful things that are entirely unanticipated, unexpected, even unimagined in the deepest sense; that is, no one would ever have thought of such a thing happening. And then, suddenly, right out of the fabric of life, there it is.
"I can do a beautiful illustration, but it doesn't have that 'instant of wonder' that a photograph will have." (Art Director Tony Anthony, quoted in Photo District News.)
Photography shows us things that
lie beyond our imagination and compel our amazement because they really
happened. It revels in the beauty, the mystery, and the strangeness of
life. It is the most powerful purely visual medium ever created.
Our work as photographers is to isolate and clarify the things we see so that others may through us see in a new way the world that is around them.
Visit my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/
Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia
are available. The price is $22.95 plus $3.95 shipping. My PayPal
address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail a check to 8943
Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how
you would like your book inscribed.
Photography and text copyright 2011-2025 David B.Jenkins.
I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.
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