Photo Essay
by David Kachel
T
he greatest asset of the photo-
graph as art is its illusion of
reality. This illusion is also the
main obstacle to understanding pho-
tography as art...
The camera compresses a 3-dimen-
sional scene into two dimensions, minia-
turizes it, falsifies colors, distorts per-
spectives, freezes time and yet somehow
produces an image that appears
inescapably truthful. So convincing is
this illusion that a photograph is
believed by most everyone to be a truth-
ful record of reality, a hard fact.
To the average person the scene in
16
front of the camera is something that is
captured, like a baseball in a mitt,
whole and complete. The final image is
stored within the camera to be simply
transferred to paper at a later time by
any competent technician.
To the artist-photographer, the orig-
inal scene is only crude, raw material.
What is recorded at the shutter’s
release is not any semblance of a fin-
ished product. It cannot be simply –
sent to the lab – because creating a
record of the scene in front of the
camera is the furthest thing from the
artist’s mind. A photograph transcends
Cenizo
Second Quarter 2012
mere record to become art when the
artist creates a new illusion of a reality
that never was.
If you see in a photograph that it is
more than just a record, if you see that
it no longer matters where the photo-
graph was taken or what the subject
matter might have been, that it speaks
to you on a higher level, then it has
indeed risen to the status of art.
Painters often work from photo-
graphs. The result is something new. Not
a painting of a photograph and certain-
ly not something literal. The painting
transcends the original photograph and
becomes new art that began as an idea
contained partially in the photograph,
but mostly in the painter’s mind.
It can be said that fine-art photogra-
phers do exactly the same thing. They
also work from photographs, but instead
of a painting, they create from a photo-
graph a new photographic reality envi-
sioned first in the mind’s eye and only
partially contained in the camera.
A fine-art photograph is an illusion,
deftly crafted and abstracted from the
real world. It is a half-truth that
becomes a lie that evolves into a new
truth. It is creation.