Why photography?
by Frits Gierstberg
Our world today is unimaginable without photography. However strange it may sound, without photography our world today is even largely invisible. For even though we are so keen on travelling, most of what we see of the world we see via photographs – in newspapers, magazines, books and lately the Internet. Television, film and video also certainly play a major role today in making the world visible, but photography preceded these media. It is the oldest of the ‘new media’ and has fundamentally changed our view of the world since the official announcement of its invention to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1839.
visual source
Published photographs have been our primary source of visual information for more than a century. The work of documentary photographers and photo journalists enables us to see what is happening in other parts of the world. But photographs inform us not only about topical events – they also represent an important visual source of historical information. Thanks to photography, we know for example what our nineteenth cerntury ancestors looked like, or how Dutch streets looked before the war. Bombed buildings and works of art can be reconstructed with the help of photographs
old loves
We also apply photography’s function as an historical document in our own lives. Whether it’s a matter of an antique photo album, childhood photographs in an old shoebox or digital images of the latest holiday in our computer, photographs allow us to preserve and cherish our memories of grandparents, childhood friendships, old loves and distant travels.
seducer
But photographs are not only documents of the sort used by scientists or the police. Contrary to what was believed in the nineteenth century, photography is a highly subjective medium. Photographers distort reality and make it look more beautiful than it is. Even photographs that look objective can be a falsification of reality. There are innumerable examples from history in which manipulated photographs have been used for propaganda purposes.
Think too of advertising photography which depicts a perfect world and where falsification is ‘permitted’. Here photography is not an informant but a seducer. Visual artists have recently been enthousiastically embracing the medium, which is a sign that they too are aware of the subjective aspect of photography, and thus of its visual possibilities.
popular
Photography has an almost infinite range of applications. It is perhaps the most applied visual medium that we have. The combination of realism and cheap, fast and perfect reproducibility makes it popular in numerous fields. Nobody can do without it, which is why learning to take photographs is like learning to speak and write.
mislead and move
All these uses and applications of photography have their own form, their own aesthetic and style. We can often see from the photograph itself what sort of photograph it is, Photography is a means of communication with a language of its own – a visual language. We ‘read’ the language of a photograph – often unconsciously – on the basis of the subject, the composition, the focus, the light, the colour or black and white tones, the format, the place where we see it or the moment when that happens. But in order to be able to fathom, understand and value this language really well, a trained and practiced eye is needed. Communication through images is booming in our visual culture, which is why there is a growing need for insight into how photographic images ‘speak’ to us, in order to know with what aim photographers make them, how they do that and in what manner their photographs are used. But also the need to know what they want to tell us and how these photographs inform, seduce, mislead and move us. These images will then enable us to understand the world around us more. And ultimately ourselves as well.
That’s why there is photography!
October 2006
Frits Gierstberg (b. 1959) worked since 1993 as head of exhibitions at the Nederlands Foto Instituut and has fulfilled the same function at the Nederlands Fotomuseum since 2003. In the past years he organised a large number of international exhibitions, symposia, lectures and debates about photography. From 1 January 2006 he is also active as Special Professor in Photography at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. In ‘Why photography?’ he discusses the role and function of photography.
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