Each second, over 41,000 photographs are taken. Based on recent trends, it is estimated that worldwide the number of non-professional photos alone that will be taken in 2017 is 1.3 trillion. Nearly 80% of these can be attributed to the rapidly growing use of smartphones, which make cameras available to most people all day, everyday. The number of photos taken has tripled each year since 2010 from a mere 80 billion. This growth is enabled by technology, but not driven by it. It is driven by the human desire to make experience aesthetic, for which taking photos is a particularly common avenue.
Long before digital photography made such growth possible, the sound of the mechanical camera shutter had become one of the distinctive sounds of the 20th century. Already by 1930, 1 billion photos were taken each year, and number of shutter clicks continued to grow exponentially. However, this click/sliding noise of the moving mirror still fills our soundscapes because digital cameras reproduce it artificially, as a comforting reminder of cameras past and, more practically, as assurance that we did indeed take a photo.
Photography as Art
Few question any longer whether photography is an art form, but when it was a young medium, like film, it was considered simply a means of mechanical reproduction of what we see, and not equal to painting the same scene, for example. During the second half of the 19th century, its primary purpose was documentation, portraits of people, places, and events, such as the famous battlefield photos of the American Civil War, or Edward Muybridge’s photosequence studies of people and animals in motion. In fact, the artistic uses of photography remain secondary to this day.
That photographs could also be Art was recognized only over time. But by the first decade of the 20th century, one could find both many more consciously artistic documentation photos and photos that were created purely as Art. One early photo of a young woman dying of turbuculosis with her worried family, is a famous example that shows early realization of photography’s dramatic potential. Due to the limits of the technology at the time, the photo is made of multiple exposures carefully planned and artfully arranged.
Arguments persisted that photography was a lesser art because it WAS mechanical reproduction after all, and was soon widely open to amateur use, but any serious reflection saw that image choice, composition, image settings, and manipulation during processing could turn it into “high” art (we can use “Art” with the capital “A”) as much as any other medium. But the dominant use has always been taking photos that are meant to just document what we see. We might make a distinction between “making photos” (using the tools available for artistic manipulation) and “taking photos” (what we do quickly in our everyday use). However, the premise of this article is that even everyday photos are taken with an aesthetic intent (although some, like Sontag, 1977, wrongly belittle this intent, comparing most everyday photography to “aesthetic consumerism”).
Like so many other forms of everyday aesthetics, the line between taking everyday photos and artistic activity is blurred, perhaps even unnecessary. Nonetheless, this post is focused on the aesthetic aspects of everyday photography done without the primary intent to make Art.
Photography as Life
Then why will non-professionals take 1.3 trillion photos this year? While we are all concerned to some degree with how everyday photos look, and while many of the millions of photos shared each day on social networking sites can be quite artistic, for most people how the photos that they share look is usually less important than what they show, and that they show something meaningful about us.
Everyday life is made meaningful, lifted above the ordinary, when we delineate it somehow, give it borders or shape, or stamp it in a personal, effortful way. It can slip between our grasp unless some effort is made to mark it in this way, or to dramatize its events and our experiences of them. All the ways mentioned in this blog, including preparing food, decorating homes, gardening, collecting, storytelling, sports, mental achievements, and many others, function to set off experience as aesthetic. Taking photos is yet another way to give shape, dramatize, and set off our experience for aesthetic appreciation. Capturing a scene within the boundaries of a photo immediately creates an object of appreciation above the blur of the ongoing events that pass in front of our eyes. We might take a photo to preserve a moment to share with others, whether the moment denotes a major accomplishment, a milestone, or just that we are alive here and now. This is what millions, or billions rather, do via social media sites. We might otherwise preserve the photo primarily for ourselves, so that we can recall what we and those around us were like on this day, to be appreciated on another day in the future. Photographic preservation can provide a sense of control over time and intransigent nature. On the contrary, some suggest that it can kill the vibrancy of the moment by calling out the fact that change and eventual decay make the captured moment already a dead one (which is also a valid aesthetic response if you think about it), Sontag (1977). This rather negative view, while potentially in the background, does not often come to mind. But taking a photo can steal our attention from an experience, in effect deadening it, if we are overzealous with our cameras instead of our naked eyes.
On holiday travels in popular destinations, the most common sight is not a monument or beautiful scene, but one person being photographed by another.
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Travels are a time to step away from everyday life, an aesthetic experience in themselves, but also a perfect opportunity to have our images preserved during a heightened moment, a time when we might feel we are at our best. Travel photos of people are often taken at famous sites, but are just as often taken at any representative location that says we are somewhere else than in our normal location, because the important subject is the person, not the place. Depending on the person, posing for such shots is either a dilemma or a delight. Some are happy to shout their presence with a glamour pose or with arms raised in real or pretend joy. Others remain uncomfortable, struggling to achieve an awkward smile, hoping the image will not look unnatural, but knowing it will anyway, because posing is always posing.
Richard Shusterman (2012) explores the interplay between the photographer and subject during a professional photo session, comparing it to theatrical performance. He mentions the complex interpersonal exchange needed to achieve the artistic goals of the portrait, whether mutual or owned only by the artist. The subject needs to feel comfortable enough to let themselves be seen for who they are, and the photographer needs to negotiate to expose who the subject really is, or who she wants him to be.
This performance aspect of taking a photo exists also in any non-professional photo portrait, even if it is less intentional or impactful. Each portrait, even the one almost lost within the crowd marveling a historical location, is a micro-drama outside the normal flow of events during those moments that lead up to the shutter snap, and both the photographers and persons being photographed usually enjoy this artifice. The act of taking the photo might even become one of those moments of feeling fully alive, even if it is a balance of pretense and genuine emotion.
Of course we also take photos of the places and things we visit, not just people in front of them, but similarly, it is our being there and the act of taking the photo that is often the most important subject. An uncountable number of photos are taken each year at places like Ayer’s Rock, the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canyon, and the Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty’s Castle. No one really needs to document these sites yet again, but they do need to document that they were there, and maybe to attempt a photo with that personal touch that demonstrates it. Perhaps a thousand photos each day are taken of the Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre. None of these photos lives up to the painting, and most are not even worth looking at, taken along with the accompanying tops of heads of complete strangers who were lucky enough to get closer. But the photo is still special because it is proof that we were there.
Other than travels, milestones and special events are another favorite time for taking photos. Weddings, graduations, birthdays, group lunches and dinners, and parties of any kind are mandatory times for photos. It is almost as if the event did not happen unless there is at least one photo taken. These photos are certainly about the people in them, but also about the event and the implied time that precedes and follows it, and photos are even one of the things that makes the event special. A wedding without a photo is almost unthinkable. In many weddings, the photographer is one of the most prominent people after the bride and groom.
Special events come in all sizes, and even a new haircut, a well prepared meal, a new dress, or a rainbow, sunset, or moonrise might demand a photo to mark the occasion.
Photography as Artful Life
With the explosion of smartphone ownership, we now have cameras at our fingertips to document not just special moments, but everyday observations that interest us. Before smartphones, the effort to find a ready camera might leave many rainbows uncaptured, but no longer. Today, the creative eye might capture special images each day--an interesting play of light, a subtle pattern or geometric arrangement of objects, a dramatic closeup, an interesting tableaux, or something seen frequently but this time in a new way, maybe due to how it is framed, angled, juxtaposed, or zoomed in or out. A daily walk, the commute to work, or the evening’s closing minutes on the balcony can all provide photo opportunities. Anything can be the source of a moment of beauty worth capturing in a photo.
While most everyday photos are intended to document something, some do more. Representation, which is one of the most traditional roles of Art, is the the role that Socrates railed against, feeling that art as an imitation of life hid the truth from us. Had the technology been around, I suspect Socrates would have hated photos of all kinds. But photos, both everyday and artistic ones, can also be used to create a new experience, and not just a representation. Photos necessarily borrow from the visual materials of life, but they can also transcend it, and the result might be like nothing at all in our daily experience, nothing like what the naked eye usually senses, at least consciously. Photos allow us to manufacture something personal, mystical, or just indefinable, which can be another one of photography’s aesthetic rewards--a means to the creation of new meanings.
Representation is not a dead end, but it is a limited one. It impossible to capture experience itself. We might want to hold onto the feeling, the flow of thoughts, the evolution of sensations over time, the entire field of view along with its sounds and smells and textures and our internal responses to them. But we can never catch it all. Even the best works of literature and films, with their richer source material, struggle to do this. What we capture in photos, when we are lucky, is always a synecdoche of the experience, a piece that we accept to remind us of the whole. When we find that small piece that is powerful enough to suggest the total experience, this is when we approach the realm of Art. But it happens everyday too, in those lucky moments when we are especially attuned. When a photo might just be enough.
Taking photos reflects a fundamental drive, an everyday aesthetic activity with the goal to make life special, to give it meaning, and to help us connect to others, the world and the transient moments that comprise a life.
References
Newhall, B. (1964) The history of photography. New York: The Museum of Modern Art.
Shusterman, R. (2012) Thinking through the body: Essays in somaesthetics. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Sontag, S. (1977), On Photography. New York: Picador.
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| Photo by Patrick Parrish |
Photography as Art
Few question any longer whether photography is an art form, but when it was a young medium, like film, it was considered simply a means of mechanical reproduction of what we see, and not equal to painting the same scene, for example. During the second half of the 19th century, its primary purpose was documentation, portraits of people, places, and events, such as the famous battlefield photos of the American Civil War, or Edward Muybridge’s photosequence studies of people and animals in motion. In fact, the artistic uses of photography remain secondary to this day.
 |
| Eadweard Muybridge, 1872, Public Domain |
 |
| Henry Peach Robinson (1958), Public Domain |
Like so many other forms of everyday aesthetics, the line between taking everyday photos and artistic activity is blurred, perhaps even unnecessary. Nonetheless, this post is focused on the aesthetic aspects of everyday photography done without the primary intent to make Art.
Photography as Life
Then why will non-professionals take 1.3 trillion photos this year? While we are all concerned to some degree with how everyday photos look, and while many of the millions of photos shared each day on social networking sites can be quite artistic, for most people how the photos that they share look is usually less important than what they show, and that they show something meaningful about us.
Everyday life is made meaningful, lifted above the ordinary, when we delineate it somehow, give it borders or shape, or stamp it in a personal, effortful way. It can slip between our grasp unless some effort is made to mark it in this way, or to dramatize its events and our experiences of them. All the ways mentioned in this blog, including preparing food, decorating homes, gardening, collecting, storytelling, sports, mental achievements, and many others, function to set off experience as aesthetic. Taking photos is yet another way to give shape, dramatize, and set off our experience for aesthetic appreciation. Capturing a scene within the boundaries of a photo immediately creates an object of appreciation above the blur of the ongoing events that pass in front of our eyes. We might take a photo to preserve a moment to share with others, whether the moment denotes a major accomplishment, a milestone, or just that we are alive here and now. This is what millions, or billions rather, do via social media sites. We might otherwise preserve the photo primarily for ourselves, so that we can recall what we and those around us were like on this day, to be appreciated on another day in the future. Photographic preservation can provide a sense of control over time and intransigent nature. On the contrary, some suggest that it can kill the vibrancy of the moment by calling out the fact that change and eventual decay make the captured moment already a dead one (which is also a valid aesthetic response if you think about it), Sontag (1977). This rather negative view, while potentially in the background, does not often come to mind. But taking a photo can steal our attention from an experience, in effect deadening it, if we are overzealous with our cameras instead of our naked eyes.
On holiday travels in popular destinations, the most common sight is not a monument or beautiful scene, but one person being photographed by another.
 |
| Photo by Patrick Parrish |
Travels are a time to step away from everyday life, an aesthetic experience in themselves, but also a perfect opportunity to have our images preserved during a heightened moment, a time when we might feel we are at our best. Travel photos of people are often taken at famous sites, but are just as often taken at any representative location that says we are somewhere else than in our normal location, because the important subject is the person, not the place. Depending on the person, posing for such shots is either a dilemma or a delight. Some are happy to shout their presence with a glamour pose or with arms raised in real or pretend joy. Others remain uncomfortable, struggling to achieve an awkward smile, hoping the image will not look unnatural, but knowing it will anyway, because posing is always posing.
Richard Shusterman (2012) explores the interplay between the photographer and subject during a professional photo session, comparing it to theatrical performance. He mentions the complex interpersonal exchange needed to achieve the artistic goals of the portrait, whether mutual or owned only by the artist. The subject needs to feel comfortable enough to let themselves be seen for who they are, and the photographer needs to negotiate to expose who the subject really is, or who she wants him to be.
This performance aspect of taking a photo exists also in any non-professional photo portrait, even if it is less intentional or impactful. Each portrait, even the one almost lost within the crowd marveling a historical location, is a micro-drama outside the normal flow of events during those moments that lead up to the shutter snap, and both the photographers and persons being photographed usually enjoy this artifice. The act of taking the photo might even become one of those moments of feeling fully alive, even if it is a balance of pretense and genuine emotion.
 |
| Photo by Patrick Parrish |
 |
| Photo by Patrick Parrish |
Special events come in all sizes, and even a new haircut, a well prepared meal, a new dress, or a rainbow, sunset, or moonrise might demand a photo to mark the occasion.
Photography as Artful Life
With the explosion of smartphone ownership, we now have cameras at our fingertips to document not just special moments, but everyday observations that interest us. Before smartphones, the effort to find a ready camera might leave many rainbows uncaptured, but no longer. Today, the creative eye might capture special images each day--an interesting play of light, a subtle pattern or geometric arrangement of objects, a dramatic closeup, an interesting tableaux, or something seen frequently but this time in a new way, maybe due to how it is framed, angled, juxtaposed, or zoomed in or out. A daily walk, the commute to work, or the evening’s closing minutes on the balcony can all provide photo opportunities. Anything can be the source of a moment of beauty worth capturing in a photo.
 |
| Barcelona, Spain, Photo by Maja Kuna |
While most everyday photos are intended to document something, some do more. Representation, which is one of the most traditional roles of Art, is the the role that Socrates railed against, feeling that art as an imitation of life hid the truth from us. Had the technology been around, I suspect Socrates would have hated photos of all kinds. But photos, both everyday and artistic ones, can also be used to create a new experience, and not just a representation. Photos necessarily borrow from the visual materials of life, but they can also transcend it, and the result might be like nothing at all in our daily experience, nothing like what the naked eye usually senses, at least consciously. Photos allow us to manufacture something personal, mystical, or just indefinable, which can be another one of photography’s aesthetic rewards--a means to the creation of new meanings.
 |
| Bytom Musuem, Poland, Photo by Maja Kuna |
Taking photos reflects a fundamental drive, an everyday aesthetic activity with the goal to make life special, to give it meaning, and to help us connect to others, the world and the transient moments that comprise a life.
References
Newhall, B. (1964) The history of photography. New York: The Museum of Modern Art.
Shusterman, R. (2012) Thinking through the body: Essays in somaesthetics. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Sontag, S. (1977), On Photography. New York: Picador.
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