Photography and discovery of reality

The photographer Wolfgang Born wrote in 1929: "The discovery of reality is the mission of photography".

It is particularly interesting that he referred to "discovering" rather than "reproducing."

Because:

1 - Reality is an illusion of our senses. Other animals like bees and bats will “see” a different reality because they have different sensitive organs. Not only we can not detect other wavelengths (infrared, ultraviolet, ultrasound, etc.) but our brain tricks us about the images we believe to be reality.

When we see a landscape on a sunny day our brain processes the images received by the optical path in order to perceive the information that is in the shadow as well as the one that is in zones of high lights. For this it proceeds like a computer - as if using an algorithm, type HDR, of Photoshop - to modify the visual information reconstructing it according what it calculates that could be. The colors and shapes are thus altered depending on the greater or lesser exposure to light.

2 - A camera does not have a powerful and creative brain like ours. Despite technological changes, the camera sensor can not obtain all the information contained in the shadow areas - if we expose the image based on the reading of the highlights (sunshine). When we process the image, we usually try to "imitate" our brain with Lightroom and or Photoshop.

Perhaps in the future there will appear mechanisms capable of detecting more information (other wavelengths) around us.

3 - Today, the act of photographing with any device is always linked to algorithms. If some more radical entity understood that we should always obtain - in photography - an image totally faithful to what we believe to be the reality, then it could indirectly be, for example, to "ban" black and white photography because it does not convey reality as we see it - in color.

When we frame an image we are already changing even more that apparent reality - because we isolate only a small part of a whole. And without a context we can be led to “see” something different from what actually happened.

Each photograph is a fiction that presents itself as true. Against what they made us believe and against what we think, photography always lies. As reality is a lie of our senses, in consequence, photography is a lie about a lie.

Walter Benjamin (in the first half of XX Century) and Roland Barthes (in 1980) saw photography as something that comes to disturb the very concept of memory and history.

Cameras are ways of changing what we think is reality. Teleobjectives and wide angles also distort such reality. All photos mediate content. Faithful recording of reality is a false standard. In other words, the more we try to reproduce reality, the more we can get away from it.

4 - If we reason with Buddhist parables about the eternal question: What are we doing in this world? We would reply that the answer is contained in the question itself. We want to find out what we are doing here. Because if we already knew it, we did not have to go through life to ask the question.

5 - Consequently we return to the opening sentence. When photographing we are just trying to discover what the reality will be. Knowing that we will not be able to fully describe it. We can not pretend to record with absolute fidelity the world around us. And the big question is: How photography can lie to expose a deeper truth.

6 - Therefore every photographer tries to interpret reality in his own way - but with the knowledge that he will never be able to reproduce it as it is.

I remember another Buddhist parable about the existence of multiple religions. Reality is like an elephant being described by several blind people around it. Each one describes the elephant depending on the place where they are. Those who feel their legs say it's a tree trunk. Those who grab at the tail say it's a broom, the one who picks up the trunk says it's a hose. That is, each one describes the elephant depending on where it is.

So the photographers will have to recognize that they are like blind people only trying to discover our world. Not as a faithful recording but trying to understand Poetry and Beauty.