Photography as Fiction

Photography, as an apparently neutral witness, seems to have no need for interpretation or imagination, and is thought to rule out invention.  It has always, however, been a medium that functions as fiction as readily as it catalogues facts.

I make photographs entirely within the traditional framework of straightforward representation.  There is a direct correspondence between what was in front of my camera and what appears in my pictures.  And yet, even as they are rightly seen as forms of evidence, I believe that my photographs are also a mode of fiction.  I fashion my pictures from things I find into things of my own.

The subject and point of my pictures are the pictures themselves, not the material from which they were made.  Of course such pictures cannot be made without material subject matter, just as poems cannot be made without words, or paintings without paint.  Yet we do not imagine that poems are merely random arrangements of letters into words, and we know that paintings are more than casual accumulations of pigment.

With this in mind, I would offer a self-evident premise: The purpose of an image is to bring something to our attention. But I would add a corollary that is less obvious: The primary thing being brought to our attention may be the image itself. And every image is a fabrication.

The practice of art, after all, is one of transforming the world one finds into a world one makes.  Taking in the results of this process, the observer, the listener, the reader, the audience that apprehends a work of art may thus in turn become, to some degree, transformed.

 

“One is taught to oppose the real and the imaginary, as though the first were always at hand and the second distant, far away.  This opposition is false.  Events are always to hand.  But the coherence of these events – which is what one means by reality – is an imaginative construction.”

John Berger, from And our faces, my heart, brief as photos