With the coming of the technological era, photography has been translated from analog to digital, enabling people to capture moments with ease. Due to its prominence, primarily nowadays to millennials who are fond of posting photos in social media, photography has been reduced to merely showing off or sharing experiences with people. Even during the early times some philosophers have already argued that photography’s ease of postproduction which is afforded by digitalization has already undermined its epistemic privilege with respect to other forms of arts such as painting.[1] Nevertheless, photography remains to be an art in itself, in virtue of the creative process the photographer and the subject of the photograph undergoes.
Contemporary photography acts like an open space which brings with it the freedom of thinking, particularly in enabling a person to perceive reality with the use of his memory and imagination. These two ways of perceiving reality (memory and imagination) are recurring in photography.[2] It sparks a kind of visual thinking wherein the person looking at a photograph is given the freedom on how to perceive reality based on how he sees the photograph. As a matter of fact, a photographic image has turned up to be a crucial factor of our visual memory, as it has the potential to save ruins and antiquities, to evaluate unknown territories, and to reveal identities. Particularly it has the capability of sending us to the idea of the survival of the past, and the immortalization of an event.[3]
However, photography must not only be reduced to its product which is the photograph itself, but other elements are also crucial in the understanding of its process. The elements of photography include the photograph or the product of the photographic process, the photographer who is in control of what happens to its product, the subject of the photograph, which includes its model or central object and the background, and the photographic equipment which is the medium that comes between the photographer and the spatiotemporal context or scene. In here we focus on the three elements of the photograph, the photographer, and the spatiotemporal context or subject of photography. In particular, we look at the relation of the photograph and the context or subject to time, and the photographer to agency, time work, and sacred time.
Contemporary photography acts like an open space which brings with it the freedom of thinking, particularly in enabling a person to perceive reality with the use of his memory and imagination.
Continue reading “Photography in Time and Agency”
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