So what is a photograph anyway?

This blog has been silent for a week or two. Why? I've been reading a lot about photography and thinking a lot, and generally tying myself in knots when initially I'd felt rather confident of my opinions. I started a series of articles explaining how I looked for an approach to understanding and appreciating photographs. It seems I jumped the gun a bit.

Anyone who embarks on such a thing inevitably starts asking what is a photograph, or what is photography, and I'm no different. On what exactly am I going to exercise these critical faculties? In starting to ask these questions I opened up a whole can of worms and embarked on a vexing journey full of false turnings and dead ends. It is no wonder that this question has exercised the minds of a lot of philosophers/thinkers. (Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes eg) as well as writers and commentators on art and photography. It's in my nature to try and delineate things and to know clearly where I am coming from, but all my attempts to pin down the elusive photograph failed. I thought I could find a clear dividing line between something that could be defined as a "photograph" and something that was merely constructed using photographic materials or technique.

I started by imagining that my definition of a photograph was that it clearly represented something that existed and was recorded by the photographer. It was based in reality. It was "found" as opposed to "created". Of course this does not mean that the photograph is completely objective and mechanical. The photographer's choices make it a personal statement. This obviously places a lot of images in the non-photograph category, but that didn't bother me - it doesn't mean these aren't worthwhile works of art, just they belonged to a different genre and would be subject to different interpretation and criticism.

As much as I tried to apply this distinction it soon became clear that it just wouldn't do. At one extreme we have completely constructed images such as those by Jeff Wall, and at the other  completely found images such as the street photography of, for example, Gary Winogrand. No problem here it seems, but unfortunately these two examples do not live in nice little compartments. They are at opposite ends of a spectrum with a continuous range of shades between one and the other - complicated by the vexed question of veracity  (What if Jeff Wall passed his images off as being actual events as opposed to staged ones?) and there was obviously no clearly defined border to cross. Do we merely need to engage with the image, or do we need to know about it's provenance. Is a studio image or still life closer to a painting - as a product of the photographers imagination rather than a representation of reality?

As a result I'm going to save myself some pain and give up trying to find this dividing line. However in the spectrum of photography there are images that interest me more than others, and for me this often hinges on some of these criteria that we might try to use unsuccessfully to define a photograph. More on this next time. In doing so I'm probably going to use the work of Jeff Wall to illustrate some of my thoughts. If you don't know his work you can find out more starting with Wikipedia. (I don't regard Wikipedia as the ultimate reference, but it's often a good starting point for this kind of research. It usually has external links, and is a bit more precise than just googling)