The Objectivity of Photography

I think that both readings (‘The Age of Light’ by Man Ray and ‘From Pigment to Light’ by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy) are talking about the things that photographs can show us that paintings and other art forms before photography could never have shown us. Both of them speak of the unprecedented precision photography has and its ability to represent a scene as exactly as possible.

While the subjectivity of photography and the large amount of control the photographer holds over the overall appearance of a photograph must be acknowledged, it has to be said that when the snapshot is taken, the photographer can only do so much to dictate the forms in the photograph. A similar point was brought up in the Bresson documentary (I think) about how a common mistake made when drawing is that the drawer has memorized the shape of a certain facial feature and simply draws that instead of drawing exactly what he/she sees in his/her subject. This mistake could never be made in photography because even if the photographer has a preconceived idea about how a nose should look, for example, the photographer cannot make the nose look like that in the photograph if the nose does not in fact look like that in real life.

Overall, photography has opened the world up to a new way of seeing and a way of seeing scenes that had never been seen before. When painters made paintings, they used their own ideas of what they wanted a scene to look like to choose forms or choose how much light would be present in different areas, but the art of photography forces the final piece to be one in which everything is exactly how it was relative to everything else at a given time.