A friend of mine once said that taking pictures meant to miss whatever is there in front of you, because you create a rupture in the process of observing your surroundings.
To the contrary, my pictures capture what I otherwise would have missed. They do not make it possible for anybody else to know what they would have seen had they been at the same spot or looked at the same object at the moment I took that specific shot. The camera helps me to create an image that nobody would have been able to see – me included – if I hadn’t consciously made a number of decisions about the lense, depth of focus, angle, shutter speed, exposure time and the position of the image‘s elements within the frame.
Taking pictures means to create them – the process helps me to note what I’m noticing. Creating pictures means to spot and visually emphasize the element that attracted my attention, so that the picture portrays that element rather than a landscape anybody could have seen (or not seen) in passing by. Still, the pictures might completely fail to engage somebody else’s attention. Either the picture‘s content is not of interest to the viewer to begin with, or it fails to focus on what could be fascinating.
Likewise, the viewer might be disappointed because the picture does not fulfill their expectations about a specific object or about how they think that object should have been portrayed (=viewed). Indeed, each picture isn’t so much a portrayal of an object, but of the way in which I perceived it. My perceptions come into existence by my interaction with the object and with the camera. But while this interaction is real, and the resulting perceptions are real, they shouldn’t be confused with ‘reality.‘
In that sense, yes – there is a rupture: I’m always at a distance from the object that I’m observing, my view of the object cannot be identical with the object. Still, photography is not the cause of that distance but its manifestation.
