What can Photography Do ?
Photography Museum, Kraków / Czarne, 2025
Three years after the opening of the main exhibition What does the picture do? The Museum of Photography in Krakow gives readers a book with the same title. However, it is not a classic catalog, but a collection of essays, articles and stories about photography, addressed to all those who like to take and view photos.
Among the authors answering the title question were: Aleksandra Boćkowska, David Campany, Jacek Dehnel, Weronika Kobylińska, Zofia Krawiec, Maciej Marcisz, Adam Mazur, Wojciech Nowicki, Kaja Puto, Radek Rak, Milena Soporowska, Filip Springer, Marcin Stachowicz, Monika Szewczyk-Wittek and Łukasz Zaremba. The texts cover a wide range of topics – from photography as a tool of expression and emancipation, through its role in shaping images and waging wars, to the relationship with artificial intelligence.
Published jointly with the Museum of Photography in Krakow
Trzy lata po otwarciu wystawy głównej Co robi zdjęcie? Muzeum Fotografii w Krakowie oddaje w ręce czytelników książkę pod tym samym tytułem. Nie jest to jednak klasyczny katalog, lecz zbiór esejów, artykułów i opowiadań o fotografii, skierowany do wszystkich, którzy lubią robić i oglądać zdjęcia.
Wystawa główna MuFo to jedyna w Polsce ekspozycja w całości poświęcona fotografii jako fenomenowi kulturowemu. Ukazuje widzom, jak od niemal dwustu lat medium to towarzyszy człowiekowi. Tytułowe pytanie, zarówno wystawy, jak i książki, skłania do refleksji na temat tego, czym jest fotografia, ale również jaki ma wpływ na naszą rzeczywistość. Książka zachęca do krytycznego patrzenia na fotografię, a tytuł Co robi zdjęcie?prowokuje, by udzielać własne odpowiedzi. To publikacja przede wszystkim do czytania, ale też do oglądania – teksty zostały uzupełnione bogatym wyborem zdjęć ze zbiorów MuFo i nie tylko.
W gronie autorów odpowiadających na tytułowe pytanie znaleźli się: Aleksandra Boćkowska, David Campany, Jacek Dehnel, Weronika Kobylińska, Zofia Krawiec, Maciej Marcisz, Adam Mazur, Wojciech Nowicki, Kaja Puto, Radek Rak, Milena Soporowska, Filip Springer, Marcin Stachowicz, Monika Szewczyk-Wittek oraz Łukasz Zaremba. Teksty poruszają szeroki wachlarz tematów – od fotografii jako narzędzia ekspresji i emancypacji, przez jej rolę w kształtowaniu wizerunków i prowadzeniu wojen, aż po relację ze sztuczną inteligencją.
Książka wydana wspólnie z Muzeum Fotografii w Krakowie
English language version below:
‘Do’
by David Campany
To think of photography as ‘doing’ something, doing anything, is to attribute to it some kind of animate agency which, of course, it cannot possibly have. Nevertheless, this kind of thinking is perfectly commonplace in the way we discuss technologies, particularly communications technologies (‘What does an iPhone do? What does the Internet do? What do headphones do? What does a typewriter do?’ And so forth). To ask what a technology or medium ‘does’ focuses us on those properties that we think are specific to it, or which it is best at, or commonly used for. But thinking about what something does is not quite the same as thinking about what it could do. And if we ask what something could do, we open up the gap between actual use and potential use
The question ‘What Does a Photo Do?’ might be similar to, but not quite the same as ‘What is Photography?’ This is because when people are asked ‘What is photography?’, they generally reply with reference to what they think is done with it. But what if photography had nothing to do? How would we then understand it? Could we understand it? Would we be able to envisage its potential differently?
To explore these questions, it is instructive to go back and consider the origins of what we think of as photography in the 1820s and 1830s. It was then that the already-known effects of light on certain chemical substances were combined with the already-known optical properties of lenses and the camera obscura. Bringing these things together, as Nicéphore Niépce did in France and William Henry Fox Talbot did in England, gave rise to at least a general idea of photography and its condition as a medium. I will focus here on Talbot, for reasons that will become clear.
There is a lot of research being conducted at the moment into Talbot’s position as a wealthy man with connections to all the various technologies and natural resources that the new invention required (from lens manufacture and advanced cabinet making in London, to silver mining in Central America). Talbot was at the intersection of all the key technological and material components that made early photography and its standardization possible. Photography may not have been produced as a direct response to the demands of European capitalism, industry and empire, but its development and functions were certainly shaped by them (not entirely – such matters are never entire – but substantially). Talbot was also at the intersection of the arts, sciences, and various branches of new knowledge formation that were emerging from the industrial revolution. All this made him well situated to consider what photography might ‘do’ or, to put it more practically, what individuals and society might do with it.
Talbot attempted to speculate about all this in his remarkable publication The Pencil of Nature, issued between 1844 and 1846 in six parts, each containing four photographic prints paired with short texts. In these texts, Talbot explained the technical procedure of each image, but he also extrapolated what photography could be used for, and what its status might become within the arts and sciences. Perhaps because he so embodied the values of Victorian capital and industrialism, his list has proved to be uncannily prescient. He covered everything from classification, archiving, topography, social documentary, journalism and legal evidence, to art, promotion, and the making visible of things and phenomena beyond the reach of the naked eye. He considered the possible role of photography in the formation of knowledge and as a distinct aesthetic experience. He considered how photography might describe details in ways that are more practical, useful and engaging than either drawing or writing. He noted how, through the use of a negative, prints could be made from a single source in a potentially unlimited number. He noted photography’s potential use in the copying and replicating of documents. He noted its personal functions and state functions. He noted how photography’s perplexing tension between automation and intention, between cold fact and subjective wish or desire will never be fully resolved and will therefore remain a constant source of doubt and possibility.
Most importantly perhaps, in being a work of photography and writing, Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature foreshadowed in a profound way just how entwined with text the medium would become. Talbot understood that photography would not be able to ‘do’ much without the accompaniment of words. In fact, just about every field, institution and discourse in which photography would be given a role, would be ‘scripto-visual’, as the artist and writer Victor Burgin has put it.[i] The cultures of photography are really cultures of images and words combined. Of course, this is not to say photographs and writing are the same. Far from it. It is the specific differences between the two that are the foundation of their complex intertwining.
For example, photographs show (describe), but they cannot explain nor communicate intention with any great precision. Open the shutter and the world as light floods unbidden through the lens and onto the light-sensitive surface, containing quantities of visual information that can far exceed intention. This is an excess of potential meaning and function, and it is created every time a photographic exposure is made. The details of the image are specific in ways that its proposed meaning and function are not. A photograph, anyphotograph, can ‘do’ or ‘be’ many different things, and to emphasise one of those things over the others usually requires language, in one form or another. Remove the language and the image reverts to open ambiguity; change the language and the function or emphasis is changed.
Just as meanings and functions may change, photography’s technological basis changes constantly. However, this is not simply a matter of ‘development’ or ‘evolution’, as if there was some natural force at work. Changes need to be desired, although these desires can be quite inchoate and open-ended. One of the many genuinely profound things about photography’s technical advances is that their uses have far exceeded any of the desires that brought them into being. This is true for all mediums and their development, but especially so for photography. We could compare this to the invention of ‘radio’. It is said that upon Marconi’s successful receiving of a radio signal sent across the Atlantic Ocean, a journalist congratulating the inventor noted that one person could now communicate with millions simultaneously. One transmitter; unlimited receivers. This was a potential that had not fully occurred to Marconi, who had been focused on point-to-point signalling, one person or location sending a message to one other. For Marconi, radio had not been about what very soon came to be called ‘broadcasting’. Within a few years, the notion of ‘radio’ seemed inseparable from ‘broadcasting’. What a medium ‘is’ and what it can ‘do’ are not the same.
Such potential can lay dormant for very long periods before it is realised. In my book Photography and Cinema, I describe the example of what came to be known as ‘bullet time’, the cinematic effect by which a moving subject appears to freeze while a movie camera’s point of view moves around it or past it.[ii] The 1999 film The Matrix popularised the technique, and since that film was set in the future, audiences at the time assumed they were watching the very latest imaging technology, something that perhaps only the new digital possibilities could have brought to photography. In fact, ‘bullet time’ could have existed as far back as the 1880s. While Eadweard Muybridge is celebrated for his rapid, consecutive frame photography of humans and animals in motion, he also experimented with simultaneous photos shot by multiple cameras of the same moving subject. If he had animated these – turning simultaneous frames into consecutive frames with his primitive but effective Zoopraxiscope projector – we would have had ‘bullet time’ over a century earlier. So, while the technique had long been possible, it had not been imagined, not been desired. Quite why it came to be desired when it did (the mid-1980s), and quite why mass audiences were ready for it when they were (the late 1990s) are fascinating and important questions I must leave to others. But this is not an isolated example. It is perfectly commonplace. While we tend to think of innovation arriving with new technological forms, it can just as well come from older forms. In photography, there is nothing to foreclose an innovative use of the Daguerreotype, just as we cannot predict what image makers might do with the latest smartphone camera app.
There is a parallel here with what we might call the historicity of the ontology of the photographic image (please forgive this slightly awkward and contradictory phrase). If we look back at the various attempts to define photography, we can see that the task never quite escapes the social and psychological circumstances of those doing the defining. Just as photography was a product of its complex circumstance, so too have been the various approaches to theorizing it. For example, in his essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (published in 1949 but written a little earlier), André Bazin argued that what distinguishes the photographic image is its status as a deathly trace of life that once was.[iii] Roland Barthes in his celebrated book Camera Lucida (1980) came to a similar conclusion. However, Bazin was writing in the traumatic aftermath of the Second World War, and Barthes was writing while mourning the death of his mother. In other words, both were expressing some kind of desire to hold onto and privilege particular existential aspects or potentials of photography. The medium really does have important functions in relation to loss and trauma, but that does not mean they are its ontological foundation. A child born in 2014 with a life far away from the experience of death may well have a very different take on what photography essentially ‘is’, but if her parents die suddenly or her community is plunged into war, then we would not be surprised to find that the preserving and memorial functions of photography come to the fore. The medium may switch overnight for her, from a means of ephemeral and light-hearted exchange with friends to the preservation of her past.
Very often, the new technological forms of photography have the retroactive effect of making the older forms seem simpler than they really were. The arrival of Photoshop seemed to make people think that its rapid facility with image alteration threatened the supposed purity and integrity of photography, especially in such fields as photojournalism. The reality was quite the opposite. The era of Photoshop led to a re-evaluation of photojournalism’s past, revealing how commonplace retouching and other forms of manipulation had always been. Moreover, Photoshop led to the establishing of a much tighter code of conduct for professionals, much greater vigilance and scrutiny around digital image manipulation in photojournalism, and thus much lower occurrences of it. (The overheated but undercooked debates about so-called ‘AI’ are also confused by this kind of retroactive misunderstanding.) The broader point, however, is that, as Talbot had pointed out, if photography is going to be classified as evidence, it will be “evidence of a novel kind”, and “what the judge and jury might say to it, is a matter which I leave to the speculation of those who possess legal acumen.”[iv] In the end, the image itself is not the testimony. Someone, or an institution, must make a claim on behalf of the image for its evidential status (language again). They can also do this on behalf of a sound recording, a drawing, or even a memory. Indeed, a child’s drawing of a witnessed event may turn out to be more significant as evidence than a photograph made by a professional journalist. Or it may not.
In a similar way, photography’s artistic or aesthetic potential will always be shadowed by its descriptive and evidential potential. It is significant that John Grierson, who coined the term ‘documentary’, described it as “the creative treatment of actuality,” with the understanding that any separation of objectivity and subjectivity would be absurd. Similarly, the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard and the photographer Jeff Wall have noted that even if a situation is staged in a highly artificial manner, the photographic image of it is a document of that artifice. In this way, all films and photographs could be understood as documents. The reverse is also true. Any image put forward for its evidential status will also have an aesthetic status, even if this is unmentioned or disavowed in its evidential claim. You get the idea. What a photograph can ‘do’ is bound to remain an open question.
[i] Victor Burgin, ‘Seeing Sense’ (1980), The End of Art Theory, MacMillan, 1986.
[ii] David Campany, Photography and Cinema, Reaktion Books, 2008.
[iii] André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (1949), What is Cinema? Vol. 1, University of California Press, 2004.
[iv] William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1844–46.