By Javier Shirley
Originally published in Round Circle Magazine — Issue 02

llumination. Eternal illumination. Without light, we would see absolutely nothing. Everything we see exists to us because light is reflected from something. Some colors and textures reflect more light than others, but of one thing we can be certain: if we can see something, it is because light has found its way back to us.

Fortunately, most of the things around us cooperate. They return enough light for us to form some idea of their size, their shape, their presence.

This is elementary physics. Nothing extraordinary.

It is not very different from a chef choosing vegetables in their most natural and simple state. Nothing from another world. Something almost any of us could do. In the same way, almost anyone can press the button on a camera.

These are simple actions.

So simple, in fact, that simplicity itself has become absurd.

Turning on a television does not require understanding how the mechanism works. We don’t even think about it. It is an almost magnificently careless act: a simple click opens an entire distant space before us. The name itself tells us what it does: tele.

The same idea exists in the telephoto lens, which is so often mistakenly reduced to the word zoom. Zoom is the act of moving continuously from one focal length to another without changing lenses. A telephoto lens does something much more elementary: it gathers the light reflected by something far away.

Once the chef has selected the ingredients, however, the real work begins. The ingredients must be prepared. Recipes are considered, cooking times understood, seasoning decided. A good chef knows what an oversalted, burned or spoiled dish can do to the person sitting at the table.

The chef is judged every day.

Photography enjoys a peculiar freedom.

It has become almost as easy as turning on a television. There is practically no barrier left. Pick up a camera and take a photograph.

Which brings us, curiously enough, to the broken clock.

If taking photographs has become as simple as holding a camera and pressing a button repeatedly, probability itself will eventually reward you. Sooner or later, you are likely to produce a photograph that would have been considered acceptable by older photographic standards.

I said older standards.

After all, even a broken clock tells the correct time twice a day.

But photography should not work only twice a day.

That would be rather like cutting your hair with a razor. One day it might turn out surprisingly well. The next time, perhaps not quite so well.

Automation has done extraordinary things for humanity. There is little reason to dispute that. Yet when someone wants a good haircut, that person usually goes to a professional stylist. Like the chef, the stylist is judged constantly. When the job is bad, the customer does not need a theory to explain it. The failure can be seen in the mirror and felt with the fingers.

Photography is different.

We are given only two dimensions, and not even movement to rescue us. What remains is something resembling a memory: a motionless image of something that happened.

Photography is always the past.

The instant the photograph exists, the moment it describes is already gone. There is no photograph of the present. There can certainly be no photograph of the future, no matter how much artificial intelligence may exist.

The past cannot be photographed until it has happened.

Someone might reasonably ask what all this mumbo jumbo is supposed to accomplish. Perhaps none of it is urgent. But I do believe it is important.

Just as it matters how a chef handles food, perhaps it should matter how we choose to register the past.

I am not suggesting that every form of art deserves the same importance as our most basic biological necessities. That would be ridiculous. But if we decide to make an art that depends almost entirely upon vision, perhaps that art deserves to exist within a framework that is flexible, yet strict enough to demand something from the person making it.

Photography should not be taken lightly simply because operating a camera has become almost as easy as turning on a television.

That ease has created a strange paradox.

In an age when everything has become easier to do well, it has also become easier to do everything badly and worse, without even noticing.

Looking is not the same as seeing.

Just as mumbling is not the same as speaking.

And screaming is not the same as singing.