The comfort zone of image-making — a reminder to creatives
“Every man and his dog is a photographer” these days is the familiar moan of photographers breaking into the habit of creating images. Not to delve too deep into the fundamental flaws of this rhetoric, the notion that everyone is a photographer fails to meet the theories that persist behind the scenes in the academic study of photo aesthetics and photography.
When we reference aesthetics and philosophy in photography, the most common names that come to mind are Susan Sontag and John Berger, amongst a few others.
Whilst both in their own right hold value in their photography critiques; few realise there are dedicated groups of philosophers beyond the known. These philosophers debate the orthodoxy of photography and challenge photography as an image-making endeavour and any associated folk-wisdom that persists within it.
To address our introduction quickly, not everyone is a photographer even at a basic level because, categorically, we cannot reduce photography to the ownership of the technology. Simply put, just because you have a camera does not mean the notion of photography is fulfilled. To assume otherwise would mean photography is akin to automatism. Defining automatism is well identified by Diarmuid Costello as follows:
In its more philosophical form, orthodoxy’s…
