Reading a Photograph

The chaotic elements of time and space present a mysterious process of complexity science when reading a photograph. Beyond the debate over whether photography is an art or not, it is the fact that I am’recording’ time and space with a camera, using it as a tool, in a way that no other visual art form can. 

I’m freezing fragments of time. It’s like that flowing river, where I can’t bathe twice in the same river, or more specifically, in the same water. That is why there is no such thing as ‘PRESENT’ in a photograph. Before I press the shutter, I want to capture something about the ‘FUTURE,’ but the future that is in the photograph is now in the ‘PAST’ (the moment I pressed the shutter). Again, in visual communication, our cognitive activity proceeds through the recovery of the past through the objects in the present, but only if we consider a photograph to be an object that we encounter on a regular basis. 

And it is within photography that I live. In agreement with Sebastiao Salgado. “I am not an artist. An artist makes an object. Me, it’s not an object, I work in history. I am a storyteller. ” However, where there is a story, fiction is never far behind. Because storytelling is such a complex process that includes not only the author’s intended meaning or the audience’s unintentional interpretation, but also a variety of other ways for the story to unfold in space and time. That’s why every photograph is only half the truth, because the rest of the “time” of the “past” is left outside the frame because that “space” was cropped by me, the photographer. When you begin to READ that picture, the fiction then begins. Outside of its frame.