The need of photographing

Why is it pertinent today in this all-video world to made photography? The question seems to raise when you are looking to all these photographic reviews done over the Net in vlog formats oppose to the traditional blogs. I am not arguing the pertinence of using video to illustrate a review of anything. For sure it can be more captivating to watch a live performance than to read a lengthiness text filled with several paragraphs of fine characters.

But what about photography versus cinematic imagery? The debate isn't new since the creation of cinematographic devices by such the Lumière brothers. And since those past times the two visual media have been coexisted almost flawlessly. In fact what is photography? A fixed moment in a fixed context with a fixed subject. A kind of instant freeze by the camera on a material or a virtual support. So photography is a very selective exercice in space and time. And that picture is available to be analyze throughly by our brain bit by bit a thing almost impossible when you look at animated picture. And that selectivity is done on place (opposed to a latter pick taken on the stream of animated pictures) at the exact moment we have chosen to register the picture.

Life is an endless decisive moments chain which imply an array of interactions impossible to really apprehend in their totality as nobody is truly omniscient. So we always are selecting part and fraction of that chain of facts, events, emotions, etc. We can say that we are constantly photographing fragments of our reality. Our memory of the flux of life is a king of home-brain-made assembly of fugitive moments that leaves perceptions translated by interpretations.

So doing photography is meanly an intuitive habit that everybody is doing implicitly. It is when we try to reproduce that human reflex on an external support that will be available for our fellows that photography is becoming a medium more difficult to master. In that case technical limitations can be overwhelming to the profane who is trying to mimic his visual interpretation of the subject with a bi-dimensional (2-D) representation. Limitations are the kind of bread that every photographers have to consume to be able to express their visual perceptions.

But the point stays true. Photography is one of the best representation of the human mind selectivity and stays as pertinent as it was on its first days. The real challenge today is to encourage the photographers to complete the entire circle of producing photographs on print support to really finalize the process and allow a better preservation of the picture for future generations.