Not A Photograph

This picture started out as a photograph of a crack in the street. The shape reminded me of a lightning bolt, so as an exercise, I processed it in Photoshop to enhance that freeling. Carefully cropped it, inverted it so the black crack became white, and so on.

The result is a little abstract, but I think gets the idea across of a lightning bolt striking in a field.

Now, most of the time I like to take pictures of real objects. Sometimes I enhance them, but the goal is usually to emphasize something about the object. Even if the result becomes a little abstract, the goal is to communicate something that is really there. It may become a photograph that depicts a specific characteristic, but it’s still a photograph.

But in this case, the lightning appearance really only existed in my mind, so it wasn’t really a characteristic of the scene itself. From that standpoint, this picture doesn’t represent anything real.

So in a sense, this is no longer a photograph in the sense of a picture of something real, because it’s not representing something that was really there, it’s representing an idea in my mind.

That seems to be the case with a lot of abstract photography – it represents ideas in the artist’s mind, perhaps with some input from the viewer’s mind. But in either case, it doesn’t represent anything in the subject itself – the subject, if there is one, is used to communicate a completely separate idea.

This is probably a gross oversimplification, but helps me think about what I’m trying to do with photography, and what the limits might be.

I do like a lot of abstract photography, and may continue to make some, but it’s harder for me and not the thing that interests me most.