We live in a visual culture so laden with camera images they are sewn into the very fabric of our lives. The average person in North America typically encounters more than a thousand of them a day. From pictures that bombard us on city streets, to those we see on social media, to online, tv, and in print, to the ones we ourselves make. Their ubiquity sometimes obscures the fact that photography both reflects and shapes our world.
 

When photography emerged some two hundred years ago, in a world where painting and drawing were the dominant forms of visual art media, it was seen as a literal transcription of reality. The shutter opened, and then it closed, a neutral action that left little room for inflection. The mechanical eye of the camera not only did not lie, it could not lie; it was objectively incapable. But today we’ve come to understand that the camera, as an extension of the human eye, is not neutral. Like the human eye, it discriminates. In the hands of people, it pictures some things, and excludes others. And what it pictures it does so in certain ways, for example lovingly, or with contempt. Photography is not a neutral observer of culture, but an active participant in it. Over time this has had broad impact on society, affecting our views on everything from history to psychology to science to politics to art.
 

While photographs may seem entirely neutral, behind every camera, behind every photograph, lies a photographer, with a point of view, with attitudes and beliefs, with fears, hates, needs, wants and desires, of which viewers may be unaware, of which the photographer her or himself may be unaware. The photographer’s eye is contingent upon experience, upbringing, and values. In written history as in the media, photography is inconspicuously intertwined with normative value judgments, where images are always inflected by culture and personality.
 

Consider the act of taking versus making pictures, a dichotomy that underscores a larger assumption about their intention and function, i.e. where meaning is located. How we feel about images affects not only how we see them, but how we judge, interpret, and use them. Their omnipresence in our culture suggests their effect on us is deep and lasting, and perhaps insidious. “In America”, wrote Susan Sontag, “the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.”
 

Indeed, photography both reflects and shapes our world, in an ongoing dialogue between what authentically originates from within a culture, and what is then fed back to that culture in the form of images; images that are acted upon, and beget still more images, in an endless cycle of creation and dissolution. The further removed we become in the process, the closer we get to what Jean Baudrillard called the hyperreal, where representation gives way to simulation. Eventually we altogether lose sight of where we began and we realize what we once considered an uninflected, objective, mechanical eye, a tool for documentation, has become partial, emotional, and subjective, an extension of the human eye constructing culture.
 

The camera as both taker and maker of photographs? Observer and participant? Reporter and engineer? These are intriguing, if contradictory ideas. A camera that simultaneously captures what we see, and what we want to see? From a critical perspective this is an alluring paradox. For contemporary artists consciously inflecting their images, it opens up a world of possibility.
 

In the past forty years digital photography has developed a vernacular all its own that differs from film-based photography; its immediacy mirrors the pace of contemporary life, it challenges our expectations of photographic truth in ways that conventional photography never could, and as a nonlinear process, it is truly postmodern, providing a multitude of vantage points from which to approach photographic truth, intention and interpretation. 

Further Reading:
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
Walter Benjamin, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
Susan Sontag, On Photography
Martha Rosler, On Documentary Photography
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Inside/Out
Clive Scott, The Spoken Image
Andy Grundberg, Crisis of the Real
Bertrand Russell, Appearance and Reality