Tuesday Reads: Mishka Henner
© Jack Davison.
“Photography is understood as a medium with no fixed identity. • Photography is about self discovery on a technical level as well as a personal level. • Photography is not intended as art and should not be judged as such. • Photography is not practiced by most people as an art. • Photography is a synthesis of the technical and the creative. • Photography is an art – when it is in the hands of artists. • Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. • Photography is aware of the heterogeneous visual traditions of fine art and the specific traditions of photography as art. • Photography is nothing – it’s life that interests me. • Photography is the beauty of life, captured.”
The general perception is that photography is not easily translatable into words. Captions tend to only weigh down the impalpable emotivity of a successful photograph. Sentences act as barriers to the otherwise fluid interpretations of a powerful image. However, Photography is somehow conveys that impalpability. As a collection of more than three thousands unrelated quotes about photography, it attempts to communicate the difficulty we still face in grasping a clear cut definition of this medium: enclosed within the frame of a single page, the reader may find two opposite statements about the nature of the medium. And what is photography, if not “a medium with no fixed identity”?
© Nadia Von Scotti.
© Alena Zhandarova.
Just like it happens with daily life, photography adapts to the perspective of each photographer: it is what you make of it. Thus, through the seemingly impersonal act of collecting and reporting multiple definitions, Mishka Henner indirectly–but decisively–makes his point: any debate about whether photography is art or not has become completely pointless.
© Bertil Nissen.
Notwithstanding our perpetual effort to pin down and delineate any media we employ for self-expression, photography eludes any border. It acquires the shape and taste of whatever the photographer analyses through the camera. As time progresses and photographers progressively unearth the potential of their cameras, such fluidity of the medium makes it impossible to discuss about its characteristics on general terms. “Photography is not intended as art”. Great, what about food? Cooking is not intended as art, just like photography: it is merely necessary for our survival as a species. We all agree on this. However, we also somehow don’t. It all boils down to the perspective one adopts on life: to find the beauty or not to find it, that is the question.
© Nhi Nguyen.
© Luca Marianaccio.
Photography may not be intended as art, still the life it captures undeniably is art. Photography reports what is worthy of being remembered about our experience, it ensures that, in the end, we choose to actually find that beauty. No wonder that we keep getting closer to a society which is constantly being documented and photographed.
Photography may not be intended as art, still the continuous improvements in the mechanic and electronic performances of cameras undeniably constitute a form of art. And so does the act of editing a series of photographs, an effort to obtain a series which is coherent either in terms of aftertaste or formal composition. And so does the process of transposing a digital image on photographic paper, each pigment penetrating its fibres according to a predefined scheme.
© Freddi and Elinleticia Högabo.
Photography may not be intended as art, still it has somehow come to be the most effective and adaptable medium for capturing human experience and everything that it encompasses, from our more or less successful coexistence with other forms of life to the more or less ingenious ways of relating with our habitat. Contemporary art does not accept clear cut definitions, which leads to a general uncertainty regarding its role. The only certainty left seems to be that life itself is the highest form of art, in its subjectivity and indefinability. And somehow, being the contemporary testimony of our existence par excellence, photography has come to be the art of capturing art.
