“Art (either empathic or abstract) is never a matter of imitation. The image produced by the artist is not a representation, more or less faithful, more or less truthful, of something already existing outside the image by itself; rather, the opposite is true: in the work, something that comes into existence only in that image (in those lines and colors, planes and volumes) is established for the first time.”

— Wilhelm Worringer, Astrazione e empatia (Abstraction & Empathy)

Photography is a form of art particularly concerned with reality. For how staged or extremely post-produced it might be, its creation will never consist of a totally abstract process: differently from the work of a painter, which might as well paint an imagined and unrealisable dream, a photographer has to represent something that actually takes place in the world–it might even be a dream, aslong as it can be staged before the camera.

Mainly due to this characteristic of the medium, photography has been mistakenly defined as a representation, or rather an imitation, of reality. By fixating real-life events on film, its role has been that of reporting both the photographer’s perspective on the world and the world itself. And while photography–mostly in its early days–has really been used by humans to capture salient events, meaningful occurrences and delicate issues, it has never been a merely imitative tool. Rather, as a form of art, it has been a means of creating new realities, be it consciously or unconsciously.

What we can observe in a photograph is never an imitation or a copy of what it has captured. Opposite, every photograph communicating an emotional layer in addition to its narrative gives life to something. A something that originates in the picture. For instance, when portraying the performance of a musician, the photographer is generating a whole new story: rather than representing what would have occurred anyhow on stage, by interacting with the subject she is establishing encounters and relationships that take place specifically because of her intervention. And the emotions perceivable in her images originate from these altered circumstances, from these exchanges of human experience.

The newly created content can take shape both in the visual construction of the image or in the emotional charge of the matter it represents; in both cases, what it portrays would not have existed without the photograph itself. Or rather, it might have existed in a form that is impossible to grasp, a form that would have been perceived differently by every person that has been testimony of its occurrence. By being staged and photographed, the performance has been transformed in a univocally authorial perception, that of the photographer. And not only that: it has been transmitted to every observer of the picture.

And believe it or not, this is enough to define photography as a form of art. Not out of pride, nor out of arrogance. Rather, out of an objective awareness of the creative potential of the medium.