A BRIEF ODE TO PHOTOGRAPHY
Jack Dalgleish
It was some time ago that I read Susan Sontag’s On Photography. I was recommended it by one of my Art teachers during my A-Levels and I gave it a read. To my 17-year-old brain, it was a wordy rollercoaster. Now, reading it again, I think Sontag was spot on. She writes, “Photographs really are experiences captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.” That experience, as she goes on to argue, is almost more real than reality itself and it is in that mediated essence of experience that is why I continue to take photographs. To take photographs as an act of capturing an experience, is to accept that you can’t pin down that experience within the four walls of a camera’s frame.
A pivotal moment for my understanding of what photography can be was when I went to the frontlines of the 2019 Hong Kong protests. I didn’t really think about why I was so drawn to documenting the police brutality and mayhem caused by the protests, but it just seemed right. The night itself was relatively uneventful, but the photos afterwards in the experience they portrayed were a thousand times more powerful. The photos we take offer a more intense experience because of a camera’s inherent ability to capture and portray information accurately. In that light, my love of photography has been in its ability to bring my experiences into a different realm, one that is simultaneously more novel and individualised but equally objective and confined (literally, within a frame). Essentially, clicking the shutter isn’t the be all and end all. It is your experience as an observer that then re-furnishes that reality that matters and is when photography is its most powerful.
This article first appeared in PRISMA, Issue 14.