Photography as a “Medium”
The thing about the word “medium” is that it always refers to something in between one thing and another.
So, what gives the word any special flavor or import, when used, is actually derived from the things that are on either side of it, not the thing that is within it.
In talking to the spirits of the dead, you are on one side and the spirits are on the other. Your medium could be a psychotropic drug or someone behind a bead curtain who burns herbs and has a crystal ball.
In making pictures, your initial real-life visual experience of something can be reiterated — with any amount of interpretation, translation, and encoding — through forming selected materials into a corresponding arrangement that can be presented for viewing, as another experience.
Things get interesting when we acknowledge that in our times, pictures themselves are routinely part of immediate real-life visual experiences preceding future moments. Or, having a memory can easily be the experience in real life that is at the front end of activity that then generates a presentation on the other end.
Calling that activity a “medium” is not metaphorical at all; it just points out that the presentation does not spontaneously appear. But what is included in the activity is effort that intends to produce a detectable meaning. This is not difficult to understand at all: anyone who accepts that a translator can convert English to French in conversation has a way of getting the meaning intended by the speaker to recur in the mind of the listener. The translator is a medium.
Functional Form
A medium has a lot of influence on how something can be conveyed from one place to another. Let’s take something like an instrumental love ballad and compare it to a literary love sonnet: Mostly dissimilar materials, mostly similar meaning, entirely different technical activity, yet enormously similar formative skills. Music and literature — although two very different mediums — can start at the same place (intention) and end at the same place (influence), through differing causes and effects.
Photography was born as a way of extending human mastery in conveying the experiential impacts of the visible environment in two ways: depicting the environment’s forms and its content. What became extended was the efficiency in re-presenting verifiable observable conditions as hi fidelity visual facts. And regardless of any future developments in technologies, photography will always refer back to drawing as its “DNA”.
What was NOT extended was the range of interests that predetermined what kind of facts and what conditions were practically preferred as a matter of cultural, psychological, or occupational predisposition. That range was already huge and photography did not make it larger.
Rather, selectivity has always been at the core of any photography that was done intentionally for future presentation or conservation. This is why even a very low resolution photograph can be enormously meaningful. What matters is not how many facts; rather, which facts.
And again, pictures themselves become part of the realities of visual experience, just as knowledge becomes part of the realities of cognition.
As part of that, we also become more familiar with how materials can be arranged into expressive form. The materials themselves can become the primary subject of attention because as humans we are innately invested in effective communication and in designing experience. As an analogy, vocabularies and languages change and grow, without becoming inscrutable or unusable, although they can go unlearned or be abandoned. Visual phenomena become the material “language” of pictures.
The Who Cares Test
An important dimension of that communications and design is sociological: the exercise of power through influence, in order to conform experiences to the objectives and goals of the power holder. All of us have lived with this in, for example, religion, education, youth slang, and… art. Here, it is crucial to not confuse the power agenda with the value nor with the definition of the medium.
Preservation of cultural “standards” and biases is always traceable to a power holder, whether the holder is a collective or individual source. Histories, it is also said, “are written by the winners.” There is a crucial difference between the histories and predispositions of what gets deemed “art” versus the actual history of a medium. As qualitative judgement of values gets centralized in societal institutions, the inherent possibilities of a medium are consistently subordinated to expectations of propriety (agreement with certain values). Such proprieties saturate conventional histories and attitudes about art.
But regardless of them, serious artists exist in large numbers across the full span of those who, said casually, are unrecognized versus recognized, newcomers versus long-timers, or experimenters versus craft-masters.
There is not some singular intersection of those dimensions of status that defines a medium nor its “correct” goals or evolution. Some sub-culture or another can go about enforcing its own perspective on what is important, to satisfy the holders and subscribers of its power. But what intrinsically distinguishes serious artists from other artists is that they have a work ethic and a conscious awareness of methodological function and personal procedure to get the medium to be their instrument for communication.
Getting the Picture
In its earliest occurrence, a photograph was a product of a method of optically manipulating light to draw (as in the Greek “graphe”) an image.
In the strictest sense, that is photography’s activity understood as a medium.
The fact is that in practice a so-called photograph can also be originated at different “places” — that is, by a variety of differing methods that produce the same desired type of effects.
But over time, known and discovered effects of the practice accumulate together; as produced by this activity, they are collectively photographic images; then less rigorously, by synecdoche, the collection is seen as “the medium”…
Those two senses of “medium” — a method and a type — are not the only ones however.
Beyond them, a formed “photographic” image can be “transported” from its current location to another location.
Outside the Image Production
In the evolution of the mediums of photo-graphic presentations, there is one vector that runs through video, digital effects, and computational generative imaging; while there is another vector that runs through printmaking, radiography, and direct electro-neural stimulation of the brain.
Inside the Image Production
We also know that within the “photography” medium, there are numerous modalities, genres, and styles that get committed, to being expressive, just as in other mediums. The variety displays a kind of natural “biodiversity” that sprouts from why each of us, different from each other as we are, chooses to talk in one way or another, about one thought or another, making our expression personal, idiosyncratic, while our idea is the subject.
Meanwhile, a type of expression — the how — can be what leads us to what we try to express, just as a certain musical instrument leads us to a kind of music we think of playing. This is exactly what is meant by per-form-ance, and we can love performance itself just as much as we are interested in any other idea we care to present. Across a wide range of expressive efforts, performance can be the subject.
Artful Vision
But from their historical beginning, photographic images have ALWAYS been able to re-present experiences by implying, illustrating, rendering, documenting, and symbolizing. At the same time, in the what, how, and why of their production, they create experiences, too.
What is in common across that broad scope is that attentive seeing makes the experience of “presence” itself into subject matter — or literally, what matters as a subject. We can anticipate that impact, for example, as discovery, proof, attraction, or resonance — all affecting our ongoing perception, recognition, and engagement through seeing. Photography’s legacy connection to seeing with the naked eye still amplifies our awareness of seeing as something beyond witnessing the world; rather, as something that shapes what we experience as being “real” about the world.
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Malcolm Ryder is the designer and former manager of the NEA Visual Arts Fellowships Grants jurying in Photography; a practicing art and business photographer and writer; and on the Board of Directors of the East Bay Photo Collective and Oakland Art Murmur in California. His degree in visual culture is from Princeton University.
