Light and Shadow.
Elements Interplay.
Rendering the familiar unfamiliar.
A visual deconstruction of the everyday.
Objective / Subjectivity: A Problematique
With the proliferation of the camera as a tool for capturing scenes and images of the everyday, a critical question must be raised. The camera, as a tool, allows one to stop action and create images of how the photographer perceives and interact with his surrounding.Hence, one would assume, because the image created is a definite representative of a certain reality, it must be true and thus, in all aspects, is objective in nature.
At face value, the logic seems unassailable. However, the fundamental flaw behind this assumption is that the camera can and will reveal all. This ignores the role of the photographer and his own subjectivity in the creation of the image. The choice of colour or black & white, the framing of the shot and other factors such as shutter speed or aperture are choices which affect and determine the final image. The photographer’s interpretation of the environment around him and hence, the social relationships with his subjects are subjectively realised in the final product.
What appears to be objective is infact a subjective realisation and interpretation of an objective reality that factors in existential structural factors. As Bourdieu has so elegantly captured, ‘Only a naive realism sees the photographic representation of reality as realistic; if it appears objective, it is because the rules defining its social use conform to the social defintion of objectivity’.
What irks me is that this is largely ignored, especially in the face of digital photography. Without an active realisation of social realities, photography is practised merely at face value. Here we find the magical photographer who is able to read minds, gifting the images of his subjects titles such as ‘Forlorn’, ‘Sad’, or the like. ( I must admit that i am, at times, prone to this as well). The interpellation of the subject is practiced within the structures of a hegemonic ideology that assumes, and assumes too much.
Evening Prayers at the Masjid Abdul Gaffoor
