Separating the Photograph from Its Birth
Photographers will tell you a good photograph needs to stand on its own. No explanation, no supporting text; what’s in the frame is what you get. If the image only works when you explain it, the thinking goes, it has already failed.
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https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/05/22/separating-the-photograph-from-its-birth/
Never Delete Any Photo
Digital photography gave us something film never had: an instant undo button for our own judgement. See an image on the back of the camera, decide it fails, press delete, and it’s gone. Film made destruction harder; you could bin a print, but the negative sat in its sleeve unless you went out of
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https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/05/15/never-delete-any-photo/
Photography Changes You Through Others
When you photograph someone and they notice you, something changes in both of you. For them, it’s brief: a moment of self-consciousness, a decision about how to respond, then absorption back into their day. By evening, you’re probably forgotten.
For you, that photograph might stay for years.
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https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/05/01/photography-changes-you-through-others/
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Photography as a way to get on with the universe
The universe doesn’t care about us. That’s not pessimism; it’s physics. We’re pattern-seeking creatures dropped into a system operating on principles entirely indifferent to human comfort. Entropy increases, complexity spirals, and meaning is something we have to manufacture ourselves becau
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https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/04/17/photography-as-a-way-to-get-on-with-the-universe/
#Photography #IMayBeWrong #Opinion #Theory #PhotographyTheory
The Photographer as Interpreter
Photography has a self-image problem, and it starts with the word “witness.”
The term has circulated in photographic theory long enough to feel like settled truth. Photographers bear witness. They stand at the edge of events, recording what happens with a fidelity that makes them morally adjac
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https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/04/10/the-photographer-as-interpreter/
The Beholder Has Changed
You already know the photograph. Nick Ut took it in 1972 on a road in Vietnam: a girl running, napalm smoke behind her. It may have shortened a war. Not because it was beautifully composed or appeared in the right publication, but because it was real. The girl existed. The road existed. Light bounc
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https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/03/27/the-beholder-has-changed/
The Two Objects of Photography
There’s a contradiction that’s been nagging at me for years, and I’ve only recently found a way to articulate why it’s a false one. Photography feels, to me, like private work. The observing, the deciding, the moment of capture: all of that happens inside my own consciousness even when I’
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https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/03/13/the-two-objects-of-photography/
When You Stop Treating Photography As a Performance, You Can Embrace Your Self Image
My mother sometimes jokes that she raised a ghost, because there are barely any photographs of me as a child or teenager. I just hated having my photo taken and I’d find ways to hide to avoid it. When I started photography ca. 2002, I started taking photos of people around me. But I continued to
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Live Photography is About Life
I can tell you exactly how I felt standing on a sand dune in Morocco many years ago, watching my wife photograph a sand dune through evening light. I remember the temperature, the angle of the sun, the smell of dust. I remember the specific quality of happiness that comes from being exactly where y
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https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/02/27/live-photography-is-about-life/
I Stole Every Photograph I’ve Ever Taken
Not legally, though we’ll get to the murky ethics of that. I mean conceptually, technically, aesthetically. Every image I’ve made is somewhere on a spectrum between homage and plagiarism, filtered through techniques I borrowed from photographers who borrowed them from other photographers who bo
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https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/02/20/i-stole-every-photograph-ive-ever-taken/
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