According to NASA, the light coming from the Sun takes 8.3 minutes to reach Earth, covering an extraordinary distance of 149,596,208 km before it bounces off the objects that surround us allowing us to see them. If you take a photo of an object that you see in daylight, when is the image of that object created? When the sunlight bounces on it, when the bounced light hits your eyes and is interpreted by your brain, or when the camera fixes that image on the film or the digital sensor? Depending on who you are, the answer to this question might be more philosophical than scientific.
If you were a copyright lawyer, you would most likely say that the image is created when it is fixed on a physical support (film, sensor, paper) and it is only then when the copyright is assigned to the creator. If you were a scientist, you would probably assert that the image was created in our brains when we interpreted the light bouncing off the object that we are looking at. If you were a philosopher, you would argue that the image is always there for as long as the light bounces off the object and it is only waiting for a set of eyes to see it.
However, any photographer, or any artist for that matter, would tell you that the image was created in our brain, not when we saw the object, but when we imagined how the object would look like from a different perspective, with a certain composition or at a different time with a different light angle even before pressing the shutter. For we as photographers are able to imagine the future and automatically turn it into the past by just the click of a button.
But, what would happen if we decided not to press that button? What would happen if we created an image in our minds that the world had never seen and just left it there, without allowing it to take its potential physical form? What would happen if we created the most beautiful and unique image and just treasured it in our brains without allowing anyone else to see it? What would happen if we denied humanity the privilege of looking at our vision of the world?
Probably nothing. Other photographers will continue creating their art and the absence of our images would likely go unnoticed. But, art is meant to be shown, and the images in our minds deserve to come to life because it is only through them that we know how to express ourselves. That's why we take photos.
Do you like what you just read? Subscribe to my weekly blog posts here!