Photography Reading - "What is a Photograph?"

Graham Clark's article "What is a Photograph" starts off by talking about the history of the photograph. While good to know, as I'm not a history buff, its not particularly interesting to me. It did get more interesting a couple of pages in.

What then is a photograph? It is, at its most basic level, 'a picture, likeness, or facsimile obtained by photography.' The meaning of a photograph, its efficacy as an image, and its value as an object, are always dependent on the contexts within which we 'read' it. On a functional level, then, the photograph is dependent on its context.

The text also makes an interesting note about the direction of a photograph, landscape and portrait being the two main views. The different aspect ration provides the image with different importance inherently. Other sizes, like a square image suggest voyeurism and immediacy; whether this is because of the shape itself or because that's how Polaroids were and we remember, it's unclear.

We can never enter a photograph's depth." Roland Barthes rightly complained about the frustration involved in the misplaced assumption that the closer we look at a photograph, the more we see.

That's an interesting point, photographs are flat thin pieces of paper, nothing more, but they contain the illusion of depth. They try to portray reality as accurately as possible, but in the end they are still completely fake.