What is Photography?

“What is Photography?” was a campaign made in partnership with B&H Photo and Video, Hasselblad, Penumbra Foundation, and Oliphant Studios produced by myself and John Harris.

The project consists of 81 portraits of members of the global photography community (artists, editors, curators, theorists, etc) paired with their reflections upon the role of photography in their lives.

In addition to its life on web and social platforms, it led to physical exhibitions paired with artists talks at Hasselblad’s SoHo studio and B&H’s Depth of Field Conference as well multiple episodes of the B&H Podcast.

Photography is my way to feel more, to connect to the people around me. It started with the people very close to me and has been expanding ever since.

Elinor Carucci, fine art photographer, with her daughter Emmanuelle Bendheim

During the Egyptian revolution I was a medic, but I knew being a physician would only be a job for me and never my passion. I was not a photographer at that time, but I witnessed many stories on the front line of the revolution as they happened, in real time. What I witnessed was strong enough to move me, to make me see what millions in my country were not able to see. For me, photography is deeply associated with the Egyptian Revolution. It taught me how be truthful and, if photography isn’t the truth, I believe we are facing an awful disaster.

Amr Alfiky, photojournalist, contributor to New York Times, Reuters

Photography is taking reality and bending it to your will.

Ben Zank, photographer

Photography is magic. It’s like alchemy; a way I can make something out of nothing.

Sam Cannon, artist and director of very short films

This is a different definition of photography, people have to understand that. I'm not just trying to be a better photographer than others—that doesn't interest me—photography is the direct access to my soul... and a connection with other souls.

Delphine Diallo, photographer and visual artist

Photography is what Artificial Intelligence can't do. Computers can detect the presence of many thousands [of] types of objects in a photograph, predict age, gender, and ethnicity of people, measure their facial expressions, and describe all colors. But this is all irrelevant when you are in the presence of a great photograph. What makes its great remains a mystery. In fact, AI’s ability to describe many different things in a photograph—contrast, composition, textures, faces, etc.—only makes this mystery greater, in my view. But this is how it’s supposed to be, anyway. If we could precisely predict all nuances of our responses to art, it would be no longer needed. And the presence of billions of photographs today shared by hundreds of millions of people daily does not diminish this mystery either, nor does it devalue the power of great photography. It only makes such photographs stand out, and affect us in the way we can't (luckily) understand rationally.

Lev Manovich, Media Theorist and Professor of Computer Science

When I photograph someone, I try to capture the person’s feelings, so when someone else sees that image, they can feel what that person is feeling. For me, photography is capturing the greatness of a person, to find the truth of each moment.

Kwame Brathwaite, photographer

Photography is an art medium to create work using real life as the art material.

Pixy Liao, artist, actress, musician

Photography is a way of life, it’s the therapy that keeps me calm and my heart beatin’. It allows me to pay attention to people that I might otherwise ignore, especially when it comes to veterans and folks struggling with mental health issues.

Michael McCoy, photojournalist, U.S. Army veteran, PTSD counselor

Photography is a tool of empowerment that has allowed me and millions of others to tell our stories.

Growing up in a religious family with very traditional values, my true identity was lost. Like many other girls from Iran, from the age of seven, I had to cover up. My school photo shows a girl barely visible from layers of cloth covering her up. You say to yourself, this is not my true-self, but this photo will be your identity going forward. And yet, a photograph can also be a means to fight back to regain one's identity. For many women and girls who do not believe in the compulsory dress code, photography has become a tool of resistance against this forced identity. I encourage all women to use social media to tell their stories about their identities.

Masih Alinejad, journalist and activist

Fine art photography is like writing poetry, taking an everyday language and asking it to do things that are a little less conventional. But photography as a whole is a shared construction, it is what we are willing to call photography—no one gets to author it, it is hard to essentialize it, it’s what the group says that photography is.

What we call photography has so many different materialities, uses, and contexts and, though there are all kinds of new ways to capture information with technology, photography will be around so long as it remains a salient category for the “group.” That is what my work is playing in—this really broad common language. In my work, photography is a kind of box, something to push against or push out of, but not break—a field of play.

Lucas Blalock, artist

The time-travel aspect of photography is important to me, because it is so tangible. A well-executed photograph from another time can really put you in that moment. The tangibility and “reality” of this time travel differentiates it from other art forms. The time to take a photo is so finite, but the time to travel with a photograph can be infinite; even a shot full of action allows you to contemplate the stillness of an image. I often wish that I had taken more photos during that “finite” time.

Chris Stein, photographer and guitarist of the band, Blondie

Photography is a means to an end; it is possibly the most effective liaison between thought, belief, and action, after the pen. The photograph is the original “influencer.”

Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, documentary photographer

The photographs I have seen are all part of me. My entire life, I have been absorbing media, which has greatly affected the person I am now and my understanding of life itself. Photography is a powerful visual language, and like the written word, it can be poetic and holds the possibility to restructure knowledge. By presenting my partner within the lineage of great beauties and populating the media with our images, we are using this language of photography to reclaim our voice within that landscape.

Lissa Rivera, photographer, with model and partner, BJ Lillis

Photography is one of the greatest gifts created; a unique visual language with the ability to speak to the larger world. As a photographer, having selected themes provides me with a sense of direction as I seek to make images. Some of the main themes that I focus on are friendship, love, family, children, dignity, struggle, protest and any other situation I deem provocative. When I encounter a situation that I wish to freeze, there is often a collaboration between my eye and my heart; that is the moment in many cases, when I press my shutter.

Social media has truly allowed me to see just how important my work is today. Due to the countless positive responses and messages I receive daily from people around the globe, I have come to realize that my photography is truly a form of visual medicine.

Jamel Shabazz, photographer, recorder of history, 2018 Gordon Parks Foundation Honoree

Photography is my safe space.

Alan-Michael Duval, fashion photographer

What is photography? Everything from a daguerreotype to a digital print, from Man Ray’s rayograms to Adam Fuss’s photograms, from sand-toned carbon prints by Julia Margaret Cameron to manipulated color Polaroids by Lucas Samaras to Jeff Wall’s meticulously constructed, computer-manipulated fictions. It’s Nadar and Penn, Brassai and Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin and Gilbert & George, “Migrant Mother,” “Dovima With Elephants,” and that snapshot you found at the flea market last week.

You may never have seen the photograph outside of a book or a magazine, but it exists somewhere as a print on paper and even if it fades or gets torn or burned up, that format—that physicality—defines it for me. Some of the images you’ve captured on your cell phone may attain the status of photographs, but most of them are just pictures—notes, reminders, information—that you’ll probably never look at again. Photography is not just noticing or recording something; it’s seeing. It involves the mind and the eye. It involves contemplation, connection, understanding, and time. It might appear effortless; it is almost never that.

Vince Aletti, critic and curator

Photography is a way for me to depict the injustices I saw when I was a criminal defense lawyer. It brings together my journalism and legal backgrounds, allows me to snoop into my subjects’ lives, takes me to places I wouldn’t ordinarily explore, and opens up my own world.

Sara Bennett, photographer

To represent someone else's story is a struggle, you have to give everything to that person because there's so much at stake. Photography is a practice, a process, and a struggle to do justice to a story.

Nolan Ryan Trowe, documentarian