My dad emailed a picture of me that he took on his cell phone the other day. There were more than a few strange things about this photo. It looked like this:
That's me by the way
It would not necessarily be all that bizarre to see a picture like this, until one is made aware of the fact that it was entirely unedited. When prodded, my dad assured me that he had not manipulated the photo, which I believe, since I have never known him to be capable of using photo editing tools before. And I didn’t do anything to it either. This was simply a technological mishap. It must have been that two pictures were combined somehow—maybe the camera snapped two shots and uploaded them as one, or something like that. In any case, my dad’s phone took artistic liberties with an image that was intended to be, as is expected of a photo, an objective representation of what is seen through the lens.
But photos are never truly objective, as many artists and cultural critics have pointed out. They are literally snapshots from a perspective, an isolated moment, and often a pose. We tend to forget this. Painting, which for a minute there seemed like it might become obsolete when photography usurped its role as documentation, instead became associated with higher expression and commentary. René Magritte did with paintings what photographers seemingly could not, by playing with our perceptions of the spatial and temporal world that photos purported to present plainly.
But in this case, technological failure elevated the camera’s representation of an intended image to something resembling what we call art. And I wonder, if this is an accidental Magritte, then who is the artist? My dad or the camera itself? Or maybe we have reached the era of sci-fi fantasy when that kind of distinction becomes impossible and irrelevant. Either that or I’m looking for artistry in all the wrong places.
