The Great Photography Scam

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My father was a skilled amateur photographer, though “amateur” was not a word he would have encouraged anyone to emphasize. He began with a Pentax and, when prosperity permitted, graduated to a Leicaflex—the sort of camera that announced its seriousness before anyone removed the lens cap. He shot Kodacolor prints and later Kodachrome slides, buying enough film to suggest that the Eastman Kodak Company’s continued solvency depended heavily upon one man in Chippewa Township.

By the mid-1970s, he had become president of the Beaver Valley Camera Club, which was probably as close as Beaver County came in those days to the Bloomsbury Group, except with more slide projectors and fewer complicated arrangements among the members.

In summer, he hosted catered camera-club outings beside our swimming pool. Young women appeared in bikinis and fashions supplied by a local designer and arranged themselves decoratively around the grounds while the men adjusted their apertures. Their wives watched with the grave composure of women who knew perfectly well what was being photographed and intended to discuss it thoroughly on the drive home.

Everyone admired the models. Everyone admired the house, the swimming pool—still a comparative rarity in Beaver County—and the acres of lawn my father kept manicured with the precision of a Marine Corps cemetery. Everyone admired his photographs, too, or at least had the courtesy to say so while eating his catered food.

I cannot say how much artistic merit the pictures possessed, although one of his compositions won an award from the Photographic Society of America, which suggests there was rather more merit than his son was prepared to concede. It also gave the family something to point to whenever the film bills arrived. My mother paid those bills and suffered mostly in silence, as women of her generation were expected to suffer when married to men with expensive hobbies and artistic aspirations. The great masters had patrons. My father had my mother.

The award matters because my father was not merely a prosperous man amusing himself with an expensive machine. He really could see. The camera did not give him that gift, although it gave him a splendid means of exercising it and an almost unlimited justification for buying accessories.

Relatives sometimes accused him of using the camera to avoid the annoying small talk expected at family gatherings. There was probably something to this. He was not a man to suffer fools gladly, and a Leicaflex provided both an occupation and an alibi. While everyone else discussed the weather, somebody’s gallbladder or what Cousin So-and- So’s boy was doing with his life, my father could study the light, adjust the focus and move purposefully toward the other side of the room.

The camera allowed him to observe without quite participating. This, too, is part of photography’s peculiar bargain. It brings the photographer closer to what he sees while placing a small machine between himself and everyone in it. He may be preserving the occasion. He may also be hiding from it.

His devotion to photography introduced me early to another of the medium’s most persuasive deceptions: the idea that buying better equipment is roughly the same thing as developing a better eye. This conviction has financed the camera industry for nearly two centuries. Somewhere, at this very moment, a man is explaining to his wife that the photograph of the bird would have been magnificent if only he had owned the $4,800 lens.

My own relationship with photography was more complicated. I was sent off to an all- male preparatory school in New Jersey, where I took pictures of mud puddles because their reflections looked like something one might have seen during an LSD trip or projected behind Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore West. I knew very little about LSD, San Francisco or serious photography, but ignorance has never prevented a prep-school boy from adopting an aesthetic position.

For me, a camera was mostly a cool toy, like an electric guitar. You carried it around in hopes that people would mistake possession of the instrument for possession of talent.

There were boys at school who really did have talent. One was Phil Ulanowsky, the son of the classical pianist Paul Ulanowsky. Phil was himself an accomplished pianist and played in the school rock band, Lennie and the White Knights. Every preparatory school in that era had a rock band. Most consisted of five boys with expensive guitars, matching turtlenecks and a repertoire extending from “Gloria” all the way to “Louie Louie.”

Phil understood the darkroom, which in those days was the inner sanctum of photography. A person could take an ordinary picture in daylight, but only someone who had stood beneath the red glow of a safelight, breathing chemical fumes and manipulating silver paper in trays, could call himself a photographer without inviting ridicule.

One summer Phil stayed with us at the farm and shared some of his secrets. We traveled the Beaver County countryside photographing abandoned farmhouses, sagging barns, empty roads and whatever else caught our fancy. It was a suitable education in photography because the countryside was already disappearing. The farmhouses seemed to be posing for their obituaries.

We were young men taking pictures of old things. We did not yet understand that this is one of photography’s principal businesses.

A photograph promises permanence. It says: This farmhouse stood here. This woman was young. This child had all his hair. This family sat together on a summer afternoon before illness, divorce, disappointment and death began revising the seating chart. The shutter opens, the shutter closes, and a fraction of a second is released from time—or so we tell ourselves.

That is the great photography scam.

The camera does not preserve a moment. It preserves the appearance of a moment. The moment itself goes right on vanishing.

This distinction is essential and nearly impossible to remember because photographs are so convincing. A painting admits that a human being has interpreted the world. The painter selects, simplifies, rearranges and occasionally improves the sitter’s nose. A photograph arrives wearing the uniform of evidence. It says, with the confidence of a courthouse clerk, “This is what happened.”

Sometimes it is. More often, it is what happened inside a rectangular frame during the 1/125th of a second when nobody blinked.

Human beings had been dreaming of such a contraption for a very long time. Ancient thinkers understood that light passing through a small opening could project an inverted image. By the Renaissance, artists were using the camera obscura as a drawing aid, though presumably without mentioning the fact to their patrons. Even genius prefers a shortcut when one is available.

The optical problem was solved long before the chemical one. Light could make an image, but nobody knew how to persuade the image to stay. Silver salts darkened when exposed to light, yet the earliest experimenters produced only temporary shadows. The visible world would sit for its portrait, but it refused to leave a print.

Then, around 1826 or 1827, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce exposed a bitumen-coated pewter plate for perhaps eight hours and produced View from the Window at Le Gras, the earliest surviving permanent camera photograph. Eight hours is not exactly an instant. It is less a snapshot than a geological survey. The sun had time to illuminate opposite sides of the buildings while Niépce waited for history to develop.

Louis Daguerre improved matters. By 1839, the daguerreotype could make a highly detailed image with exposures measured in minutes rather than working days. In Daguerre’s famous photograph of the Boulevard du Temple, a busy Paris street appears almost deserted because moving traffic passed too quickly to register. Only a man standing still while having his boots blackened remained in view long enough to be recorded.

Thus, one of the earliest photographs of a human being was also one of photography’s earliest lies. The camera showed an empty boulevard that was not empty. It told the truth faithfully and got the facts wrong.

William Henry Fox Talbot developed the negative-positive process, allowing multiple prints to be made from one exposure. Daguerre had captured a moment; Talbot discovered how to distribute it. By the late 19th century, dry plates and flexible roll film made photography increasingly practical. Then George Eastman put a camera into ordinary hands with the slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest.”

No advertising line has ever summarized a revolution more neatly—or concealed more of its consequences.

You pressed the button. Kodak did the developing. Time did the rest.

The Brownie camera brought photography to millions. Kodachrome brought the world into color. Leica made the 35-millimeter camera elegant and portable. Polaroid eliminated the wait. Digital photography eliminated the film. The smartphone eliminated almost everything except the finger.

Today, taking a picture requires no knowledge of shutter speed, aperture, focal length, emulsion or light. The telephone performs calculations that would have bewildered my father and probably offended him. It combines exposures, corrects shadows, sharpens faces, smooths skin and brightens the sunset before the sunset has had time to disappoint us. Artificial intelligence improves what light delivered, leaving us with an image of the world as it might have appeared had reality employed a better lighting director.

We now take more photographs in a day than people took during the entire first century of the medium. This is usually described as progress, although it may also be evidence that civilization has confused documentation with living.

Susan Sontag recognized this danger in the 1970s. She argued that taking pictures is a way of collecting the world. The tourist no longer merely visits Venice. He acquires Venice in 146 installments, including nineteen photographs of lunch.

The camera certifies the experience, but it can also replace it. Instead of looking at the Grand Canyon, we turn our backs on it so the Grand Canyon can appear behind us. The human face occupies the foreground. Geological time is reduced to background scenery for a photograph proving that we were there.

We see this everywhere: at concerts, weddings, funerals, birthday parties, fireworks displays and school plays. A child walks onto the stage for what may be the only third- grade performance of his theatrical career, and an entire audience raises phones between itself and the event. Each parent watches the child on a five-inch screen while recording a video that no one, possibly including the parent, will ever watch again.

We have preserved the memory by failing to be fully present for its creation.

The modern meal must endure a photo session before it can be eaten. Eggs cool. Ice cream melts. Everyone waits while one member of the party leans over the table seeking the angle at which avocado toast reveals its inner life.

Photography once documented exceptional events. Now events occur in order to be photographed.

Yet this is not the whole story. Photography also reveals things ordinary sight misses: the expression that crosses a face between smiles, the detail hiding at the edge of a scene, the physical grace contained in a fraction of arrested movement. It can expose what official ceremonies are designed to conceal.

I learned that from the genuinely gifted photographers whose paths crossed mine. During my summer internship writing speeches at the White House, I encountered David

Hume Kennerly, already famous for his combat photography in Vietnam and beginning a new chapter as President Ford’s official White House photographer. Kennerly had seen the camera operate in its two most consequential settings: war and power.

In both places, access is everything. The important photograph is often not the ceremonial image arranged for public consumption but the unguarded instant before or after it: the fatigue in a face, the glance across a room, the body’s small betrayal of the official story. A speechwriter supplies language intended to control the moment. A photographer waits for the moment that language cannot control.

Years later, while working on the H.J. Heinz Company’s 1994 annual report, I spent three weeks in New Zealand with Stephen Wilkes. Our subjects ranged from Sir Edmund Hillary and Prime Minister Jim Bolger to bungee-jumping pioneer A.J. Hackett. Peter Gabriel happened to be performing in Auckland during our visit and entered the photographic procession as well, because that is the sort of thing that happens when traveling with Stephen Wilkes and almost never happens when traveling alone.

Stephen has remained my friend ever since. He is an artist of enormous patience, although patience seems a curious virtue to associate with a medium supposedly built around an instant. His work reveals that a great photograph is not merely snatched from time. It is watched for, anticipated and composed. The decisive moment may require hours, days, elaborate planning, good fortune and the kind of concentration most of us cannot sustain while waiting for a traffic light.

My friend Emmanuel Panagiotakis, the acclaimed Beaver County photographer who calls himself a “Light Chaser,” embodies the same paradox. Emmanuel has won awards, exhibited widely and achieved that curious modern form of immortality in which one’s work appears as the screen saver on a Samsung television. An image that began with one man chasing light can materialize on thousands of walls while their owners search for the remote.

“Light Chaser” may be the best description of a photographer ever devised. Light is always leaving. It changes by the second. It strikes a barn, a river, a face or a hillside and then moves on. The photographer chases it not because it can be stopped, but because it cannot.

Roland Barthes wrote about the accidental detail in a photograph that pierces the viewer. It may be something the photographer barely noticed: a hand resting on a chair, a crooked necktie, an empty place at the table. The detail acquires power because the viewer knows something the people in the photograph do not.

Suppose I look at one of my father’s slides of a camera-club party beside our swimming pool. I see the fashions, the haircuts, the lawn furniture, the young models and the men with cameras. But what may strike me is my mother at the edge of the frame, holding a plate or looking away. It may be my father’s Leicaflex resting on a table. It may be a deck chair occupied by someone whose name I have forgotten.

The people in the photograph remain innocent of the future.

They do not know what became of the marriage, the house or the healthy young body. They do not know who died first, which ambitions were fulfilled or which hopes were packed away. The photograph’s power comes partly from their ignorance and ours. They cannot see forward. We cannot go back.

Every photograph therefore becomes a small memorial, even when its subject is still alive. The baby in the picture is gone, though the adult survives. The young father beside the pool is gone, though an older man may still answer to his name. The abandoned farmhouse was disappearing even as Phil and I photographed it. We thought we were preserving the building. In fact, we were documenting its departure.

Perhaps this is why old photographs exert such power over us. They do not restore the past. They demonstrate its inaccessibility.

I can look at a Kodachrome slide my father took and recover astonishing detail: the exact red of a bathing suit, the green of the lawn, the chrome on a car, the particular blue that Kodak persuaded an entire generation to remember as the color of the sky. Yet I cannot step into the picture. I cannot hear what was being said. I cannot ask my father what lens he used or my mother what she thought of the bill. The image brings everything close enough to see and keeps it forever beyond reach.

That is the cruelty hidden inside the miracle.

The digital age has made the scam grander. Our photographs now seem weightless and eternal. They no longer appear vulnerable to fading paper, scratched negatives, mildew, fire or an unfortunate afternoon with a slide projector. They float in “clouds,” those imaginary heavens maintained by corporations whose terms of service none of us has read.

We say the photographs are preserved forever. By “forever,” we mean until the password is forgotten, the subscription lapses, the format becomes obsolete, the company fails, the server farm loses power or our heirs decide that 43,000 nearly identical images of our dog exceed the requirements of family history.

Film at least produced an object. A negative could be held to the light. A print could be placed in a drawer and discovered fifty years later by a grandchild. The digital photograph exists everywhere and nowhere. We possess more images than any civilization in history and may leave fewer recoverable ones behind.

We also alter them with increasing ease. Photography has always involved manipulation: choice of frame, lens, exposure, paper, cropping and timing. The darkroom was never a temple of unvarnished truth. But computational photography has made interpretation automatic. The camera sees several possible worlds, combines them and hands us the most flattering one.

Soon the photograph may no longer mean “this existed.” It may mean “something rather like this could plausibly have existed.”

And still I take pictures.

This is the embarrassing weakness in my case against photography. I know the medium cheats. I know it can substitute possession for attention, turn suffering into spectacle, beautify falsehood and leave the photographer standing outside the very moment he is attempting to save.

I also know that sometimes a photograph reveals what memory has discarded.

There is the tilt of my father’s head. The shape of my mother’s hands. The summer light on the farm. A friend standing beside an abandoned house, both of us unaware of how young we are. The accidental detail waits inside the frame for decades until time teaches us how to see it.

Photography cannot deliver eternity. It cannot even deliver the past. What it offers is stranger and perhaps more valuable: a fragment of evidence that the visible world once arranged itself in precisely this way and that someone cared enough—or was vain enough, curious enough, lonely enough or alert enough—to press the button.

The photograph says: Look.

It does not say what to see. It does not supply the missing voices, restore the dead or explain why the people were happy before they became unhappy. It cannot tell us whether the camera-club husbands admired the composition or merely the model. It cannot tell us what my mother said in the car afterward.

It fixes the light and loses the life.

That is the scam. It is also the gift.

My father understood at least part of this, although I doubt he would have expressed it in such terms. He probably would have said that the picture was underexposed and that I needed a better lens. Then he would have loaded another roll of Kodachrome, lifted the Leicaflex to his eye and gone back to chasing what could never be caught.

One push of the button, and the moment was ours for eternity.

Or whatever passes for eternity in the digital age.