23th Sept 2025

Photography, for most people, is a common way to record life. But with the rise of media, it’s become the main way. In doing so, people have ignored the happiness of truly “arriving” in the present moment. Clicking the shutter is like jotting down a quick note, a way of claiming the world we see—but it also alienates us from it.

There’s something almost aggressive about photography. Photographers project their subjectivity onto whatever they shoot. Whether it’s idealizing a subject like a muse or chasing raw, unpolished street scenes—it’s still intervention. Taking a picture is always interference, even though photography as an art can feel like non-intervention, the camera simply acting as an observer.

Now, photography is also just cheap entertainment. It’s become a mass art form—but not one most people actually practice as art. It’s more like a social ritual, a way to ward off anxiety, a tool of power.

Photography has turned into one of the main ways people “experience” something, or pretend to participate in something. It’s both presence and absence.

It’s also an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects, just by being photographed, carry an aura of mortality. Every photo makes us think of death. To photograph is to take part in someone or something’s fragility, transience, inevitability. Each image is a slice of time, frozen, bearing witness to its passing.

Photos can stir emotion—especially when tied to certain contexts—and they can even reinforce moral stances. But no matter how much they move our conscience, they’ll never replace true ethical or political understanding.

A single photo might be more memorable than moving footage, because it’s a clean slice of time rather than a flow. Time eventually frames photographs as art.

A photo holds a world made of space and time. But you can’t just read it on the surface. You have to interpret it through narrative, through time. Only stories let us truly understand what we see.

Needing photos to confirm reality, to reinforce experience—that’s aesthetic consumerism. It turns “experience” into a “shoot” and a “post.”