Photography
as an inter-subjective experience
“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
― Susan Sontag
While studying Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others I learned two significant things when it comes to being a "witness" to others’ lives: critical analysis & contextualization. Keeping these things in mind while witnessing others’ lives (especially behind the lens), is essential to depicting the most inter-subjective and accurate reality not only in regards to one’s suffering, but to anything!.
I like to emphasize that photographic depictions of reality – that can be bordered, framed, worshiped, torn, burned, forgotten, and turned into propaganda- can never truly do their subject and thus their subject’s story (or context) justice.