PHOTOGRAPHY…..
WHERE TO FOCUS?
Dr .Meghali Goswami

There is no such thing as true objectivity, of course, in
photography or any other medium. By its nature, a photograph
is an incomplete and therefore slanted picture of reality;
it is a stylized depiction that represents exactly what the
photographer wants us to see, and no more. Each photograph is
like a story, and we have to remember that behind every story is
a storyteller. It is also worth recalling that conventional photomanipulation
has been around as long as the camera. Cropping
alone is a powerful tool, and there are plenty of basic darkroom
techniques for removing or altering aspects of any photograph.
Surrealist art photographers like Jerry Uelsmann have
captivated colleagues and collectors for decades by creatively
embedding exotic foreign images into natural landscapes.
Again a question is raised in one’s mind that does a
photograph have an aesthetic value even after it is manoeuvred?
The real challenge for aesthetics of photography consists of
two responsibilities. The first is to establish that the truly
definitive features of a photograph arise from its being the
causal product of a purely mechanical, photo-chemical
process. The second is to establish that these features can
belong to recognisably aesthetic categories. We do not need
to establish that there are novel aesthetic categories which
appeared only with the emergence of photography. We need
not only show that the definitive features of photographs
can fit well into established aesthetic categories, such as the
magnificent or the awful.