Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

The illusion of photography is that the camera is a tool for instantly transferring vision onto paper or  screen. Photography as a folk art, where the action is all point-and-click (or, more accurately, look-point-click) encourages this illusion. The camera becomes a black box with its internal workings only minimally known and few interventions into those workings even possible. (And even many of these interventions are mysterious: what exactly are you doing when you put a camera into night mode? It’s knowable, but the average camera-wielder doesn’t know.)

The art of photography lies in making interventions or in choosing not to, in understanding the functions of the camera and working through, with, or against them rather than in leaving them a mystery. This does not necessitate the production of a photograph that breaks the illusion, however, nor does it exclude the use of photo editing software afterwards, as this is simply another step in the same process. It doesn’t even require the use of an SLR or DSLR camera, though most photographer-artists choose to use one.

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