Is Photography art?

When we consider photography in contemporary terms (photographs taken by our contemporaries) we must conceive of the medium in two distinct new registers: the ‘artistic’, defined by its form and sensibility, and, in a more rigorously Kantian sense, a ‘transcendental’ one—thanks to its fundamental inherent conditions which allows perception of experience itself, because, unlike other classic art forms which have adapted to space and time, photography has shaped our own.

Since the creation of print, most modern inventions today could be set aside without altering our lives in any profound way. However, the world as we know it would be unthinkable without photography´s greatest legacy: the image. With the birth of photography, a new form of communication was unleashed —one that does not merely reflect reality but constructs it.

Geology helped us expose Earth’s deep-time achievements; Paleontology allowed us to reconstruct the enigma of life itself. Archaeology helped us reconstruct the fragments of our own story (reimagining civilization from the puzzling debris of time), and photography—our latest medium—has become the supreme architect of future memory, a canon by which we´ll register existence, both from past centuries and those new to come. In the current landscape of human evolution, photography has no competitors; it has fostered an ecosystem that far exceeds all expectations envisioned at its inception.

We remain largely unaware of the true impact of photography, simplistically categorizing it as an art form while depriving it of the renaissance it deserves. Once a medium exclusively tailored for the elites (one that required expensive equipment, a certain delicacy, and a touch of sensibility) in less than a decade, becoming a moral and existential compass for modern life. No longer a mere artifact of luxury, it has broadly democratized self-examination and, in the process, woven itself into the fabric of human consciousness.

Its modern devotion to entertainment and individualism has granted consumers the means to seize photography as an instrument of ego, because (much like our ego) photography has evolved alongside the way we gaze upon the reflection of our own image. Yes, images have become our mirrors, and photography, a proud and self-celebratory display of trophies, serves as a distorted funhouse of perception where we dizzily contemplate life, not as it is, but for what we wish it to appear……

THIS IS A SAMPLE FROM THE ESSAY IS PHOTOGRAPHY ART?

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