Why photography?

Why and how to develop photographic work in 2025?

Since the invention of photography in the 19th century, the act of taking or viewing a photograph has evolved and continues to evolve based on the intentions of photographers and viewers alike. Photographic practices in 2025 are indeed no longer the same as those of Nicéphore Niépce's darkroom in 1825.

Photographs have long been considered by some as a neutral recording of reality—a trace, an imprint based on a mechanical and chemical process that directly captures the light reflected by objects. The earliest photographic intentions were primarily documentary and portraiture-based: preserving a visual record of important places, people, or events, and keeping testimonies of the world for future generations.

Over time, intentions multiplied: artistic, scientific, advertising, commercial, ideological, educational, tourist, personal, and social.

What intention should one adopt to develop photographic work?

It is worth noting that, even though artists such as Man Ray used photography as early as the 1930s in the service of subjective creativity, theorists in the 1980s once again attempted, drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce's concept of the index, to conceive photography as a trace of reality.

The proliferation of media and social networks, the ever-increasing ease of taking, editing, faking, viewing, sharing, liking, or disliking a photo, as well as the recent emergence of AI image generators, are transforming our relationship with photography.

Today, we take and look at photographs daily. The widespread and intensive use of photography has been accompanied by an acceleration in the capture, sharing, and viewing of images. We take photos on the fly and post them immediately on social networks. Likewise, we consume images at a frantic pace, often scrolling through them rapidly without taking the time to look at them in detail.

The use of photography, for both the photographer and the viewer, seems to be becoming an end in itself, beyond the content of the image. The act of taking or viewing photographs without any other purpose thus takes on more importance than what the photographs actually represent.

Has photographic intention simply disappeared?

Taking and viewing photos daily influences the attention we pay to places, objects, and people.

We can take a photograph of a place without taking the time to look at and appreciate the real place, and we can look at photographs on our smartphone on the train without lifting our eyes to observe, through the train window, the real landscape we are passing through.

Sometimes we also find ourselves living through the lens of a camera or the screen of our smartphone—for example, at a show we are filming while constantly checking the framing, or when taking photos in a museum without looking at the works themselves, only at our smartphone screen.

Photography is gradually taking the place of our direct, sensory experiences of the physical world, and photographic space seems to be substituting itself for real space.

To the question "What is photography in 2025?", one possible answer would be to consider photography as an alteration, a reduction of our physical and sensory experience of places, objects, and people.

" No thinker would dare say that the scent of hawthorn is useless to the constellations. "

The lost shuttlecock

What is a badminton shuttlecock doing here? Was it forgotten, abandoned? And this wire fence—am I inside or outside the playing area? Didn't the children have any way to retrieve it? Did they have to rush home? Were they scolded by a neighbor for playing here?

Looking and questioning evokes stories, transforming a simple object into an infinite number of possible sources of poetry.

At the expense of experiential pleasure, three real-life examples

The desire to take and share a "beautiful photo" and a "beautiful memory" can tend to constrain and ultimately damage the real experience. Photography can thus lead us to live uncomfortable and unpleasant experiences for the sole purpose of staging and fabricating our memories.

A photographer might ask a young married couple to pose at a specific spot, because the framing allows the couple to be perfectly seen in the foreground with the Eiffel Tower in the background, even if the couple is actually several kilometers away from the tower, and a pile of garbage, out of frame but right next to them, is emitting an unpleasant odor. Will the newlyweds forget that they never actually saw the Eiffel Tower up close, and that bad smell, when they look at the photograph a few years later?

Staging and fabricating our memories

This photographer might also ask the couple to simulate crossing a bridge over the Seine, raising and lowering their legs repetitively and artificially in place, until the perfect shot is obtained. Will the newlyweds forget that they never actually crossed the bridge, and the cramps they experienced due to this repetitive movement?

In very touristy places, visitors also often prioritize photography over the real experience. For example, tourists at the Itsukushima Shinto shrine in Japan are willing to wait longer and longer in line to capture the same iconic photo of the famous red Torii, seemingly floating on the water. What will be the time limit beyond which tourists will give up on the photo, to perhaps simply look at and enjoy the place?

It is worth noting that Serge Tisseron, psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, reminds us in his text Photography Made with Hands (2011) that not understanding or looking down on tourist photography reveals a lack of understanding of the psychic process, and that one of the important functions of tourist photography is to allow us, as tourists who, for various reasons, may not have fully experienced the present moment, to relive or reconstruct that moment through viewing photographs with family or friends.

Moreover, the act of photographing oneself or friends in a public space alters the experience of that space for uninvolved people outside the group being photographed. The upside of this phenomenon is that everyone smiles around us during our walks; the downside is that photographers sometimes block the way, forcing us to change our path, or that a selfie stick prevents us from appreciating a landscape.

" I love the theatre. It is so much more real than life. "

If photography today tends to become a space in itself, devoid of intention, and if it diverts our attention from real space, leading us to experience it only in a pragmatic and prosaic way, how, conversely, can we envision the photographic act as a means of paying particular attention to what surrounds us?

Can the photographic act be an intentional and aesthetic experience through which to live poetically in the world?

Can photography allow us to look—and to invite others to look—differently, to cast an attentive, intentional gaze on details, moments, and emotions that we don't always take the time to notice in our daily lives?

We no longer pay attention to the world, and we deprive ourselves of an infinity of possible aesthetic experiences. Cannot photography then be a tool for introspection and investigation of new aesthetic experiences?

Seeking ordinary or unusual presences, imagining worlds as they have been, could have been, are, will be, or might be.

A lady in Tokyo

A cup of coffee

The droplets

Surprising heuristics and inviting daydreaming

But how can we invite the invention of new worlds and offer the aesthetic experience?

We constantly use heuristics—mental strategies and shortcuts—to save time and energy. When we look at an image, our brain tries to identify it and associate it with already acquired experiences or knowledge. A photograph that our brain categorizes among what it already knows therefore does not prompt careful reading and invites neither aesthetic experience nor daydreaming.

Photography, like any poetic language, communicates an interpretation of the world and must therefore surprise, awaken curiosity, and invite attentive looking. A landscape, an object, a person, an animal, a plant, or an architectural element, through its form, its location, its configuration in space, its state—whether new or deteriorated—its use, contains or evokes a narrative from which everyone is free to let their imagination wander: a story that each person is free to continue.

Photography then allows the photographer as well as the viewer to construct their own personal vision and interpretation of the photographed subject.

Why is it there, and like that? Why is this person here? What are they doing, and how do they live? Who placed or abandoned this object here? Who lived in and modified this place in this way? What was it like yesterday, and how will it look tomorrow?

In an era of ever-escalating staging, emotions, and the extraordinary—as well as AI image generation tools—cannot photography, on the contrary, allow us to pay attention to the simple, ordinary things of our world, such as a water droplet, an abandoned object, or the gaze of a person at their window?

Each photograph becomes an opportunity to create a unique narrative, to stimulate the imagination, and to transform our daily experience—to live poetically in the world.

A lion in Tokyo

" One can easily estimate that a society totally dependent on robots would become soft and decadent, and end up withering and dying of pure boredom, or, more subtly, by losing the will to live. "

Offering photographic series around a shared theme, juxtaposing different or similar images, also invites daydreaming.

Invisible things thus become familiar to us and enrich our ordinary experience.
The series Water in the city and the series Lights in the city invite us to look at water or light for what they are in themselves, and deliberately to forget the rest—to discover their hidden presences and their many facets. Through photography, water transforms, and light no longer illuminates a place but exists for itself.

Photography then invites us to discover the extraordinary within the ordinary—to pay attention, in everyday experience, to the simplest but perhaps most essential things. What would we be without water or light? It thus invites curiosity and daily participation in one's environment, much like observing one's garden every morning, watching for flowers to bloom, or for autumn to arrive.

The series Objects in the city and the series People in the city invite us to turn our attention to the uses of the city. How do we inhabit and use the city? Each photograph becomes an invitation to imagination and daydreaming, to the discovery of possible worlds.

The series Gods and the city invites us to reflect on why human productions can be so multiple and varied, and the series Tokyo Dogs attempts to capture our anthropomorphic relationship with domestic animals in the context of Japan.

" The only true voyage of discovery would be not to travel through a hundred different lands but to see through a hundred different pairs of eyes. "

Where do the theories of photography stand?, Symposium 2015.
Worlds of fiction, Lecture by Thomas Pavel, 30 years on, 2017.
Photography Made with Hands, Serge Tisseron, 2011.
The Aesthetic Experience, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, 2015.
The Photographic Act, Philippe Dubois, 1983.
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin, 1936.