Comment by igouy
14 hours ago
> Is it to replicate what he saw through the viewfinder?
The experience is bigger than "saw".
Is it to hint at what they felt?
Later, looking at a purely-2d-visual representation is a different kind of experience than being there.
If it's art, to induce a feeling in the audience, then I don't see why you need to restrict it to actual photos of actual things. Once you start tweaking the picture, you can make it feel like all sorts of things that it's not, or appear to be something it's not, so why not go the whole hog and just create an image with whatever tools you can? It seems like photographs some with some sense of legitimacy as being "real" even though photographers can distort how things look to convey some feeling. Susan Sontag's essay described taking many photos of a subject until they showed the right emotion. So you can make anyone look like any emotion by cherry-picking from a huge set of shots.