“…unless an image was created with a camera, it is not photography.”

“Photography, by definition, is to draw with light or to make an image with light onto a surface. It does not require any specific technical apparatus to form these marks.”

The above quotations come from a discussion that happened on LensCulture’s Facebook page, scant days ago. Yet these same kinds of discussions have been echoing around photography for well over a century. Since the medium’s inception, people have been arguing about its definition, its boundaries, its materiality and its limits. The arguments continue all the way to the very words, ”medium’s inception”. Did it begin with the first photographic device? The first light-sensitive material? The first camera obscura? Was the first photographer Johann Heinrich Schulze? Thomas Wedgwood? Joseph Nicéphore Niépce? Or was it the first person to use a camera obscura, some thousands of years ago? Does it really matter?

Art, in all its forms, always strives to question itself, redefine itself, and chart new territory. While some would argue that photography must remain tied to its technological, material roots, not everyone agrees.

Enter the International Center of Photography’s latest exhibition, “What Is a Photograph?” In the words of the show’s curator Carol Squiers, “The show does not answer the question, it poses the question. It is an open question, and that’s why I find this period in photography so exciting.”

This major exhibition brings together 21 emerging and established artists who have reconsidered and reinvented the role of light, color, composition, materiality, and the subject in the art of photography. Can a photograph be taken without a camera? Well, yes, if we consider the art to be simply “drawing with light”.

These artists, whose work spans the past 40 years, have not only stretched the limits of photography’s physical materiality but also confronted the digital revolution in the medium. The results are imaginative re-examinations of the art of analog photography, the new world of digital images, and the hybrid creations that both systems can produce.




If nothing else, the show (and the catalogue) promise to provoke, stimulate, and call for a reaction. Whether it is a positive or negative one is really up to you.

—Alexander Strecker

What Is a Photograph?
Curated by Carol Squiers
Publisher: ICP and DelMonico Books
Harcover, 256 pages

Editor’s note: The exhibition ”
What Is a Photograph?” was shown at the International Center for Photography from January 31 to May 4, 2014.