What Are the Rules?
By Harold Merklinger
Mark Schacter's essay on these pages titled Am I a Photographic Cheat? invites answers.
Photography, like many aspects of life, is a game – but we don't always know the rules.
The mere notion of "cheating" implies that some set of rules exists. As a physicist I'll offer that photographic technology has no choice but to obey the laws of physics. Whatever works works; whatever fails fails. It's pretty hard to cheat Physics! But there is usually a human aspect to photography: the photographer and the viewer. Indeed the subset of photography discussed on The Luminous Landscape pretty much sets a high value on the human element whether it's the ergonomics of the tools used or the assessment of the image produced. Physics has little to do with the human aspects apart from the fact that physics plays a role in keeping the humans alive. Thus I would argue that any rules associated with photography somehow must derive primarily from those humans rath...