What is the true meaning of photography?

I am not a professional, just a hobby, so I will not make any comments, I will only talk about my personal feelings.

Photography is sometimes fake, but it has a fake meaning.

What this kind of photography reflects is a lens’ recording of the fake and the real. This true record of falsehoods is also very meaningful. At least it is a true record and proof of the existence of falsehoods. Furthermore, everything is a complex contradiction. There is no pure falsehood, no matter how false it is. It contains real things, but it may not be easy to discover, or it may only be discovered with considerable knowledge and experience.

Personally, I feel that photography is a representation of life, a representation of life, and a record of what will exist, has existed, or has existed. It can be beautiful, it can be ugly, it can be kind, it can be evil, it can be bright, it can be dark... Photography records a lot of beauty, whether you love photography or not. I feel it deeply, so I won’t say more.

Let’s talk about the fakeness of deliberately posing in front of the camera. The people or objects in front of the camera may be deliberately arranged, but when they are recorded by the camera and reproduced in front of people's eyes through photography, they are real, and they are deliberate fabrications (fake) of the reality recorded by photography. For example, what I personally think is particularly fake are the group photos, with flat models and the like, and inspections and the like (I won’t talk about this)... Let’s just talk about the group photos. It was obvious that everyone was tacitly aware of it, and there were even a few people There is a huge gap between them, and they have to pretend to be brothers from all over the world... This is to match the photography, be real and deliberate, and be real and fake. I think that the expressions and body movements of the people in this kind of photos can be ignored. The meaning of this kind of photography that is purely for recording fakeness is that it at least reflects a kind of fakeness, a kind of fakeness that everyone deliberately shows in order to cooperate with the photography. The fakeness of the collective public, everyone knows it is fake, but still pretends to be fake. This fakeness proves that everyone is pretending, and photography just proves the authenticity of the characters pretending (fake) in front of the camera. On the basis of proving the (fake) posture, what photography illustrates is actually the contradiction between the inside and the outside that people, as a collection of social relations, show in a certain situation, which is a reflection of people's social psychology.

If we don’t consider that photography truly records postures (fake), and therefore truly reflects people, the meaning of the contradiction between appearance and duplicity is beyond the scope. The significance of photography to record fakeness is also that (as mentioned before, there is truth in everything that is fake, and there is fakeness in realness), and I also took a group photo to say that the truth here is not only the truth of everyone collectively posing (fake), but also the most typical one is everyone. clothes, hairstyle. This (the hairstyle and clothing recorded in the photos) may be true or false. It may be that everyone deliberately wore certain clothes and hairstyle to match the photography. They are completely different from his usual appearance! But after a few years, when I see this photo again, the truth it reflects is that except for the truth that someone deliberately pretended to be in order to take the photo (this can still be classified as a fake thing of posing in front of the camera) , you can also see the hairstyles and clothes that were popular a few years ago from everyone's appearance. This also reflects the popularity of the time. If we dig deeper, there are profound social and historical reasons for the popularity of such hairstyles and clothes at that time, and this is very meaningful for people to study this aspect.

Don’t you always say that it has been 30 years since the reform and opening up? There are many old photos, everyone poses collectively, and the traces of deliberate dressing up are very obvious, that is, in front of the camera, they deliberately fake it in order to cooperate with the photo, but today we see Later, that is, after having time to wash it away, we can still see the big social trends at that time, which can be cultural or cosmetic, and such popularity at that time is also inseparable from the socio-economic environment at that time.

Having said so much, I just want to say that sometimes photography is indeed fake, but fakeness has the meaning of fakeness. It reflects people’s true psychological intention of deliberately showing some kind of fakeness, and it is true in the fake. Meaning, just waiting to be discovered.

Actually, to be honest, what I hate the most is fakeness, so sometimes I hate fakeness in some photography, but if I think about it rationally, they also have fake meanings.

What I personally like very much is documentary photography. I really like it because most of it is candid shots without deliberately posing. (But to take a step back, is the snapshot necessarily true? It is also possible that what is captured is fake for a moment, but it is not deliberately fake. There is no absolute truth or falsehood, only relative) The chosen subject matter is not ordinary photography. What is common is that there are few praises and more records of life. Life is sharp, profound, and shocking. I recommend you to read it.

(However, I don’t know your true age. The scenes of racial conflicts, wars, conflicts, and deaths reflected in some works are indeed cruel. If you are still young, I recommend you not to read them. I am afraid that it will have negative impact on your healthy values ??and worldview. Good influence) (But honestly speaking, I still recommend you to take a look at foreign documentary photography. It’s not that the moon is full in foreign countries, but that domestic documentary photography started late, and due to various social reasons, it is inconsistent with foreign The documentary photography works are so far apart that I cannot praise them)