what even IS photography???

its whatever the fuck you do with the output produced by a camera.

It's what you make it

Recording a still image onto a surface that permeates it, using light and special optics which affect the field of view.

It's not an honorific term. It's not inherently "art" although it certainly can be. Being a photographer means being someone who produces images. You can photography anything you like, which is why it's so popular, because it's so readily accessible and doesn't require hours of practicing fine motor skills in order to produce acceptable images.

What isn't?

>>3125998
a milkshake? the sound of your mom getting .. ah, you know the rest ..

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good question
here are some readings on the subject

On Photography - Susan Sontag
Camera Lucida - Roland Barthes

at this point if you think you have figured out what photography is keep reading

Simulacra & Simulation - Jean Baudrillard (not specific to photo)
Seduction - Jean Baudrillard (not specific to photo)
Faking Death - Penny Levine (Canadian art photography)
The Last Picture Show / Artists Using Photography 1960-1982

by now you will thoroughly hate photography and want to sell what gear you have so continue to a few pick-me-ups

Photography and the Art of Chance - Robin Kelsey
and my current favorite
A Matter of Memory / Photography as Object in the Digital Age

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>>3127291
this was an ironic troll post by the way. new anons shouldnt read any of that jew drivel and french charlatanry, not even as an ironic performance. its literal trash that will make you an even badder photog, like that faggot from NYC that tries to emulate daido.

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>>3127297
>this was an ironic troll
Not at all, theory is very reverent to OPs question.
Is photography the snapshit of a hobbyist, is it a wedding album shot by a semi-skilled photographer for hire, is it the 900billion Fuji x100 "street" snaps of the back of peoples heads, is it a beautiful scenic landscape, or is it a large duratran by Jeff Wall? Or perhaps is it all of these things and none of them? Is Photography something greater?

In Ghost Dance, Jacques Derrida suggested that film & video was a sort of "phantom" or ghost, and photography was not. But was he mistaken, had he overlooked something in the photograph? Photography may be just as much a spector as it's cousin video, just as much the disembodied essence of the subject that was photographed.

or "its whatever the fuck you do with the output produced by a camera." as >>3125981 suggests.

>>3127569
theres nothing of value to be found in kike academia or the cucked french charlatan scholars who never held a camera in their lives. would you take some fap addicted paedo priest opinion on "whats a family" over a proper family man opinion on the matter? i guess you would.

even sugar has more to say regarding photography than those loonies.

>as >>3125981 suggests.
yeah, the correct answer. that was me.

>>3127291
>“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”
>Susan Sontag, On Photography
RLY MAKES U THINK HUH

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I don't know

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>>3127572
>In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe. This punctum, more or less blurred beneath the abundance and the disparity of contemporary photographs, is vividly legible in historical photographs: there is always a defeat of Time in them: that is dead and that is going to die. >Roland Barthes - Camera Lucida
photography starts getting interesting once you start looking beyond the sheer physical properties of it, and into the more complex abstract concepts.

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Nobody knows. Those who pretend to know, does not know they are pretending.

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Painting with light

>>3127625
nice fanfic.

The death of traditional art and the birth of modern art.

Artists didn't need to record history artistically after the birth of photography - so they moved into experimenting with colour, form and symbolism in the 1880/90's.

(It wasnt just photography alone which caused modernism in art to come around, but i think it was more important than people realise).

>>3125978
The lazy option for the graphic artist.

The easy way for being artsy this days, nothing more, and nother more apropiatte for a fake society than a fake art right? Thats the only reason photography has some worth

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>>3127572
>When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun