Does photography have a language?

It seems there’s this common notion that certain things are so clear and comprehensible that they are beyond language. That you should be able to look at a picture and understand. I don’t agree. No one reads a poem and says that understanding the language, culture, and time the poem was created isn’t valuable. Why would we assume that there isn’t more to a discipline that’s over a century old than meets the eye? Even if you can’t describe it through verbal language (not something I wholly agree with, but not wholly incorrect, either), that doesn’t mean there’s no language there.

There are those pictures that say just what they have to say in quick, digestible bites. A fleeting moment – a feeling to consume in a glance. I’m not saying these images are better or worse. Simply that they are not everything. If not always, surely now, image-making has become the pursuit of either the pretty or the dramatic. Anything in between barely seems to register. But, pictures can work in so many ways and address so much more. To limit it to one unit of measurement or even a single schema is pointless. And we should want it that way. Because that means there is something to create. Something to see. And, most importantly, something to say.

It’s tempting to say we live in a visually illiterate society. Maybe we do. But that doesn’t get to the core of the issue, which is simply recognizing the idea that there is visual literacy. There is. Vision is concept. Forms are ideas. And, as with any other medium, thought plays off thought. There is more to it than the plain paper or simple pixels in front of us. Image-making is an evolving landscape that flows through time, constantly growing. And it’s the growing that’s the key. What we produce today is relevant today. Tomorrow, it changes. It becomes yesterday’s work, and only in understanding what yesterday meant can we appreciate the value of the work. Call it a language, call it whatever you want. But whatever it is, with more than 36,500 yesterdays, that’s a lot to build on and a whole lot of building we can do.