Photography is a heroic copulation with the material world.
The running theme throughout the text is that photography as an art exists almost entirely as metaphor. In this sense, photography is associated with the concept of making the entire world a canvas or a sheet of paper and the act of taking a picture becomes an act of creation.
Photography is the inventory of mortality.
This metaphorical interpretation of photography is related to ease with which it made capturing the process of aging common. Prior to photographs, the only way to show the difference between a person when they were young and as they aged was through painting which was hardly a democratic means of keeping inventory. Photography opened up the possibility of tracking a person’s march through mortality to almost infinite lengths.
Photography is as an instrument for knowing things.
The metaphor takes photography out of the realm of mere art or technology and imprints upon a much larger conceptual identity. Through photographic processes, the range of what remains unknown has shrunk and the potential for knowing things which had threatened to remain hidden forever has expanded. In this sense photography is more than just mere camera and posing, but scientific and medical imaging capable of capturing what even the naked eye cannot. Put more directly: photography is knowledge.
Photography is a supreme opportunity for self-expression.
Photograph as literally the embodiment of self-expression that is measured in contained metaphorical tones in this statement has finally come of age. The “selfie” has made this figurative connection between the identity of the person taking the photo and the medium itself a completely self-contained reality in which the subject and object and medium of the photo are not just interconnected, but inseparable.
Photography is acquisition.
As a metaphor, this has several layers of meaning. The most literal is that when someone takes a photo they can acquire the image and refer to it as a means of owning that moment in time forever. More figuratively, photography allows a person to acquire ownership of a moment in time in which they did not literally exist; a photograph can create an emotional bond to a subject or an event or a conceptualization of what is portrayed in the image. Through collection of photographic images, one can even acquire an entire life experience without having actually experienced.
