The Photograph Already Exists

[This is one of my first pieces of writing on photograps (c. 2011). I have expanded it in new directions since then.]

On my first day in Dublin, I walked into the front square at Trinity College. I had barely crossed the threshold when I saw the bell tower. It stands in the centre of the square, tall and symmetrical, with enough architectural confidence to anchor a campus. I had seen it before. On postcards, university websites, travel blogs. I knew exactly what it looked like. Still, I took a photograph. Not just one. I circled around it, found the angle where the arch cut against the sky, waited for tourists to move, pressed the shutter. I wasn’t alone. Nearly everyone around me was doing the same.

This is not a complaint. I don’t think we take photographs because we want to possess the image. We take them because we want to affirm the moment. To say: I was here. I stood at this distance, in this light, under this particular version of the sky. The photograph already exists. But this one is mine. That difference, small as it is, speaks to something fundamental about how digital photography has reshaped our sense of time. The image is no longer a record of what was seen. It is a mark of presence. It performs the moment, rather than preserving it.

There is no longer any scarcity. We don’t ration film. We don’t pause before each frame. We take five versions of the same shot, just in case. And still, we worry we missed something. The more we can capture, the more we feel the need to. If the printed photograph was once something to be returned to, a fragment of memory retrieved from a drawer, then the digital photograph is something else. It exists in a kind of forward motion. It is not about reflection. It is about immediate confirmation. Here I am.

But now we find ourselves in an even stranger situation. We no longer need to be there at all. It began quietly. A finger in the frame could be erased. A stranger in the background, brushed out. A group photo where someone blinked could be fixed so that everyone smiled, everyone’s eyes open, no one distracted. The photograph, once stubborn and contingent, became negotiable. We started to remove the moment’s interruptions. The awkwardness. The slant. The wind in the hair. The thing that made the image feel real — that small resistance — became a flaw to be corrected.

And then something else happened. We began to collapse time. Instead of choosing the best shot, we let the system merge them. A dozen photographs, taken in quick succession, layered into one. The clearest face from frame three, the sharpest hand from frame seven, the softest light from frame nine. We no longer remembered which one was the original. Or if that distinction even mattered. The synthetic photograph doesn’t just alter the image. It erases the moment. What we are left with is a kind of perfect average — all memory compressed into a single, frictionless record. But the record is no longer of what was. It is of what should have been.

From there, it is a short distance to fabrication. A sunset that never happened. A trip we never took. A street that no longer exists, reconstructed from old maps and good guesses. Faces that have never been seen, belonging to people who have never lived. The image detaches itself from the event. It becomes its own event. The question is no longer “Why photograph what already exists?” but “Why photograph at all?” Why stand still, in imperfect light, if the system can make it better, cleaner, more complete? We can summon images now. We don’t have to witness them.

And yet the compulsion remains. We still lift the camera. We still point. We still say: that. There is something in the act that resists replacement. Not because it is sacred, but because it is situated. Because it insists on the body — on presence, on friction, on the missed shot. The photograph, however corrected, still bears the trace of standing there. Of choosing a frame. Of accepting that something was always just outside it. Maybe synthetic images will learn to mimic that trace. Maybe they already do. But I still believe in the version where the light hit wrong, and I took it anyway.

I was there.
And this version of the bell tower — this particular angle, this particular day — did not exist until I made it.