Notes

The Need to Be Seen

Since the launch of the Hylonicum project, I have been looking online for ways to share my photographs. I have a personal Instagram account, which I opened before Instagram was purchased by Facebook (how I miss the gilded age when Instagram was a photo platform and Facebook showed you your friends’ posts in chronological order! I even miss Farmville!). I used to have a Flickr account, too. Here too, my first account dated back to the Yahoo! era, when Flickr was crowded with photographers and free. So many things have changed since. And after a few months of exploring several platforms, I feel it’s time to share my thoughts on some important points.

The relational nature of photography

For me, photography continues to be testimony. If you, casual reader, have read my other notes, you should already know that. Post-editing tools can and should be used, but with parsimony and according to strict criteria that are ultimately grounded in the ethical basis of the photographic act. If we assume that photography is an act of testimony, we face a crucial implication: testimony is itself relational. Let’s imagine that I take a photo of event x. Any photo is the photo of an event, even a photo of an empty street, since it freezes what occurs in that street at that specific moment. The photo Px is a testimony to my reading, as the photographer, of event x in a specific, unique way from my point of view (where I am, what I see) and according to my hermeneutics of the scene (how I interpret it and what message I want to convey through it).

The result is twofold. On the one hand, the photograph is a relic testifying that event x occurred. On the other, it is also an encoded message, information that is open and ontologically justified by its transmission to a receiver. In both cases, the photo’s nature, its characteristic function, one may say, is its openness to the seer. As testimony, its function is fulfilled when someone sees it and appreciates the occurrence of event x, the fact that it existed. As an encoded message, the photo’s function is to convey the message, that is, the interpretation of event x encoded in Px and the information I wanted to transmit through it. This means that a photo is actualised according to its function only when it is seen by someone and, consequently, that a photo that is not seen, as long as it is not seen, functions only in potency. A photo conserved in an archive still exists as an artefact. However, its proper function is carried out only when someone goes to the archive, retrieves it, and looks at it: the photograph exists actually, while its characteristic function can remain potential. To function properly as a photograph, to be “perfected” in its being a photograph, a photo needs to be seen, its testimony offered, its message conveyed.

Serialisation and habituation

Of course, this is my own take on photography: feel free to disagree! Yet if my concise analysis holds, then it can shed light on a few issues that have been unfolding and that, I am sure, many fellow photographers, professional and amateur alike, have themselves experienced. I was mentioning above my early Instagram and Flickr accounts. In the fifteen years that have passed since, the way we experience the world and its photographic testimony has changed profoundly. We live in a world that is utterly saturated with images. Taking a photo has never been easier: all it takes is a phone. Every day millions of pictures are taken, millions of images produced, shared, commented on. And when we are surrounded by photos, the attention available to each image necessarily becomes scarcer. It is like a buffet where you have so much to eat: after having eaten a little of everything, even the nicest slice of cake can look distasteful. Naturally, in the past few years a new item has appeared on the menu: AI-generated images. They change a great deal in terms of the epistemology of photography, but this is not what I want to discuss here. Indeed, the reasons why photography is in a moment of crisis precede the current AI shift.

As I was saying, taking a photograph has never been easier. There is no need to know anything technical: the software of your phone will take care of everything and create the best picture according to the algorithm, an algorithm which is the same in all phones of the same model running the same software version. This means something important. Let’s make a mental experiment. Suppose that photographer A takes a shot of a sunset on an empty beach, producing photograph Pa. The settings of Pa are chosen automatically by the algorithm, following the computational aesthetic devised by the manufacturer. Now let’s assume that photographer B gets to the very same place right after photographer A, just seconds after photographer A has left. Photographer B uses the same kind of phone as photographer A to take a photo Pb of the very same sunset. Naturally, the light will be slightly different, but imperceptibly so. Pb, taken by photographer B, is produced using the same algorithmic settings as Pa, because these are shared by both phones. As a result, Pa and Pb are almost identical with respect to features such as exposure, detail, contrast, and white balance, which are some of the fundamental parameters of any photograph. In theory, then, if we could imagine a hundred people taking in succession the same photo from the same place and with the same framing (meaning, without moving around to a different position), we would have a hundred almost identical photos. This is the serialisation of photography.

This fact, however, has a further implication. While many people do not possess cameras, most of us do possess a phone and will use it to take photos. If every phone belonging to the same kind z processes the captured scene through the same computational pipeline, then sufficiently similar acts of photographing will tend to produce images shaped according to the same principles of exposure, contrast, detail, colour, and sharpening. Now let’s multiply this over and over: one single person will likely take dozens of photos every week. Each photo, let’s remember, is stylised according to the algorithm: its exposure, detail, and contrast are chosen automatically by the algorithm of the phone. The more photos I take, the more accustomed I become to the way in which they are stylised by the algorithm, and the more I come to like that style.

Yet all this also implies a process of habituation, which is crucial to acknowledge, I believe. The more photos I take, the more familiar I become with the way the algorithm processes them, and the more I like what the algorithm does. With each new experience of the algorithmic photograph, I develop a habit of liking the way it chooses the right exposure, the right contrast, the right detail. And this habit, being a necessary consequence of repeatedly taking photographs with a phone that has the same algorithm as any other phone of that kind, becomes socialised: it becomes a tacit norm.

This is one of the main reasons, I think, why most photos we see on social media share similar styles, exposures, and ways of looking. It is not primarily a matter of imitation but of habituation: no deliberate act of imitation is required, since repeated exposure gradually makes these aesthetic choices familiar and, eventually, normative. I am sure that any of us has had experiences of this. Think, for instance, of the contrast in black-and-white photographs and compare it with Ansel Adams’s reflections on tonal schemes and with the automatic settings of phones and post-editing programmes. Software and algorithms are teaching us what a good photograph is. They do so directly, on our hardware, by producing the image.

Yet they also do so indirectly, through social sharing and by governing the ways in which the photo is circulated. This is a second main reason for the similarity across photos on the internet. Consider how photos are uploaded to social media platforms and processed by algorithms that, following specific yet elusive criteria, prioritise some photos over others. This creates a feedback loop: the more the photo is aligned with the algorithmic criteria, the better it will score in terms of visibility and, quite plausibly, likes. The better the photo scores in terms of likes, the more prone the photographer will be to consider those aesthetic criteria the right ones to use. In this way, the computational serialisation of production leads to the aesthetic standardisation of perception. A recent study by Keyan Liu, Xuanming Hong, and Qianling Jiang in Scientific Reports has identified a closely related phenomenon among design students: visual environments that are mediated by algorithms seem to be associated to both aesthetic homogenisation and an increasing reliance on platform-based criteria of aesthetic judgement (read). Although their study does not establish causality, I believe that the same hypothesis deserves to be tested in photography.

Experientialisation and taxidermisation

Late-capitalist societies like the ones we live in are grounded in extractive finalism: the need always to produce something, extract something, or have a goal when carrying out an activity. Free time is eroded by extractive finalism. It is more and more difficult to conceive of activities that are intrinsically satisfying without some kind of implicit, tacit extraction of a goal. This is directly linked to photography. If it is true that extractive finalism pushes us to pursue activities that produce something, one of the easiest ways to do that is to take a photo of it. This way, our goal is not only achieved: it is also manifested to our peers.

This process has crucial effects. Let me give an example. A few weeks ago, I was visiting my family in Tuscany and decided to wander around a little in the Chianti area. This is a beautiful region filled with vineyards, trees, agricultural fields, and small villages. When I was a kid, I remember how relaxing it all was: you could go there to enjoy some peace of mind and a walk. Peace of mind, though, is neither provable nor extractable: it is not an “experience”. And experience is what people crave: renting a Vespa, joining a group of Cinquecento to go around, tasting wine in a winery… these are experiences that provide a goal that can be (1) extracted and (2) proven. The experientialisation of tourism is leading to the taxidermisation of places like Tuscany: they look alive, but they are actually a simulacrum of life, existing only to be consumed by visitors through inauthentic experiences whose goal can be extracted and proven. Of course, the easiest way to prove that “I had this great experience” is by taking a photo and posting it on social media.

There used to be social media for photography, where you could upload photos knowing that people would see them attentively and maybe leave some feedback. Instagram was something like that, too, for a period of time. Even Facebook was. Evidently, this is over. Instagram only exists to keep people engaged, and it does so accidentally with images; this is the only real difference it has from Facebook. Our interaction with those images, which on occasion happen, again accidentally, to be photos taken by real people, still includes the appreciation of the photograph as both testimony and coded message. The problem is that the testimony function is very often reduced to “such a great experience”, “such a fantastic place”, “such a superb dinner”. And, with a little generalisation, in several cases (particularly those I am referring to here, which are based on the extractive finalism of experiences), the coded message is simply “my life is great because I can extract this goal from my experience”. The more likes you get, the better the experience. So the goal changes: it is not the experience itself, but the likes you can get from it. This way, though, free time becomes experientiable only insofar as the experience can be directed towards extracting likes, which provide the positive feedback on the message we want to convey. You scroll and scroll, and the more experiential slop you find, the more you become habituated to it and internalise that this is what you, too, need to do.

Naturally, not all images posted on social media share these connotations; fortunately so. Yet several do, with nefarious and pervasive consequences. Let me mention another example from this summer. In Colle Val d’Elsa there is a splendid riverside path with pristine blue waters. Until a few years ago, only locals knew about it. I myself visited this fantastic place repeatedly in the past, enjoying early morning walks and taking a few pictures. Now, Colle Val d’Elsa is not a taxidermic place like several overtouristed places in Tuscany. Yet all it took was a series of shots of people swimming in those pristine waters posted on Instagram for hundreds of tourists to start going there to “experience” the place. The local City Hall eventually had to forbid swimming because they were threatening to destroy the delicate ecosystem they were so eager to experience (and remember, a simple walk is not enough to qualify as an experience: you need to immerse yourself in the place, literally in this case). Photos of that place received so many likes, though, that it became unmissable – and after all, even if the experience destroyed the place itself, the goal was never the experience itself or its future replication and implicit conservation, but the extraction of a provable something that can get positive feedback in terms of likes.

Altering functions

Late-capitalist societies, with their extractive finalism applied to social media platforms, have changed the way we interact with photos. Even more, this trend has changed the function that a photograph is to perform. Testimony requires attentive looking and reflection, which generate in the seer a willingness to decode the message impressed in the photograph. This is fundamentally a reflective activity: it is the communication of a message that is interpreted and judged and, in many cases, can also work as a call for action (think of documentary photography). Photos posted on social media following the extractive finalism I sketched above, in turn, do not call for either an attentive look or reflection. They are recursions of experiences that call for the production of further experiences, more similar to advertisements than to testimonies: advertisements of experiences and individual lives. A photograph does not sell but discloses. This kind of image, in turn, remains photographically constituted, but its photographic function becomes subordinated to another function.

Let me circle back to the beginning. If a photograph’s characteristic function is actualised by being seen, a photographer’s work is completed only by showing their work. This also means finding ways to reach out to potentially interested seers: just putting everything on a website is not enough, it seems. So social media appear to be both ineludible and unbearable: they are needed to actualise the photograph, yet they destroy the authenticity of the photograph, the photographer, and the subject at the very same time. It’s true: we still have Flickr zombieing around and 500px in constant transmutation. Do they still work? Do they still have a real function? That is for another time and another note – I have written too much already.

Latest update: August 2026