Plausible Fictions

Suppose photographing is, in fact, an act of projecting, rather than “capturing”  extant meaning.   Rather than records, then, photographs present possibilities, sometimes in tremendously persuasive detail.  Photographs are what comes of using our tools to reach into an inherently meaningless mass of whirling particles, selecting and assembling them so as to produce something meaningful — a picture.  If we accept the premise, then a “good” photograph is one that corresponds to, effectively “realizes” a particular possibility in a viewer’s mind.  Such an esthetic (value system) wouldn’t need to distinguish between “straight” or “manipulated,” fact or fiction.  All would be fictions.  One could judge an image’s plausibility — plausibility being potentially technical (obedience to technical rules of perspective, light, etc.) or emotional or geological or historical.  Or one might, with Flusser, put a priority on those images that are unfamiliar, new…and therefore terrifying.