Photographer or Author? Why This Opposition Is a False Question

Speaking today about an “authorial approach” in photography has almost become a rite of passage. The expression circulates through books, courses and conversations between photographers, as if there were a natural progression that would first lead one to learn how to make images, then, in a second stage, to access a deeper, more conscious, more legitimate practice.

The photographer would be the one who masters the camera, light and composition. The author would be the one who finally has something to say. This opposition is seductive because it gives a simple shape to a real frustration. Yet it rests on a misunderstanding.

First, one thing must be clarified: the word “author” is not used here in the strictly legal sense of copyright. This is not a discussion about the legal status of a photograph, nor about the conditions under which an image may be protected. The word refers instead to a practice capable of building a vision, a coherence, a form and an identifiable language.

Many photographers know that particular moment when the practice stops being simply euphoric. Photo walks continue, images accumulate, some of them are successful, sometimes even noticed or complimented, and yet a strange feeling settles in: the feeling of producing without truly building. This unease is often interpreted as a sign that one should “move on”, go beyond the simple status of photographer and enter a more ambitious territory.

The problem is that this reading excessively simplifies what is really at stake.

The false comfort of a simplified hierarchy

The history of photography is enough to weaken this opposition. In Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work, the act of taking photographs, the frame, the circulation of images and the book all move together. Images à la Sauvette, published in 1952, is not merely a collection of good photographs: it is a major editorial object, conceived as a form of culmination of the photographic work.

This idea is all the more important because Cartier-Bresson himself gave an essential place to the printed image. The Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson’s dossier dedicated to Images à la Sauvette recalls this sentence: “In short, our final image is the printed one.” In other words, the work does not stop at the shutter release. It continues through editing, layout, the book and distribution.

The same could be said of Josef Koudelka or Daido Moriyama. The Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson recalls, for example, that in 1972, Shashin yo sayonara, also known as Farewell Photography, deconstructed the accepted rules of good photographic practice. In these trajectories, the author does not appear after photography. He appears in the very way of photographing, choosing, repeating, editing, printing and publishing.

The problem, then, is not the word “photographer”. The problem lies rather in our contemporary way of practicing, which often confuses production with construction.

Photographing a lot does not necessarily mean moving forward. A practice can be intense, regular, technically solid, and yet go round in circles. The number of images produced guarantees neither depth, nor coherence, nor singularity. It simply gives a measure of activity.

But an activity is not a body of work.

This confusion is not insignificant, because it flatters a very contemporary imaginary: that of identity transformation. The idea that there exists a symbolic threshold to cross, a moment when one would become something else. More serious. Deeper. More legitimate. But the reality of artistic work is infinitely less theatrical. It rests less on revelation than on discipline.

The real shift, then, does not oppose the photographer to the author. It opposes a practice that accumulates to a practice that builds.

The trap of permanent production

Contemporary photography encourages an extraordinarily fluid relationship to the image. Digital technology has removed many material constraints. One can shoot without counting, sort quickly, publish immediately, archive almost without limit. This technical comfort has transformed practice into a continuous flow.

This flow produces a powerful illusion: that of constant creativity.

We photograph, so we feel we are moving. We publish, so we feel we exist. We receive feedback, so we feel the work is progressing.

But this cycle can also become a trap.

Susan Sontag opens On Photography with an idea that has become famous: to collect photographs is to collect the world. This intuition, formulated long before Instagram, still sheds light on our contemporary relationship to the accumulation of images. Photography can easily give the impression that we appropriate reality because we capture it. Yet collecting is not building.

The problem is not quantity. Some great photographers produced enormously. The problem is the absence of confrontation with that material. An image published immediately almost never passes through the filter of time. It is judged in the excitement of the moment, rarely within the logic of an ensemble.

This is precisely where the unease begins. Not because the images are bad, but because they remain isolated events. They never begin to form an identifiable territory.

The frustration felt by many photographers comes less from a lack of talent than from a lack of structure. They sense that they are making images, but not yet making work.

The obsession with the “message” is often a dead end

Faced with this void, one piece of advice keeps returning: one should have something to say.

The intention seems healthy. After all, no one wants to produce empty images. Yet this injunction often produces the opposite effect.

Because it pushes photographers to look too early for a big subject.

One then decides to work on contemporary solitude, memory, identity, the relationship to the city, the passing of time. These themes carry immediate gravity. They give the impression of entering something serious. But that gravity is sometimes purely conceptual.

Having a subject is not having a gaze.

One can produce perfectly banal images under the cover of an ambitious theme. The subject then acts as an intellectual varnish that gives an impression of depth without truly transforming the photography.

The danger is subtle but frequent: the image stops being looked at for itself and becomes illustrative. It has to “serve” a pre-existing idea. Yet an illustrative photograph is often predictable.

John Berger reminds us in Understanding a Photograph that a photograph cannot be reduced to what it shows: what is visible also calls upon what remains outside the frame, absent, implicit. This nuance shifts the question away from the “message” and towards the experience of reading.

Some of the strongest works do not function because they deliver a clear message. They function because they impose a singular perception.

Moriyama does not function like an essayist illustrating a rational thesis on Tokyo. Rather, he builds a visual experience made of tension, noise, proximity, collision and fragments. In How I Take Photographs, he presents his practice from a very direct, physical and instinctive angle, more closely tied to walking, the street and the shutter release than to the illustration of a prior concept.

The real issue is perhaps not so much knowing what one wants to say as understanding how one looks.

Form often precedes discourse

This is where an important confusion appears. Many discourses on authorship value intention, but say very little about visual language. Yet what makes a body of work identifiable is not first its subject, but its form.

The same theme can produce radically different works depending on how it is photographed. Distance from the subject, the violence or restraint of the framing, the relationship to movement, image density, contrast, the repetition of certain motifs: this is where a writing begins.

This writing does not necessarily appear through a clear intellectual decision. It often emerges slowly, through unconscious repetitions. Some photographers discover after the fact that their gaze always returns to certain tensions, certain bodies, certain materials, certain ambiguities.

It is precisely this repetition that deserves to be observed.

The fantasy of the photographer who first defines a grand vision before going out to photograph rarely corresponds to the reality of the work. Much more often, practice produces confused material that must then be learned to read.

As Charlotte Cotton shows in The Photograph as Contemporary Art, an important part of contemporary photography cannot be understood only through what is represented, but through the strategies, devices and forms that artists put in place.

In other words, language sometimes appears before discourse.

And that is excellent news.

Because it means that a practice can become coherent without having to justify itself immediately through a concept.

Editing, where the work changes nature

If there is a place where a photographic work begins to take shape, it is probably not only in the moment of pressing the shutter, but in the work of editing.

This part remains less glamorous. It has neither the energy of shooting, nor the excitement of discovery, nor the immediate gratification of publication. Yet it is central.

To photograph is to collect. To edit is to write.

Of course, certain writing decisions already exist at the moment of shooting: distance, focal length, rhythm, angle, repetition, the way of entering or not entering the scene. But editing makes these decisions visible. It reveals what returns. It distinguishes the interesting accident from the isolated accident. It transforms an accumulation of images into a readable territory.

This distinction profoundly changes the way we think about the practice.

A technically strong image does not automatically belong in an ensemble. A photograph one loves very much can become a parasite if it diverts attention or breaks a fragile coherence. Conversely, a more discreet image can become essential through its ability to create a particular rhythm or tension.

Building a body of work therefore requires a form of brutality.

One must learn to remove what pleases but weakens.

To recognize redundancies.

To understand that certain images seduce in isolation but contribute to nothing larger.

This is often where photographers discover that the real work lies less in the isolated capture than in the organization of an ensemble.

David Campany formulates this clearly in an Aperture article dedicated to photographic editing: unless images are absolutely singular and have no intended relation to others, there will always be editing work; if the photographer does not do it, someone else will have to. He also reminds us that there is no photobook without editing.

A portfolio is not necessarily a body of work

This confusion is frequent, especially in the age of online galleries and social media.

Accumulating one’s “best images” can produce a convincing portfolio. It can demonstrate an eye, a sensitivity, a mastery. But it does not necessarily constitute a body of work.

A body of work is not a best-of.

It implies an internal logic. A breathing. A coherence that goes beyond the simple addition of good images.

A portfolio can function as a showcase. A body of work, by contrast, requires a structure. It does not simply show that one knows how to make good images. It shows that a gaze insists, returns, organizes, eliminates, connects.

This idea is particularly clear in contemporary reflections on the photobook. Aperture recalls, in its guide to producing a photobook, that sequence, paper, format, design, binding and rhythm all fully participate in the reading of a project. The support is not packaging. It modifies the experience.

A photography book, a solid exhibition or a carefully considered sequence immediately reveals this difference. An image that shone alone can become too demonstrative within an ensemble. Another, more discreet image, can suddenly become indispensable because it allows the sequence to breathe.

The artist statement as refuge

An artist statement can enrich a body of work. It can provide context, clarify an approach, propose a reading. In certain documentary or conceptual projects, it can even be an integral part of the device.

But it becomes problematic when it serves to compensate for images that do not hold.

A well-written text quickly gives an impression of depth. It can make a body of work appear denser than it really is. This is precisely why one must be wary of it.

Some projects seem first to exist in their formulation. The vocabulary is right. The theme is ambitious. The conceptual framework appears coherent. Then one looks at the images, and something does not hold.

This gap is revealing.

A simple principle deserves to be kept in mind: if the text carries the essential power of the project, the problem is probably not literary.

The images must hold.

Discourse can accompany.

It must not compensate.

This demand is harsh, but healthy. It forces us not to confuse the intelligence of commentary with the real strength of visual work.

What it really means to build a body of work

Building a body of work does not consist in adopting a flattering identity.

It is not becoming an “author” as one changes status.

It means accepting work that is much less romantic than the word suggests.

It means slowing down, returning to one’s own images, recognizing one’s obsessions, letting certain intuitions develop, renouncing permanent dispersion, giving form to an ensemble.

A body of work rarely emerges from a grand inaugural gesture. It appears more often through a patient accumulation of coherent choices.

This process is slow. Sometimes frustrating. Often less spectacular than we imagine.

But it is infinitely more real than the simplistic story of the photographer who would suddenly become an author through a moment of awareness.

This work also implies materialization. As long as images remain floating on a hard drive or in the digital flow, they partly escape the test of construction. As soon as they must take their place in a book, a zine, an exhibition or even a tightened sequence, they are confronted with a more demanding logic. They have to justify their presence.

It is often at this moment that the practice ceases to be pure accumulation and truly becomes editorial.

A few questions more useful than “am I an author?”

Rather than asking whether one has crossed a symbolic threshold, it may be more honest to face a few more concrete questions.

• When you look at your images over several years, do recurring forms appear, or only a succession of scattered experiments?
• Do your photographs speak to one another, or does each live in its own separate world?
• Do your strongest images truly belong to the same visual territory?
• Would you be able to remove 30% of your work without weakening the whole, perhaps even strengthening it?
• If your artist statement were removed, would your work still retain an identifiable presence?
• If someone came across twenty of your images without your name, would they recognize that they belong to the same gaze?

These questions are less seductive than the fantasy of the “authorial approach”.

But they are infinitely more useful.

The support is not proof of depth

One must finally say something that many discourses on the authorial approach avoid: not every project necessarily deserves a book, an exhibition or an edition.

The book is not a medal. The exhibition is not an absolution. The statement is not a sacrament.

A weak body of work does not become strong because it is printed on beautiful paper, carefully bound or presented in an elegant layout. The support can amplify a work. It cannot invent its necessity in its place.

This is why the question of support must come at the right moment. It should not be: “How can I make this project look serious?” but rather: “Which support genuinely allows this work to be read better?”

A book can create intimacy and sequence. An exhibition can impose a physical presence, a scale, a relationship to the body. A zine can give a quick, nervous, deliberately imperfect form. An online portfolio can make work accessible but also flatten it. No support is noble by nature. Everything depends on what it adds to the reading.

It is also an ethical question. Producing an object without strong editorial necessity can sometimes transform hesitation into artificial proof of seriousness. Conversely, waiting, cutting, tightening, re-editing, postponing a book or an exhibition can be a more demanding gesture than publishing too quickly.

What really matters

The opposition between photographer and author is seductive because it tells a simple story. It gives the impression that there exists a natural, almost initiatory progression that would grant access to a superior practice.

Reality is much less theatrical.

The problem is not being a photographer.

The problem is believing that producing is enough.

A body of work is not born from a change of label, nor from a big subject, nor from a well-formulated text.

It is born from a language, a coherence, a demand, a gaze lucid enough to organize what it produces instead of simply accumulating it.

The real question is therefore probably not: “Am I a photographer or an author?”

The real question is more uncomfortable.

Am I building something that will outlast me, or am I simply feeding the flow?

If the answer is unclear, that is not a disaster. It may even be the true beginning of the work.

Set a constraint. Print twenty images. Cut half of them. Remove the flattering but useless images. Remove the text. Observe what remains. Start again. It is often in this slow, unspectacular work that a practice stops being a succession of images and becomes a voice.

And perhaps the only question that truly matters next is this: if twenty of your images were laid on a table today, would they already form a voice — or only a taste?