“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”
— John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972
The camera has usurped the human male as the dominant power, and subjugated all to its will. The mechanical image is the primary vehicle through which concepts, meaning, and understanding are spread. The camera has become the predominant point of view through which most people see most of the world, and as such has rooted itself in our minds. Spend any amount of time on TikTok or Instagram Reels or Youtube Shorts or Google Giggles, and you will inevitably come across a video captioned ‘POV: doing some-thing’, with the doing something being a stand-in in this writing for any amount of mundane or extreme thing. What you will notice is that none of these videos are actually from the point of view of the person doing said action, but from the third person perspective of a camera. It seems that the hypothetical camera has replaced our own eyesight as the primary mode of negotiating experience. The camera is now more real than our own perception. Only from this apocalyptic perspective, it seems, does the problem of photography assume the importance it deserves.
