Source: Leiva (2024). Dragons in Osu Kannon.

07/07/2024

As you know, I have this photography hobby. I’m not a professional, but I have many years of learning. You could say I am a mid-term amateur in the field. The paradox lies in that I used to hate photography, but somehow life, work, necessity, and reality showed me that photography constitutes an important art and an important data source. Thinking about photography should make us aware that what we see is not reality itself (objectively), but reality from a specific perspective, with a certain tool (organ) in a certain interval of time.

Sometimes, photography is used to capture beauty. Then, we are not interested in capturing the truth (scientific or statistically representative) of an object (casually called the subject in photography), but the best representation of that object in a specific situation. The situation in which we capture the images, let’s say at a party, changes each moment. The people dancing and having fun cannot be captured in just one frame. The party experience is beyond the photography of that party. What we feel and see cannot be fully represented in photography, but a good photographer can take pictures that represent the best moments of the party, which then, through memory or imagination, could reconnect us with that party again or for the first time. Unlike those who want the mean or median, this kind of photograph should be the highest 5% of the distribution of photos arranged by quality. We don’t want average photos; we want top 5% photos or even top 1%.

But, what is quality? This is a very subjective question. What’s good quality for me might be bad quality for you. Even a blurry image could have an artistic meaning, right? Quality has an objective component, but also an artistic one. Sometimes, there is even a sentimental component. First, photographs are engravings of light on a photosensitive material. We don’t capture instants because some photographs capture an interval of time. There are three key variables in basic photography: shutter speed, aperture, and ISO (what we understand as sensitivity). The shutter speed regulates how much time we let the sensor be exposed to the reflection of light on objects. The aperture regulates how much light we let in at each instant. The sensitivity regulates how much our cameras will react to the light coming in. Commonly known to photographers is that we get an equilibrium of exposure by changing these parameters. However, the advanced one knows that there are many possible solutions: then the objectives of the photographer matter, the situations, the light conditions, the nature of the objects being photographed, and many other variables I just cannot list in a short essay.

Other times, photography is used not to reach beauty, but to reach truth. Then we don’t want the best 5% photos, but a collection of them that somehow render the object and try to understand the object itself. Important is to notice that we never reach the absolute truth of anything, but we approach it. We cannot understand even the total truth of small objects. However, we cannot be too cynical and say we know nothing about that object. Maybe with what we know, it’s enough. Maybe not. But knowing this fundamental truth should make us humble enough to acknowledge that we are, to some extent, always ignorant of reality. We are not omniscient gods who can see all possible perspectives of an object. We can’t even reach the processing power that a machine can have in analyzing many perspectives of one object provided that there are hundreds or millions of photos of it. But we have imagination and creativity. Even in science, these two characteristics play a key role. Just remember that Einstein created his theories while playing the violin (read this) or that Eiji Nakatsu found a solution for the Shinkansen sonic boom just by admiring the beauty of nature, particularly in birds (read this).

Arts, contemplation, and science may be different and may have different objectives, but they are all connected in human experience. In many senses, remote sensing science relies on this. We collect a lot of images from outer space using satellites, but at the end of the day, we are somehow artists. We try to analyze trends, outliers, and relations between variables, but we still should be mindful of the limitations of what we say and offer as policy recommendations. We also have ideologies. Sometimes, we shall let our ideologies be challenged by reality, and sometimes we shall change reality toward what we strongly believe is correct and decent. When we want to change our ideology to honor reality, we are scientists; when we want to change reality based on our ideas, we are policymakers. When we want to change reality based on what we know of it, provided that our objectives are clear and ethical, we provide evidence-based policy recommendations.

The main message is that politicians should have their roots grounded in reality, not in their mental machinations. And of course, yet, we have ideology. There is space for religion and faith. But religion and faith should not neglect the efforts of scientists. Conversely, science should also know its limitations. The same with arts. Not everything is allowed. However, more things than we believe are possible and correct. And it’s our duty to work on that. Respect for human dignity, the promotion of nature sustainability, and the acceptance of our small role in human history shall always be in our minds. Keeping in mind that the main objective of politics is peace, we, the scientists and artists, shall never forget we remain politicians and that we also have our duties in the promotion of peace and mutual understanding. We are not politically neutral. We can’t. The same happens with photography. The samples we take of reality, the selection of the top 5%, the processing and publishing: all these stages represent their own responsibilities and shall be done ethically.

*Chat GPT was used for style correction and some translations of Spanish to English in the first version of this essay which was written without AI help from the scratch.