“Photography performs one function supremely well: it shows what something or somebody looked like, under a particular set of conditions at a particular moment in time. This specificity has been, and remains, photography’s boon as well as its bane …. An earnest and honest appreciation of subject matter is the genesis of a clearer, deeper vision. Photography is rooted in the The Thing Itself.”

Excerpt from The Thing Itself — The fundamental principle of photography by Bill Jay

Bill Jay was a wonderful writer and lecturer — always cogent about things photographic — expressing himself pithily without nonsense. However, I wonder if an elaborated worldwide activity like photography can be defined at all with assertions like his. Mr. Jay references a saying of Edward Weston:

“The camera should be used for a recording of life, rendering the very substance of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.” 

What of the photograph I share above taken downtown Cairo, Egypt —what is the subject matter here — its root — the thing itself?

Is our subject the shiny late model motorcycle (a rare sight in this part of the world) surrounded by goats; or rather should we focus on the seven goats surrounding the machine? If I owned the shop in the background selling Egyptian-themed pottery, I would see things my own way. The subject here would be my business and the neighborhood where I sell my products. There seems to me no specificity, no obvious thing-in-itself here; nevertheless the image has an intriguing quality. For me the subject exists on a higher level of abstraction. When I look at the photo, the shaggy goats and their feces covering the sidewalk constitute the motif, but only as the animals serve to illustrate a broader theme. To encapsulate that I offer this: The surprising and delightful things you chance upon when you leave your regimented modern country of origin behind. Can an impression expressed by a sentence like this be the subject of a photograph? Considering the dictates of our famous writers, this would seem impossible; an idea is very far from “polished steel and palpitating flesh.” It is possible my sentence expresses the meaning of the picture, not its subject. But if meaning isn’t our ultimate subject, it seems we are wasting our time pursuing serious-minded photography.