Photos have had a long, difficult history with notions of "art". Especially nowadays with the rise of technology and accessibility to cameras and camera software that make it easy for everyone to take pictures of everything, and
make it look really good, and since we can't seem to figure out what's "talent" and what's "technology", some problems arise for what to include in the definition of "art".

So if skill and training isn’t a requirement for creating, what is the key to being included in the category of "art"?

One answer is symbolic meaning. In this view, interpretation and the viewer plays perhaps a bigger role in defining the meaning of the photograph. In other words, the photograph does not only represent the thing in the photograph -- it stands for more than that. An easy way to think about this is when looking at photos of signs. In the example below, we can assume that the photographer is using the map of the Hong Kong MTR to represent the rails themselves, or even the transit and movement of people around the city in general.

[insert LKF photo]

But in order to derive meaning, we look into the context of the photo. We can, for example, look at the picture below and investigate things that don’t have inherent meaning, like color and shapes to draw some conclusions: the red and
the blue may be interpreted as opposites, like fire and water. The roundish shape of the blue provides another contrast to the sharp square reds. We can think of this as conflict and opposition, or we can think of it as harmony – things working together. Without any context about where this photo was, what the words say, who is depicted on the poster, etc., how can we really know what the symbolic meaning is?

Additionally, with regards to context and symbolism, in one of their responses to me, a group of young men wrote that they “wanted to reflect the diversity of Hong Kong” and another participant in Macau told me that he wanted to show “the side that tourists don’t see.” This project, by its nature, removes photos away from their authors and their original context. This man sitting can be anything: a casual afternoon outside? A poverty that forces this shirtless man to do
personal things in public spaces? Humid whether? The privilege of men to take off their shirts and make the public their home?

Sometimes all it takes for something to be considered art if to put it within the physical confines of a museum. This is an indicator to audiences to look for the symbolic meaning. A toilet in a house is mundane, but a toilet in a museum
exhibit is a "Fountain" because it’s presence in that space, in that context, indicates to the audience that it has a meaning, that it’s symbolic. In this case, we take the photos taken by these participants more seriously because they are collected and given the context of being in an academic work. The decision to include or exclude is a dynamic of power and authority.

Photographs are a sort of contradiction: they contain their context, yet they are removed from it. They can be taken out and given new contexts by being replicated in different spaces than the one in which they were derived. Yet, they always contain that original context.

Moreover, there is something eerily creepy about taking a photo: things are still, unmoving – dead. We even call the act of taking a photo “shooting,” as if we are killing the experience and embalming it into a preserved mummy, a mere corpse of the life it once was.  It is, as Roland Barthes morbidly puts it, “a re-presentation, which is to say ultimately resurrection…” (Trachtenberg 269). And in order to avoid killing the moment in which it represents, "…the photographer must exert herself to the utmost to keep the Photo from becoming Death." (Barthes 14).

[picture of Quyen being morbid here]

Some see cameras as an easy way for us as travellers to avoid “real” interactions of places we travel to. Often, we feel powerless and lost in new places and taking photos is a way of dealing with this sense of not knowing what to do. We
take the photographs without “really” experiencing and resurrect the corpse of that empty experience later, giving it new contexts and new life. Yet at the same time, the act of taking a photo is an interaction with the places in which we travel to. It’s a way of noticing, redefining, taking back some power. We aren’t mere objects in which an
experience happens to, we make that experience into what we want it to be. While we preserve (and mummify) experiences, we are also able re-define, resurrect, and give life back to these moments.

And the power to continually take and give life, beyond being able to represent some kind of truth or to communicate messages, is the ultimate form of power that a photograph can give.

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