What is photography? | Artist and Photographer Mary Mattingly answers the question for B&H Photo

B&H Photo asks photographers to answer a simple yet complex question, "What is photography?"

Artist and Photographer Mary Mattingly answers, "Most immediately, photography to me is a record of a moment that has been able to enter a physical realm; a construction, fiction, fabrication, or truth, it represents what was (seen or unseen). It's a memory of, and an elemental story. I need it as it is a lens with which I can create worlds. Upon closer examination, photography connects me to the complexities and contradictions of life largely removed from the supply chains that make it up: full of toxicities that I usually do not readily see but may feel the aftermath of, the health impacts of, and the connection it has to mapping, colonization, militarization, and security. The medium slides precariously in and out of ethical arguments for and against: it at once can illuminate social injustices while simultaneously exaggerating them." (-What Is Photography?)