Like all technical images, photographs are concepts encoded as states of things, including photographers’ concepts such as those…

Flusser, Photography

“Like all technical images, photographs are concepts encoded as states of things, including photographers’ concepts such as those that have been programmed into the camera. This gives photography critics the task of decoding these two interweaving codes in any photograph. Photographers encode their concepts as photographic images so as to give others information, so as to produce models for them and thereby to become immortal in the memory of others. The camera encodes the concepts programmed into it as images in order to program society to act as a feedback mechanism in the interests of progressive camera improvement. If photographic criticism succeeds in unravelling these two intentions of photographs, then the photographic messages will be decoded. If photography critics do not succeed in this task, photographs remain undecoded and appear to be representations of states of things in the world out there, just as if they reflected ‘themselves’ onto a surface. Looked at uncritically like this, they accomplish their task perfectly: programming society to act as though under a magic spell for the benefit of cameras.”

Vilém Flusser Towards a Philosophy of Photography.