By Nicholas Serenati
We have been taught to believe that cameras capture reality.
They don’t.
They construct authority.
This distinction is not semantic. It is structural. It reshapes how we understand photography, video, memory, and truth itself.
The camera does not simply record what exists. It determines what matters.
And once something is recorded, it acquires a peculiar form of legitimacy that unrecorded reality never receives.
The Moment Something Is Filmed, It Changes Ontological Status
A lived event and a recorded event are not the same thing.
The lived event exists in experience. The recorded event exists in history.
The difference is enormous.
A conversation happens. It is felt, processed, and remembered imperfectly. But once that same conversation is filmed, it acquires permanence. It becomes evidence. It becomes referential. It becomes something that can be replayed, analyzed, and believed beyond the fragility of human memory.
This transformation is not passive. It is an act of elevation.
The camera does not merely observe. It authorizes.
The philosopher Michel Foucault argued that observation is never neutral—it is deeply entangled with power. To observe is to define. To record is to institutionalize. When the camera enters a space, it reorganizes the hierarchy of reality itself. What is recorded becomes privileged. What is not recorded begins to disappear from cultural relevance.
In this way, the camera functions less like a mirror and more like a mechanism of selection.
It does not reflect the world.
It edits it.
Photography Does Not Preserve Reality. It Produces It.
The common assumption is that photography preserves moments that would otherwise be lost. This is only partially true. What photography actually preserves is not reality, but a version of reality that has been framed, selected, and isolated.
Every photograph is an act of exclusion.
Outside the frame, entire worlds continue to exist—events, emotions, movements, and relationships that remain undocumented. But once the frame is established, the contents of that frame acquire disproportionate importance.
The photograph becomes the official version.
The theorist Vilém Flusser described the camera as an apparatus—a system that shapes human intention as much as it fulfills it. The photographer believes they are choosing what to photograph, but the apparatus itself, along with cultural habits and visual conventions, shapes those choices long before the shutter is pressed.
The result is that photography does not simply record reality. It constructs a hierarchy of visibility.
Some things become permanent.
Most things vanish.
Recorded Images Replace Lived Experience as Cultural Truth
We increasingly trust images more than memory.
If something was not photographed, it begins to feel uncertain. If something was recorded, it becomes difficult to dispute. The image assumes the role of witness.
Susan Sontag wrote that photographs function as a way of certifying experience. They do not merely represent events—they validate them. The photograph becomes proof that something happened.
This has profound consequences.
The camera becomes not just a tool of documentation, but a tool of epistemology—a machine that produces knowledge and belief.
Events that are recorded become culturally real. Events that are not recorded begin to dissolve into abstraction.
This is why surveillance holds such power. This is why historical archives shape collective memory. This is why artists who control the image control the narrative.
The image does not simply show reality.
It determines what reality becomes.
Video Intensifies Authority by Controlling Time Itself
If photography constructs authority through selection, video constructs authority through duration.
Video does not simply isolate a moment. It preserves temporal continuity. It captures movement, hesitation, transition, and transformation.
The viewer is no longer asked to imagine what happened before or after.
They are given the illusion of complete access.
This illusion is powerful.
Video appears to eliminate ambiguity. It appears to provide transparency. But it is still framed. It is still selective. It is still governed by the position of the camera and the decisions of the person operating it.
The authority of video comes from its ability to simulate completeness.
But it is never complete.
It is always authored.
The Camera Is Not Neutral. It Is an Instrument of Cultural Power.
This is the uncomfortable truth at the center of image-making.
The camera does not passively observe the world. It actively participates in shaping it.
It determines what is remembered and what is forgotten.
It determines what becomes history and what disappears.
It determines what is seen and what remains invisible.
Artists who understand this are not simply taking pictures or making videos. They are engaging in the construction of cultural memory itself.
They are defining what future generations will believe existed.
They are not capturing reality.
They are authoring it.
The Responsibility of the Contemporary Image-Maker
To operate a camera is to assume responsibility—not only for aesthetics, but for perception itself.
Every frame declares:
This is worth seeing.
This is worth remembering.
This is worth believing.
The question is no longer whether photography and video capture reality.
The question is who has the authority to define it.
And more importantly—
Whether they understand the weight of that authority.
Subscribe to Continue This Series: The Architecture of Perception
This essay is part of an ongoing philosophical series examining photography, video art, and the nature of perception in the contemporary world.
If you are an artist, filmmaker, photographer, or thinker seeking deeper clarity on the role of images in shaping reality, this series is written for you.
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- Why Most People Look But Never See
- Photography Is Time Made Visible. Video Is Time Made Experiential
- The Violence of the Frame
- Editing Is Where Meaning Actually Happens
Because learning to use a camera is technical.
Learning to understand what it does to reality is philosophical.
Nicholas Serenati: Contextualized 
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