When a language is spoken by those who don’t even know the alphabet
Photography portrays itself as a universal language that can communicate with anybody without the need for translation. A single glance suffices to grasp what a photo shows: a face, a moment, an emotion. Yet this apparent immediacy hides a paradox. If photography is a language, its grammar remains known to few, while the majority ignore its fundamental rules.
Taking a photograph goes beyond simply recording an event. It represents a complex communicative act requiring conscious choices: framing, light, technical and narrative timing, aperture, composition. These factors, combined, form the syntax of the image.
The photographer constructs sentences, frames thoughts, and modulates tones through the image. Every shot is a discourse that speaks, but to be understood it must have a coherent structure.
The problem arises when this grammar is ignored. Like a language spoken without knowledge of syntax or vocabulary, photography risks becoming a collection of meaningless signs. Its expressive power is lost, and the message becomes banal. The masses produce images, but few are conscious authors.
Speaking photography means mastering its rules. It means knowing what to communicate, how, and to whom.
However, this visual literacy remains largely unknown. Formal education neglects photography as a language; society settles for immediate, impulsive, and compulsive communication. The result is a cultural impoverishment that reflects in the very quality of the images produced and shared.
This widespread lack of education nests within a radical transformation of the photographic act, which has accelerated and amplified the drift. To fully understand the present, we need to return to the moment when everything began to change with the advent of smartphones and social networks.
Back then, photography preserved a more measured and less invasive dimension. Taking a photo required technical effort and conscious intent, beyond the obvious need to own a camera. Images born in this context were printed, archived, exhibited, published, or simply kept in family albums, where their circulation, even on a large scale, remained limited and selective.
This does not mean the quality was always superior, but the value of the shot lay in its deliberation. The photographic act was still a deliberate and reflective gesture, a form of meditated storytelling, destined to be preserved and revisited.
The explosion of smartphones radically changed this dynamic. The photographic tool transformed into a constant extension of the person, always ready in the pocket, removing technical and temporal barriers. At the same time, social networks provided a global and immediate stage for every image, exponentially multiplying visibility and circulation.
This combination democratized the production and sharing of images, putting into the hands of the masses a power once reserved for few. However, this widespread accessibility has also significantly contributed to the flattening of photographic language. The masses have flooded social media with an incessant stream of images, often lacking grammatical awareness, feeding a visual noise that suffocates expressive depth.
Photographs no longer thought through and reasoned, but taken simply to be immediately shown, tend to replicate simple and recognizable models, fostering standardized and homogenized visual illiteracy. Algorithms reward what is easy to read and quick to consume, while complex and layered language gets lost in the flow.
In this context, visual culture becomes even more crucial as an element of power and distinction, and mastering its grammar becomes an essential skill for navigating a world where images govern perceptions and identities.
Those who know the visual language possess a critical ability to read, interpret, and produce images with deep meaning, as opposed to mere visual noise, thus creating a substantial divide between those who merely scroll and those who exercise an active and selective gaze.
After all, ignorance breeds passivity and resignation, feeding itself in a vicious cycle. Conversely, education opens a space of intellectual freedom, where photography returns to being a tool for thought, provocation, and transformation.
Photography therefore stands at a crossroads between two opposing destinies: continuing its progressive degeneration into automatic and empty production, or being reborn as a living and rigorous language, capable of speaking with intensity and clarity, increasing its expressive power and reclaiming its role as a privileged instrument to narrate the complexity of human experience, beyond appearance and immediacy.
