There's a somewhat common bumper sticker that says "Don't believe everything you think," which I think is good advice, and I want to port it over to photography and how we shoot, curate and develop our images.

During the course of a presentation to the local photography group, I referenced a time, not so long ago, when there was such a thing as "photographic evidence." No one laughed, and it wasn't because they didn't remember - I think it's because the notion of what is true brings up a lot of anxiety these days.

But I believe photography is, and has always been, a fiction which, like literary fiction, points to something underlying, whether it be the strange regalness of a common American bullfrog, or the causes of our inhumanity. (See Sebastio Salgado.) We shoot one thing, only to discover something much deeper when we open it on the bigger screen, or we re-discover things within old photos that we simply were not attuned to when we first processed them.

I recently read an article by Isaac Bashevis Singer, who bemoans the loss of a clear view of what is righteous and what is evil. As much as I admire the man, my own Buddhist-adjacent tendencies leave me at odds with him: everything is relative, and everything changes, including beauty, valor, truth, and all the other virtues.

The reason we should not believe everything we think, then, is not because it's wrong - how much control do we have over our thoughts, really? - but because our perception of what we think will absolutely change. That is, if we are curious and open to learning about ourselves and the world around us, at any rate. What is right, and what we think is good, will change.

People we have held historically in esteem are now tainted; others rise in our estimation. We judge those of the past through the lens of our own cultural mores, and find them lacking, or newly admirable, not because their actions have changed, but because our interpretation of them have.

So too, art. The makers and their expressions rise and fall out of fashion, yet the paintings and sculptures and prints remain the same. In the very short time I have been involved with this photography club, I've heard the phrase "sharp as a tack" rise and then ebb in the importance of judging a photo.

Software, of course, can play a role in this process, perhaps less - but not entirely absent from - our aesthetic judgement, but in the resuscitation of old shots. Those vacation photos you liked, but the sky was blown out? Not a problem anymore. Nor is a bad crop. In not so long a time, we can imagine images that were taken out of focus will be rendered perfectly usable with a few mouse clicks.

Everything changes. Just this week, I came across an interview with a Muslim man in the West Bank recently who said, "Everything changes except Allah," and I wonder if God might disagree with that. Stasis is boring, and as much as our brains ache for permanence, for some sort of solid ground, there is no evidence that anything of that nature exists.

An argument can be made that we have all the photos we need already on our hard drives, and that combing through them and processing them could keep us busy for the rest of our short lives. But shooting helps to refine our judegment of what we want to say and how we want to say it. What I said yesterday with my camera may not be what I want to say today, and I may find myself arguing against what I said a year ago. Personally, I hope never reach a point where I believe anything, much less my art, is settled.