July 14, 2025

al-Hiba's call to arms
to his partisans.

Monday:
My views on Photography and the Camera obscura – July 14, 2025

I am profoundly opposed to the taking of photographs, particularly of people, for they do not reflect an accurate representation of the object in the material world, yet they lack the creative depth of an illustration or a portrait grounded in the sacred and the senses of the artist able to bring out the qualities of the landscape or of the subject; the camera is merely instrumental. It is this instrumentality, the practicality of the enterprise, that has rendered the camera completely pointless: for what is the quality in the photograph? Nay, there is no such thing as a photograph of high quality, for the photograph is the antithesis of quality – it is the destruction and death of quality! What the camera captures is often considered reality or a representation that is completely congruent with reality, and therefore Photography may not be said to be an enterprise of high quality or indeed of skillful means – Photography is nothing but the bastardization of the artist and his vocation. Verily, Photography is surely representative of our times of decline and cultural decay; no longer can it be said that people put in effort in capturing the world, for they have obscured their senses with the material temptation and with the lust of the beast. At every step in the modern world, quality must take the backseat to evermore cheaper and lower quality "solutions", for what matters in our times of the Kali Yuga is not the quality in the enterprise, but the quantity; the more output something can be said to have, the more it is valued and the more it can boost economic growth. "Quality" is no longer bound by the celestial order, for the discrimination of particles composing any feature apparent in the world has been rendered oppressive and evil by the humanist axiom; quality is whatever goes, it is whatever man decides that it is or what the market decides that it is. Quality has been subject to the will of the populist horde, it has been democratized and the result is the destruction of the sacred within more and more of the creation and the inception of the photograph, the world as it is without having been filtered through man – the world without feature and thus no real quality and no real representation of the world. What is the meaning of representation if that representation brings no more insight or no more sense to the world than by merely observing the world on your own?

    I also do not like photographs because they lack personality and charm, and this is because they do not bring any news or any perspective – photographs are the definition of pointless without sense and without quality. Quality can surely be said many times to be pointless, from a merely instrumental and objective standpoint, but this is only due to modern man's hubris, for he has deprived himself of sense and of any need to gain profound insight, something that an illustration can bring but that modern man nonetheless has made himself blind to; for modern man, only the instrumental and the immediately practical in the material sense can be said to bring value and to perform a function worthy of recognition, everything else is superstitious.

Martha Darley Mutrie,
Orchids, 1865

    Why does everything have to be practical to the point of complete pointlessness these days? The answer is of course the final solution to the human condition—to turn every man into a robot, into the beast. That would be the preferable solution indeed to humanity, for in the absence of the sacred there would be no need for humanity for there would be no need for sentient life in the first place. Surely the robot would outperform any man given enough time? At any rate, I refuse to allow anyone to take a photograph of me, and that's why I appear on the internet under several aliases, for what is important about me are my thoughts and my opinions put into text, not my appearance. I believe in total anonymity for this reason alone, a topic that I intend to cover at another time. The reduction of society to the benefit of the beastly and the instrumental is right in line with the liberal paradigm, for the camera represents the individual, not how the individual is shaped by his context, for the camera predisposes that man is the individual, without being bound to either the sacred or the small and parochial qualities in life, thus he only needs to be represented as he is, without context and without contours, features, or forms – the photograph captures the formless man. This fact is reflected by the deep history of man's religious traditions: it is often considered haram and a profound violation to attempt to capture the prophet Muhammad in illustration, according to Islamic jurisprudence, Fiq. But this is only the act of illustration, then consider the act of photography in that context? It is surely a violation of morality to take a photograph, for it violates the good conscience of the subject captured, it assumes the subject's approval of the liberal order and his own reduction to nothing but his material qualities. I consider it a sin to capture any man in photography, for it also violates my good conscience. No man can be properly represented in a photograph, for the photograph captures nothing of the qualities of the man; instead the man is reduced to the beast without consent. The camera spreads the disease of sin and lust further than any other instrument of the beast, for it paralyzes man in the form of his flesh only.

Reginald Drax – July 14, 2025.