Genuinely curious about this since this is probably the first time I hear about someone who dislikes photos. Since moving pictures also seems out of the question, are you mainly into text?
Not at all. :) Well, I'm interested in text, just not just text, but consider myself a visual person.
I should have elaborated, but I am in general just not a fan of photos capturing moments. Whether staged or not, I feel photos are generally just not interesting and don't capture what's "real", so to speak. They capture this one frame of time that really isn't experienced by us in the way it's presented, and so I personally have a hard time finding it interesting or relatable. I highly prefer motion pictures (videos, films, etc.). A particular example that comes to mind is the tank man in the famous Tiananmen Square photo. The video is so much more powerful and meaningful to me. (However in this case, maybe my point is diluted because that photo is indeed a rather powerful one.)
There's a Portlandia skit that also captures a part of what I mean, where Fred and a girlfriend go on this European vacation that was miserable, nothing happened, and they ended up breaking up, but their pictures on Instagram (or something) looked amazing and seemed to capture the time of their life.
Another example are photographs of James Turrell's work. While photographs are indeed interesting, they simply do not capture what it's like to experience his works in person. I do like manipulated photographs though, such as the "drone painting" by Reuben Wu (https://www.instagram.com/itsreuben/).
I think photography kind of stands in this uninteresting arena (for me!) between other static art (e.g., paintings, computer-generated art, etc.) and motion art. Also, it seems everyone and their dog is a photographer now, so that can be a bit of a turn off as well, for better or worse on my part.
Then again, I probably contradict myself on this stance from time to time.
The Gabby Petito story, or for that matter, numerous commercial / Hollywood film production which were disasters on the set but produced classic or much-loved films, suggest that even video may well fail to capture or distort the true essence of a situation.
Narrative tools can be used to project truths or fictions. Which they do is rather at the mercy of the author / creator, editor, and often audience and/or reviewers. The latter becomes clear where the reception to a work changes long after it has been completed, through changing contexts.
That a photograph is a capture of a specific interval of light, with framing and exposure, does mean that an individual image can distort or project a false narrative in ways that might be more difficult with a longer and more contextually-grounded set of registrations. But there are plenty of examples of manipulation in video as well. Framing, context, juxtaposition, the Kuleshov effect, ... Auteurs know and use these.
