Answer: Hawking radiation is a result of doing quantum mechanics outside a black hole! In short, a stationary observer outside a black hole, according to quantum mechanics, measures a precisely thermal spectrum of radiation originating from the black hole. What form this radiation takes depends on what quantum fields inhabit the universe, but this crucial result would hold in any case; photons or no photons!
Ultimately I don’t think that there’s really any way to visualise what’s going on. For me I just take it as a consequence of doing quantum mechanics near a black hole *. I suppose that I think (and believe that physicists should perhaps most correctly think) of Hawking radiation as a process, not a “noun”. Some people have cooked up explanations involving virtual particle pairs popping out of the vacuum on the horizon, where one exits and one falls in etc. and the outgoing guy is the Hawking radiation but I don’t really buy this, chiefly because I don’t think that virtual particles exist. Hawking’s original calculation doesn’t care about any of this anyway.
Black holes in nature, naively certainly do appear to violate the conservation of information . This is precisely because of the nature of Hawking radiation: it’s exactly thermal. This means that, no matter what goes in, the same spectrum of radiation emerges. Evidently, it’s then naively impossible to reconstruct the information pertaining to the in-falling stuff from what is, in this sense, just whitenoise. Some argue that if you do the calculation carefully, you can in principle recover this information but as far as I’m aware there’s no consensus as to whether or not this is possible.
As far as things falling into the horizon are concerned (such as your photons), there are two camps. One (I agree with them) maintains that due to Einstein's equivalence principle (loosely speaking, that no local patch of spacetime is in any sense “special”), an observer falling through the event horizon wouldn’t notice anything particularly special (though it’d probably be an interesting light-show!), they’d just go right on in. It’s only when they approached the singularity that things would get tense: the tidal forces near the singularity in the centre would ultimately tear any matter to shreds! The second camp support the firewall argument, which claims that the paradox is solved by an impassible wall of extremely high-energy quanta inhabiting the region just behind the horizon. As a relativist I’m less sympathetic to this view since I’d rather like to hope that solving the information paradox doesn’t require giving up Einstein’s equivalence principle (upon which Einstein’s theory of General Relativity is based). Nonetheless, if this is true, anything entering the black hole horizon would be immediately destroyed by this “firewall”.
*The reason that this happens is rather involved, and, most elegantly, requires understanding the path-integral formulation of quantum mechanical states. At the very least, what one can do is to see that the creation/annihilation operators acting on the vacuum state in Minkowski space correspond to those in a thermal state from the point of view of an observer at a fixed distance outside the black hole (and therefore a uniformally accelerating observer). This latter approach is rather ugly but tractable with some work. This is all a consequence of the fact that, in general, the ontology of quantum mechanical states are dependent on a choice of coordinates. In other words, what one observer calls a “vacuum state”, another observer (with a different coordinate system) might call an “excited state”. Indeed, the example at hand is precisely an instance of this.
Step-by-step explanation: