2022 Photography Book Insights
Last year I attempted a reading challenge for the first time. I aimed for twelve books, one per month seemed a reasonable endeavor, and ultimately fell two short. I’ve never cared much for deadlines so it shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise. Maybe this year will be different and I’ll achieve that oh so lofty, arbitrary goal. Anyway, two of the books that I read were on the topic of photography and rather than writing broad book reviews or analysis I feel that simply compiling some of my favorite passages here may be beneficial to myself and hopefully others as well. I debated adding my own commentary underneath these quotes but ultimately I believe that they speak for themselves and my thoughts would only serve to dilute a readers experience.
The first book that I read was On Photography by Susan Sontag. Sontag was known as an essayist, philosopher, Harvard grad, critic, and activist. She was also a longterm partner of famous photographer Annie Leibovitz. In the book were plenty of interesting thoughts about photography as an art form and as a means of interacting with the world around us. For a bit of context, this was published in 1977; photography and media consumption has obviously changed dramatically in the years since. However, I find many of these quotes to feel more prescient than dated.
“Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events.”
“To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged (at least for as long as it takes to get a “good” picture), to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing—including, when that is the interest, another person’s pain or misfortune.”
“It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. An ugly or grotesque subject may be moving because it has been dignified by the attention of the photographer. A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) morality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
“Like the dead relatives and friends preserved in the family album, whose presence in photographs exorcises some of the anxiety and remorse prompted by their disappearance, so the photographs of neighborhoods now torn down, rural places disfigured and made barren, supply our pocket relation to the past.”
“The lover’s photograph hidden in a married woman’s wallet, the poster photograph of a rock star tacked up over an adolescent’s bed, the campaign-button image of a politician’s face pinned on a voter’s coat, the snapshots of a cabdriver’s children clipped to the visor—all such talismanic uses of photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality.”
“Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one—and can help build a nascent one.”
“Each still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again. Photographs like the one that made the front page of most newspapers in the world in 1972 - a naked South Vietnamese child just sprayed by American napalm, running down a highway toward the camera, her arms open, screaming with pain—probably did more to increase the public revulsion against the war than a hundred hours of televised barbarities.”
“The vast photographic catalogue of misery and injustice throughout the world has given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more ordinary—making it appear familiar, remote (“it’s only a photograph”), inevitable. At the time of the first photographs of the Nazi camps, there was nothing banal about these images. After thirty years, a saturation point may have been reached. In these last decades, “concerned” photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.”
“A photograph of 1900 that was affecting then because of the subject would, today, be more likely to move us because it is a photograph taken in 1900. The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past. Aesthetic distance seems built into the very experience of looking at photographs, if not right away, then certainly with the passage of time. Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.”
“The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world which denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery. Any photograph has multiple meanings; indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of fascination. The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: “There is the surface. Now think—or rather feel, intuit—what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.” Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.
“The omnipresence of photographs has an incalculable effect on our ethical sensibility. By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.”
“It would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating in a public event comes more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in photographed form. That most logical of ninteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”
“In addition to romanticism (extreme or not) about the past, photography offers instant romanticism about the present. In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past but the one who invents it. As Berenice Abbott writes: “The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes the past.””
“Through photographs we follow in the most intimate, troubling way the reality of how people age. To look at an old photograph of oneself, of anyone one has known, or of a much photographed public person is to feel, first of all: how much younger I (she, he) was then. Photography is the inventory of morality.”
“Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people.”
“Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful through the camera’s eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes. More beautiful, by modern taste. Recall that it was Brenton and other Surrealists who invented the secondhand store as a temple of vanguard taste and upgraded visits to flea markets into a mode of aesthetic pilgrimage. The Surrealist ragpicker’s acuity was directed to finding beautiful what other people found ugly or without interest and relevance—bric-a-brac, naive or pop objects, urban debris.”
“The photographer was thought to be an acute but non-interfering observer—a scribe, not a poet. But as people quickly discovered that nobody takes the same picture of the same thing, the supposition that cameras furnish an impersonal objective image yielded to the fact that photographs are evidence not only of what’s there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation of the world.”
“A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for the masses) and as an object for surveillance (for rulers).”
“Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and a means of making it obsolete.”
The second book that I read was Why People Photograph by Robert Adams. Adams is a former college professor turned nature photographer. This book is a collection of essays, largely focusing on photography’s relation to the American landscape. The quotes that I pulled are primarily his thoughts on photography as an art form and a profession.
“Years ago when I began to enjoy photographs I was struck by the fact that I did not have to read photographers’ statements in order to love the pictures. Sometimes remarks about the profession by people like Stieglitz and Weston were inspiring, but almost nothing they said about specific pictures enriched my experience of those pictures. Photographers seemed so strikingly unable to write at length about what they had made, in fact, that I came to wonder if there was any exception at all, a single case where an artist’s writing did not end up making a picture smaller, less complex, less resonant, less worthy of a comparison with life. Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision. Other ways are relatively imprecise and incomplete.”
“The main reason that artists don’t willingly describe or explain what they produce is, however, that the minute they do so they’ve admitted failure. Words are proof that the vision they had is not, in the opinion of some at least, fully there in the picture. Characterizing in words what they thought they’d shown is an acknowledgement that the photograph is unclean—that it is not art.”
“If you have to fill the quiet of a picture, the least destructive way seems to be to speak about what was in front of the camera rather than what you made of it. It seems the least a trick, the closest you can get to speaking about the meaning of a picture without actually doing so. C.S. Lewis admitted, when he was asked to set forth his beliefs, that he never felt less sure of them than when he tried to speak of them. Photographers know this frailty. To them words are a pallid, diffuse way of describing and celebrating what matters. Their gift is to see what will be affecting as a print. Mute.”
“Part of the difficulty in trying to be both an artist and a businessperson is this: You make a picture because you have seen something beyond price; then you are to turn and assign to your record of it a cash value. If the selling is not necessarily a contradiction of the truth in the picture, it is so close to being a contradiction—and the truth is always in shades of gray—that you are worn down by the threat.”
“At a time when, more than ever before, we have to live by hope, the question is what photography can contribute. If it can take us by way of the ominous surface of life to discoveries that can save us, this still seems to me the best, because the surface is where we have to live most of the time. Alternatively, if some art can allow us briefly to escape that surface so that we recover a memory or an intuition of what is affirmable, that contributes too.”
“Some art is meant, I think, to help us as we rest, as we get ready to go out again. Laura Gilpin’s pictures are of this kind. One opens books of them in anticipation of renewal.”
“Photographer Diane Arbus said that when she stood in front of her subject she wanted to accept it as it was. “Instead of arranging it,” she said, “I arrange myself.””
“Art never, of course, explains or proves meaning—the picture is only a record of the artist’s witness to it. He or she can, however, be a convincing witness.”
“At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect—a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.”
Hopefully anyone who read this far found some inspiring, thought-provoking, or at least semi-interesting tidbits. If so, I’d highly recommend reading both of these books. Hopefully, in about ten months time, I’ll have read at least two more of the photography related books sitting on my shelves and have a new batch of quotes ready to put into an overly long blog post.