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Susan Sontag On Photography

On Photography       by Susan Sontag       On Photography       n         Copyright       On Photography     Copyright © 1973 by Susan Sontag   Published by arrangement with Farrar, Straus & Giroux   Cover art and eForeword to the electronic edition copyright ©   2005 by RosettaBooks, LLC     All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or repro-   duced in any manner whatsoever without written permission   except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles   and reviews.     For information address Editor@RosettaBooks.com     First electronic edition published 2005 by RosettaBooks LLC,   New York.       ISBN 0-7953-2699-8         On Photography       iii         Contents       eForeword     (A one pager by SS, May 1977)     In Plato's Cave     America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly     Melancholy Objects     The Heroism of Vision     Photographic Evangels     The Image- World     A Brief Anthology of Quotations (Homage to W.B.)   About this Title           On Photography       y         eForeword       One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, On Photography   first appeared in 1977 and is described by its author as "a progress   of essays about the meaning and career of photographs." It begins   with the famous "In Plato's Cave" essay, then offers five other   prose meditations on this topic, and concludes with a fascinating   and far-reaching "Brief Anthology of Quotations."     "A brilliant analysis of the profound changes photographic images   have made in our way of looking at the world and at ourselves   over the last 140 years." — Washington Post Book World     "Every page of On Photography raises important and exciting   questions about its subject and raises them in the best way." — The   New York Times Book Review     " On Photography is to my mind the most original and illuminating   study of the subject." — Calvin Trillin, The New Yorker .     Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933.   She received her B.A. from the College of the University of   Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and   theology at Harvard University and Saint Anne's College, Oxford.   A human rights activist for more than two decades, Ms. Sontag   served from 1987 to 1989 as president of the American Center of   PEN, the international writers' organization dedicated to freedom   of expression and the advancement of literature, from which         On Photography       vi       platform she led a number of campaigns on behalf of persecuted   and imprisoned writers.     Among Ms. Sontag's many honors are the 2003 Peace Prize of   the German Book Trade, the 2003 Prince of Asturias Prize, the   2001 Jerusalem Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award   for On Photography (1978).     RosettaBooks is the leading publisher dedicated exclusively to   electronic editions of great works of fiction and non-fiction that   reflect our world. RosettaBooks is a committed e-publisher,   maximizing the resources of the Web in opening a fresh   dimension in the reading experience. In this electronic reading   environment, each RosettaBook will enhance the experience   through The RosettaBooks Connection. This gateway instantly   delivers to the reader the opportunity to learn more about the   title, the author, the content and the context of each work, using   the full resources of the Web.     To experience The RosettaBooks Connection for On Photography:     www.RosettaBookscom.com/OnPhotography       On Photography       vii       It all started with one essay — about some of the problems, aesthetic   and moral, posed by the omnipresence of photographed images; but   the more I thought about what photographs are, the more complex   and suggestive they became. So one generated another, and that one   (to my bemusement) another, and so on — a progress of essays, about   the meaning and career of photographs — until I'd gone far enough   so that the argument sketched in the first essay, documented and   digressed from in the succeeding essays, could be recapitulated and   extended in a more theoretical way; and could stop.     The essays were first published (in a slightly different form) in   The New York Review of Books, and probably would never have   been written were it not for the encouragement given by its editors,   my friends Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, to my obsession with   photography. I am grateful to them, and to my friend Don Eric   Levine, for much patient advice and unstinting help.       S.S.     May 1977             On Photography       1         In Plato's Cave       Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling,   its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated   by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal   images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around,   claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since   then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems.   This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms   of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual   code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth   looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a   grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally,   the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give   us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads — as   an anthology of images.     To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and   television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with   still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap   to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard's   Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured   into joining the King's Army by the promise that they will be able   to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy,   and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel- Ange and   Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns   out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of   Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature,   Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures         On Photography       2       from around the globe. Godard's gag vividly parodies the   equivocal magic of the photographic image. Photographs are   perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and   thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs   really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of   consciousness in its acquisitive mood.     To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It   means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that   feels like knowledge — and, therefore, like power. A now notorious   first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world   into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus   of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern,   inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of   leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than   photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge   people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present.   What is written about a person or an event is frankly an   interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings   and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements   about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that   anyone can make or acquire.     Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world,   themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored,   tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects;   they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold;   they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem   to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on   tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and   magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit   them; publishers compile them.     For many decades the book has been the most influential way   of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby   guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality — photographs   are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid — and a wider public.   The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image.   But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a   photograph loses much less of its essential quality when         On Photography       3       reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not   a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs   into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs   are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing   holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount   of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker's film, Si   j'avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated   meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a   subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still   photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at   each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual   legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in   a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served   up in books.     Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but   doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it. In   one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting   with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of   Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of   modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly   mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera   record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof   that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there   is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which   is like what's in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through   amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual   photographer, a photograph — any photograph — seems to have   a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible   reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image   like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty,   unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first   of all, to show something "out there," just like the Polaroid owner   for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or   the shutter-bug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs   of daily life.     While a painting or a prose description can never be other than           On Photography       4       a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated   as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption   of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest,   seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic   exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth.   Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring   reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and   conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security   Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among   them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee)   would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper   subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on   film — the precise expression on the subject's face that supported   their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture,   exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should   look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are   always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a   sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just   interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the   world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the   taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous,   or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole   enterprise. This very passivity — and ubiquity — of the   photographic record is photography's "message," its aggression.     Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal   photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a   virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort,   and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of   the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s,   photography's glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding   decades, during which technology made possible an ever   increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a   set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David   Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera   as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking   photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From   its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible           On Photography       5       number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The   subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried   out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning:   to democratize all experiences by translating them into images.     That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome   and expensive contraption — the toy of the clever, the wealthy,   and the obsessed — seems remote indeed from the era of sleek   pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first   cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only   inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no   professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either,   and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous,   that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being   an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography   came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses   for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against   these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.     Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an   amusement as sex and dancing — which means that, like every   mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as   an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a   tool of power.     Memorializing the achievements of individuals considered as   members of families (as well as of other groups) is the earliest   popular use of photography. For at least a century, the wedding   photograph has been as much a part of the ceremony as the   prescribed verbal formulas. Cameras go with family life. According   to a sociological study done in France, most households have a   camera, but a household with children is twice as likely to have   at least one camera as a household in which there are no children.   Not to take pictures of one's children, particularly when they are   small, is a sign of parental indifference, just as not turning up for   one's graduation picture is a gesture of adolescent rebellion.     Through photographs, each family constructs a   portrait-chronicle of itself — a portable kit of images that bears   witness to its connectedness. It hardly matters what activities are           On Photography       6       photographed so long as photographs get taken and are cherished.   Photography becomes a rite of family life just when, in the   industrializing countries of Europe and America, the very   institution of the family starts undergoing radical surgery. As that   claustrophobic unit, the nuclear family, was being carved out of   a much larger family aggregate, photography came along to   memorialize, to restate symbolically, the imperiled continuity   and vanishing extendedness of family life. Those ghostly traces,   photographs, supply the token presence of the dispersed relatives.   A family's photograph album is generally about the extended   family — and, often, is all that remains of it.     As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past   that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space   in which they are insecure. Thus, photography develops in tandem   with one of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism.   For the first time in history, large numbers of people regularly   travel out of their habitual environments for short periods of   time. It seems positively unnatural to travel for pleasure without   taking a camera along. Photographs will offer indisputable   evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried   out, that fun was had. Photographs document sequences of   consumption carried on outside the view of family, friends,   neighbors. But dependence on the camera, as the device that   makes real what one is experiencing, doesn't fade when people   travel more. Taking photographs fills the same need for the   cosmopolitans accumulating photograph-trophies of their boat   trip up the Albert Nile or their fourteen days in China as it does   for lower-middle-class vacationers taking snapshots of the Eiffel   Tower or Niagara Falls.     A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a   way of refusing it — by limiting experience to a search for the   photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.   Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. The   very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general   feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel.   Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves   and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Unsure of other           On Photography       7       responses, they take a picture. This gives shape to experience:   stop, take a photograph, and move on. The method especially   appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work   ethic — Germans, Japanese, and Americans. Using a camera   appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not   working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having   fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation   of work: they can take pictures.     People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent   picture takers, at home and abroad. Everyone who lives in an   industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but   in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break   with the past has been particularly traumatic. In the early 1970s,   the fable of the brash American tourist of the 1950s and 1960s,   rich with dollars and Babbittry, was replaced by the mystery of   the group-minded Japanese tourist, newly released from his island   prison by the miracle of overvalued yen, who is generally armed   with two cameras, one on each hip.     Photography has become one of the principal devices for   experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.   One full-page ad shows a small group of people standing pressed   together, peering out of the photograph, all but one looking   stunned, excited, upset. The one who wears a different expression   holds a camera to his eye; he seems self-possessed, is almost   smiling. While the others are passive, clearly alarmed spectators,   having a camera has transformed one person into something   active, a voyeur: only he has mastered the situation. What do   these people see? We don't know. And it doesn't matter. It is an   Event: something worth seeing — and therefore worth     photographing. The ad copy, white letters across the dark lower   third of the photograph like news coming over a teletype machine,   consists of just six words:   ". . .Prague. . .Woodstock. . .Vietnam. . .Sapporo. . .Londonderry. . .LEICA"   Crushed hopes, youth antics, colonial wars, and winter sports are   alike — are equalized by the camera. Taking photographs has set   up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the   meaning of all events.           On Photography       8       A photograph is not just the result of an encounter between   an event and a photographer; picture-taking is an event in itself,   and one with ever more peremptory rights — to interfere with, to   invade, or to ignore whatever is going on. Our very sense of   situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions. The   omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists   of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn,   makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever   its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself — so that   something else can be brought into the world, the photograph.   After the event has ended, the picture will still exist, conferring   on the event a kind of immortality (and importance) it would   never otherwise have enjoyed. While real people are out there   killing themselves or other real people, the photographer stays   behind his or her camera, creating a tiny element of another world:   the image-world that bids to outlast us all.     Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention. Part   of the horror of such memorable coups of contemporary   photojournalism as the pictures of a Vietnamese bonze reaching   for the gasoline can, of a Bengali guerrilla in the act of bayoneting   a trussed-up collaborator, comes from the awareness of how   plausible it has become, in situations where the photographer has   the choice between a photograph and a life, to choose the   photograph. The person who intervenes cannot record; the person   who is recording cannot intervene. Dziga Vertov's great film,   Man with a Movie Camera (1929), gives the ideal image of the   photographer as someone in perpetual movement, someone   moving through a panorama of disparate events with such agility   and speed that any intervention is out of the question. Hitchcock's   Rear Window (1954) gives the complementary image: the   photographer played by James Stewart has an intensified relation   to one event, through his camera, precisely because he has a   broken leg and is confined to a wheelchair; being temporarily   immobilized prevents him from acting on what he sees, and makes   it even more important to take pictures. Even if incompatible   with intervention in a physical sense, using a camera is still a form   of participation. Although the camera is an observation station,           On Photography       9       the act of photographing is more than passive observing. Like   sexual voyeurism, it is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly,   encouraging whatever is going on to keep on happening. 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.     "I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do — that   was one of my favorite things about it," Diane Arbus wrote, "and   when I first did it I felt very perverse." Being a professional   photographer can be thought of as naughty, to use Arbus's pop   word, if the photographer seeks out subjects considered to be   disreputable, taboo, marginal. But naughty subjects are harder   to find these days. And what exactly is the perverse aspect of   picture-taking? If professional photographers often have sexual   fantasies when they are behind the camera, perhaps the perversion   lies in the fact that these fantasies are both plausible and so   inappropriate. In Blowup (1966), Antonioni has the fashion   photographer hovering convulsively over Veruschka's body with   his camera clicking. Naughtiness, indeed! In fact, using a camera   is not a very good way of getting at someone sexually. Between   photographer and subject, there has to be distance. The camera   doesn't rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude,   trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor,   assassinate — all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove,   can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment.     There is a much stronger sexual fantasy in Michael Powell's   extraordinary movie Peeping Tom (1960), which is not about a   Peeping Tom but about a psychopath who kills women with a   weapon concealed in his camera, while photographing them. Not   once does he touch his subjects. He doesn't desire their bodies;   he wants their presence in the form of filmed images — those   showing them experiencing their own death — which he screens   at home for his solitary pleasure. The movie assumes connections   between impotence and aggression, professionalized looking and           On Photography       10       cruelty, which point to the central fantasy connected with the   camera. The camera as phallus is, at most, a flimsy variant of the   inescapable metaphor that everyone unselfconsciously employs.   However hazy our awareness of this fantasy, it is named without   subtlety whenever we talk about "loading" and "aiming" a camera,   about "shooting" a film.     The old-fashioned camera was clumsier and harder to reload   than a brown Bess musket. The modern camera is trying to be a   ray gun. One ad reads:     The Yashica Electro-35 GT is the spaceage camera your   family will love. Take beautiful pictures day or night.   Automatically. Without any nonsense. Just aim, focus and   shoot. The GT's computer brain and electronic shutter will   do the rest.     Like a car, a camera is sold as a predatory weapon — one that's as   automated as possible, ready to spring. Popular taste expects an   easy, an invisible technology. Manufacturers reassure their   customers that taking pictures demands no skill or expert   knowledge, that the machine is all-knowing, and responds to the   slightest pressure of the will. It's as simple as turning the ignition   key or pulling the trigger.     Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy- machines whose use   is addictive. However, despite the extravagances of ordinary   language and advertising, they are not lethal. In the hyperbole   that markets cars like guns, there is at least this much truth: except   in wartime, cars kill more people than guns do. The camera/gun   does not kill, so the ominous metaphor seems to be all bluff — like   a man's fantasy of having a gun, knife, or tool between his legs.   Still, there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture.   To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they   never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never   have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically   possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to   photograph someone is a sublimated murder — a soft murder,   appropriate to a sad, frightened time.     Eventually, people might learn to act out more of their           On Photography       11       aggressions with cameras and fewer with guns, with the price   being an even more image- choked world. One situation where   people are switching from bullets to film is the photographic safari   that is replacing the gun safari in East Africa. The hunters have   Hasselblads instead of Winchesters; instead of looking through   a telescopic sight to aim a rifle, they look through a viewfinder to   frame a picture. In end-of-the-century London, Samuel Butler   complained that "there is a photographer in every bush, going   about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour." The   photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too   rare to kill. Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this   earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to   be what it always had been — what people needed protection from.   Now nature — tamed, endangered, mortal — needs to be protected   from people. When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are   nostalgic, we take pictures.     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) mortality,   vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment   and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.     Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when   the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of   change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social   life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available   to record what is disappearing. The moody, intricately textured   Paris of Atget and Brassai is mostly gone. 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           On Photography       12       now torn down, rural places disfigured and made barren, supply   our pocket relation to the past.     A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence.   Like a wood fire in a room, photographs — especially those of   people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished   past — are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable   that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic   feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.   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 can abet desire in the most direct, utilitarian way — as   when someone collects photographs of anonymous examples of   the desirable as an aid to masturbation. The matter is more   complex when photographs are used to stimulate the moral   impulse. Desire has no history — at least, it is experienced in each   instance as all foreground, immediacy. It is aroused by archetypes   and is, in that sense, abstract. But moral feelings are embedded   in history, whose personae are concrete, whose situations are   always specific. Thus, almost opposite rules hold true for the use   of the photograph to awaken desire and to awaken conscience.   The images that mobilize conscience are always linked to a given   historical situation. The more general they are, the less likely they   are to be effective.     A photograph that brings news of some unsuspected zone of   misery cannot make a dent in public opinion unless there is an   appropriate context of feeling and attitude. The photographs   Mathew Brady and his colleagues took of the horrors of the   battlefields did not make people any less keen to go on with the   Civil War. The photographs of ill-clad, skeletal prisoners held at   Andersonville inflamed Northern public opinion — against the   South. (The effect of the Andersonville photographs must have         On Photography       13       been partly due to the very novelty, at that time, of seeing   photographs.) The political understanding that many Americans   came to in the 1960s would allow them, looking at the   photographs Dorothea Lange took of Nisei on the West Coast   being transported to internment camps in 1942, to recognize their   subject for what it was — a crime committed by the government   against a large group of American citizens. Few people who saw   those photographs in the 1940s could have had so unequivocal a   reaction; the grounds for such a judgment were covered over by   the pro-war consensus. Photographs cannot create a moral   position, but they can reinforce one — and can help build a nascent   one.     Photographs may be more memorable than moving images,   because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Television is a   stream of underselected images, each of which cancels its   predecessor. 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.     One would like to imagine that the American public would not   have been so unanimous in its acquiescence to the Korean War   if it had been confronted with photographic evidence of the   devastation of Korea, an ecocide and genocide in some respects   even more thorough than those inflicted on Vietnam a decade   later. But the supposition is trivial. The public did not see such   photographs because there was, ideologically, no space for them.   No one brought back photographs of daily life in Pyongyang, to   show that the enemy had a human face, as Felix Greene and Marc   Riboud brought back photographs of Hanoi. Americans did have   access to photographs of the suffering of the Vietnamese (many   of which came from military sources and were taken with quite   a different use in mind) because journalists felt backed in their   efforts to obtain those photographs, the event having been defined           On Photography       14       by a significant number of people as a savage colonialist war. The   Korean War was understood differently — as part of the just   struggle of the Free World against the Soviet Union and   China — and, given that characterization, photographs of the   cruelty of unlimited American firepower would have been   irrelevant.     Though an event has come to mean, precisely, something worth   photographing, it is still ideology (in the broadest sense) that   determines what constitutes an event. There can be no evidence,   photographic or otherwise, of an event until the event itself has   been named and characterized. And it is never photographic   evidence which can construct — more properly, identify — events;   the contribution of photography always follows the naming of   the event. What determines the possibility of being affected   morally by photographs is the existence of a relevant political   consciousness. Without a politics, photographs of the   slaughter-bench of history will most likely be experienced as,   simply, unreal or as a demoralizing emotional blow.     The quality of feeling, including moral outrage, that people   can muster in response to photographs of the oppressed, the   exploited, the starving, and the massacred also depends on the   degree of their familiarity with these images. Don McCullin's   photographs of emaciated Biafrans in the early 1970s had less   impact for some people than Werner Bischof s photographs of   Indian famine victims in the early 1950s because those images   had become banal, and the photographs of Tuareg families dying   of starvation in the sub- Sahara that appeared in magazines   everywhere in 1973 must have seemed to many like an unbearable   replay of a now familiar atrocity exhibition.     Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.   Unfortunately, the ante keeps getting raised — partly through the   very proliferation of such images of horror. One's first encounter   with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of   revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative   epiphany. For me, it was photographs of Bergen-Belsen and   Dachau which I came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa   Monica in July 1945. Nothing I have seen — in photographs or in           On Photography       15       real life — ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed,   it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I   saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after, though it was   several years before I understood fully what they were about.   What good was served by seeing them? They were only   photographs — of an event I had scarcely heard of and could do   nothing to affect, of suffering I could hardly imagine and could   do nothing to relieve. When I looked at those photographs,   something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that   of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my   feelings started to tighten; something went dead; something is   still crying.     To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the   photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily   strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can   also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started   down the road of seeing more — and more. Images transfix. Images   anesthetize. An event known through photographs certainly   becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen   the photographs — think of the Vietnam War. (For a   counter-example, think of the Gulag Archipelago, of which we   have no photographs.) But after repeated exposure to images it   also becomes less real.     The same law holds for evil as for pornography. The shock of   photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as   the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a   pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more. The sense   of taboo which makes us indignant and sorrowful is not much   sturdier than the sense of taboo that regulates the definition of   what is obscene. And both have been sorely tried in recent years.   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"           On Photography       16       photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as   to arouse it.     The ethical content of photographs is fragile. With the possible   exception of photographs of those horrors, like the Nazi camps,   that have gained the status of ethical reference points, most   photographs do not keep their emotional charge. A photograph   of 1900 that was affecting then because of its 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 industrialization of photography permitted its rapid   absorption into rational — that is, bureaucratic — ways of running   society. No longer toy images, photographs became part of the   general furniture of the environment — touchstones and   confirmations of that reductive approach to reality which is   considered realistic. Photographs were enrolled in the service of   important institutions of control, notably the family and the   police, as symbolic objects and as pieces of information. Thus, in   the bureaucratic cataloguing of the world, many important   documents are not valid unless they have, affixed to them, a   photograph-token of the citizen's face.     The "realistic" view of the world compatible with bureaucracy   redefines knowledge — as techniques and information.     Photographs are valued because they give information. They tell   one what there is; they make an inventory. To spies,   meteorologists, coroners, archaeologists, and other information   professionals, their value is inestimable. But in the situations in   which most people use photographs, their value as information   is of the same order as fiction. The information that photographs   can give starts to seem very important at that moment in cultural   history when everyone is thought to have a right to something   called news. Photographs were seen as a way of giving information           On Photography       17       to people who do not take easily to reading. The Daily News still   calls itself "New York's Picture Newspaper," its bid for populist   identity. At the opposite end of the scale, Le Monde, a newspaper   designed for skilled, well-informed readers, runs no photographs   at all. The presumption is that, for such readers, a photograph   could only illustrate the analysis contained in an article.     A new sense of the notion of information has been constructed   around the photographic image. The photograph is a thin slice   of space as well as time. In a world ruled by photographic images,   all borders ("framing") seem arbitrary. Anything can be separated,   can be made discontinuous, from anything else: all that is   necessary is to frame the subject differently. (Conversely, anything   can be made adjacent to anything else.) Photography reinforces   a nominalist view of social reality as consisting of small units of   an apparently infinite number — as the number of photographs   that could be taken of anything is unlimited. Through   photographs, the world becomes a series of unrelated, freestanding   particles; and history, past and present, a set of anecdotes and   faits divers. 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.     Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept   it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of   understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it   looks. All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to   say no. Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from   a photograph. Of course, photographs fill in blanks in our mental   pictures of the present and the past: for example, Jacob Riis's   images of New York squalor in the 1880s are sharply instructive           On Photography       18       to those unaware that urban poverty in late- nineteenth- century   America was really that Dickensian. Nevertheless, the camera's   rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses. As   Brecht points out, a photograph of the Krupp works reveals   virtually nothing about that organization. In contrast to the   amorous relation, which is based on how something looks,   understanding is based on how it functions. And functioning   takes place in time, and must be explained in time. Only that   which narrates can make us understand.     The limit of photographic knowledge of the world is that, while   it can goad conscience, it can, finally, never be ethical or political   knowledge. The knowledge gained through still photographs will   always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or   humanist. It will be a knowledge at bargain prices — a semblance   of knowledge, a semblance of wisdom; as the act of taking pictures   is a semblance of appropriation, a semblance of rape. The very   muteness of what is, hypothetically, comprehensible in   photographs is what constitutes their attraction and   provocativeness. 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.     Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced   by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone   is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into   image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.   Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the   surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the   world — all these elements of erotic feeling are affirmed in the   pleasure we take in photographs. But other, less liberating feelings   are expressed as well. 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           On Photography       19       nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarme, said that everything in   the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists   to end in a photograph.             On Photography       21         America , Seen Through   Photographs , Darkly       As Walt Whitman gazed down the democratic vistas of culture,   he tried to see beyond the difference between beauty and ugliness,   importance and triviality. It seemed to him servile or snobbish   to make any discriminations of value, except the most generous   ones. Great claims were made for candor by our boldest, most   delirious prophet of cultural revolution. Nobody would fret about   beauty and ugliness, he implied, who was accepting a sufficiently   large embrace of the real, of the inclusiveness and vitality of actual   American experience. All facts, even mean ones, are incandescent   in Whitman's America — that ideal space, made real by history,   where "as they emit themselves facts are showered with light."   The Great American Cultural Revolution heralded in the   preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) didn't break   out, which has disappointed many but surprised none. One great   poet alone cannot change the moral weather; even when the poet   has millions of Red Guards at his disposal, it is still not easy. Like   every seer of cultural revolution, Whitman thought he discerned   art already being overtaken, and demystified, by reality. "The   United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem." But   when no cultural revolution occurred, and the greatest of poems   seemed less great in days of Empire than it had under the   Republic, only other artists took seriously Whitman's program   of populist transcendence, of the democratic trans-valuation of   beauty and ugliness, importance and triviality. Far from having         On Photography       22       been themselves demystified by reality, the American   arts — notably photography — now aspired to do the demystifying.     In photography's early decades, photographs were expected to   be idealized images. This is still the aim of most amateur   photographers, for whom a beautiful photograph is a photograph   of something beautiful, like a woman, a sunset. In 1915 Edward   Steichen photographed a milk bottle on a tenement fire escape,   an early example of a quite different idea of the beautiful   photograph. And since the 1920s, ambitious professionals, those   whose work gets into museums, have steadily drifted away from   lyrical subjects, conscientiously exploring plain, tawdry, or even   vapid material. In recent decades, photography has succeeded in   somewhat revising, for everybody, the definitions of what is   beautiful and ugly — along the lines that Whitman had proposed.   If (in Whitman's words) "each precise object or condition or   combination or process exhibits a beauty," it becomes superficial   to single out some things as beautiful and others as not. If "all   that a person does or thinks is of consequence," it becomes   arbitrary to treat some moments in life as important and most as   trivial.     To photograph is to confer importance. There is probably no   subject that cannot be beautified; moreover, there is no way to   suppress the tendency inherent in all photographs to accord value   to their subjects. But the meaning of value itself can be altered — as   it has been in the contemporary culture of the photographic image   which is a parody of Whitman's evangel. In the mansions of   pre-democratic culture, someone who gets photographed is a   celebrity. In the open fields of American experience, as catalogued   with passion by Whitman and as sized up with a shrug by Warhol,   everybody is a celebrity. No moment is more important than any   other moment; no person is more interesting than any other   person.     The epigraph for a book of Walker Evans's photographs   published by the Museum of Modern Art is a passage from   Whitman that sounds the theme of American photography's most   prestigious quest:           On Photography       23       I do not doubt but the majesty & beauty of the world are   latent in any iota of the world. . .1 do not doubt there is far   more in trivialities, insects, vulgar persons, slaves, dwarfs,   weeds, rejected refuse, than I have supposed. ...     Whitman thought he was not abolishing beauty but generalizing   it. So, for generations, did the most gifted American   photographers, in their polemical pursuit of the trivial and the   vulgar. But among American photographers who have matured   since World War II, the Whitmanesque mandate to record in its   entirety the extravagant candors of actual American experience   has gone sour. In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty   & beauty. You get dwarfs.     Starting from the images reproduced and consecrated in the   sumptuous magazine Camera Work that Alfred Stieglitz published   from 1903 to 1917 and exhibited in the gallery he ran in New   York from 1905 to 1917 at 291 Fifth Avenue (first called the Little   Gallery of the Photo-Secession, later simply "291") — magazine   and gallery constituting the most ambitious forum of   Whitmanesque judgments — American photography has moved   from affirmation to erosion to, finally, a parody of Whitman's   program. In this history the most edifying figure is Walker Evans.   He was the last great photographer to work seriously and assuredly   in a mood deriving from Whitman's euphoric humanism,   summing up what had gone on before (for instance, Lewis Hine's   stunning photographs of immigrants and workers), anticipating   much of the cooler, ruder, bleaker photography that has been   done since — as in the prescient series of "secret" photographs of   anonymous New York subway riders that Evans took with a   concealed camera between 1939 and 1941. But Evans broke with   the heroic mode in which the Whitmanesque vision had been   propagandized by Stieglitz and his disciples, who had   condescended to Hine. Evans found Stieglitz's work arty.     Like Whitman, Stieglitz saw no contradiction between making   art an instrument of identification with the community and   aggrandizing the artist as a heroic, romantic, self-expressing ego.   In his florid, brilliant book of essays, Port of New York (1924),         On Photography       24       Paul Rosenfeld hailed Stieglitz as one "of the great affirmers of   life. There is no matter in all the world so homely, trite, and   humble that through it this man of the black box and chemical   bath cannot express himself entire." Photographing, and thereby   redeeming the homely, trite, and humble is also an ingenious   means of individual expression. "The photographer," Rosenfeld   writes of Stieglitz, "has cast the artist's net wider into the material   world than any man before him or alongside him." Photography   is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material   world. Like Hine, Evans sought a more impersonal kind of   affirmation, a noble reticence, a lucid understatement. Neither   in the impersonal architectural still lifes of American facades and   inventories of rooms that he loved to make, nor in the exacting   portraits of Southern sharecroppers he took in the late 1930s   (published in the book done with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise   Famous Men), was Evans trying to express himself.     Even without the heroic inflection, Evans's project still descends   from Whitman's: the leveling of discriminations between the   beautiful and the ugly, the important and the trivial. Each thing   or person photographed becomes — a photograph; and becomes,   therefore, morally equivalent to any other of his photographs.   Evans's camera brought out the same formal beauty in the   exteriors of Victorian houses in Boston in the early 1930s as in   the store buildings on main streets in Alabama towns in 1936.   But this was a leveling up, not down. Evans wanted his   photographs to be "literate, authoritative, transcendent." The   moral universe of the 1930s being no longer ours, these adjectives   are barely credible today. Nobody demands that photography be   literate. Nobody can imagine how it could be authoritative.   Nobody understands how anything, least of all a photograph,   could be transcendent.     Whitman preached empathy, concord in discord, oneness in   diversity. Psychic intercourse with everything, everybody — plus   sensual union (when he could get it) — is the giddy trip that is   proposed explicitly, over and over and over, in the prefaces and   the poems. This longing to proposition the whole world also   dictated his poetry's form and tone. Whitman's poems are a           On Photography       25       psychic technology for chanting the reader into a new state of   being (a microcosm of the "new order" envisaged for the polity);   they are functional, like mantras — ways of transmitting charges   of energy. The repetition, the bombastic cadence, the run-on   lines, and the pushy diction are a rush of secular afflatus, meant   to get readers psychically airborne, to boost them up to that height   where they can identify with the past and with the community of   American desire. But this message of identification with other   Americans is foreign to our temperament now.     The last sigh of the Whitmanesque erotic embrace of the nation,   but universalized and stripped of all demands, was heard in the   "Family of Man" exhibit organized in 1955 by Edward Steichen,   Stieglitz's contemporary and co-founder of Photo-Secession. Five   hundred and three photographs by two hundred and seventy- three   photographers from sixty-eight countries were supposed to   converge — to prove that humanity is "one" and that human   beings, for all their flaws and villainies, are attractive creatures.   The people in the photographs were of all races, ages, classes,   physical types. Many of them had exceptionally beautiful bodies;   some had beautiful faces. As Whitman urged the readers of his   poems to identify with him and with America, Steichen set up   the show to make it possible for each viewer to identify with a   great many of the people depicted and, potentially, with the   subject of every photograph: citizens of World Photography all.     It was not until seventeen years later that photography again   attracted such crowds at the Museum of Modern Art: for the   retrospective given Diane Arbus's work in 1972. In the Arbus   show, a hundred and twelve photographs all taken by one person   and all similar — that is, everyone in them looks (in some sense)   the same — imposed a feeling exactly contrary to the reassuring   warmth of Steichen's material. Instead of people whose   appearance pleases, representative folk doing their human thing,   the Arbus show lined up assorted monsters and borderline   cases — most of them ugly; wearing grotesque or unflattering   clothing; in dismal or barren surroundings — who have paused   to pose and, often, to gaze frankly, confidentially at the viewer.           On Photography       26       Arbus's work does not invite viewers to identify with the pariahs   and miserable-looking people she photographed. Humanity is   not one.     The Arbus photographs convey the anti-humanist message   which people of good will in the 1970s are eager to be troubled   by, just as they wished, in the 1950s, to be consoled and distracted   by a sentimental humanism. There is not as much difference   between these messages as one might suppose. The Steichen show   was an up and the Arbus show was a down, but either experience   serves equally well to rule out a historical understanding of reality.     Steichen's choice of photographs assumes a human condition   or a human nature shared by everybody. By purporting to show   that individuals are born, work, laugh, and die everywhere in the   same way, "The Family of Man" denies the determining weight   of history — of genuine and historically embedded differences,   injustices, and conflicts. Arbus's photographs undercut politics   just as decisively, by suggesting a world in which everybody is an   alien, hopelessly isolated, immobilized in mechanical, crippled   identities and relationships. The pious uplift of Steichen's   photograph anthology and the cool dejection of the Arbus   retrospective both render history and politics irrelevant. One does   so by universalizing the human condition, into joy; the other by   atomizing it, into horror.     The most striking aspect of Arbus's work is that she seems to   have enrolled in one of art photography's most vigorous   enterprises — concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate — but   without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected   to serve. Her work shows people who are pathetic, pitiable, as   well as repulsive, but it does not arouse any compassionate   feelings. For what would be more correctly described as their   dissociated point of view, the photographs have been praised for   their candor and for an unsentimental empathy with their   subjects. What is actually their aggressiveness toward the public   has been treated as a moral accomplishment: that the photographs   don't allow the viewer to be distant from the subject. More   plausibly, Arbus's photographs — with their acceptance of the   appalling — suggest a naivete which is both coy and sinister, for         On Photography       27       it is based on distance, on privilege, on a feeling that what the   viewer is asked to look at is really other. Bunuel, when asked once   why he made movies, said that it was "to show that this is not the   best of all possible worlds." Arbus took photographs to show   something simpler — that there is another world.     The other world is to be found, as usual, inside this one.   Avowedly interested only in photographing people who "looked   strange," Arbus found plenty of material close to home. New   York, with its drag balls and welfare hotels, was rich with freaks.   There was also a carnival in Maryland, where Arbus found a   human pincushion, a hermaphrodite with a dog, a tattooed man,   and an albino sword-swallower; nudist camps in New Jersey and   in Pennsylvania; Disneyland and a Hollywood set, for their dead   or fake landscapes without people; and the unidentified mental   hospital where she took some of her last, and most disturbing,   photographs. And there was always daily life, with its endless   supply of oddities — if one has the eye to see them. The camera   has the power to catch so-called normal people in such a way as   to make them look abnormal. The photographer chooses oddity,   chases it, frames it, develops it, titles it.     "You see someone on the street," Arbus wrote, "and essentially   what you notice about them is the flaw." The insistent sameness   of Arbus's work, however far she ranges from her prototypical   subjects, shows that her sensibility, armed with a camera, could   insinuate anguish, kinkiness, mental illness with any subject. Two   photographs are of crying babies; the babies look disturbed, crazy.   Resembling or having something in common with someone else   is a recurrent source of the ominous, according to the   characteristic norms of Arbus's dissociated way of seeing. It may   be two girls (not sisters) wearing identical raincoats whom Arbus   photographed together in Central Park; or the twins and triplets   who appear in several pictures. Many photographs point with   oppressive wonder to the fact that two people form a couple; and   every couple is an odd couple: straight or gay, black or white, in   an old-age home or in a junior high. People looked eccentric   because they didn't wear clothes, like nudists; or because they   did, like the waitress in the nudist camp who's wearing an apron.           On Photography       28       Anybody Arbus photographed was a freak — a boy waiting to   march in a pro-war parade, wearing his straw boater and his   "Bomb Hanoi" button; the King and Queen of a Senior Citizens   Dance; a thirtyish suburban couple sprawled in their lawn chairs;   a widow sitting alone in her cluttered bedroom. In "A Jewish giant   at home with his parents in the Bronx, NY, 1970," the parents   look like midgets, as wrong-sized as the enormous son hunched   over them under their low living-room ceiling.     The authority of Arbus's photographs derives from the contrast   between their lacerating subject matter and their calm,   matter-of-fact attentiveness. This quality of attention — the   attention paid by the photographer, the attention paid by the   subject to the act of being photographed — creates the moral   theater of Arbus's straight-on, contemplative portraits. Far from   spying on freaks and pariahs, catching them unawares, the   photographer has gotten to know them, reassured them — so that   they posed for her as calmly and stiffly as any Victorian notable   sat for a studio portrait by Julia Margaret Cameron. A large part   of the mystery of Arbus's photographs lies in what they suggest   about how her subjects felt after consenting to be photographed.   Do they see themselves, the viewer wonders, like that 7 . Do they   know how grotesque they are? It seems as if they don't.     The subject of Arbus's photographs is, to borrow the stately   Hegelian label, "the unhappy consciousness." But most characters   in Arbus's Grand Guignol appear not to know that they are ugly.   Arbus photographs people in various degrees of unconscious or   unaware relation to their pain, their ugliness. This necessarily   limits what kinds of horrors she might have been drawn to   photograph: it excludes sufferers who presumably know they are   suffering, like victims of accidents, wars, famines, and political   persecutions. Arbus would never have taken pictures of accidents,   events that break into a life; she specialized in slow-motion private   smashups, most of which had been going on since the subject's   birth.     Though most viewers are ready to imagine that these people,   the citizens of the sexual underworld as well as the genetic freaks,   are unhappy, few of the pictures actually show emotional distress.           On Photography       29       The photographs of deviates and real freaks do not accent their   pain but, rather, their detachment and autonomy. The female   impersonators in their dressing rooms, the Mexican dwarf in his   Manhattan hotel room, the Russian midgets in a living room on   100th Street, and their kin are mostly shown as cheerful,   self-accepting, matter-of-fact. Pain is more legible in the portraits   of the normals: the quarreling elderly couple on a park bench,   the New Orleans lady bartender at home with a souvenir dog, the   boy in Central Park clenching his toy hand grenade.     Brassai denounced photographers who try to trap their subjects   off-guard, in the erroneous belief that something special will be   revealed about them.* In the world colonized by Arbus, subjects   are always revealing themselves. There is no decisive moment.   Arbus's view that self- revelation is a continuous, evenly distributed   process is another way of maintaining the Whitmanesque   imperative: treat all moments as of equal consequence. Like   Brassai, Arbus wanted her subjects to be as fully conscious as   possible, aware of the act in which they were participating. Instead   of trying to coax her subjects into a natural or typical position,   they are encouraged to be awkward — that is, to pose. (Thereby,   the revelation of self gets identified with what is strange, odd,   askew.) Standing or sitting stiffly makes them seem like images   of themselves.     Most Arbus pictures have the subjects looking straight into the   camera. This often makes them look even odder, almost deranged.   Compare the 1912 photograph by Lartigue of a woman in a   plumed hat and veil ("Racecourse at Nice") with Arbus's "Woman   with a Veil on Fifth Avenue, NYC, 1968." Apart from the   characteristic ugliness of Arbus's subject (Lartigue's subject is,       *     Not an error, really. There is something on people's faces when they don't know   they are being observed that never appears when they do. If we did not know how   Walker Evans took his subway photographs (riding the New York subways for hundreds   of hours, standing, with the lens of his camera peering between two buttons of his   topcoat), it would be obvious from the pictures themselves that the seated passengers,   although photographed close and frontally, didn't know they were being photographed;   their expressions are private ones, not those they would offer to the camera.           On Photography       30       just as characteristically, beautiful), what makes the woman in   Arbus's photograph strange is the bold unselfconsciousness of   her pose. If the Lartigue woman looked back, she might appear   almost as strange.     In the normal rhetoric of the photographic portrait, facing the   camera signifies solemnity, frankness, the disclosure of the   subject's essence. That is why frontality seems right for ceremonial   pictures (like weddings, graduations) but less apt for photographs   used on billboards to advertise political candidates. (For   politicians the three-quarter gaze is more common: a gaze that   soars rather than confronts, suggesting instead of the relation to   the viewer, to the present, the more ennobling abstract relation   to the future.) What makes Arbus's use of the frontal pose so   arresting is that her subjects are often people one would not expect   to surrender themselves so amiably and ingenuously to the   camera. Thus, in Arbus's photographs, frontality also implies in   the most vivid way the subject's cooperation. To get these people   to pose, the photographer has had to gain their confidence, has   had to become "friends" with them.     Perhaps the scariest scene in Tod Browning's film Freaks (1932)   is the wedding banquet, when pinheads, bearded women, Siamese   twins, and living torsos dance and sing their acceptance of the   wicked normal-sized Cleopatra, who has just married the gullible   midget hero. "One of us! One of us! One of us!" they chant as a   loving cup is passed around the table from mouth to mouth to   be finally presented to the nauseated bride by an exuberant dwarf.   Arbus had a perhaps oversimple view of the charm and hypocrisy   and discomfort of fraternizing with freaks. Following the elation   of discovery, there was the thrill of having won their confidence,   of not being afraid of them, of having mastered one's aversion.   Photographing freaks "had a terrific excitement for me," Arbus   explained. "I just used to adore them."     Diane Arbus's photographs were already famous to people who   follow photography when she killed herself in 1971; but, as with   Sylvia Plath, the attention her work has attracted since her death   is of another order — a kind of apotheosis. The fact of her suicide           On Photography       31       seems to guarantee that her work is sincere, not voyeuristic, that   it is compassionate, not cold. Her suicide also seems to make the   photographs more devastating, as if it proved the photographs   to have been dangerous to her.     She herself suggested the possibility. "Everything is so superb   and breathtaking. I am creeping forward on my belly like they do   in war movies." While photography is normally an omnipotent   viewing from a distance, there is one situation in which people   do get killed for taking pictures: when they photograph people   killing each other. Only war photography combines voyeurism   and danger. Combat photographers can't avoid participating in   the lethal activity they record; they even wear military uniforms,   though without rank badges. To discover (through   photographing) that life is "really a melodrama," to understand   the camera as a weapon of aggression, implies there will be   casualties. "I'm sure there are limits," she wrote. "God knows,   when the troops start advancing on you, you do approach that   stricken feeling where you perfectly well can get killed." Arbus's   words in retrospect describe a kind of combat death: having   trespassed certain limits, she fell in a psychic ambush, a casualty   of her own candor and curiosity.     In the old romance of the artist, any person who has the   temerity to spend a season in hell risks not getting out alive or   coming back psychically damaged. The heroic avant-gardism of   French literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth   centuries furnishes a memorable pantheon of artists who fail to   survive their trips to hell. Still, there is a large difference between   the activity of a photographer, which is always willed, and the   activity of a writer, which may not be. One has the right to, may   feel compelled to, give voice to one's own pain — which is, in any   case, one's own property. One volunteers to seek out the pain of   others.     Thus, what is finally most troubling in Arbus's photographs is   not their subject at all but the cumulative impression of the   photographer's consciousness: the sense that what is presented   is precisely a private vision, something voluntary. Arbus was not   a poet delving into her entrails to relate her own pain but a           On Photography       32       photographer venturing out into the world to collect images that   are painful. And for pain sought rather than just felt, there may   be a less than obvious explanation. According to Reich, the   masochist's taste for pain does not spring from a love of pain but   from the hope of procuring, by means of pain, a strong sensation;   those handicapped by emotional or sensory analgesia only prefer   pain to not feeling anything at all. But there is another explanation   of why people seek pain, diametrically opposed to Reich's, that   also seems pertinent: that they seek it not to feel more but to feel   less.     Insofar as looking at Arbus's photographs is, undeniably, an   ordeal, they are typical of the kind of art popular among   sophisticated urban people right now: art that is a self-willed test   of hardness. Her photographs offer an occasion to demonstrate   that life's horror can be faced without squeamishness. The   photographer once had to say to herself, Okay, I can accept that;   the viewer is invited to make the same declaration.     Arbus's work is a good instance of a leading tendency of high   art in capitalist countries: to suppress, or at least reduce, moral   and sensory queasiness. Much of modern art is devoted to   lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to   what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was   too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals — that   body of psychic custom and public sanctions that draws a vague   boundary between what is emotionally and spontaneously   intolerable and what is not. The gradual suppression of queasiness   does bring us closer to a rather formal truth — that of the   arbitrariness of the taboos constructed by art and morals. But our   ability to stomach this rising grotesqueness in images (moving   and still) and in print has a stiff price. In the long run, it works   out not as a liberation of but as a subtraction from the self: a   pseudo-familiarity with the horrible reinforces alienation, making   one less able to react in real life. What happens to people's feelings   on first exposure to today's neighborhood pornographic film or   to tonight's televised atrocity is not so different from what happens   when they first look at Arbus's photographs.     The photographs make a compassionate response feel           On Photography       33       irrelevant. The point is not to be upset, to be able to confront the   horrible with equanimity. But this look that is not (mainly)   compassionate is a special, modern ethical construction: not   hardhearted, certainly not cynical, but simply (or falsely) naive.   To the painful nightmarish reality out there, Arbus applied such   adjectives as "terrific," "interesting," "incredible," "fantastic,"   "sensational" — the childlike wonder of the pop mentality. The   camera — according to her deliberately naive image of the   photographer's quest — is a device that captures it all, that seduces   subjects into disclosing their secrets, that broadens experience.   To photograph people, according to Arbus, is necessarily "cruel,"   "mean." The important thing is not to blink.     "Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and to do   what I wanted to do," Arbus wrote. The camera is a kind of   passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions,   freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the   people photographed. The whole point of photographing people   is that you are not intervening in their lives, only visiting them.   The photographer is supertourist, an extension of the   anthropologist, visiting natives and bringing back news of their   exotic doings and strange gear. The photographer is always trying   to colonize new experiences or find new ways to look at familiar   subjects — to fight against boredom. For boredom is just the   reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather   than inside a situation, and one leads to the other. "The Chinese   have a theory that you pass through boredom into fascination,"   Arbus noted. Photographing an appalling underworld (and a   desolate, plastic overworld), she had no intention of entering into   the horror experienced by the denizens of those worlds. They are   to remain exotic, hence "terrific." Her view is always from the   outside.     "I'm very little drawn to photographing people that are known   or even subjects that are known," Arbus wrote. "They fascinate   me when I've barely heard of them." However drawn she was to   the maimed and the ugly, it would never have occurred to Arbus   to photograph Thalidomide babies or napalm victims — public           On Photography       34       horrors, deformities with sentimental or ethical associations.   Arbus was not interested in ethical journalism. She chose subjects   that she could believe were found, just lying about, without any   values attached to them. They are necessarily a historical subjects,   private rather than public pathology, secret lives rather than open   ones.     For Arbus, the camera photographs the unknown. But   unknown to whom? Unknown to someone who is protected, who   has been schooled in moralistic and in prudent responses. Like   Nathanael West, another artist fascinated by the deformed and   mutilated, Arbus came from a verbally skilled, compulsively   health-minded, indignation-prone, well-to-do Jewish family, for   whom minority sexual tastes lived way below the threshold of   awareness and risk-taking was despised as another goyish   craziness. "One of the things I felt I suffered from as a kid," Arbus   wrote, "was that I never felt adversity. I was confined in a sense   of unreality. ... And the sense of being immune was, ludicrous as   it seems, a painful one." Feeling much the same discontent, West   in 1927 took a job as a night clerk in a seedy Manhattan hotel.   Arbus's way of procuring experience, and thereby acquiring a   sense of reality, was the camera. By experience was meant, if not   material adversity, at least psychological adversity — the shock of   immersion in experiences that cannot be beautified, the encounter   with what is taboo, perverse, evil.     Arbus's interest in freaks expresses a desire to violate her own   innocence, to undermine her sense of being privileged, to vent   her frustration at being safe. Apart from West, the 1930s yield   few examples of this kind of distress. More typically, it is the   sensibility of someone educated and middle-class who came of   age between 1945 and 1955 — a sensibility that was to flourish   precisely in the 1960s.     The decade of Arbus's serious work coincides with, and is very   much of, the sixties, the decade in which freaks went public, and   became a safe, approved subject of art. What in the 1930s was   treated with anguish — as in Miss Lonely-hearts and The Day of   the Locust — would in the 1960s be treated in a perfectly deadpan   way, or with positive relish (in the films of Fellini, Arrabal,           On Photography       35       Jodorowsky, in underground comics, in rock spectacles). At the   beginning of the sixties, the thriving Freak Show at Coney Island   was outlawed; the pressure is on to raze the Times Square turf of   drag queens and hustlers and cover it with skyscrapers. As the   inhabitants of deviant underworlds are evicted from their   restricted territories — banned as unseemly, a public nuisance,   obscene, or just unprofitable — they increasingly come to infiltrate   consciousness as the subject matter of art, acquiring a certain   diffuse legitimacy and metaphoric proximity which creates all the   more distance.     Who could have better appreciated the truth of freaks than   someone like Arbus, who was by profession a fashion   photographer — a fabricator of the cosmetic lie that masks the   intractable inequalities of birth and class and physical appearance.   But unlike Warhol, who spent many years as a commercial artist,   Arbus did not make her serious work out of promoting and   kidding the aesthetic of glamour to which she had been   apprenticed, but turned her back on it entirely. Arbus's work is   reactive — reactive against gentility, against what is approved. It   was her way of saying fuck Vogue, fuck fashion, fuck what's pretty.   This challenge takes two not wholly compatible forms. One is a   revolt against the Jews' hyper-developed moral sensibility. The   other revolt, itself hotly moralistic, turns against the success world.   The moralist's subversion advances life as a failure as the antidote   to life as a success. The aesthete's subversion, which the sixties   was to make peculiarly its own, advances life as a horror show as   the antidote to life as a bore.     Most of Arbus's work lies within the Warhol aesthetic, that is,   defines itself in relation to the twin poles of boringness and   freakishness; but it doesn't have the Warhol style. Arbus had   neither Warhol's narcissism and genius for publicity nor the   self-protective blandness with which he insulates himself from   the freaky nor his sentimentality. It is unlikely that Warhol, who   comes from a working-class family, ever felt any of the   ambivalence toward success which afflicted the children of the   Jewish upper middle classes in the 1960s. To someone raised as   a Catholic, like Warhol (and virtually everyone in his gang), a           On Photography       36       fascination with evil comes much more genuinely than it does to   someone from a Jewish background. Compared with Warhol,   Arbus seems strikingly vulnerable, innocent — and certainly more   pessimistic. Her Dantesque vision of the city (and the suburbs)   has no reserves of irony. Although much of Arbus's material is   the same as that depicted in, say, Warhol's Chelsea Girls (1966),   her photographs never play with horror, milking it for laughs;   they offer no opening to mockery, and no possibility of finding   freaks endearing, as do the films of Warhol and Paul Morrissey.   For Arbus, both freaks and Middle America were equally exotic:   a boy marching in a pro-war parade and a Levittown housewife   were as alien as a dwarf or a transvestite; lower-middle-class   suburbia was as remote as Times Square, lunatic asylums, and   gay bars. Arbus's work expressed her turn against what was public   (as she experienced it), conventional, safe, reassuring — and   boring — in favor of what was private, hidden, ugly, dangerous,   and fascinating. These contrasts, now, seem almost quaint. What   is safe no longer monopolizes public imagery. The freakish is no   longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre,   in sexual disgrace, emotionally vacant are seen daily on the   newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the   streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.     Sophisticated in the familiar modernist way — choosing   awkwardness, naivete, sincerity over the slickness and artificiality   of high art and high commerce — Arbus said that the photographer   she felt closest to was Weegee, whose brutal pictures of crime and   accident victims were a staple of the tabloids in the 1940s.   Weegee's photographs are indeed upsetting, his sensibility is   urban, but the similarity between his work and Arbus's ends there.   However eager she was to disavow standard elements of   photographic sophistication such as composition, Arbus was not   unsophisticated. And there is nothing journalistic about her   motives for taking pictures. What may seem journalistic, even   sensational, in Arbus's photographs places them, rather, in the   main tradition of Surrealist art — their taste for the grotesque,           On Photography       37       their professed innocence with respect to their subjects, their   claim that all subjects are merely objets trouves.     "I would never choose a subject for what it meant to me when   I think of it," Arbus wrote, a dogged exponent of the Surrealist   bluff. Presumably, viewers are not supposed to judge the people   she photographs. Of course, we do. And the very range of Arbus's   subjects itself constitutes a judgment. Brassai, who photographed   people like those who interested Arbus — see his "La Mome Bijou"   of 1932 — also did tender cityscapes, portraits of famous artists.   Lewis Hine's "Mental Institution, New Jersey, 1924" could be a   late Arbus photograph (except that the pair of Mongoloid children   posing on the lawn are photographed in profile rather than   frontally); the Chicago street portraits Walker Evans took in 1946   are Arbus material, as are a number of photographs by Robert   Frank. The difference is in the range of other subjects, other   emotions that Hine, Brassai, Evans, and Frank photographed.   Arbus is an auteur in the most limiting sense, as special a case in   the history of photography as is Giorgio Morandi, who spent a   half century doing still lifes of bottles, in the history of modern   European painting. She does not, like most ambitious   photographers, play the field of subject matter — even a little. On   the contrary, all her subjects are equivalent. And making   equivalences between freaks, mad people, suburban couples, and   nudists is a very powerful judgment, one in complicity with a   recognizable political mood shared by many educated, left-liberal   Americans. The subjects of Arbus's photographs are all members   of the same family, inhabitants of a single village. Only, as it   happens, the idiot village is America. Instead of showing identity   between things which are different (Whitman's democratic vista),   everybody is shown to look the same.     Succeeding the more buoyant hopes for America has come a   bitter, sad embrace of experience. There is a particular melancholy   in the American photographic project. But the melancholy was   already latent in the heyday of Whitmanesque affirmation, as   represented by Stieglitz and his Photo-Secession circle. Stieglitz,   pledged to redeem the world with his camera, was still shocked   by modern material civilization. He photographed New York in           On Photography       38       the 1910s in an almost quixotic spirit — camera/lance against   skyscraper/windmill. Paul Rosenfeld described Stieglitz's efforts   as a "perpetual affirmation." The Whitmanesque appetites have   turned pious: the photographer now patronizes reality. One needs   a camera to show patterns in that "dull and marvelous opacity   called the United States."     Obviously, a mission as rotten with doubt about   America — even at its most optimistic — was bound to get deflated   fairly soon, as post- World War I America committed itself more   boldly to big business and consumerism. Photographers with less   ego and magnetism than Stieglitz gradually gave up the struggle.   They might continue to practice the atomistic visual stenography   inspired by Whitman. But, without Whitman's delirious powers   of synthesis, what they documented was discontinuity, detritus,   loneliness, greed, sterility. Stieglitz, using photography to challenge   the materialist civilization, was, in Rosenfeld's words, "the man   who believed that a spiritual America existed somewhere, that   America was not the grave of the Occident." The implicit intent   of Frank and Arbus, and of many of their contemporaries and   juniors, is to show that America is the grave of the Occident.     Since photography cut loose from the Whitmanesque   affirmation — since it has ceased to understand how photographs   could aim at being literate, authoritative, transcendent — the best   of American photography (and much else in American culture)   has given itself over to the consolations of Surrealism, and   America has been discovered as the quintessential Surrealist   country. It is obviously too easy to say that America is just a freak   show, a wasteland — the cut-rate pessimism typical of the   reduction of the real to the surreal. But the American partiality   to myths of redemption and damnation remains one of the most   energizing, most seductive aspects of our national culture. What   we have left of Whitman's discredited dream of cultural revolution   are paper ghosts and a sharp-eyed witty program of despair.           On Photography       39         Melancholy Objects       Photography has the unappealing reputation of being the most   realistic, therefore facile, of the mimetic arts. In fact, it is the one   art that has managed to carry out the grandiose, century-old   threats of a Surrealist takeover of the modern sensibility, while   most of the pedigreed candidates have dropped out of the race.     Painting was handicapped from the start by being a fine art,   with each object a unique, handmade original. A further liability   was the exceptional technical virtuosity of those painters usually   included in the Surrealist canon, who seldom imagined the canvas   as other than figurative. Their paintings looked sleekly calculated,   complacently well made, undialectical. They kept a long, prudent   distance from Surrealism's contentious idea of blurring the lines   between art and so-called life, between objects and events, between   the intended and the unintentional, between pros and amateurs,   between the noble and the tawdry, between craftsmanship and   lucky blunders. The result was that Surrealism in painting   amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked   dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and   agoraphobic nightmares. (Only when its libertarian rhetoric   helped to nudge Jackson Pollock and others into a new kind of   irreverent abstraction did the Surrealist mandate for painters   finally seem to make wide creative sense.) Poetry, the other art   to which the early Surrealists were particularly devoted, has yielded   almost equally disappointing results. The arts in which Surrealism   has come into its own are prose fiction (as content, mainly, but   much more abundant and more complex thematically than that         On Photography       40       claimed by painting), theater, the arts of assemblage, and — most   triumphantly — photography.     That photography is the only art that is natively surreal does   not mean, however, that it shares the destinies of the official   Surrealist movement. On the contrary. Those photographers   (many of them ex-painters) consciously influenced by Surrealism   count almost as little today as the nineteenth-century "pictorial"   photographers who copied the look of Beaux- Arts painting. Even   the loveliest trouvailles of the 1920s — the solarized photographs   and Rayographs of Man Ray, the photograms of Laszlo   Moholy-Nagy, the multiple-exposure studies of Bragaglia, the   photomontages of John Heartfield and Alexander   Rodchenko — are regarded as marginal exploits in the history of   photography. The photographers who concentrated on interfering   with the supposedly superficial realism of the photograph were   those who most narrowly conveyed photography's surreal   properties. The Surrealist legacy for photography came to seem   trivial as the Surrealist repertoire of fantasies and props was   rapidly absorbed into high fashion in the 1930s, and Surrealist   photography offered mainly a mannered style of portraiture,   recognizable by its use of the same decorative conventions   introduced by Surrealism in other arts, particularly painting,   theater, and advertising. The mainstream of photographic activity   has shown that a Surrealist manipulation or theatricalization of   the real is unnecessary, if not actually redundant. Surrealism lies   at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation   of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower   but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision. The   less doctored, the less patently crafted, the more naive — the more   authoritative the photograph was likely to be.     Surrealism has always courted accidents, welcomed the   uninvited, flattered disorderly presences. What could be more   surreal than an object which virtually produces itself, and with a   minimum of effort? An object whose beauty, fantastic disclosures,   emotional weight are likely to be further enhanced by any   accidents that might befall it? It is photography that has best   shown how to juxtapose the sewing machine and the umbrella,           On Photography       41       whose fortuitous encounter was hailed by a great Surrealist poet   as an epitome of the beautiful.     Unlike the fine-art objects of pre-democratic eras, photographs   don't seem deeply beholden to the intentions of an artist. Rather,   they owe their existence to a loose cooperation (quasi- magical,   quasi- accidental) between photographer and subject — mediated   by an ever simpler and more automated machine, which is tireless,   and which even when capricious can produce a result that is   interesting and never entirely wrong. (The sales pitch for the first   Kodak, in 1888, was: "You press the button, we do the rest." The   purchaser was guaranteed that the picture would be "without any   mistake.") In the fairy tale of photography the magic box insures   veracity and banishes error, compensates for inexperience and   rewards innocence.     The myth is tenderly parodied in a 1928 silent film, The   Cameraman, which has an inept dreamy Buster Keaton vainly   struggling with his dilapidated apparatus, knocking out windows   and doors whenever he picks up his tripod, never managing to   take one decent picture, yet finally getting some great footage (a   photojournalist scoop of a tong war in New York's   Chinatown) — by inadvertence. It is the hero's pet monkey who   loads the camera with film and operates it part of the time.     The error of the Surrealist militants was to imagine the surreal to   be something universal, that is, a matter of psychology, whereas   it turns out to be what is most local, ethnic, class-bound, dated.   Thus, the earliest surreal photographs come from the 1850s, when   photographers first went out prowling the streets of London,   Paris, and New York, looking for their unposed slice of life. These   photographs, concrete, particular, anecdotal (except that the   anecdote has been effaced) — moments of lost time, of vanished   customs — seem far more surreal to us now than any photograph   rendered abstract and poetic by superimposition, under-printing,   solarization, and the like. Believing that the images they sought   came from the unconscious, whose contents they assumed as   loyal Freudians to be timeless as well as universal, the Surrealists   misunderstood what was most brutally moving, irrational,           On Photography       42       unassimilable, mysterious — time itself. What renders a   photograph surreal is its irrefutable pathos as a message from   time past, and the concreteness of its intimations about social   class.     Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought   it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.   As an aesthetics that yearns to be a politics, Surrealism opts for   the underdog, for the rights of a disestablished or unofficial reality.   But the scandals flattered by Surrealist aesthetics generally turned   out to be just those homely mysteries obscured by the bourgeois   social order: sex and poverty. Eros, which the early Surrealists   placed at the summit of the tabooed reality they sought to   rehabilitate, was itself part of the mystery of social station. While   it seemed to flourish luxuriantly at extreme ends of the scale, both   the lower classes and the nobility being regarded as naturally   libertine, middle-class people had to toil to make their sexual   revolution. Class was the deepest mystery: the inexhaustible   glamour of the rich and powerful, the opaque degradation of the   poor and outcast.     The view of reality as an exotic prize to be tracked down and   captured by the diligent hunter-with-a-camera has informed   photography from the beginning, and marks the confluence of   the Surrealist counter-culture and middle-class social   adventurism. Photography has always been fascinated by social   heights and lower depths. Documentarists (as distinct from   courtiers with cameras) prefer the latter. For more than a century,   photographers have been hovering about the oppressed, in   attendance at scenes of violence — with a spectacularly good   conscience. Social misery has inspired the comfortably-off with   the urge to take pictures, the gentlest of predations, in order to   document a hidden reality, that is, a reality hidden from them.     Gazing on other people's reality with curiosity, with   detachment, with professionalism, the ubiquitous photographer   operates as if that activity transcends class interests, as if its   perspective is universal. In fact, photography first comes into its   own as an extension of the eye of the middle-class flaneur, whose   sensibility was so accurately charted by Baudelaire. The         On Photography       43       photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker   reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the   voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of   voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur   of empathy, the flaneur finds the world "picturesque." The   findings of Baudelaire's flaneur are variously exemplified by the   candid snapshots taken in the 1890s by Paul Martin in London   streets and at the seaside and by Arnold Genthe in San Francisco's   Chinatown (both using a concealed camera), by Atget's twilight   Paris of shabby streets and decaying trades, by the dramas of sex   and loneliness depicted in Brassai's book Paris de nuit (1933), by   the image of the city as a theater of disaster in Weegee's Naked   City (1945). The flaneur is not attracted to the city's official   realities but to its dark seamy corners, its neglected   populations — an unofficial reality behind the facade of bourgeois   life that the photographer "apprehends," as a detective apprehends   a criminal.     Returning to The Cameraman: a tong war among poor Chinese   makes an ideal subject. It is completely exotic, therefore worth   photographing. Part of what assures the success of the hero's film   is that he doesn't understand his subject at all. (As played by   Buster Keaton, he doesn't even understand that his life is in   danger.) The perennial surreal subject is How the Other Half Lives,   to cite the innocently explicit title that Jacob Riis gave to the book   of photographs of the New York poor that he brought out in 1890.   Photography conceived as social documentation was an   instrument of that essentially middle-class attitude, both zealous   and merely tolerant, both curious and indifferent, called   humanism — which found slums the most enthralling of decors.   Contemporary photographers have, of course, learned to dig in   and limit their subject. Instead of the chutzpa of "the other half,"   we get, say, East 100th Street (Bruce Davidson's book of Harlem   photographs published in 1970). The justification is still the same,   that picture-taking serves a high purpose: uncovering a hidden   truth, conserving a vanishing past. (The hidden truth is, moreover,   often identified with the vanishing past. Between 1874 and 1886,           On Photography       44       prosperous Londoners could subscribe to the Society for   Photographing the Relics of Old London.)     Starting as artists of the urban sensibility, photographers quickly   became aware that nature is as exotic as the city, rustics as   picturesque as city slum dwellers. In 1897 Sir Benjamin Stone,   rich industrialist and conservative MP from Birmingham, founded   the National Photographic Record Association with the aim of   documenting traditional English ceremonies and rural festivals   which were dying out. "Every village," Stone wrote, "has a history   which might be preserved by means of the camera." For a wellborn   photographer of the late nineteenth century like the bookish   Count Giuseppe Primoli, the street life of the underprivileged   was at least as interesting as the pastimes of his fellow aristocrats:   compare Primoli's photographs of King Victor Emmanuel's   wedding with his photographs of the Naples poor. It required the   social immobility of a photographer of genius who happened to   be a small child, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, to confine subject matter   to the outlandish habits of the photographer's own family and   class. But essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other   people's reality, and eventually in one's own.     Perhaps the earliest model of the sustained look downward are   the thirty-six photographs in Street Life in London (1877-78) taken   by the British traveler and photographer John Thomson. But for   each photographer specializing in the poor, many more go after   a wider range of exotic reality. Thomson himself had a model   career of this kind. Before turning to the poor of his own country,   he had already been to see the heathen, a sojourn which resulted   in his four-volume Illustrations of China and Its People (1873-74).   And following his book on the street life of the London poor, he   turned to the indoor life of the London rich: it was Thomson   who, around 1880, pioneered the vogue of at-home photographic   portraiture.     From the beginning, professional photography typically meant   the broader kind of class tourism, with most photographers   combining surveys of social abjection with portraits of celebrities   or commodities (high fashion, advertising) or studies of the nude.   Many of the exemplary photographic careers of this century (like           On Photography       45       those of Edward Steichen, Bill Brandt, Henri Cartier-Bresson,   Richard Avedon) proceed by abrupt changes in the social level   and ethical importance of subject matter. Perhaps the most   dramatic break is that between the pre-war and the post-war work   of Bill Brandt. To have gone from the tough-minded photographs   of Depression squalor in northern England to his stylish celebrity   portraits and semi-abstract nudes of the last decades seems a long   journey indeed. But there is nothing particularly idiosyncratic,   or perhaps even inconsistent, in these contrasts. Traveling between   degraded and glamorous realities is part of the very momentum   of the photographic enterprise, unless the photographer is locked   into an extremely private obsession (like the thing Lewis Carroll   had for little girls or Diane Arbus had for the Halloween crowd).     Poverty is no more surreal than wealth; a body clad in filthy   rags is not more surreal than a principessa dressed for a ball or a   pristine nude. What is surreal is the distance imposed, and   bridged, by the photograph: the social distance and the distance   in time. Seen from the middle-class perspective of photography,   celebrities are as intriguing as pariahs. Photographers need not   have an ironic, intelligent attitude toward their stereotyped   material. Pious, respectful fascination may do just as well,   especially with the most conventional subjects.     Nothing could be farther from, say, the subtleties of Avedon   than the work of Ghitta Carell, Hungarian-born photographer   of the celebrities of the Mussolini era. But her portraits now look   as eccentric as Avedon's, and far more surreal than Cecil Beaton's   Surrealist- influenced photographs from the same period. By   setting his subjects — see the photographs he took of Edith Sitwell   in 1927, of Cocteau in 1936 — in fanciful, luxurious decors, Beaton   turns them into overexplicit, unconvincing effigies. But Carell's   innocent complicity with the wish of her Italian generals and   aristocrats and actors to appear static, poised, glamorous exposes   a hard, accurate truth about them. The photographer's reverence   has made them interesting; time has made them harmless, all too   human.     Some photographers set up as scientists, others as moralists. The           On Photography       46       scientists make an inventory of the world; the moralists   concentrate on hard cases. An example of photography- as -science   is the project August Sander began in 1911: a photographic   catalogue of the German people. In contrast to George Grosz's   drawings, which summed up the spirit and variety of social types   in Weimar Germany through caricature, Sander's "archetype   pictures" (as he called them) imply a pseudo-scientific neutrality   similar to that claimed by the covertly partisan typological sciences   that sprang up in the nineteenth century like phrenology,   criminology, psychiatry, and eugenics. It was not so much that   Sander chose individuals for their representative character as that   he assumed, correctly, that the camera cannot help but reveal   faces as social masks. Each person photographed was a sign of a   certain trade, class, or profession. All his subjects are   representative, equally representative, of a given social   reality — their own.     Sander's look is not unkind; it is permissive, unjudging.   Compare his 1930 photograph "Circus People" with Diane Arbus's   studies of circus people or with the portraits of demimonde   characters by Lisette Model. People face Sander's camera, as they   do in Model's and Arbus's photographs, but their gaze is not   intimate, revealing. Sander was not looking for secrets; he was   observing the typical. Society contains no mystery. Like Eadweard   Muybridge, whose photographic studies in the 1880s managed   to dispel misconceptions about what everybody had always seen   (how horses gallop, how people move) because he had subdivided   the subject's movements into a precise and lengthy enough   sequence of shots, Sander aimed to shed light on the social order   by atomizing it, into an indefinite number of social types. It   doesn't seem surprising that in 1934, five years after its   publication, the Nazis impounded the unsold copies of Sander's   book Antlitz der Zeit ( The Face of Our Time) and destroyed the   printing blocks, thus bringing his national-portrait project to an   abrupt end. (Sander, who stayed in Germany throughout the Nazi   period, switched to landscape photography.) The charge was that   Sander's project was anti-social. What might well have seemed   anti-social to Nazis was his idea of the photographer as an         On Photography       47       impassive census-taker, the completeness of whose record would   render all commentary, or even judgment, superfluous.     Unlike most photography with a documentary intention,   enthralled either by the poor and unfamiliar, as preeminently   photographable subjects, or by celebrities, Sander's social sample   is unusually, conscientiously broad. He includes bureaucrats and   peasants, servants and society ladies, factory workers and   industrialists, soldiers and gypsies, actors and clerks. But such   variety does not rule out class condescension. Sander's eclectic   style gives him away. Some photographs are casual, fluent,   naturalistic; others are naive and awkward. The many posed   photographs taken against a flat white background are a cross   between superb mug shots and old-fashioned studio portraits.   Unselfconsciously, Sander adjusted his style to the social rank of   the person he was photographing. Professionals and the rich tend   to be photographed indoors, without props. They speak for   themselves. Laborers and derelicts are usually photographed in   a setting (often outdoors) which locates them, which speaks for   them — as if they could not be assumed to have the kinds of   separate identities normally achieved in the middle and upper   classes.     In Sander's work everybody is in place, nobody is lost or   cramped or off-center. A cretin is photographed in exactly the   same dispassionate way as a bricklayer, a legless World War I   veteran like a healthy young soldier in uniform, scowling   Communist students like smiling Nazis, a captain of industry like   an opera singer. "It is not my intention either to criticize or   describe these people," Sander said. While one might have   expected that he would have claimed not to have criticized his   subjects, by photographing them, it is interesting that he thought   he hadn't described them either. Sander's complicity with   everybody also means a distance from everybody. His complicity   with his subjects is not naive (like Carell's) but nihilistic. Despite   its class realism, it is one of the most truly abstract bodies of work   in the history of photography.     It is hard to imagine an American attempting an equivalent of   Sander's comprehensive taxonomy. The great photographic           On Photography       48       portraits of America — like W alker Evans's American Photographs   (1938) and Robert Frank's The Americans (1959) — have been   deliberately random, while continuing to reflect the traditional   relish of documentary photography for the poor and the   dispossessed, the nation's forgotten citizens. And the most   ambitious collective photographic project ever undertaken in this   country, by the Farm Security Administration in 1935, under the   direction of Roy Emerson Stryker, was concerned exclusively with   "low-income groups."* The FSA project, conceived as "a pictorial   documentation of our rural areas and rural problems" (Stryker's   words), was unabashedly propagandistic, with Stryker coaching   his team about the attitude they were to take toward their problem   subject. The purpose of the project was to demonstrate the value   of the people photographed. Thereby, it implicitly defined its   point of view: that of middle-class people who needed to be   convinced that the poor were really poor, and that the poor were   dignified. It is instructive to compare the FSA photographs with   those by Sander. Though the poor do not lack dignity in Sander's   photographs, it is not because of any compassionate intentions.   They have dignity by juxtaposition, because they are looked at in   the same cool way as everybody else.     American photography was rarely so detached. For an approach   reminiscent of Sander's, one must look to people who   documented a dying or superseded part of America — like Adam   Clark Vroman, who photographed Indians in Arizona and New   Mexico between 1895 and 1904. Vroman's handsome photographs   are unexpressive, uncondescending, unsentimental. Their mood   is the very opposite of the FSA photographs: they are not moving,       Though that changed, as is indicated in a memo from Stryker to his staff in 1942,   when the new morale needs of World War II made the poor too downbeat a subject.   "We must have at once-, pictures of men, women and children who appear as if they   really believed in the U.S. Get people with a little spirit. Too many in our file now paint   the U.S. as an old person's home and that just about everybody is too old to work and   too malnourished to care much what happens. ... We particularly need young men and   women who work in our factories.... Housewives in their kitchen or in their yard   picking flowers. More contented-looking old couples...".           On Photography       49       they are not idiomatic, they do not invite sympathy. They make   no propaganda for the Indians. Sander didn't know he was   photographing a disappearing world. Vroman did. He also knew   that there was no saving the world that he was recording.     Photography in Europe was largely guided by notions of the   picturesque (i.e., the poor, the foreign, the time-worn), the   important (i.e., the rich, the famous), and the beautiful.   Photographs tended to praise or to aim at neutrality. Americans,   less convinced of the permanence of any basic social arrangements,   experts on the "reality" and inevitability of change, have more   often made photography partisan. Pictures got taken not only to   show what should be admired but to reveal what needs to be   confronted, deplored — and fixed up. American photography   implies a more summary, less stable connection with history; and   a relation to geographic and social reality that is both more   hopeful and more predatory.     The hopeful side is exemplified in the well-known use of   photographs in America to awaken conscience. At the beginning   of the century Lewis Hine was appointed staff photographer to   the National Child Labor Committee, and his photographs of   children working in cotton mills, beet fields, and coal mines did   influence legislators to make child labor illegal. During the New   Deal, Stryker's PSA project (Stryker was a pupil of Hine's) brought   back information about migrant workers and sharecroppers to   Washington, so that bureaucrats could figure out how to help   them. But even at its most moralistic, documentary photography   was also imperious in another sense. Both Thomson's detached   traveler's report and the impassioned muckraking of Riis or Hine   reflect the urge to appropriate an alien reality. And no reality is   exempt from appropriation, neither one that is scandalous (and   should be corrected) nor one that is merely beautiful (or could   be made so by the camera). Ideally, the photographer was able to   make the two realities cognate, as illustrated by the title of an   interview with Hine in 1920, "Treating Labor Artistically."     The predatory side of photography is at the heart of the alliance,   evident earlier in the United States than anywhere else, between           On Photography       50       photography and tourism. After the opening of the West in 1869   by the completion of the transcontinental railroad came the   colonization through photography. The case of the American   Indians is the most brutal. Discreet, serious amateurs like Vro man   had been operating since the end of the Civil War. They were the   vanguard of an army of tourists who arrived by the end of the   century, eager for "a good shot" of Indian life. The tourists   invaded the Indians' privacy, photographing holy objects and the   sacred dances and places, if necessary paying the Indians to pose   and getting them to revise their ceremonies to provide more   photogenic material.     But the native ceremony that is changed when the tourist   hordes come sweeping down is not so different from a scandal in   the inner city that is corrected after someone photographs it.   Insofar as the muckrakers got results, they too altered what they   photographed; indeed, photographing something became a   routine part of the procedure for altering it. The danger was of a   token change — limited to the narrowest reading of the   photograph's subject. The particular New York slum, Mulberry   Bend, that Riis photographed in the late 1880s was subsequently   torn down and its inhabitants rehoused by order of Theodore   Roosevelt, then state governor, while other, equally dreadful slums   were left standing.     The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and   consecrates. Photography expresses the American impatience   with reality, the taste for activities whose instrumentality is a   machine. "Speed is at the bottom of it all," as Hart Crane said   (writing about Stieglitz in 1923), "the hundredth of a second   caught so precisely that the motion is continued from the picture   indefinitely: the moment made eternal." Faced with the awesome   spread and alienness of a newly settled continent, people wielded   cameras as a way of taking possession of the places they visited.   Kodak put signs at the entrances of many towns listing what to   photograph. Signs marked the places in national parks where   visitors should stand with their cameras.     Sander is at home in his own country. American photographers   are often on the road, overcome with disrespectful wonder at           On Photography       51       what their country offers in the way of surreal surprises. Moralists   and conscienceless despoilers, children and foreigners in their   own land, they will get something down that is disappearing — and,   often, hasten its disappearance by photographing it. To take, like   Sander, specimen after specimen, seeking an ideally complete   inventory, presupposes that society can be envisaged as a   comprehensible totality. European photographers have assumed   that society has something of the stability of nature. Nature in   America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized   by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.     The American landscape has always seemed too varied,   immense, mysterious, fugitive to lend itself to scientism. "He   doesn't know, he can't say, before the facts," Henry James wrote   in The American Scene (1907),     and he doesn't even want to know or to say; the facts   themselves loom, before the understanding, in too large a   mass for a mere mouthful: it is as if the syllables were too   numerous to make a legible word. The il legible word,   accordingly, the great inscrutable answer to questions, hangs   in the vast American sky, to his imagination, as something   fantastic and abracadabrant, belonging to no known   language, and it is under this convenient ensign that he   travels and considers and contemplates, and, to the best of   his ability, enjoys.     Americans feel the reality of their country to be so stupendous,   and mutable, that it would be the rankest presumption to   approach it in a classifying, scientific way. One could get at it   indirectly, by subterfuge — breaking it off into strange fragments   that could somehow, by synecdoche, be taken for the whole.     American photographers (like American writers) posit   something ineffable in the national reality — something, possibly,   that has never been seen before. Jack Kerouac begins his   introduction to Robert Frank's book The Americans :           On Photography       52       That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the   streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby   funeral, that's what Robert Frank has captured in these   tremendous photographs taken as he travelled on the road   around practically forty- eight states in an old used car (on   Guggenheim Fellowship) and with the agility, mystery,   genius, sadness and strange secrecy of a shadow   photographed scenes that have never been seen on film....   After seeing these pictures you end up finally not knowing   any more whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin.     Any inventory of America is inevitably anti-scientific, a delirious   "abracadabrant" confusion of objects, in which jukeboxes   resemble coffins. James at least managed to make the wry   judgment that "this particular effect of the scale of things is the   only effect that, throughout the land, is not directly adverse to   joy." For Kerouac — for the main tradition of American   photography — the prevailing mood is sadness. Behind the   ritualized claims of American photographers to be looking around,   at random, without preconceptions — lighting on subjects,   phlegmatically recording them — is a mournful vision of loss.     The effectiveness of photography's statement of loss depends   on its steadily enlarging the familiar iconography of mystery,   mortality, transience. More traditional ghosts are summoned up   by some older American photographers, such as Clarence John   Laughlin, a self-avowed exponent of "extreme romanticism" who   began in the mid-1950s photographing decaying plantation houses   of the lower Mississippi, funerary monuments in Louisiana's   swamp burial grounds, Victorian interiors in Milwaukee and   Chicago; but the method works as well on subjects which do not,   so conventionally, reek of the past, as in a Laughlin photograph   from 1962, "Spectre of Coca-Cola." 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           On Photography       53       contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now   becomes past."     Returning to New York from Paris in 1929, after the years of   apprenticeship with Man Ray and her discovery (and rescue) of   the then barely known work of Eugene Atget, Abbott set about   recording the city. In the preface to her book of photographs that   came out in 1939, Changing New York, she explains: "If I had   never left America, I would never have wanted to photograph   New York. But when I saw it with fresh eyes, I knew it was my   country, something I had to set down in photographs." Abbott's   purpose ("I wanted to record it before it changed completely")   sounds like that of Atget, who spent the years between 1898 and   his death in 1927 patiently, furtively documenting a small-scale,   time-worn Paris that was vanishing. But Abbott is setting down   something even more fantastic: the ceaseless replacement of the   new. The New York of the thirties was very different from Paris:   "not so much beauty and tradition as native fantasia emerging   from accelerated greed." Abbott's book is aptly titled, for she is   not so much memorializing the past as simply documenting ten   years of the chronic self-destruct quality of American experience,   in which even the recent past is constantly being used up, swept   away, torn down, thrown out, traded in. Fewer and fewer   Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture,   grandparents' pots and pans — the used things, warm with   generations of human touch, that Rilke celebrated in The Duino   Elegies as being essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have   our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight   portable museum.     Photographs, which turn the past into a consumable object, are   a short cut. Any collection of photographs is an exercise in   Surrealist montage and the Surrealist abbreviation of history. As   Kurt Schwitters and, more recently, Bruce Conner and Ed   Kienholz have made brilliant objects, tableaux, environments out   of refuse, we now make a history out of our detritus. And some   virtue, of a civic kind appropriate to a democratic society, is   attached to the practice. The true modernism is not austerity but           On Photography       54       a garbage- strewn plenitude — the willful travesty of Whitman's   magnanimous dream. Influenced by the photographers and the   pop artists, architects like Robert Venturi learn from Las Vegas   and find Times Square a congenial successor to the Piazza San   Marco; and Reyner Banham lauds Los Angeles's "instant   architecture and instant townscape" for its gift of freedom, of a   good life impossible amid the beauties and squalors of the   European city — extolling the liberation offered by a society whose   consciousness is built, ad hoc, out of scraps and junk. America,   that surreal country, is full of found objects. Our junk has become   art. Our junk has become history.     Photographs are, of course, artifacts. But their appeal is that   they also seem, in a world littered with photographic relics, to   have the status of found objects — unpremeditated slices of the   world. Thus, they trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and   the magic of the real. They are clouds of fantasy and pellets of   information. Photography has become the quintessential art of   affluent, wasteful, restless societies — an indispensable tool of the   new mass culture that took shape here after the Civil War, and   conquered Europe only after World War II, although its values   had gained a foothold among the well-off as early as the 1850s   when, according to the splenetic description of Baudelaire, "our   squalid society" became narcissistically entranced by Daguerre's   "cheap method of disseminating a loathing for history."     The Surrealist purchase on history also implies an undertow   of melancholy as well as a surface voracity and impertinence. At   the very beginning of photography, the late 1830s, William H.   Fox Talbot noted the camera's special aptitude for recording "the   injuries of time." Fox Talbot was talking about what happens to   buildings and monuments. For us, the more interesting abrasions   are not of stone but of flesh. 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 mortality. A touch of the finger now suffices to invest   a moment with posthumous irony. Photographs show people           On Photography       55       being so irrefutably there and at a specific age in their lives; group   together people and things which a moment later have already   disbanded, changed, continued along the course of their   independent destinies. One's reaction to the photographs Roman   Vishniac took in 1938 of daily life in the ghettos of Poland is   overwhelmingly affected by the knowledge of how soon all these   people were to perish. To the solitary stroller, all the faces in the   stereotyped photographs cupped behind glass and affixed to   tombstones in the cemeteries of Latin countries seem to contain   a portent of their death. 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. Some working-class Berliners in Robert Siodmak's film   Menschen am Sonntag (1929) are having their pictures taken at   the end of a Sunday outing. One by one they step before the   itinerant photographer's black box — grin, look anxious, clown,   stare. The movie camera lingers in close-up to let us savor the   mobility of each face; then we see the face frozen in the last of its   expressions, embalmed in a still. The photographs shock, in the   flow of the movie — transmuting, in an instant, present into past,   life into death. And one of the most disquieting films ever made,   Chris Marker's La Jetee (1963), is the tale of a man who foresees   his own death, narrated entirely with still photographs.     As the fascination that photographs exercise is a reminder of   death, it is also an invitation to sentimentality. Photographs turn   the past into an object of tender regard, scrambling moral   distinctions and disarming historical judgments by the generalized   pathos of looking at time past. One recent book arranges in   alphabetical order the photographs of an incongruous group of   celebrities as babies or children. Stalin and Gertrude Stein, who   face outward from opposite pages, look equally solemn and   huggable; Elvis Presley and Proust, another pair of youthful   page-mates, slightly resemble each other; Hubert Humphrey (age   3) and Aldous Huxley (age 8), side by side, have in common that   both already display the forceful exaggerations of character for   which they were to be known as adults. No picture in the book   is without interest and charm, given what we know (including,           On Photography       56       in most cases, photographs) of the famous creatures those children   were to become. For this and similar ventures in Surrealist irony,   naive snapshots or the most conventional studio portraits are   most effective: such pictures seem even more odd, moving,   premonitory.     Rehabilitating old photographs, by finding new contexts for   them, has become a major book industry. A photograph is only   a fragment, and with the passage of time its moorings come   unstuck. It drifts away into a soft abstract pastness, open to any   kind of reading (or matching to other photographs). A   photograph could also be described as a quotation, which makes   a book of photographs like a book of quotations. And an   increasingly common way of presenting photographs in book   form is to match photographs themselves with quotes.     One example: Bob Adelman's Down Home (1972), a portrait   of a rural Alabama county, one of the poorest in the nation, taken   over a five-year period in the 1960s. Illustrating the continuing   predilection of documentary photography for losers, Adelman's   book descends from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, whose point   was precisely that its subjects were not famous, but forgotten. But   Walker Evans's photographs were accompanied by eloquent prose   written (sometimes overwritten) by James Agee, which aimed to   deepen the reader's empathy with the sharecroppers' lives. No   one presumes to speak for Adelman's subjects. (It is characteristic   of the liberal sympathies which inform his book that it purports   to have no point of view at all — that is, to be an entirely impartial,   non-empathic look at its subjects.) Down Home could be   considered a version in miniature, county-wide, of August   Sander's project: to compile an objective photographic record of   a people. But these specimens talk, which lends a weight to these   unpretentious photographs that they would not have on their   own. Paired with their words, their photographs characterize the   citizens of Wilcox County as people obliged to defend or exhibit   their territory; suggest that these lives are, in a literal sense, a series   of positions or poses.     Another example: Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip (1973),   which also constructs, with the aid of photographs, a portrait of           On Photography       57       a rural county — but the time is the past, between 1890 and 1910,   years of severe recession and economic hardship, and Jackson   County is reconstructed by means of found objects dating from   those decades. These consist of a selection of photographs taken   by Charles Van Schaick, the county seat's leading commercial   photographer, some three thousand of whose glass negatives are   stored in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin; and quotations   from period sources, mainly local newspapers and the records of   the county insane asylum, and fiction about the Midwest. The   quotations have nothing to do with the photographs but are   correlated with them in an aleatoric, intuitive way, as words and   sounds by John Cage are matched at the time of performance   with the dance movements already choreographed by Merce   Cunningham.     The people photographed in Down Home are the authors of   the declarations we read on the facing pages. White and black,   poor and well-off talk, exhibiting contrasting views (particularly   on matters of class and race). But whereas the statements that go   with Adelman's photographs contradict each other, the texts that   Lesy has collected all say the same thing: that an astonishing   number of people in turn-of-the-century America were bent on   hanging themselves in barns, throwing their children into wells,   cutting their spouses' throats, taking off their clothes on Main   Street, burning their neighbors' crops, and sundry other acts likely   to land them in jail or the loony bin. In case anyone was thinking   that it was Vietnam and all the domestic funk and nastiness of   the past decade which had made America a country of darkening   hopes, Lesy argues that the dream had collapsed by the end of the   last century — not in the inhuman cities but in the farming   communities; that the whole country has been crazy, and for a   long time. Of course, Wisconsin Death Trip doesn't actually prove   anything. The force of its historical argument is the force of   collage. To Van Schaick's disturbing, handsomely time-eroded   photographs Lesy could have matched other texts from the   period — love letters, diaries — to give another, perhaps less   desperate impression. His book is rousing, fashionably pessimistic   polemic, and totally whimsical as history.           On Photography       58       A number of American authors, most notably Sherwood   Anderson, have written as polemically about the miseries of   small-town life at roughly the time covered by Lesy's book. But   although works of photo-fiction like Wisconsin Death Trip explain   less than many stories and novels, they persuade more now,   because they have the authority of a document. Photographs — and   quotations — seem, because they are taken to be pieces of reality,   more authentic than extended literary narratives. The only prose   that seems credible to more and more readers is not the fine   writing of someone like Agee, but the raw record — edited or   unedited talk into tape recorders; fragments or the integral texts   of sub-literary documents (court records, letters, diaries,   psychiatric case histories, etc.); self-deprecatingly sloppy, often   paranoid first-person reportage. There is a rancorous suspicion   in America of whatever seems literary, not to mention a growing   reluctance on the part of young people to read anything, even   subtitles in foreign movies and copy on a record sleeve, which   partly accounts for the new appetite for books of few words and   many photographs. (Of course, photography itself increasingly   reflects the prestige of the rough, the self-disparaging, the offhand,   the undisciplined — the "anti-photograph.")     "All of the men and women the writer had ever known had   become grotesques," Anderson says in the prologue to Winesburg,   Ohio (1919), the title of which was originally supposed to be The   Book of the Grotesque. He goes on: "The grotesques were not all   horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful...."   Surrealism is the art of generalizing the grotesque and then   discovering nuances (and charms) in that. No activity is better   equipped to exercise the Surrealist way of looking than   photography, and eventually we look at all photographs   surrealistically. People are ransacking their attics and the archives   of city and state historical societies for old photographs; ever more   obscure or forgotten photographers are being rediscovered. Books   of photography pile higher and higher — measuring the lost past   (hence, the promotion of amateur photography), taking the   temperature of the present. Photographs furnish instant history,   instant sociology, instant participation. But there is something           On Photography       59       remarkably anodyne about these new forms of packaging reality.   The Surrealist strategy, which promised a new and exciting   vantage point for the radical criticism of modern culture, has   devolved into an easy irony that democratizes all evidence, that   equates its scatter of evidence with history. Surrealism can only   deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an   accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.     The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous   quotations) is a Surrealist taste. Thus, Walter Benjamin — whose   Surrealist sensibility is the most profound of anyone's on   record — was a passionate collector of quotations. In her   magisterial essay on Benjamin, Hannah Arendt recounts that   "nothing was more characteristic of him in the thirties than the   little notebooks with black covers which he always carried with   him and in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations   what daily living and reading netted him in the way of 'pearls'   and 'coral.' On occasion he read from them aloud, showed them   around like items from a choice and precious collection." Though   collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic   mimetism — victimless collecting, as it were — this should not be   taken to mean that Benjamin disapproved of, or did not indulge   in, the real thing. For it was Benjamin's conviction that reality   itself invited — and vindicated — the once heedless, inevitably   destructive ministrations of the collector. In a world that is well   on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes   someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of   modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered   the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place,   the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating   the choicer, more emblematic fragments.     The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has   become the most surreal of subjects — making it possible, as   Benjamin said, to see a new beauty in what is vanishing. From   the start, photographers not only set themselves the task of   recording a disappearing world but were so employed by those   hastening its disappearance. (As early as 1842, that indefatigable           On Photography       60       improver of French architectural treasures, Viollet-le-Duc,   commissioned a series of daguerreotypes of Notre Dame before   beginning his restoration of the cathedral.) "To renew the old   world," Benjamin wrote, "that is the collector's deepest desire   when he is driven to acquire new things." But the old world cannot   be renewed — certainly not by quotations; and this is the rueful,   quixotic aspect of the photographic enterprise.     Benjamin's ideas are worth mentioning because he was   photography's most original and important critic — despite (and   because of) the inner contradiction in his account of photography   which follows from the challenge posed by his Surrealist sensibility   to his Marxist/Brechtian principles — and because Benjamin's   own ideal project reads like a sublimated version of the   photographer's activity. This project was a work of literary   criticism that was to consist entirely of quotations, and would   thereby be devoid of anything that might betray empathy. A   disavowal of empathy, a disdain for message- mongering, a claim   to be invisible — these are strategies endorsed by most professional   photographers. The history of photography discloses a long   tradition of ambivalence about its capacity for partisanship: the   taking of sides is felt to undermine its perennial assumption that   all subjects have validity and interest. But what in Benjamin is an   excruciating idea of fastidiousness, meant to permit the mute past   to speak in its own voice, with all its unresolvable complexity,   becomes — when generalized, in photography — the cumulative   de-creation of the past (in the very act of preserving it), the   fabrication of a new, parallel reality that makes the past immediate   while underscoring its comic or tragic ineffectuality, that invests   the specificity of the past with an unlimited irony, that transforms   the present into the past and the past into pastness.     Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion   that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a   sense of the past. But while traditional arts of historical   consciousness attempt to put the past in order, distinguishing the   innovative from the retrograde, the central from the marginal,   the relevant from the irrelevant or merely interesting, the   photographer's approach — like that of the collector — is           On Photography       61       unsystematic, indeed anti- systematic. The photographer's ardor   for a subject has no essential relation to its content or value, that   which makes a subject classifiable. It is, above all, an affirmation   of the subject's thereness; its rightness (the rightness of a look on   a face, of the arrangement of a group of objects), which is the   equivalent of the collector's standard of genuineness; its   quiddity — whatever qualities make it unique. The professional   photographer's preeminently willful, avid gaze is one that not   only resists the traditional classification and evaluation of subjects   but seeks consciously to defy and subvert them. For this reason,   its approach to subject matter is a good deal less aleatoric than is   generally claimed.     In principle, photography executes the Surrealist mandate to   adopt an uncompromisingly egalitarian attitude toward subject   matter. (Everything is "real.") In fact, it has — like mainstream   Surrealist taste itself — evinced an inveterate fondness for trash,   eyesores, rejects, peeling surfaces, odd stuff, kitsch. Thus, Atget   specialized in the marginal beauties of jerry-built wheeled vehicles,   gaudy or fantastic window displays, the raffish art of shop signs   and carousels, ornate porticoes, curious door knockers and   wrought-iron grilles, stucco ornaments on the facades of   run-down houses. The photographer — and the consumer of   photographs — follows in the footsteps of the ragpicker, who was   one of Baudelaire's favorite figures for the modern poet:     Everything that the big city threw away, everything it lost,   everything it despised, everything it crushed underfoot, he   catalogues and collects.... Fie sorts things out and makes a   wise choice; he collects, like a miser guarding a treasure, the   refuse which will assume the shape of useful or gratifying   objects between the jaws of the goddess of Industry.     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   Breton 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           On Photography       62       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.     As the structuring of a prose fiction, a painting, a film by means   of quotations — think of Borges, of Kitaj, of Godard — is a   specialized example of Surrealist taste, so the increasingly common   practice of putting up photographs on living-room and bedroom   walls, where formerly hung reproductions of paintings, is an index   of the wide diffusion of Surrealist taste. For photographs   themselves satisfy many of the criteria for Surrealist approbation,   being ubiquitous, cheap, unprepossessing objects. A painting is   commissioned or bought; a photograph is found (in albums and   drawers), cut out (of newspapers and magazines), or easily taken   oneself. And the objects that are photographs not only proliferate   in a way that paintings don't but are, in a certain sense,   aesthetically indestructible. Leonardo's "The Last Supper" in   Milan hardly looks better now; it looks terrible. Photographs,   when they get scrofulous, tarnished, stained, cracked, faded still   look good; do often look better. (In this, as in other ways, the art   that photography does resemble is architecture, whose works are   subject to the same inexorable promotion through the passage   of time; many buildings, and not only the Parthenon, probably   look better as ruins.)     What is true of photographs is true of the world seen   photographically. Photography extends the eighteenth- century   literati's discovery of the beauty of ruins into a genuinely popular   taste. And it extends that beauty beyond the romantics' ruins,   such as those glamorous forms of decrepitude photographed by   Laughlin, to the modernists' ruins — reality itself. The   photographer is willy-nilly engaged in the enterprise of antiquing   reality, and photographs are themselves instant antiques. The   photograph offers a modern counterpart of that characteristically   romantic architectural genre, the artificial ruin: the ruin which   is created in order to deepen the historical character of a   landscape, to make nature suggestive — suggestive of the past.     The contingency of photographs confirms that everything is   perishable; the arbitrariness of photographic evidence indicates           On Photography       63       that reality is fundamentally unclassifiable. Reality is summed up   in an array of casual fragments — an endlessly alluring, poignantly   reductive way of dealing with the world. Illustrating that partly   jubilant, partly condescending relation to reality that is the rallying   point of Surrealism, the photographer's insistence that everything   is real also implies that the real is not enough. By proclaiming a   fundamental discontent with reality, Surrealism bespeaks a posture   of alienation which has now become a general attitude in those   parts of the world which are politically powerful, industrialized,   and camera-wielding. Why else would reality ever be thought of   as insufficient, flat, overordered, shallowly rational? In the past,   a discontent with reality expressed itself as a longing for another   world. In modern society, a discontent with reality expresses itself   forcefully and most hauntingly by the longing to reproduce this   one. As if only by looking at reality in the form of an   object — through the fix of the photograph — is it really real, that   is, surreal.     Photography inevitably entails a certain patronizing of reality.   From being "out there," the world comes to be "inside"   photographs. Our heads are becoming like those magic boxes   that Joseph Cornell filled with incongruous small objects whose   provenance was a France he never once visited. Or like a hoard   of old movie stills, of which Cornell amassed a vast collection in   the same Surrealist spirit: as nostalgia-provoking relics of the   original movie experience, as means of a token possession of the   beauty of actors. But the relation of a still photograph to a film   is intrinsically misleading. To quote from a movie is not the same   as quoting from a book. Whereas the reading time of a book is   up to the reader, the viewing time of a film is set by the filmmaker   and the images are perceived only as fast or as slowly as the editing   permits. Thus, a still, which allows one to linger over a single   moment as long as one likes, contradicts the very form of film,   as a set of photographs that freezes moments in a life or a society   contradicts their form, which is a process, a flow in time. The   photographed world stands in the same, essentially inaccurate   relation to the real world as stills do to movies. Life is not about           On Photography       64       significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs   are.     The lure of photographs, their hold on us, is that they offer at   one and the same time a connoisseur's relation to the world and   a promiscuous acceptance of the world. For this connoisseur's   relation to the world is, through the evolution of the modernist   revolt against traditional aesthetic norms, deeply implicated in   the promotion of kitsch standards of taste. Though some   photographs, considered as individual objects, have the bite and   sweet gravity of important works of art, the proliferation of   photographs is ultimately an affirmation of kitsch. Photography's   ultra-mobile gaze flatters the viewer, creating a false sense of   ubiquity, a deceptive mastery of experience. Surrealists, who aspire   to be cultural radicals, even revolutionaries, have often been under   the well-intentioned illusion that they could be, indeed should   be, Marxists. But Surrealist aestheticism is too suffused with irony   to be compatible with the twentieth century's most seductive   form of moralism. Marx reproached philosophy for only trying   to understand the world rather than trying to change it.   Photographers, operating within the terms of the Surrealist   sensibility, suggest the vanity of even trying to understand the   world and instead propose that we collect it.           On Photography       65         The Heroism of Vision       Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many,   through photographs, have discovered beauty. Except for those   situations in which the camera is used to document, or to mark   social rites, what moves people to take photographs is finding   something beautiful. (The name under which Fox Talbot patented   the photograph in 1841 was the calotype: from kalos, beautiful.)   Nobody exclaims, "Isn't that ugly! I must take a photograph of   it." Even if someone did say that, all it would mean is: "I find that   ugly thing. . .beautiful."     It is common for those who have glimpsed something beautiful   to express regret at not having been able to photograph it. So   successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that   photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard   of the beautiful. House-proud hosts may well pull out   photographs of the place to show visitors how really splendid it   is. We learn to see ourselves photographically: to regard oneself   as attractive is, precisely, to judge that one would look good in a   photograph. Photographs create the beautiful and — over   generations of picture-taking — use it up. Certain glories of nature,   for example, have been all but abandoned to the indefatigable   attentions of amateur camera buffs. The image-surfeited are likely   to find sunsets corny; they now look, alas, too much like   photographs.     Many people are anxious when they're about to be   photographed: not because they fear, as primitives do, being   violated but because they fear the camera's disapproval. People         On Photography       66       want the idealized image: a photograph of themselves looking   their best. They feel rebuked when the camera doesn't return an   image of themselves as more attractive than they really are. But   few are lucky enough to be "photogenic" — that is, to look better   in photographs (even when not made up or flattered by the   lighting) than in real life. That photographs are often praised for   their candor, their honesty, indicates that most photographs, of   course, are not candid. A decade after Fox Talbot's   negative-positive process had begun replacing the daguerreotype   (the first practicable photographic process) in the mid- 1840s, a   German photographer invented the first technique for retouching   the negative. His two versions of the same portrait — one   retouched, the other not — astounded crowds at the Exposition   Universelle held in Paris in 1855 (the second world fair, and the   first with a photography exhibit). The news that the camera could   lie made getting photographed much more popular.     The consequences of lying have to be more central for   photography than they ever can be for painting, because the flat,   usually rectangular images which are photographs make a claim   to be true that paintings can never make. A fake painting (one   whose attribution is false) falsifies the history of art. A fake   photograph (one which has been retouched or tampered with,   or whose caption is false) falsifies reality. The history of   photography could be recapitulated as the struggle between two   different imperatives: beautification, which comes from the fine   arts, and truth-telling, which is measured not only by a notion of   value-free truth, a legacy from the sciences, but by a moralized   ideal of truth-telling, adapted from nineteenth-century literary   models and from the (then) new profession of independent   journalism. Like the post-romantic novelist and the reporter, the   photographer was supposed to unmask hypocrisy and combat   ignorance. This was a task which painting was too slow and   cumbersome a procedure to take on, no matter how many   nineteenth-century painters shared Millet's belief that le beau c'est   le vrai. Astute observers noticed that there was something naked   about the truth a photograph conveyed, even when its maker did   not mean to pry. In The House of the Seven Gables (1851)           On Photography       67       Hawthorne has the young photographer, Holgrave, remark about   the daguerreotype portrait that "while we give it credit only for   depicting the merest surface, it actually brings out the secret   character with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon,   even could he detect it."     Freed from the necessity of having to make narrow choices (as   painters did) about what images were worth contemplating,   because of the rapidity with which cameras recorded anything,   photographers made seeing into a new kind of project: as if seeing   itself, pursued with sufficient avidity and single-mindedness,   could indeed reconcile the claims of truth and the need to find   the world beautiful. Once an object of wonder because of its   capacity to render reality faithfully as well as despised at first for   its base accuracy, the camera has ended by effecting a tremendous   promotion of the value of appearances. Appearances as the camera   records them. Photographs do not simply render   reality — realistically. It is reality which is scrutinized, and   evaluated, for its fidelity to photographs. "In my view," the   foremost ideologue of literary realism, Zola, declared in 1901 after   fifteen years of amateur picture-taking, "you cannot claim to have   really seen something until you have photographed it." Instead   of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for   the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of   reality, and of realism.     The earliest photographers talked as if the camera were a copying   machine; as if, while people operate cameras, it is the camera that   sees. The invention of photography was welcomed as a means of   easing the burden of ever accumulating information and sense   impressions. In his book of photographs The Pencil of Nature   (1844-46), Fox Talbot relates that the idea of photography came   to him in 1833, on the Italian Journey that had become obligatory   for Englishmen of inherited wealth like himself, while making   some sketches of the landscape at Lake Como. Drawing with the   help of a camera obscura, a device which projected the image but   did not fix it, he was led to reflect, he says, "on the inimitable   beauty of the pictures of nature's painting which the glass lens of           On Photography       68       the camera throws upon the paper" and to wonder "if it were   possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves   durably." The camera suggested itself to Fox Talbot as a new form   of notation whose allure was precisely that it was   impersonal — because it recorded a "natural" image; that is, an   image which comes into being "by the agency of Light alone,   without any aid whatever from the artist's pencil."     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.* It became clear that there   was not just a simple, unitary activity called seeing (recorded by,   aided by cameras) but "photographic seeing," which was both a   new way for people to see and a new activity for them to perform.     A Frenchman with a daguerreotype camera was already   roaming the Pacific in 1841, the same year that the first volume   of Excursions daguerriennes: Vues et monuments les plus   remarquables du globe was published in Paris. The 1850s was the   great age of photographic Orientalism: Maxime Du Camp, making   a Grand Tour of the Middle East with Flaubert between 1849 and       The restriction of photography to impersonal seeing has of course continued to   have its advocates. Among the Surrealists, photography was thought to be liberating   to the extent that it transcended mere personal expression: Breton starts his essay of   1920 on Max Ernst by calling the practice of automatic writing "a true photography of   thought," the camera being regarded as "a blind instrument" whose superiority in "the   imitation of appearances" had "dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in   painting as well as poetry." In the opposing aesthetic camp, the Bauhaus theoreticians   took a not dissimilar view, treating photography as a branch of design, like architec-   ture — creative but impersonal, unencumbered by such vanities as the painterly surface,   the personal touch. In his book Painting, Photography, Film (1925) Moholy-Nagy   praises the camera for imposing "the hygiene of the optical," which will eventually   "abolish that pictorial and imaginative association pattern... which has been stamped   upon our vision by great individual painters."           On Photography       69       1851, centered his picture-taking activity on attractions like the   Colossus of Abu Simbel and the Temple of Baalbek, not the daily   life of fellahin. Soon, however, travelers with cameras annexed a   wider subject matter than famous sites and works of art.   Photographic seeing meant an aptitude for discovering beauty in   what everybody sees but neglects as too ordinary. Photographers   were supposed to do more than just see the world as it is, including   its already acclaimed marvels; they were to create interest, by new   visual decisions.     There is a peculiar heroism abroad in the world since the   invention of cameras: the heroism of vision. Photography opened   up a new model of freelance activity — allowing each person to   display a certain unique, avid sensibility. Photographers departed   on their cultural and class and scientific safaris, searching for   striking images. They would entrap the world, whatever the cost   in patience and discomfort, by this active, acquisitive, evaluating,   gratuitous modality of vision. Alfred Stieglitz proudly reports that   he had stood three hours during a blizzard on February 22, 1893,   "awaiting the proper moment" to take his celebrated picture,   "Fifth Avenue, Winter." The proper moment is when one can see   things (especially what everyone has already seen) in a fresh way.   The quest became the photographer's trademark in the popular   imagination. By the 1920s the photographer had become a modern   hero, like the aviator and the anthropologist — without necessarily   having to leave home. Readers of the popular press were invited   to join "our photographer" on a "journey of discovery," visiting   such new realms as "the world from above," "the world under   the magnifying glass," "the beauties of every day," "the unseen   universe," "the miracle of light," "the beauty of machines," the   picture that can be "found in the street."     Everyday life apotheosized, and the kind of beauty that only   the camera reveals — a corner of material reality that the eye   doesn't see at all or can't normally isolate; or the overview, as   from a plane — these are the main targets of the photographer's   conquest. For a while the close-up seemed to be photography's   most original method of seeing. Photographers found that as they   more narrowly cropped reality, magnificent forms appeared. In           On Photography       70       the early 1840s the versatile, ingenious Fox Talbot not only   composed photographs in the genres taken over from   painting — portrait, domestic scene, townscape, landscape, still   life — but also trained his camera on a seashell, on the wings of a   butterfly (enlarged with the aid of a solar microscope), on a   portion of two rows of books in his study. But his subjects are   still recognizably a shell, butterfly wings, books. When ordinary   seeing was further violated — and the object isolated from its   surroundings, rendering it abstract — new conventions about what   was beautiful took hold. What is beautiful became just what the   eye can't (or doesn't) see: that fracturing, dislocating vision that   only the camera supplies.     In 1915 Paul Strand took a photograph which he titled   "Abstract Patterns Made by Bowls." In 1917 Strand turned to   close-ups of machine forms, and throughout the twenties did   close-up nature studies. The new procedure — its heyday was   between 1920 and 1935 — seemed to promise unlimited visual   delights. It worked with equally stunning effect on homely objects,   on the nude (a subject one might have supposed to be virtually   exhausted by painters), on the tiny cosmologies of nature.   Photography seemed to have found its grandiose role, as the   bridge between art and science; and painters were admonished   to learn from the beauties of microphotographs and aerial views   in Moholy-Nagy's book Von Material zur Architektur, published   by the Bauhaus in 1928 and translated into English as The New   Vision. It was the same year as the appearance of one of the first   photographic best-sellers, a book by Albert Renger-Patzsch   entitled Die Welt ist schon ( The World Is Beautiful), which   consisted of one hundred photographs, mostly close-ups, whose   subjects range from a colocasia leaf to a potter's hands. Painting   never made so shameless a promise to prove the world beautiful.     The abstracting eye — represented with particular brilliance in   the period between the two world wars by some of the work of   Strand, as well as of Edward Weston and Minor White — seems   to have been possible only after the discoveries made by modernist   painters and sculptors. Strand and Weston, who both acknowledge   a similarity between their ways of seeing and those of Kandinsky           On Photography       71       and Brancusi, may have been attracted to the hard edge of Cubist   style in reaction to the softness of Stieglitz's images. But it is just   as true that the influence flowed the other way. In 1909, in his   magazine Camera Work, Stieglitz notes the undeniable influence   of photography on painting, although he cites only the   Impressionists — whose style of "blurred definition" inspired his   own.* And Moholy-Nagy in The New Vision correctly points out   that "the technique and spirit of photography directly or indirectly   influenced Cubism." But for all the ways in which, from the 1840s   on, painters and photographers have mutually influenced and   pillaged each other, their procedures are fundamentally opposed.   The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. That is, the   identification of the subject of a photograph always dominates   our perception of it — as it does not, necessarily, in a painting.   The subject ofWeston's "Cabbage Leaf," taken in 1931, looks like   a fall of gathered cloth; a title is needed to identify it. Thus, the   image makes its point in two ways. The form is pleasing, and it   is (surprise!) the form of a cabbage leaf. If it were gathered cloth,   it wouldn't be so beautiful. We already know that beauty, from   the fine arts. Hence the formal qualities of style — the central issue   in painting — are, at most, of secondary importance in   photography, while what a photograph is of is always of primary   importance. The assumption underlying all uses of photography,   that each photograph is a piece of the world, means that we don't       *     The large influence that photography exercised upon the Impressionists is a com-   monplace of art history. Indeed, it is not much of an exaggeration to say, as Stieglitz   does, that "the impressionist painters adhere to a style of composition that is strictly   photographic." The camera's translation of reality into highly polarized areas of light   and dark, the free or arbitrary cropping of the image in photographs, the indifference   of photographers to making space, particularly background space, intelligible — these   were the main inspiration for the Impressionist painters' professions of scientific interest   in the properties of light, for their experiments in flattened perspective and unfamiliar   angles and decentralized forms that are sliced off by the picture's edge. ("They depict   life in scraps and fragments," as Stieglitz observed in 1909.) A historical detail: the very   first Impressionist exhibition, in April 1874, was held in Nadar's photography studio   on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris.           On Photography       72       know how to react to a photograph (if the image is visually   ambiguous: say, too closely seen or too distant) until we know   what piece of the world it is. What looks like a bare coronet — the   famous photograph taken by Harold Edgerton in 1936 — becomes   far more interesting when we find out it is a splash of milk.     Photography is commonly regarded as an instrument for   knowing things. When Thoreau said, "You can't say more than   you see," he took for granted that sight had pride of place among   the senses. But when, several generations later, Thoreau's dictum   is quoted by Paul Strand to praise photography, it resonates with   a different meaning. Cameras did not simply make it possible to   apprehend more by seeing (through microphotography and   teledetection). They changed seeing itself, by fostering the idea   of seeing for seeing's sake. Thoreau still lived in a polysensual   world, though one in which observation had already begun to   acquire the stature of a moral duty. He was talking about a seeing   not cut off from the other senses, and about seeing in context   (the context he called Nature), that is, a seeing linked to certain   presuppositions about what he thought was worth seeing. When   Strand quotes Thoreau, he assumes another attitude toward the   sensorium: the didactic cultivation of perception, independent   of notions about what is worth perceiving, which animates all   modernist movements in the arts.     The most influential version of this attitude is to be found in   painting, the art which photography encroached on remorselessly   and plagiarized from enthusiastically from its beginnings, and   with which it still coexists in febrile rivalry. According to the usual   account, what photography did was to usurp the painter's task   of providing images that accurately transcribe reality. For this   "the painter should be deeply grateful," insists Weston, viewing   this usurpation, as have many photographers before and since,   as in fact a liberation. By taking over the task of realistic picturing   hitherto monopolized by painting, photography freed painting   for its great modernist vocation — abstraction. But photography's   impact on painting was not as clear-cut as that. For, as   photography was entering the scene, painting was already, on its   own, beginning its long retreat from realistic           On Photography       73       representation — Turner was born in 1775, Fox Talbot in   1800 — and the territory photography came to occupy with such   rapid and complete success would probably have been   depopulated anyway. (The instability of nineteenth- century   painting's strictly representational achievements is most clearly   demonstrated by the fate of portraiture, which came more and   more to be about painting itself rather than about sitters — and   eventually ceased to interest most ambitious painters, with such   notable recent exceptions as Francis Bacon and Warhol, who   borrow lavishly from photographic imagery.)     The other important aspect of the relation between painting   and photography omitted in the standard account is that the   frontiers of the new territory acquired by photography   immediately started expanding, as some photographers refused   to be confined to turning out those ultra-realistic triumphs with   which painters could not compete. Thus, of the two famous   inventors of photography, Daguerre never conceived of going   beyond the naturalist painter's range of representation, while Fox   Talbot immediately grasped the camera's ability to isolate forms   which normally escape the naked eye and which painting had   never recorded. Gradually photographers joined in the pursuit   of more abstract images, professing scruples reminiscent of the   modernist painters' dismissal of the mimetic as mere picturing.   Painting's revenge, if you will. The claim made by many   professional photographers to do something quite different from   recording reality is the clearest index of the immense   counter-influence that painting has had on photography. But   however much photographers have come to share some of the   same attitudes about the inherent value of perception exercised   for perception's sake and the (relative) unimportance of subject   matter which have dominated advanced painting for more than   a century, their applications of these attitudes cannot duplicate   those of painting. For it is in the nature of a photograph that it   can never entirely transcend its subject, as a painting can. Nor   can a photograph ever transcend the visual itself, which is in some   sense the ultimate aim of modernist painting.     The version of the modernist attitude most relevant to           On Photography       74       photography is not to be found in painting — even as it was then   (at the time of its conquest, or liberation, by photography),   certainly as it is now. Except for such marginal phenomena as   Super Realism, a revival of Photo-Realism which is not content   with merely imitating photographs but aims to show that painting   can achieve an even greater illusion of verisimilitude, painting is   still largely ruled by a suspicion of what Duchamp called the   merely retinal. The ethos of photography — that of schooling us   (in Moholy-Nagy's phrase) in "intensive seeing" — seems closer   to that of modernist poetry than that of painting. As painting has   become more and more conceptual, poetry (since Apollinaire,   Eliot, Pound, and William Carlos Williams) has more and more   defined itself as concerned with the visual. ("No truth but in   things," as Williams declared.) Poetry's commitment to   concreteness and to the autonomy of the poem's language parallels   photography's commitment to pure seeing. Both imply   discontinuity, disarticulated forms and compensatory unity:   wrenching things from their context (to see them in a fresh way),   bringing things together elliptically, according to the imperious   but often arbitrary demands of subjectivity.     While most people taking photographs are only seconding   received notions of the beautiful, ambitious professionals usually   think they are challenging them. According to heroic modernists   like Weston, the photographer's venture is elitist, prophetic,   subversive, revelatory. Photographers claimed to be performing   the Blakean task of cleansing the senses, "revealing to others the   living world around them," as Weston described his own work,   "showing to them what their own unseeing eyes had missed."   Although Weston (like Strand) also claimed to be indifferent   to the question of whether photography is an art, his demands   on photography still contained all the romantic assumptions   about the photographer as Artist. By the century's second decade,   certain photographers had confidently appropriated the rhetoric   of a vanguard art: armed with cameras, they were doing rude   battle with conformist sensibilities, busy fulfilling Pound's   summons to Make It New. Photography, not "soft, gutless           On Photography       75       painting," says Weston with virile disdain, is best equipped to   "bore into the spirit of today." Between 1930 and 1932 Weston's   diaries of Daybooks are full of effusive premonitions of impending   change and declarations of the importance of the visual shock   therapy that photographers were administering. "Old ideals are   crashing on all sides, and the precise uncompromising camera   vision is, and will be more so, a world force in the revaluation of   life."     Weston's notion of the photographer's agon shares many   themes with the heroic vitalism of the 1920s popularized by D.   H. Lawrence: affirmation of the sensual life, rage at bourgeois   sexual hypocrisy, self-righteous defense of egotism in the service   of one's spiritual vocation, manly appeals for a union with nature.   (Weston calls photography "a way of self-development, a means   to discover and identify oneself with all the manifestations of   basic forms — with nature, the source.") But while Lawrence   wanted to restore the wholeness of sensory appreciation, the   photographer — even one whose passions seem so reminiscent of   Lawrence's — necessarily insists on the preeminence of one sense:   sight. And, contrary to what Weston asserts, the habit of   photographic seeing — of looking at reality as an array of potential   photographs — creates estrangement from, rather than union   with, nature.     Photographic seeing, when one examines its claims, turns out   to be mainly the practice of a kind of dissociative seeing, a   subjective habit which is reinforced by the objective discrepancies   between the way that the camera and the human eye focus and   judge perspective. These discrepancies were much remarked by   the public in the early days of picture-taking. Once they began to   think photographically, people stopped talking about   photographic distortion, as it was called. (Now, as William Ivins,   Jr., has pointed out, they actually hunt for that distortion.) Thus,   one of the perennial successes of photography has been its strategy   of turning living beings into things, things into living beings. The   peppers Weston photographed in 1929 and 1930 are voluptuous   in a way that his female nudes rarely are. Both the nudes and the   pepper are photographed for the play of forms — but the body is           On Photography       76       characteristically shown bent over upon itself, all the extremities   cropped, with the flesh rendered as opaque as normal lighting   and focus allow, thus decreasing its sensuality and heightening   the abstractness of the body's form; the pepper is viewed close-up   but in its entirety, the skin polished or oiled, and the result is a   discovery of the erotic suggestiveness of an ostensibly neutral   form, a heightening of its seeming palpability.     It was the beauty of forms in industrial and scientific   photography that dazzled the Bauhaus designers, and, indeed,   the camera has recorded few images more interesting formally   than those taken by metallurgists and crystallographers. But the   Bauhaus approach to photography has not prevailed. No one now   considers the beauty revealed in photographs to be epitomized   by scientific microphotography. In the main tradition of the   beautiful in photography, beauty requires the imprint of a human   decision: that this would make a good photograph, and that the   good picture would make some comment. It proved more   important to reveal the elegant form of a toilet bowl, the subject   of a series of pictures Weston did in Mexico in 1925, than the   poetic magnitude of a snowflake or a coal fossil.     For Weston, beauty itself was subversive — as seemed confirmed   when some people were scandalized by his ambitious nudes. (In   fact, it was Weston — followed by Andre Kertesz and Bill   Brandt — who made nude photography respectable.) Now   photographers are more likely to emphasize the ordinary   humanity of their revelations. Though photographers have not   ceased to look for beauty, photography is no longer thought to   create, under the aegis of beauty, a psychic breakthrough.   Ambitious modernists, like Weston and Cartier-Bresson, who   understand photography as a genuinely new way of seeing   (precise, intelligent, even scientific), have been challenged by   photographers of a later generation, like Robert Frank, who want   a camera eye that is not piercing but democratic, who don't claim   to be setting new standards for seeing. Weston's assertion that   "photography has opened the blinds to a new world vision" seems   typical of the overoxygenated hopes of modernism in all the arts   during the first third of the century — hopes since abandoned.           On Photography       77       Although the camera did make a psychic revolution, it was hardly   in the positive, romantic sense that Weston envisaged.     Insofar as photography does peel away the dry wrappers of   habitual seeing, it creates another habit of seeing: both intense   and cool, solicitous and detached; charmed by the insignificant   detail, addicted to incongruity. But photographic seeing has to   be constantly renewed with new shocks, whether of subject matter   or technique, so as to produce the impression of violating ordinary   vision. For, challenged by the revelations of photographers, seeing   tends to accommodate to photographs. The avant-garde vision   of Strand in the twenties, of Weston in the late twenties and early   thirties, was quickly assimilated. Their rigorous close-up studies   of plants, shells, leaves, time-withered trees, kelp, driftwood,   eroded rocks, pelicans' wings, gnarled cypress roots, and gnarled   workers' hands have become cliches of a merely photographic   way of seeing. What it once took a very intelligent eye to see,   anyone can see now. Instructed by photographs, everyone is able   to visualize that once purely literary conceit, the geography of the   body: for example, photographing a pregnant woman so that her   body looks like a hillock, a hillock so that it looks like the body   of a pregnant woman.     Increased familiarity does not entirely explain why certain   conventions of beauty get used up while others remain. The   attrition is moral as well as perceptual. Strand and Weston could   hardly have imagined how these notions of beauty could become   so banal, yet it seems inevitable once one insists — as Weston   did — on so bland an ideal of beauty as perfection. Whereas the   painter, according to Weston, has always "tried to improve nature   by self-imposition," the photographer has "proved that nature   offers an endless number of perfect 'compositions,' — order   everywhere." Behind the modernist's belligerent stance of aesthetic   purism lay an astonishingly generous acceptance of the world.   For Weston, who spent most of his photographic life on the   California coast near Carmel, the Walden of the 1920s, it was   relatively easy to find beauty and order, while for Aaron Siskind,   a photographer of the generation after Strand and a New Yorker,   who began his career by taking architectural photographs and           On Photography       78       genre photographs of city people, the question is one of creating   order. "When I make a photograph," Siskind writes, "I want it to   be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose   basic condition is order." For Cartier-Bresson, to take photographs   is "to find the structure of the world — to revel in the pure pleasure   of form," to disclose that "in all this chaos, there is order." (It   may well be impossible to talk about the perfection of the world   without sounding unctuous.) But displaying the perfection of the   world was too sentimental, too a historical a notion of beauty to   sustain photography. It seems inevitable that Weston, more   committed than Strand ever was to abstraction, to the discovery   of forms, produced a much narrower body of work than Strand   did. Thus Weston never felt moved to do socially conscious   photography and, except for the period between 1923 and 1927   that he spent in Mexico, shunned cities. Strand, like   Cartier-Bresson, was attracted to the picturesque desolations and   damages of urban life. But even far from nature, both Strand and   Cartier-Bresson (one could also cite Walker Evans) still   photograph with the same fastidious eye that discerns order   everywhere.     The view of Stieglitz and Strand and Weston — that photographs   should be, first of all, beautiful (that is, beautifully   composed) — seems thin now, too obtuse to the truth of disorder:   even as the optimism about science and technology which lay   behind the Bauhaus view of photography seems almost pernicious.   Weston's images, however admirable, however beautiful, have   become less interesting to many people, while those taken by the   mid-nineteenth-century English and French primitive   photographers and by Atget, for example, enthrall more than   ever. The judgment of Atget as "not a fine technician" that Weston   entered in his Daybooks perfectly reflects the coherence of   Weston's view and his distance from contemporary taste.   "Halation destroyed much, and the color correction not good,"   Weston notes; "his instinct for subject matter was keen, but his   recording weak, — his construction inexcusable... so often one   feels he missed the real thing." Contemporary taste faults Weston,   with his devotion to the perfect print, rather than Atget and the           On Photography       79       other masters of photography's demotic tradition. Imperfect   technique has come to be appreciated precisely because it breaks   the sedate equation of Nature and Beauty. Nature has become   more a subject for nostalgia and indignation than an object of   contemplation, as marked by the distance of taste which separates   both the majestic landscapes of Ansel Adams (Weston's   best-known disciple) and the last important body of photographs   in the Bauhaus tradition, Andreas Feininger's The Anatomy of   Nature (1965), from current photographic imagery of nature   defiled.     As these formalist ideals of beauty seem, in retrospect, linked   to a certain historical mood, optimism about the modern age (the   new vision, the new era), so the decline of the standards of   photographic purity represented by both W eston and the Bauhaus   school has accompanied the moral letdown experienced in recent   decades. In the present historical mood of disenchantment one   can make less and less sense out of the formalist's notion of   timeless beauty. Darker, time-bound models of beauty have   become prominent, inspiring a reevaluation of the photography   of the past; and, in an apparent revulsion against the Beautiful,   recent generations of photographers prefer to show disorder,   prefer to distill an anecdote, more often than not a disturbing   one, rather than isolate an ultimately reassuring "simplified form"   (Weston's phrase). But notwithstanding the declared aims of   indiscreet, unposed, often harsh photography to reveal truth, not   beauty, photography still beautifies. Indeed, the most enduring   triumph of photography has been its aptitude for discovering   beauty in the humble, the inane, the decrepit. At the very least,   the real has a pathos. And that pathos is — beauty. (The beauty of   the poor, for example.)     Weston's celebrated photograph of one of his fiercely loved   sons, "Torso of Neil," 1925, seems beautiful because of the   shapeliness of its subject and because of its bold composition and   subtle lighting — a beauty that is the result of skill and taste. Jacob   Riis's crude flashlit photographs taken between 1887 and 1890   seem beautiful because of the force of their subject, grimy   shapeless New York slum-dwellers of indeterminate age, and           On Photography       80       because of the rightness of their "wrong" framing and the blunt   contrasts produced by the lack of control over tonal values — a   beauty that is the result of amateurism or inadvertence. The   evaluation of photographs is always shot through with such   aesthetic double standards. Initially judged by the norms of   painting, which assume conscious design and the elimination of   nonessentials, the distinctive achievements of photographic seeing   were until quite recently thought to be identical with the work of   that relatively small number of photographers who, through   reflection and effort, managed to transcend the camera's   mechanical nature to meet the standards of art. But it is now clear   that there is no inherent conflict between the mechanical or naive   use of the camera and formal beauty of a very high order, no kind   of photograph in which such beauty could not turn out to be   present: an unassuming functional snapshot may be as visually   interesting, as eloquent, as beautiful as the most acclaimed fine-art   photographs. This democratizing of formal standards is the logical   counterpart to photography's democratizing of the notion of   beauty. Traditionally associated with exemplary models (the   representative art of the classical Greeks showed only youth, the   body in its perfection), beauty has been revealed by photographs   as existing everywhere. Along with people who pretty themselves   for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been   assigned their beauty.     For photographers there is, finally, no difference — no greater   aesthetic advantage — between the effort to embellish the world   and the counter- effort to rip off its mask. Even those   photographers who disdained retouching their portraits — a mark   of honor for ambitious portrait photographers from Nadar   on — tended to protect the sitter in certain ways from the camera's   too revealing gaze. And one of the typical endeavors of portrait   photographers, professionally protective toward famous faces   (like Garbo's) which really are ideal, is the search for "real" faces,   generally sought among the anonymous, the poor, the socially   defenseless, the aged, the insane — people indifferent to (or   powerless to protest) the camera's aggressions. Two portraits that   Strand did in 1916 of urban casualties, "Blind Woman" and           On Photography       81       "Man," are among the first results of this search conducted in   close-up. In the worst years of the German depression Helmar   Lerski made a whole compendium of distressing faces, published   under the title Kopfe des Alltags (Everyday Faces) in 1931. The   paid models for what Lerski called his "objective character   studies" — with their rude revelations of over-enlarged pores,   wrinkles, skin blemishes — were out-of-work servants procured   from an employment exchange, beggars, street sweepers, vendors,   and washerwomen.     The camera can be lenient; it is also expert at being cruel. But   its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to   the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste. Thus,   while fashion photography is based on the fact that something   can be more beautiful in a photograph than in real life, it is not   surprising that some photographers who serve fashion are also   drawn to the non-photogenic. There is a perfect complementarity   between Avedon's fashion photography, which flatters, and the   work in which he comes on as The One Who Refuses to   Flatter — for example, the elegant, ruthless portraits Avedon did   in 1972 of his dying father. The traditional function of portrait   painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of   everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much   more limited career in photography considered as an art.   Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias.     As the vehicle of a certain reaction against the conventionally   beautiful, photography has served to enlarge vastly our notion of   what is aesthetically pleasing. Sometimes this reaction is in the   name of truth. Sometimes it is in the name of sophistication or   of prettier lies: thus, fashion photography has been developing,   over more than a decade, a repertoire of paroxysmic gestures that   shows the unmistakable influence of Surrealism. ("Beauty will be   convulsive," Breton wrote, "or it will not be at all.") Even the most   compassionate photojournalism is under pressure to satisfy   simultaneously two sorts of expectations, those arising from our   largely surrealist way of looking at all photographs, and those   created by our belief that some photographs give real and   important information about the world. The photographs that           On Photography       82       W. Eugene Smith took in the late 1960s in the Japanese fishing   village of Minamata, most of whose inhabitants are crippled and   slowly dying of mercury poisoning, move us because they   document a suffering which arouses our indignation — and   distance us because they are superb photographs of Agony,   conforming to surrealist standards of beauty. Smith's photograph   of a dying girl writhing on her mother's lap is a Pieta for the world   of plague victims which Artaud invokes as the true subject of   modern dramaturgy; indeed, the whole series of photographs are   possible images for Artaud's Theater of Cruelty.     Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and   emotional weight depends on where it is inserted. A photograph   changes according to the context in which it is seen: thus Smith's   Minamata photographs will seem different on a contact sheet, in   a gallery, in a political demonstration, in a police file, in a   photographic magazine, in a general news magazine, in a book,   on a living-room wall. Each of these situations suggests a different   use for the photographs but none can secure their meaning. As   Wittgenstein argued for words, that the meaning is the use — so   for each photograph. And it is in this way that the presence and   proliferation of all photographs contributes to the erosion of the   very notion of meaning, to that parceling out of the truth into   relative truths which is taken for granted by the modern liberal   consciousness.     Socially concerned photographers assume that their work can   convey some kind of stable meaning, can reveal truth. But partly   because the photograph is, always, an object in a context, this   meaning is bound to drain away; that is, the context which shapes   whatever immediate — in particular, political — uses the   photograph may have is inevitably succeeded by contexts in which   such uses are weakened and become progressively less relevant.   One of the central characteristics of photography is that process   by which original uses are modified, eventually supplanted by   subsequent uses — most notably, by the discourse of art into which   any photograph can be absorbed. And, being images themselves,   some photographs right from the start refer us to other images   as well as to life. The photograph that the Bolivian authorities           On Photography       83       transmitted to the world press in October 1967 of Che Guevara's   body, laid out in a stable on a stretcher on top of a cement trough,   surrounded by a Bolivian colonel, a U.S. intelligence agent, and   several journalists and soldiers, not only summed up the bitter   realities of contemporary Latin American history but had some   inadvertent resemblance, as John Berger has pointed out, to   Mantegna's "The Dead Christ" and Rembrandt's "The Anatomy   Lesson of Professor Tulp." What is compelling about the   photograph partly derives from what it shares, as a composition,   with these paintings. Indeed, the very extent to which that   photograph is unforgettable indicates its potential for being   depoliticized, for becoming a timeless image.     The best writing on photography has been by   moralists — Marxists or would-be Marxists — hooked on   photographs but troubled by the way photography inexorably   beautifies. As Walter Benjamin observed in 1934, in an address   delivered in Paris at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, the   camera     is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a   rubbish-heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a   river dam or an electric cable factory: in front of these,   photography can only say, 'How beautiful. '...It has   succeeded in turning abject poverty itself, by handling it in   a modish, technically perfect way, into an object of   enjoyment.     Moralists who love photographs always hope that words will save   the picture. (The opposite approach to that of the museum curator   who, in order to turn a photojournalist's work into art, shows the   photographs without their original captions.) Thus, Benjamin   thought that the right caption beneath a picture could "rescue it   from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary   use value." He urged that writers start taking photographs, to   show the way.     Socially concerned writers have not taken to cameras, but they   are often enlisted, or volunteer, to spell out the truth to which   photographs testify — as James Agee did in the texts he wrote to           On Photography       84       accompany Walker Evans's photographs in Let Us Now Praise   Famous Men, or as John Berger did in his essay on the photograph   of the dead Che Guevara, this essay being in effect an extended   caption, one that attempts to firm up the political associations   and moral meaning of a photograph that Berger found too   satisfying aesthetically, too suggestive iconographically. Godard   and Gorin's short film A Letter to Jane (1972) amounts to a kind   of counter-caption to a photograph — a mordant criticism of a   photograph of Jane Fonda taken during a visit to North Vietnam.   (The film is also a model lesson on how to read any photograph,   how to decipher the un-innocent nature of a photograph's   framing, angle, focus.) What the photograph — it shows Fonda   listening with an expression of distress and compassion as an   unidentified Vietnamese describes the ravages of American   bombing — meant when it was published in the French picture   magazine L'Express in some ways reverses the meaning it had for   the North Vietnamese, who released it. But even more decisive   than how the photograph was changed by its new setting is how   its revolutionary use-value to the North Vietnamese was sabotaged   by what L'Express furnished as a caption. "This photograph, like   any photograph," Godard and Gorin point out, "is physically   mute. It talks through the mouth of the text written beneath it."   In fact, words do speak louder than pictures. Captions do tend   to override the evidence of our eyes; but no caption can   permanently restrict or secure a picture's meaning.     What the moralists are demanding from a photograph is that   it do what no photograph can ever do — speak. The caption is the   missing voice, and it is expected to speak for truth. But even an   entirely accurate caption is only one interpretation, necessarily a   limiting one, of the photograph to which it is attached. And the   caption-glove slips on and off so easily. It cannot prevent any   argument or moral plea which a photograph (or set of   photographs) is intended to support from being undermined by   the plurality of meanings that every photograph carries, or from   being qualified by the acquisitive mentality implicit in all   picture-taking — and picture-collecting — and by the aesthetic   relation to their subjects which all photographs inevitably propose.           On Photography       85       Even those photographs which speak so laceratingly of a specific   historical moment also give us vicarious possession of their   subjects under the aspect of a kind of eternity: the beautiful. The   photograph of Che Guevara is finally. . .beautiful, as was the man.   So are the people of Minamata. So is the small Jewish boy   photographed in 1943 during a round-up in the Warsaw Ghetto,   his arms raised, solemn with terror — whose picture the mute   heroine of Bergman's Persona has brought with her to the mental   hospital to meditate on, as a photo-souvenir of the essence of   tragedy.     In a consumer society, even the most well-intentioned and   properly captioned work of photographers issues in the discovery   of beauty. The lovely composition and elegant perspective of   Lewis Hine's photographs of exploited children in   turn-of-the-century American mills and mines easily outlast the   relevance of their subject matter. Protected middle-class   inhabitants of the more affluent corners of the world — those   regions where most photographs are taken and consumed — learn   about the world's horrors mainly through the camera:   photographs can and do distress. But the aestheticizing tendency   of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress   ends by neutralizing it. Cameras miniaturize experience, transform   history into spectacle. As much as they create sympathy,   photographs cut sympathy, distance the emotions. Photography's   realism creates a confusion about the real which is (in the long   run) analgesic morally as well as (both in the long and in the short   run) sensorially stimulating. Hence, it clears our eyes. This is the   fresh vision everyone has been talking about.     Whatever the moral claims made on behalf of photography, its   main effect is to convert the world into a department store or   museum-without-walls in which every subject is depreciated into   an article of consumption, promoted into an item for aesthetic   appreciation. Through the camera people become customers or   tourists of reality — or Realites, as the name of the French   photo-magazine suggests, for reality is understood as plural,   fascinating, and up for grabs. Bringing the exotic near, rendering           On Photography       86       the familiar and homely exotic, photographs make the entire   world available as an object of appraisal. For photographers who   are not confined to projecting their own obsessions, there are   arresting moments, beautiful subjects everywhere. The most   heterogeneous subjects are then brought together in the fictive   unity offered by the ideology of humanism. Thus, according to   one critic, the greatness of Paul Strand's pictures from the last   period of his life — when he turned from the brilliant discoveries   of the abstracting eye to the touristic, world-anthologizing tasks   of photography — consists in the fact that "his people, whether   Bowery derelict, Mexican peon, New England farmer, Italian   peasant, French artisan, Breton or Hebrides fisherman, Egyptian   fellahin, the village idiot or the great Picasso, are all touched by   the same heroic quality — humanity." What is this humanity? It   is a quality things have in common when they are viewed as   photographs.     The urge to take photographs is in principle an indiscriminate   one, for the practice of photography is now identified with the   idea that everything in the world could be made interesting   through the camera. But this quality of being interesting, like that   of manifesting humanity, is an empty one. The photographic   purchase on the world, with its limitless production of notes on   reality, makes everything homologous. Photography is no less   reductive when it is being reportorial than when it reveals   beautiful forms. By disclosing the thingness of human beings, the   humanness of things, photography transforms reality into a   tautology. When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that   there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.     Photographs are often invoked as an aid to understanding and   tolerance. In humanist jargon, the highest vocation of   photography is to explain man to man. But photographs do not   explain; they acknowledge. Robert Frank was only being honest   when he declared that "to produce an authentic contemporary   document, the visual impact should be such as will nullify   explanation." If photographs are messages, the message is both   transparent and mysterious. "A photograph is a secret about a   secret," as Arbus observed. "The more it tells you the less you         On Photography       87       know." Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing   through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to   the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes   emotional detachment.     The force of a photograph is that it keeps open to scrutiny   instants which the normal flow of time immediately replaces.   This freezing of time — the insolent, poignant stasis of each   photograph — has produced new and more inclusive canons of   beauty. But the truths that can be rendered in a dissociated   moment, however significant or decisive, have a very narrow   relation to the needs of understanding. Contrary to what is   suggested by the humanist claims made for photography, the   camera's ability to transform reality into something beautiful   derives from its relative weakness as a means of conveying truth.   The reason that humanism has become the reigning ideology of   ambitious professional photographers — displacing formalist   justifications of their quest for beauty — is that it masks the   confusions about truth and beauty underlying the photographic   enterprise.             On Photography       89         Photographic Evangels       Like other steadily aggrandizing enterprises, photography has   inspired its leading practitioners with a need to explain, again   and again, what they are doing and why it is valuable. The era in   which photography was widely attacked (as parricidal with respect   to painting, predatory with respect to people) was a brief one.   Painting of course did not expire in 1839, as one French painter   hastily predicted; the finicky soon ceased to dismiss photography   as menial copying; and by 1854 a great painter, Delacroix,   graciously declared how much he regretted that such an admirable   invention came so late. Nothing is more acceptable today than   the photographic recycling of reality, acceptable as an everyday   activity and as a branch of high art. Yet something about   photography still keeps the first-rate professionals defensive and   hortatory: virtually every important photographer right up to the   present has written manifestoes and credos expounding   photography's moral and aesthetic mission. And photographers   give the most contradictory accounts of what kind of knowledge   they possess and what kind of art they practice.     The disconcerting ease with which photographs can be taken, the   inevitable even when inadvertent authority of the camera's results,   suggest a very tenuous relation to knowing. No one would dispute   that photography gave a tremendous boost to the cognitive claims   of sight, because — through close-up and remote sensing — it so   greatly enlarged the realm of the visible. But about the ways in   which any subject within the range of unaided vision is further         On Photography       90       known through a photograph or the extent to which, in order to   get a good photograph, people need to know anything about what   they are photographing, there is no agreement. Picture-taking   has been interpreted in two entirely different ways: either as a   lucid and precise act of knowing, of conscious intelligence, or as   a pre-intellectual, intuitive mode of encounter. Thus Nadar,   speaking of his respectful, expressive pictures of Baudelaire, Dore,   Michelet, Hugo, Berlioz, Nerval, Gautier, Sand, Delacroix, and   other famous friends, said "the portrait I do best is of the person   I know best," while Avedon has observed that most of his good   portraits are of people he met for the first time when   photographing them.     In this century, the older generation of photographers described   photography as a heroic effort of attention, an ascetic discipline,   a mystic receptivity to the world which requires that the   photographer pass through a cloud of unknowing. According to   Minor White, "the state of mind of the photographer while   creating is a blank... when looking for pictures.... The   photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying   himself with everything in order to know it and to feel it better."   Cartier-Bresson has likened himself to a Zen archer, who must   become the target so as to be able to hit it; "thinking should be   done beforehand and afterwards," he says, "never while actually   taking a photograph." Thought is regarded as clouding the   transparency of the photographer's consciousness, and as   infringing on the autonomy of what is being photographed.   Determined to prove that photographs could — and when they   are good, always do — transcend literalness, many serious   photographers have made of photography a noetic paradox.   Photography is advanced as a form of knowing without knowing:   a way of outwitting the world, instead of making a frontal attack   on it.     But even when ambitious professionals disparage thinking   — suspicion of the intellect being a recurrent theme in   photographic apologetics — they usually want to assert how   rigorous this permissive visualizing needs to be. "A photograph   is not an accident — it is a concept," Ansel Adams insists. "The           On Photography       91       'machine-gun' approach to photography — by which many   negatives are made with the hope that one will be good — is fatal   to serious results." To take a good photograph, runs the common   claim, one must already see it. That is, the image must exist in   the photographer's mind at or before the moment when the   negative is exposed. Justifying photography has for the most part   precluded admitting that the scattershot method, especially as   used by someone experienced, may yield a thoroughly satisfactory   result. But despite their reluctance to say so, most photographers   have always had — with good reason — an almost superstitious   confidence in the lucky accident.     Lately, the secret is becoming avowable. As the defense of   photography enters its present, retrospective phase, there is an   increasing diffidence in claims about the alert, knowing state of   mind that accomplished picture-taking presumes. The   anti-intellectual declarations of photographers, commonplaces   of modernist thinking in the arts, have prepared the way for the   gradual tilt of serious photography toward a skeptical investigation   of its own powers, a commonplace of modernist practice in the   arts. Photography as knowledge is succeeded by photography   as — photography. In sharp reaction against any ideal of   authoritative representation, the most influential of the younger   American photographers reject any ambition to pre-visualize the   image and conceive their work as showing how different things   look when photographed.     Where the claims of knowledge falter, the claims of creativity   take up the slack. As if to refute the fact that many superb pictures   are by photographers devoid of any serious or interesting   intentions, the insistence that picture-taking is first of all the   focusing of a temperament, only secondarily of a machine, has   always been one of the main themes of the defense of   photography. This is the theme stated so eloquently in the finest   essay ever written in praise of photography, Paul Rosenfeld's   chapter on Stieglitz in Port of New York. By using "his   machinery" — as Rosenfeld puts it — "unmechanically," Stieglitz   shows that the camera not only "gave him an opportunity of   expressing himself' but supplied images with a wider and "more           On Photography       92       delicate" gamut "than the hand can draw." Similarly, Weston   insists over and over that photography is a supreme opportunity   for self-expression, far superior to that offered by painting. For   photography to compete with painting means invoking originality   as an important standard for appraising a photographer's work,   originality being equated with the stamp of a unique, forceful   sensibility. What is exciting "are photographs that say something   in a new manner," Harry Callahan writes, " not for the sake of   being different, but because the individual is different and the   individual expresses himself." For Ansel Adams "a great   photograph" has to be "a full expression of what one feels about   what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is, thereby,   a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety."     That there is a difference between photography conceived as   "true expression" and photography conceived (as it more   commonly is) as faithful recording is evident; though most   accounts of photography's mission attempt to paper over the   difference, it is implicit in the starkly polarized terms that   photographers employ to dramatize what they do. As modern   forms of the quest for self-expression commonly do, photography   recapitulates both of the traditional ways of radically opposing   self and world. Photography is seen as an acute manifestation of   the individualized "I," the homeless private self astray in an   overwhelming world — mastering reality by a fast visual   anthologizing of it. Or photography is seen as a means of finding   a place in the world (still experienced as overwhelming, alien) by   being able to relate to it with detachment — bypassing the   interfering, insolent claims of the self. But between the defense   of photography as a superior means of self-expression and the   praise of photography as a superior way of putting the self at   reality's service there is not as much difference as might appear.   Both presuppose that photography provides a unique system of   disclosures: that it shows us reality as we had not seen it before.     This revelatory character of photography generally goes by the   polemical name of realism. From Fox Talbot's view that the   camera produces "natural images" to Berenice Abbott's   denunciation of "pictorial" photography to Cartier-Bresson's           On Photography       93       warning that "the thing to be feared most is the artificially   contrived," most of the contradictory declarations of   photographers converge on pious avowals of respect for   things-as-they-are. For a medium so often considered to be merely   realistic, one would think photographers would not have to go   on as they do, exhorting each other to stick to realism. But the   exhortations continue — another instance of the need   photographers have for making something mysterious and urgent   of the process by which they appropriate the world.     To insist, as Abbott does, that realism is the very essence of   photography does not, as it might seem, establish the superiority   of one particular procedure or standard; does not necessarily   mean that photo-documents (Abbott's word) are better than   pictorial photographs.* Photography's commitment to realism   can accommodate any style, any approach to subject matter.   Sometimes it will be defined more narrowly, as the making of   images which resemble, and inform us about, the world.   Interpreted more broadly, echoing the distrust of mere likeness   which has inspired painting for more than a century, photographic   realism can be — is more and more — defined not as what is "really"   there but as what I "really" perceive. While all modern forms of   art claim some privileged relation to reality, the claim seems   particularly justified in the case of photography. Yet photography   has not, finally, any more immune than painting has to the most   characteristic modern doubts about any straightforward relation   to reality — the inability to take for granted the world as observed.   Even Abbott cannot help assuming a change in the very nature   of reality: that it needs the selective, more acute eye of the camera,   there being simply much more of it than ever before. "Today, we       The original meaning of pictorial was, of course, the positive one popularized by   the most famous of the nineteenth-century art photographers, Henry Peach Robinson,   in his book Pictorial Effect in Photography ( 1869). "His system was to flatter everything,"   Abbott says in a manifesto she wrote in 1951, "Photography at the Crossroads." Praising   Nadar, Brady, Atget, and Hine as masters of the photo-document, Abbott dismisses   Stieglitz as Robinson's heir, founder of a "superpictorial school" in which, once again,   "subjectivity predominated."           On Photography       94       are confronted with reality on the vastest scale mankind has   known," she declares, and this puts "a greater responsibility on   the photographer."     All that photography's program of realism actually implies is   the belief that reality is hidden. And, being hidden, is something   to be unveiled. Whatever the camera records is a   disclosure — whether it is imperceptible, fleeting parts of   movement, an order that natural vision is incapable of perceiving   or a "heightened reality" (Moholy-Nagy's phrase), or simply the   elliptical way of seeing. What Stieglitz describes as his "patient   waiting for the moment of equilibrium" makes the same   assumption about the essential hiddenness of the real as Robert   Frank's waiting for the moment of revealing disequilibrium, to   catch reality off-guard, in what he calls the "in-between   moments."     Just to show something, anything, in the photographic view is   to show that it is hidden. But it is not necessary for photographers   to point up the mystery with exotic or exceptionally striking   subjects. When Dorothea Lange urges her colleagues to   concentrate on "the familiar," it is with the understanding that   the familiar, rendered by a sensitive use of the camera, will thereby   become mysterious. Photography's commitment to realism does   not limit photography to certain subjects, as more real than others,   but rather illustrates the formalist understanding of what goes   on in every work of art: reality is, in Viktor Shklovsky's word,   de- familiarized. What is being urged is an aggressive relation to   all subjects. Armed with their machines, photographers are to   make an assault on reality — which is perceived as recalcitrant, as   only deceptively available, as unreal. "The pictures have a reality   for me that the people don't," Avedon has declared. "It is through   the photographs that I know them." To claim that photography   must be realistic is not incompatible with opening up an even   wider gap between image and reality, in which the mysteriously   acquired knowledge (and the enhancement of reality) supplied   by photographs presumes a prior alienation from or devaluation   of reality.     As photographers describe it, picture-taking is both a limitless           On Photography       95       technique for appropriating the objective world and an   unavoidably solipsistic expression of the singular self. Photographs   depict realities that already exist, though only the camera can   disclose them. And they depict an individual temperament,   discovering itself through the camera's cropping of reality. For   Moholy-Nagy the genius of photography lies in its ability to render   "an objective portrait: the individual to be photographed so that   the photographic result shall not be encumbered with subjective   intention." For Lange every portrait of another person is a   "self-portrait" of the photographer, as for Minor   White — promoting "self-discovery through a camera" — landscape   photographs are really "inner landscapes." The two ideals are   antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the   world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the   instrument of intrepid, questing subjectivity, the photographer   is all.     Moholy-Nagy's demand for the photographer's self-effacement   follows from his appreciation of how edifying photography is: it   retains and upgrades our powers of observation, it brings about   "a psychological transformation of our eyesight." (In an essay   published in 1936, he says that photography creates or enlarges   eight distinct varieties of seeing: abstract, exact, rapid, slow,   intensified, penetrative, simultaneous, and distorted.) But   self-effacement is also the demand behind quite different,   anti-scientific approaches to photography, such as that expressed   in Robert Frank's credo: "There is one thing the photograph must   contain, the humanity of the moment." In both views the   photographer is proposed as a kind of ideal observer — for   Moholy-Nagy, seeing with the detachment of a researcher; for   Frank, seeing "simply, as through the eyes of the man in the   street."     One attraction of any view of the photographer as ideal   observer — whether impersonal (Moholy-Nagy) or friendly   (Frank) — is that it implicitly denies that picture-taking is in any   way an aggressive act. That it can be so described makes most   professionals extremely defensive. Cartier-Bresson and Avedon   are among the very few to have talked honestly (if ruefully) about         On Photography       96       the exploitative aspect of the photographer's activities. Usually   photographers feel obliged to protest photography's innocence,   claiming that the predatory attitude is incompatible with a good   picture, and hoping that a more affirmative vocabulary will put   over their point. One of the more memorable examples of such   verbiage is Ansel Adams's description of the camera as an   "instrument of love and revelation"; Adams also urges that we   stop saying that we "take" a picture and always say we "make"   one. Stieglitz's name for the cloud studies he did in the late   1920s — "Equivalents," that is, statements of his inner feelings — is   another, soberer instance of the persistent effort of photographers   to feature the benevolent character of picture-taking and discount   its predatory implications. What talented photographers do   cannot of course be characterized either as simply predatory or   as simply, and essentially, benevolent. Photography is the   paradigm of an inherently equivocal connection between self and   world — its version of the ideology of realism sometimes dictating   an effacement of the self in relation to the world, sometimes   authorizing an aggressive relation to the world which celebrates   the self. One side or the other of the connection is always being   rediscovered and championed.     An important result of the coexistence of these two   ideals — assault on reality and submission to reality — is a recurrent   ambivalence toward photography's means. Whatever the claims   for photography as a form of personal expression on a par with   painting, it remains true that its originality is inextricably linked   to the powers of the machine: no one can deny the informativeness   and formal beauty of many photographs made possible by the   steady growth of these powers, like Harold Edgerton's high-speed   photographs of a bullet hitting its target, of the swirls and eddies   of a tennis stroke, or Lennart Nilsson's endoscopic photographs   of the interior of the human body. But as cameras get ever more   sophisticated, more automated, more acute, some photographers   are tempted to disarm themselves or to suggest that they are really   not armed, and prefer to submit themselves to the limits imposed   by a pre-modern camera technology — a cruder, less high-powered   machine being thought to give more interesting or expressive           On Photography       97       results, to leave more room for the creative accident. Not using   fancy equipment has been a point of honor for many   photographers — including Weston, Brandt, Evans,     Cartier-Bresson, Frank — some sticking with a battered camera   of simple design and slow lens that they acquired early in their   careers, some continuing to make their contact prints with   nothing more elaborate than a few trays, a bottle of developer,   and a bottle of hypo solution.     The camera is indeed the instrument of "fast seeing," as one   confident modernist, Alvin Langdon Coburn, declared in 1918,   echoing the Futurist apotheosis of machines and speed.   Photography's present mood of doubt can be gauged by   Cartier-Bresson's recent statement that it may be too fast. The   cult of the future (of faster and faster seeing) alternates with the   wish to return to a more artisanal, purer past — when images still   had a handmade quality, an aura. This nostalgia for some pristine   state of the photographic enterprise underlies the current   enthusiasm for daguerreotypes, stereograph cards, photographic   cartes de visite, family snapshots, the work of forgotten nineteenth-   and early-twentieth-century provincial and commercial   photographers.     But the reluctance to use the newest high-powered equipment   is not the only or indeed the most interesting way in which   photographers express their attraction to photography's past. The   primitivist hankerings that inform current photographic taste are   actually being aided by the ceaseless innovativeness of camera   technology. For many of these advances not only enlarge the   camera's powers but also recapitulate — in a more ingenious, less   cumbersome form — earlier, discarded possibilities of the medium.   Thus, the development of photography hinges on the replacement   of the daguerreotype process, direct positives on metal plates, by   the positive-negative process, whereby from an original (negative)   an unlimited number of prints (positives) can be made. (Although   invented simultaneously in the late 1830s, it was Daguerre's   government-supported invention, announced in 1839 with great   publicity, rather than Fox Talbot's positive-negative process, that   was the first photographic process in general use.) But now the           On Photography       98       camera could be said to be turning back upon itself. The Polaroid   camera revives the principle of the daguerreotype camera: each   print is a unique object. The hologram (a three-dimensional image   created with laser light) could be considered a variant on the   heliogram — the first, cameraless photographs made in the 1820 s   by Nicephore Niepce. And the increasingly popular use of the   camera to produce slides — images which cannot be displayed   permanently or stored in wallets and albums, but can only be   projected on walls or on paper (as aids for drawing) — goes back   even further into the camera's pre-history, for it amounts to using   the photographic camera to do the work of the camera obscura.     "History is pushing us to the brink of a realistic age," according   to Abbott, who summons photographers to make the jump   themselves. But while photographers are perpetually urging each   other to be bolder, a doubt persists about the value of realism   which keeps them oscillating between simplicity and irony,   between insisting on control and cultivating the unexpected,   between the eagerness to take advantage of the complex evolution   of the medium and the wish to reinvent photography from   scratch. Photographers seem to need periodically to resist their   own knowingness and to remystify what they do.     Questions about knowledge are not, historically, photography's   first line of defense. The earliest controversies center on the   question of whether photography's fidelity to appearances and   dependence on a machine did not prevent it from being a fine   art — as distinct from a merely practical art, an arm of science,   and a trade. (That photographs give useful and often startling   kinds of information was obvious from the beginning.   Photographers only started worrying about what they knew, and   what kind of knowledge in a deeper sense a photograph supplies,   after photography was accepted as an art.) For about a century   the defense of photography was identical with the struggle to   establish it as a fine art. Against the charge that photography was   a soulless, mechanical copying of reality, photographers asserted   that it was a vanguard revolt against ordinary standards of seeing,   no less worthy an art than painting.           On Photography       99       Now photographers are choosier about the claims they make.   Since photography has become so entirely respectable as a branch   of the fine arts, they no longer seek the shelter that the notion of   art has intermittently given the photographic enterprise. For all   the important American photographers who have proudly   identified their work with the aims of art (like Stieglitz, White,   Siskind, Callahan, Lange, Laughlin), there are many more who   disavow the question itself. Whether or not the camera's "results   come under the category of Art is irrelevant," Strand wrote in the   1920s; and Moholy-Nagy declared it "quite unimportant whether   photography produces 'art' or not." Photographers who came to   maturity in the 1940s or later are bolder, openly snubbing art,   equating art with artiness. They generally claim to be finding,   recording, impartially observing, witnessing, exploring   themselves — anything but making works of art. At first, it was   photography's commitment to realism that placed it in a   permanently ambivalent relation to art; now it is its modernist   heritage. The fact that important photographers are no longer   willing to debate whether photography is or is not a fine art, except   to proclaim that their work is not involved with art, shows the   extent to which they simply take for granted the concept of art   imposed by the triumph of modernism: the better the art, the   more subversive it is of the traditional aims of art. And modernist   taste has welcomed this unpretentious activity that can be   consumed, almost in spite of itself, as high art.     Even in the nineteenth century, when photography was thought   to be so evidently in need of defense as a fine art, the line of   defense was far from stable. Julia Margaret Cameron's claim that   photography qualifies as an art because, like painting, it seeks the   beautiful was succeeded by Henry Peach Robinson's Wildean   claim that photography is an art because it can lie. In the early   twentieth century Alvin Langdon Coburn's praise of photography   as "the most modern of the arts," because it is a fast, impersonal   way of seeing, competed with Weston's praise of photography as   a new means of individual visual creation. In recent decades the   notion of art has been exhausted as an instrument of polemic;   indeed, a good part of the immense prestige that photography           On Photography       100       has acquired as an art form comes from its declared ambivalence   toward being an art. When photographers now deny that they   are making works of art, it is because they think they are doing   something better than that. Their disclaimers tell us more about   the harried status of any notion of art than about whether   photography is or isn't one.     Despite the efforts of contemporary photographers to exorcise   the specter of art, something lingers. For instance, when   professionals object to having their photographs printed to the   edge of the page in books or magazines, they are invoking the   model inherited from another art: as paintings are put in frames,   photographs should be framed in white space. Another instance:   many photographers continue to prefer black-and-white images,   which are felt to be more tactful, more decorous than color — or   less voyeuristic and less sentimental or crudely lifelike. But the   real basis for this preference is, once again, an implicit comparison   with painting. In the introduction to his book of photographs   The Decisive Moment (1952), Cartier-Bresson justified his   unwillingness to use color by citing technical limitations: the slow   speed of color film, which reduces the depth of focus. But with   the rapid progress in color-film technology during the last two   decades, making possible all the tonal subtlety and high resolution   one might desire, Cartier-Bresson has had to shift his ground,   and now proposes that photographers renounce color as a matter   of principle. In Cartier-Bresson's version of that persistent myth   according to which — following the camera's invention — a division   of territory took place between photography and painting, color   belongs to painting. He enjoins photographers to resist temptation   and keep up their side of the bargain.     Those still involved in defining photography as an art are always   trying to hold some line. But it is impossible to hold the line: any   attempt to restrict photography to certain subjects or certain   techniques, however fruitful these have proved to be, is bound to   be challenged and to collapse. For it is in the very nature of   photography that it be a promiscuous form of seeing, and, in   talented hands, an infallible medium of creation. (As John   Szarkowski observes, "a skillful photographer can photograph           On Photography       101       anything well.") Hence, its longstanding quarrel with art, which   (until recently) meant the results of a discriminating or purified   way of seeing, and a medium of creation governed by standards   that make genuine achievement a rarity. Understandably,   photographers have been reluctant to give up the attempt to define   more narrowly what good photography is. The history of   photography is punctuated by a series of dualistic   controversies — such as the straight print versus the doctored   print, pictorial photography versus documentary   photography — each of which is a different form of the debate   about photography's relation to art: how close it can get while   still retaining its claim to unlimited visual acquisition. Recently,   it has become common to maintain that all these controversies   are now outmoded, which suggests that the debate has been   settled. But it is unlikely that the defense of photography as art   will ever completely subside. As long as photography is not only   a voracious way of seeing but one which needs to claim that it is   a special, distinctive way, photographers will continue to take   shelter (if only covertly) in the defiled but still prestigious   precincts of art.     Photographers who suppose they are getting away from the   pretensions of art as exemplified in painting by taking pictures   remind us of those Abstract Expressionist painters who imagined   they were getting away from art, or Art, by the act of painting   (that is, by treating the canvas as a field of action rather than as   an object). And much of the prestige that photography has   recently acquired as an art is based on the convergence of its   claims with those of more recent painting and sculptured The       * ^     The claims of photography are, of course, much older. For the now familiar practice     that substitutes encounter for fabrication, found objects or situations for made (or     made-up) ones, decision for effort, the prototype is photography's instant art through     the mediation of a machine. It was photography that first put into circulation the idea     of an art that is produced not by pregnancy and childbirth but by a blind date     (Duchamp's theory of "rendezvous"). But professional photographers are much less     secure than their Duchamp-influenced contemporaries in the established fine arts, and     generally hasten to point out that a moment's decision presupposes a long training of           On Photography       102       seemingly insatiable appetite for photography in the 1970s   expresses more than the pleasure of discovering and exploring a   relatively neglected art form; it derives much of its fervor from   the desire to reaffirm the dismissal of abstract art which was one   of the messages of the pop taste of the 1960s. Paying more and   more attention to photographs is a great relief to sensibilities tired   of, or eager to avoid, the mental exertions demanded by abstract   art. Classical modernist painting presupposes highly developed   skills of looking, and a familiarity with other art and with certain   notions about the history of art. Photography, like pop art,   reassures viewers that art isn't hard; it seems to be more about   subjects than about art.     Photography is the most successful vehicle of modernist taste   in its pop version, with its zeal for debunking the high culture of   the past (focusing on shards, junk, odd stuff; excluding nothing);   its conscientious courting of vulgarity; its affection for kitsch; its   skill in reconciling avant-garde ambitions with the rewards of   commercialism; its pseudoradical patronizing of art as reactionary,   elitist, snobbish, insincere, artificial, out of touch with the broad   truths of everyday life; its transformation of art into cultural   document. At the same time, photography has gradually acquired   all the anxieties and self-consciousness of a classic modernist art.   Many professionals are now worried that this populist strategy is   being carried too far, and that the public will forget that   photography is, after all, a noble and exalted activity — in short,   an art. For the modernist promotion of naive art always contains   a joker: that one continue to honor its hidden claim to   sophistication.     It cannot be a coincidence that just about the time that   photographers stopped discussing whether photography is an art,   it was acclaimed as one by the general public and photography   entered, in force, into the museum. The museum's naturalization   of photography as art is the conclusive victory of the century-long       sensibility, of the eye, and to insist that the effortlessness of picture-taking does not   make the photographer any less of an artificer than a painter.           On Photography       103       campaign waged by modernist taste on behalf of an open-ended   definition of art, photography offering a much more suitable   terrain than painting for this effort. For the line between amateur   and professional, primitive and sophisticated is not just harder   to draw with photography than it is with painting — it has little   meaning. Naive or commercial or merely utilitarian photography   is no different in kind from photography as practiced by the most   gifted professionals: there are pictures taken by anonymous   amateurs which are just as interesting, as complex formally, as   representative of photography's characteristic powers as a Stieglitz   or an Evans.     That all the different kinds of photography form one   continuous and interdependent tradition is the once startling,   now obvious-seeming assumption which underlies contemporary   photographic taste and authorizes the indefinite expansion of   that taste. To make this assumption only became plausible when   photography was taken up by curators and historians and regularly   exhibited in museums and art galleries. Photography's career in   the museum does not reward any particular style; rather, it   presents photography as a collection of simultaneous intentions   and styles which, however different, are not perceived as in any   way contradictory. But while the operation has been a huge success   with the public, the response of photography professionals is   mixed. Even as they welcome photography's new legitimacy, many   of them feel threatened when the most ambitious images are   discussed in direct continuity with all sorts of images, from   photojournalism to scientific photography to family   snapshots — charging that this reduces photography to something   trivial, vulgar, a mere craft.     The real problem with bringing functional photographs,   photographs taken for a practical purpose, on commercial   assignment, or as souvenirs, into the mainstream of photographic   achievement is not that it demeans photography, considered as   a fine art, but that the procedure contradicts the nature of most   photographs. In most uses of the camera, the photograph's naive   or descriptive function is paramount. But when viewed in their   new context, the museum or gallery, photographs cease to be           On Photography       104       "about" their subjects in the same direct or primary way; they   become studies in the possibilities of photography. Photography's   adoption by the museum makes photography itself seem   problematic, in the way experienced only by a small number of   self-conscious photographers whose work consists precisely in   questioning the camera's ability to grasp reality. The eclectic   museum collections reinforce the arbitrariness, the subjectivity   of all photographs, including the most straightforwardly   descriptive ones.     Putting on shows of photographs has become as featured a   museum activity as mounting shows of individual painters. But   a photographer is not like a painter, the role of the photographer   being recessive in much of serious picture-taking and virtually   irrelevant in all the ordinary uses. So far as we care about the   subject photographed, we expect the photographer to be an   extremely discreet presence. Thus, the very success of   photojournalism lies in the difficulty of distinguishing one   superior photographer's work from another's, except insofar as   he or she has monopolized a particular subject. These photographs   have their power as images (or copies) of the world, not of an   individual artist's consciousness. And in the vast majority of   photographs which get taken — for scientific and industrial   purposes, by the press, by the military and the police, by   families — any trace of the personal vision of whoever is behind   the camera interferes with the primary demand on the   photograph: that it record, diagnose, inform.     It makes sense that a painting is signed but a photograph is not   (or it seems bad taste if it is). The very nature of photography   implies an equivocal relation to the photographer as auteur, and   the bigger and more varied the work done by a talented   photographer, the more it seems to acquire a kind of corporate   rather than individual authorship. Many of the published   photographs by photography's greatest names seem like work   that could have been done by another gifted professional of their   period. It requires a formal conceit (like Todd Walker's solarized   photographs or Duane Michals's narrative-sequence photographs)   or a thematic obsession (like Eakins with the male nude or           On Photography       105       Laughlin with the Old South) to make work easily recognizable.   For photographers who don't so limit themselves, their body of   work does not have the same integrity as does comparably varied   work in other art forms. Even in those careers with the sharpest   breaks of period and style — think of Picasso, of Stravinsky — one   can perceive the unity of concerns that transcends these breaks   and can (retrospectively) see the inner relation of one period to   another. Knowing the whole body of work, one can see how the   same composer could have written Le Sacre du printemps, the   Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, and the late neo-Schoenbergian   works; one recognizes Stravinsky's hand in all these compositions.   But there is no internal evidence for identifying as the work of a   single photographer (indeed, one of the most interesting and   original of photographers) those studies of human and animal   motion, the documents brought back from photo-expeditions in   Central America, the government-sponsored camera surveys of   Alaska and Yosemite, and the "Clouds" and "Trees" series. Even   after knowing they were all taken by Muybridge, one still can't   relate these series of pictures to each other (though each series   has a coherent, recognizable style), any more than one could infer   the way Atget photographed trees from the way he photographed   Paris shop windows, or connect Roman Vishniac's pre-war   portraits of Polish Jews with the scientific microphotographs he   has been taking since 1945. In photography the subject matter   always pushes through, with different subjects creating   unbridgeable gaps between one period and another of a large   body of work, confounding signature.     Indeed, the very presence of a coherent photographic   style — think of the white backgrounds and flat lighting of   Avedon's portraits, of the distinctive grisaille of Atget's Paris street   studies — seems to imply unified material. And subject matter   seems to have the largest part in shaping a viewer's preferences.   Even when photographs are isolated from the practical context   in which they may originally have been taken, and looked at as   works of art, to prefer one photograph to another seldom means   only that the photograph is judged to be superior formally; it   almost always means — as in more casual kinds of looking — that           On Photography       106       the viewer prefers that kind of mood, or respects that intention,   or is intrigued by (or feels nostalgic about) that subject. The   formalist approaches to photography cannot account for the   power of what has been photographed, and the way distance in   time and cultural distance from the photograph increase our   interest.     Still, it seems logical that contemporary photographic taste has   taken a largely formalist direction. Although the natural or naive   status of subject matter in photography is more secure than in   any other representational art, the very plurality of situations in   which photographs are looked at complicates and eventually   weakens the primacy of subject matter. The conflict of interest   between objectivity and subjectivity, between demonstration and   supposition, is unresolvable. While the authority of a photograph   will always depend on the relation to a subject (that it is a   photograph of something), all claims on behalf of photography   as art must emphasize the subjectivity of seeing. There is an   equivocation at the heart of all aesthetic evaluations of   photographs; and this explains the chronic defensiveness and   extreme mutability of photographic taste.     For a brief time — say, from Stieglitz through the reign of   Weston — it appeared that a solid point of view had been erected   with which to evaluate photographs: impeccable lighting, skill of   composition, clarity of subject, precision of focus, perfection of   print quality. But this position, generally thought of as   Westonian — essentially technical criteria for what makes a   photograph good — is now bankrupt. (Weston's deprecating   appraisal of the great Atget as "not a fine technician" shows its   limitations.) What position has replaced Weston's? A much more   inclusive one, with criteria which shift the center of judgment   from the individual photograph, considered as a finished object,   to the photograph considered as an example of "photographic   seeing." What is meant by photographic seeing would hardly   exclude Weston's work but it would also include a large number   of anonymous, unposed, crudely lit, asymmetrically composed   photographs formerly dismissed for their lack of composition.   The new position aims to liberate photography, as art, from the           On Photography       107       oppressive standards of technical perfection; to liberate   photography from beauty, too. It opens up the possibility of a   global taste, in which no subject (or absence of subject), no   technique (or absence of technique) disqualifies a photograph.     While in principle all subjects are worthy pretexts for exercising   the photographic way of seeing, the convention has arisen that   photographic seeing is clearest in offbeat or trivial subject matter.   Subjects are chosen because they are boring or banal. Because we   are indifferent to them, they best show up the ability of the camera   to "see." When Irving Penn, known for his handsome photographs   of celebrities and food for fashion magazines and ad agencies,   was given a show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1975, it was   for a series of close-ups of cigarette butts. "One might guess,"   commented the director of the museum's Department of   Photography, John Szarkowski, "that [Penn] has only rarely   enjoyed more than a cursory interest in the nominal subjects of   his pictures." Writing about another photographer, Szarkowski   commends what can "be coaxed from subject matter" that is   "profoundly banal." Photography's adoption by the museum is   now firmly associated with those important modernist conceits:   the "nominal subject" and the "profoundly banal." But this   approach not only diminishes the importance of subject matter;   it also loosens the photograph from its connection with a single   photographer. The photographic way of seeing is far from   exhaustively illustrated by the many one-photographer shows   and retrospectives that museums now put on. To be legitimate   as an art, photography must cultivate the notion of the   photographer as auteur and of all photographs taken by the same   photographer as constituting a body of work. These notions are   easier to apply to some photographers than to others. They seem   more applicable to, say, Man Ray, whose style and purposes   straddle photographic and painterly norms, than to Steichen,   whose work includes abstractions, portraits, ads for consumer   goods, fashion photographs, and aerial reconnaissance   photographs (taken during his military career in both world wars).   But the meanings that a photograph acquires when seen as part   of an individual body of work are not particularly to the point           On Photography       108       when the criterion is photographic seeing. Rather, such an   approach must necessarily favor the new meanings that any one   picture acquires when juxtaposed — in ideal anthologies, either   on museum walls or in books — with the work of other   photographers.     Such anthologies are meant to educate taste about photography   in general; to teach a form of seeing which makes all subjects   equivalent. When Szarkowski describes gas stations, empty living   rooms, and other bleak subjects as "patterns of random facts in   the service of [the photographer's] imagination," what he really   means is that these subjects are ideal for the camera. The ostensibly   formalist, neutral criteria of photographic seeing are in fact   powerfully judgmental about subjects and about styles. The   revaluation of naive or casual nineteenth-century photographs,   particularly those which were taken as humble records, is partly   due to their sharp-focus style — a pedagogic corrective to the   "pictorial" soft focus which, from Cameron to Stieglitz, was   associated with photography's claim to be an art. Yet the standards   of photographic seeing do not imply an unalterable commitment   to sharp focus. Whenever serious photography is felt to have been   purged of outmoded relations to art and to prettiness, it could   just as well accommodate a taste for pictorial photography, for   abstraction, for noble subjects rather than cigarette butts and gas   stations and turned backs.     The language in which photographs are generally evaluated is   extremely meager. Sometimes it is parasitical on the vocabulary   of painting: composition, light, and so forth. More often it consists   in the vaguest sorts of judgments, as when photographs are praised   for being subtle, or interesting, or powerful, or complex, or simple,   or — a favorite — deceptively simple.     The reason the language is poor is not fortuitous: say, the   absence of a rich tradition of photographic criticism. It is   something inherent in photography itself, whenever it is viewed   as an art. Photography proposes a process of imagination and an   appeal to taste quite different from that of painting (at least as   traditionally conceived). Indeed, the difference between a good           On Photography       109       photograph and a bad photograph is not at all like the difference   between a good and a bad painting. The norms of aesthetic   evaluation worked out for painting depend on criteria of   authenticity (and fakeness), and of craftsmanship — criteria that   are more permissive or simply non-existent for photography.   And while the tasks of connoisseurship in painting invariably   presume the organic relation of a painting to an individual body   of work with its own integrity, and to schools and iconographical   traditions, in photography a large individual body of work does   not necessarily have an inner stylistic coherence, and an individual   photographer's relation to schools of photography is a much more   superficial affair.     One criterion of evaluation which painting and photography   do share is innovativeness; both paintings and photographs are   often valued because they impose new formal schemes or changes   in the visual language. Another criterion which they can share is   the quality of presence, which Walter Benjamin considered the   defining characteristic of the work of art. Benjamin thought that   a photograph, being a mechanically reproduced object, could not   have genuine presence. It could be argued, however, that the very   situation which is now determinative of taste in photography, its   exhibition in museums and galleries, has revealed that   photographs do possess a kind of authenticity. Furthermore,   although no photograph is an original in the sense that a painting   always is, there is a large qualitative difference between what could   be called originals — prints made from the original negative at the   time (that is, at the same moment in the technological evolution   of photography) that the picture was taken — and subsequent   generations of the same photograph. (What most people know   of the famous photographs — in books, newspapers, magazines,   and so forth — are photographs of photographs; the originals,   which one is likely to see only in a museum or a gallery, offer   visual pleasures which are not reproducible.) The result of   mechanical reproduction, Benjamin says, is to "put the copy of   the original into situations which would be out of reach for the   original itself." But to the extent that, say, a Giotto can still be   said to possess an aura in the situation of museum display, where           On Photography       110       it too has been wrenched from its original context and, like the   photograph, "meets the beholder halfway" (in the strictest sense   of Benjamin's notion of the aura, it does not), to that extent an   Atget photograph printed on the now unobtainable paper he used   can also be said to possess an aura.     The real difference between the aura that a photograph can   have and that of a painting lies in the different relation to time.   The depredations of time tend to work against paintings. But part   of the built-in interest of photographs, and a major source of   their aesthetic value, is precisely the transformations that time   works upon them, the way they escape the intentions of their   makers. Given enough time, many photographs do acquire an   aura. (The fact that color photographs don't age in the way   black-and-white photographs do may partly explain the marginal   status which color has had until very recently in serious   photographic taste. The cold intimacy of color seems to seal off   the photograph from patina.) For while paintings or poems do   not get better, more attractive simply because they are older, all   photographs are interesting as well as touching if they are old   enough. It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such   thing as a bad photograph — only less interesting, less relevant,   less mysterious ones. Photography's adoption by the museum   only accelerates that process which time will bring about anyway:   making all work valuable.     The role of the museum in forming contemporary photographic   taste cannot be overestimated. Museums do not so much arbitrate   what photographs are good or bad as offer new conditions for   looking at all photographs. This procedure, which appears to be   creating standards of evaluation, in fact abolishes them. The   museum cannot be said to have created a secure canon for the   photographic work of the past, as it has for painting. Even as it   seems to be sponsoring a particular photographic taste, the   museum is undermining the very idea of normative taste. Its role   is to show that there are no fixed standards of evaluation, that   there is no canonical tradition of work. Under the museum's   attentions, the very idea of a canonical tradition is exposed as   redundant.           On Photography       111       What keeps photography's Great Tradition always in flux,   constantly being reshuffled, is not that photography is a new art   and therefore somewhat insecure — this is part of what   photographic taste is about. There is a more rapid sequence of   rediscovery in photography than in any other art. Illustrating that   law of taste given its definitive formulation by T. S. Eliot whereby   each important new work necessarily alters our perception of the   heritage of the past, new photographs change how we look at past   photographs. (For example, Arbus's work has made it easier to   appreciate the greatness of the work of Hine, another   photographer devoted to portraying the opaque dignity of   victims.) But the swings in contemporary photographic taste do   not only reflect such coherent and sequential processes of   reevaluation, whereby like enhances like. What they more   commonly express is the complementarity and equal value of   antithetical styles and themes.     For several decades American photography has been dominated   by a reaction against "Westonism" — that is, against contemplative   photography, photography considered as an independent visual   exploration of the world with no evident social urgency. The   technical perfection of Weston's photographs, the calculated   beauties of White and Siskind, the poetic constructions of   Frederick Sommer, the self-assured ironies of Cartier-Bresson — all   these have been challenged by photography that is, at least   programmatically, more naive, more direct; that is hesitant, even   awkward. But taste in photography is not that linear. Without   any weakening of the current commitments to informal   photography and to photography as social document, a perceptible   revival of Weston is now taking place — as, with the passage of   enough time, Weston's work no longer looks timeless; as, by the   much broader definition of naivete with which photographic taste   operates, Weston's work also looks naive.     Finally, there is no reason to exclude any photographer from   the canon. Right now there are mini-revivals of such long-despised   pictorialists from another era as Oscar Gustav Rejlander, Henry   Peach Robinson, and Robert Demachy. As photography takes the   whole world as its subject, there is room for every kind of taste.           On Photography       112       Literary taste does exclude: the success of the modernist   movement in poetry elevated Donne but diminished Dryden.   With literature, one can be eclectic up to a point, but one can't   like everything. With photography, eclecticism has no limits. The   plain photographs from the 1870s of abandoned children admitted   to a London institution called Doctor Barnardo's Home (taken   as "records") are as moving as David Octavius Hill's complex   portraits of Scottish notables of the 1840s (taken as "art"). The   clean look of Weston's classic modern style is not refuted by, say,   Benno Friedman's ingenious recent revival of pictorial blurriness.     This is not to deny that each viewer likes the work of some   photographers more than others: for example, most experienced   viewers today prefer Atget to Weston. What it does mean is that,   by the nature of photography, one is not really obliged to choose;   and that preferences of that sort are, for the most part, merely   reactive. Taste in photography tends to be, is perhaps necessarily,   global, eclectic, permissive, which means that in the end it must   deny the difference between good taste and bad taste. This is what   makes all the attempts of photography polemicists to erect a canon   seem ingenuous or ignorant. For there is something fake about   all photographic controversies — and the attentions of the museum   have played a crucial role in making this clear. The museum levels   up all schools of photography. Indeed, it makes little sense even   to speak of schools. In the history of painting, movements have   a genuine life and function: painters are often much better   understood in terms of the school or movement to which they   belonged. But movements in the history of photography are   fleeting, adventitious, sometimes merely perfunctory, and no   first-rate photographer is better understood as a member of a   group. (Think of Stieglitz and Photo-Secession, Weston and/64,   Renger-Patzsch and the New Objectivity, Walker Evans and the   Farm Security Administration project, Cartier-Bresson and   Magnum.) To group photographers in schools or movements   seems to be a kind of misunderstanding, based (once again) on   the irrepressible but invariably misleading analogy between   photography and painting.     The leading role now played by museums in forming and           On Photography       113       clarifying the nature of photographic taste seems to mark a new   stage from which photography cannot turn back. Accompanying   its tendentious respect for the profoundly banal is the museum's   diffusion of a historicist view, one that inexorably promotes the   entire history of photography. Small wonder that photography   critics and photographers seem anxious. Underlying many of the   recent defenses of photography is the fear that photography is   already a senile art, littered by spurious or dead movements; that   the only task left is curatorship and historiography. (While prices   skyrocket for photographs old and new.) It is not surprising that   this demoralization should be felt at the moment of photography's   greatest acceptance, for the true extent of photography's triumph   as art, and over art, has not really been understood.     Photography entered the scene as an upstart activity, which   seemed to encroach on and diminish an accredited art: painting.   For Baudelaire, photography was painting's "mortal enemy"; but   eventually a truce was worked out, according to which   photography was held to be painting's liberator. Weston employed   the most common formula for easing the defensiveness of painters   when he wrote in 1930: "Photography has, or will eventually,   negate much painting — for which the painter should be deeply   grateful." Freed by photography from the drudgery of faithful   representation, painting could pursue a higher task: abstraction.*       *     Valery claimed that photography performed the same service for writing, by exposing   the "illusory" claim of language to "convey the idea of a visual object with any degree   of precision." But writers should not fear that photography "might ultimately restrict   the importance of the art of writing and act as its substitute," Valery says in "The   Centenary of Photography" (1929). If photography "discourages us from describing,"   he argues,     we are thus reminded of the limits of language and are advised, as writers, to put   our tools to a use more befitting their true nature. A literature would purify itself if   it left to other modes of expression and production the tasks which they can perform   far more effectively, and devoted itself to ends it alone can accomplish. . .one of which   [is] the perfecting of language that constructs or expounds abstract thought, the   other exploring all the variety of poetic patterns and resonances.           On Photography       114       Indeed, the most persistent idea in histories of photography and   in photography criticism is this mythic pact concluded between   painting and photography, which authorized both to pursue their   separate but equally valid tasks, while creatively influencing each   other. In fact, the legend falsifies much of the history of both   painting and photography. The camera's way of fixing the   appearance of the external world suggested new patterns of   pictorial composition and new subjects to painters: creating a   preference for the fragment, raising interest in glimpses of humble   life, and in studies of fleeting motion and the effects of light.   Painting did not so much turn to abstraction as adopt the camera's   eye, becoming (to borrow Mario Praz's words) telescopic,   microscopic, and photoscopic in structure. But painters have   never stopped attempting to imitate the realistic effects of   photography. And, far from confining itself to realistic   representation and leaving abstraction to painters, photography   has kept up with and absorbed all the anti-naturalistic conquests   of painting.     More generally, this legend does not take into account the   voraciousness of the photographic enterprise. In the transactions   between painting and photography, photography has always had       Valery's argument is not convincing. Although a photograph may be said to record   or show or present, it does not ever, properly speaking, "describe"; only language de-   scribes, which is an event in time. Valery suggests opening a passport as "proof' of his   argument: "the description scrawled there does not bear comparison with the snapshot   stapled alongside it." But this is using description in the most debased, impoverished   sense; there are passages in Dickens or Nabokov which describe a face or a part of the   body better than any photograph. Nor does it argue for the inferior descriptive powers   of literature to say, as Valery does, that "the writer who depicts a landscape or a face,   no matter how skillful he may be at his craft, will suggest as many different visions as   he has readers." The same is true of a photograph.     As the still photograph is thought to have freed writers from the obligation of describ-   ing, movies are often held to have usurped the novelist's task of narrating or story-   telling — thereby, some claim, freeing the novel for other, less realistic tasks. This version   of the argument is more plausible, because movies are a temporal art. But it does not   do justice to the relation between novels and films.           On Photography       115       the upper hand. There is nothing surprising in the fact that   painters from Delacroix and Turner to Picasso and Bacon have   used photographs as visual aids, but no one expects photographers   to get help from painting. Photographs may be incorporated or   transcribed into the painting (or collage, or combine), but   photography encapsulates art itself. The experience of looking at   paintings may help us to look better at photographs. But   photography has weakened our experience of painting. (In more   than one sense, Baudelaire was right.) Nobody ever found a   lithograph or an engraving of a painting — the popular older   methods of mechanical reproduction — more satisfying or more   exciting than the painting. But photographs, which turn   interesting details into autonomous compositions, which   transform true colors into brilliant colors, provide new, irresistible   satisfactions. The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond   the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give   more accurate reports on reality (including works of art).   Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as   a letdown. Photographs make normative an experience of art that   is mediated, second-hand, intense in a different way. (To deplore   that photographs of paintings have become substitutes for the   paintings for many people is not to support any mystique of "the   original" that addresses the viewer without mediation. Seeing is   a complex act, and no great painting communicates its value and   quality without some form of preparation and instruction.   Moreover, the people who have a harder time seeing the original   work of art after seeing the photographic copy are generally those   who would have seen very little in the original.)     As most works of art (including photographs) are now known   from photographic copies, photography — and the art activities   derived from the model of photography, and the mode of taste   derived from photographic taste — has decisively transformed the   traditional fine arts and the traditional norms of taste, including   the very idea of the work of art. Less and less does the work of art   depend on being a unique object, an original made by an   individual artist. Much of painting today aspires to the qualities   of reproducible objects. Finally, photographs have become so           On Photography       116       much the leading visual experience that we now have works of   art which are produced in order to be photographed. In much of   conceptual art, in Christo's packaging of the landscape, in the   earthworks of Walter De Maria and Robert Smithson, the artist's   work is known principally by the photographic report of it in   galleries and museums; sometimes the size is such that it can only   be known in a photograph (or from an airplane). The photograph   is not, even ostensibly, meant to lead us back to an original   experience.     It was on the basis of this presumed truce between photography   and painting that photography was — grudgingly at first, then   enthusiastically — acknowledged as a fine art. But the very question   of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a   misleading one. Although photography generates works that can   be called art — it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic   pleasure — photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all.   Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other   things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific   discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists,   and Balzac's Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport   pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays,   wedding pictures, and Atget's Paris. Photography is not an art   like, say, painting and poetry. Although the activities of some   photographers conform to the traditional notion of a fine art, the   activity of exceptionally talented individuals producing discrete   objects that have value in themselves, from the beginning   photography has also lent itself to that notion of art which says   that art is obsolete. The power of photography — and its centrality   in present aesthetic concerns — is that it confirms both ideas of   art. But the way in which photography renders art obsolete is, in   the long run, stronger.     Painting and photography are not two potentially competitive   systems for producing and reproducing images, which simply   had to arrive at a proper division of territory to be reconciled.   Photography is an enterprise of another order. Photography,   though not an art form in itself, has the peculiar capacity to turn   all its subjects into works of art. Superseding the issue of whether           On Photography       117       photography is or is not an art is the fact that photography heralds   (and creates) new ambitions for the arts. It is the prototype of the   characteristic direction taken in our time by both the modernist   high arts and the commercial arts: the transformation of arts into   meta-arts or media. (Such developments as film, TV, video, the   tape-based music of Cage, Stockhausen, and Steve Reich are logical   extensions of the model established by photography.) The   traditional fine arts are elitist: their characteristic form is a single   work, produced by an individual; they imply a hierarchy of subject   matter in which some subjects are considered important,   profound, noble, and others unimportant, trivial, base. The media   are democratic: they weaken the role of the specialized producer   or auteur (by using procedures based on chance, or mechanical   techniques which anyone can learn; and by being corporate or   collaborative efforts); they regard the whole world as material.   The traditional fine arts rely on the distinction between authentic   and fake, between original and copy, between good taste and bad   taste; the media blur, if they do not abolish outright, these   distinctions. The fine arts assume that certain experiences or   subjects have a meaning. The media are essentially contentless   (this is the truth behind Marshall McLuhan's celebrated remark   about the message being the medium itself); their characteristic   tone is ironic, or dead-pan, or parodistic. It is inevitable that more   and more art will be designed to end as photographs. A modernist   would have to rewrite Pater's dictum that all art aspires to the   condition of music. Now all art aspires to the condition of   photography.             On Photography       119         The Image-World       Reality has always been interpreted through the reports given by   images; and philosophers since Plato have tried to loosen our   dependence on images by evoking the standard of an image-free   way of apprehending the real. But when, in the mid-nineteenth   century, the standard finally seemed attainable, the retreat of old   religious and political illusions before the advance of humanistic   and scientific thinking did not — as anticipated — create mass   defections to the real. On the contrary, the new age of unbelief   strengthened the allegiance to images. The credence that could   no longer be given to realities understood in the form of images   was now being given to realities understood to he images, illusions.   In the preface to the second edition (1843) of The Essence of   Christianity, Feuerbach observes about "our era" that it "prefers   the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation   to the reality, appearance to being" — while being aware of doing   just that. And his premonitory complaint has been transformed   in the twentieth century into a widely agreed-on diagnosis: that   a society becomes "modern" when one of its chief activities is   producing and consuming images, when images that have   extraordinary powers to determine our demands upon reality   and are themselves coveted substitutes for firsthand experience   become indispensable to the health of the economy, the stability   of the polity, and the pursuit of private happiness.     Feuerbach's words — he is writing a few years after the invention   of the camera — seem, more specifically, a presentiment of the   impact of photography. For the images that have virtually         On Photography       120       unlimited authority in a modern society are mainly photographic   images; and the scope of that authority stems from the properties   peculiar to images taken by cameras.     Such images are indeed able to usurp reality because first of all   a photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an   interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly   stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask. While a   painting, even one that meets photographic standards of   resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation,   a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation   (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject   in a way that no painting can be. Between two fantasy alternatives,   that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted   Shakespeare or that a prototype of the camera had been invented   early enough to have photographed him, most Bardolators would   choose the photograph. This is not just because it would   presumably show what Shakespeare really looked like, for even   if the hypothetical photograph were faded, barely legible, a   brownish shadow, we would probably still prefer it to another   glorious Holbein. Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be   like having a nail from the True Cross.     Most contemporary expressions of concern that an image- world   is replacing the real one continue to echo, as Feuerbach did, the   Platonic depreciation of the image: true insofar as it resembles   something real, sham because it is no more than a resemblance.   But this venerable naive realism is somewhat beside the point in   the era of photographic images, for its blunt contrast between the   image ("copy") and the thing depicted (the "original") — which   Plato repeatedly illustrates with the example of a painting — does   not fit a photograph in so simple a way. Neither does the contrast   help in understanding image-making at its origins, when it was   a practical, magical activity, a means of appropriating or gaining   power over something. The further back we go in history, as E.   H. Gombrich has observed, the less sharp is the distinction   between images and real things; in primitive societies, the thing   and its image were simply two different, that is, physically distinct,   manifestations of the same energy or spirit. Hence, the supposed           On Photography       121       efficacy of images in propitiating and gaining control over   powerful presences. Those powers, those presences were present   in them.     For defenders of the real from Plato to Feuerbach to equate   image with mere appearance — that is, to presume that the image   is absolutely distinct from the object depicted — is part of that   process of desacralization which separates us irrevocably from   the world of sacred times and places in which an image was taken   to participate in the reality of the object depicted. What defines   the originality of photography is that, at the very moment in the   long, increasingly secular history of painting when secularism is   entirely triumphant, it revives — in wholly secular     terms — something like the primitive status of images. Our   irrepressible feeling that the photographic process is something   magical has a genuine basis. No one takes an easel painting to be   in any sense co-substantial with its subject; it only represents or   refers. But a photograph is not only like its subject, a homage to   the subject. It is part of, an extension of that subject; and a potent   means of acquiring it, of gaining control over it.     Photography is acquisition in several forms. In its simplest   form, we have in a photograph surrogate possession of a cherished   person or thing, a possession which gives photographs some of   the character of unique objects. Through photographs, we also   have a consumer's relation to events, both to events which are   part of our experience and to those which are not — a distinction   between types of experience that such habit-forming   consumership blurs. A third form of acquisition is that, through   image-making and image-duplicating machines, we can acquire   something as information (rather than experience). Indeed, the   importance of photographic images as the medium through which   more and more events enter our experience is, finally, only a   byproduct of their effectiveness in furnishing knowledge   dissociated from and independent of experience.     This is the most inclusive form of photographic acquisition.   Through being photographed, something becomes part of a   system of information, fitted into schemes of classification and   storage which range from the crudely chronological order of           On Photography       122       snapshot sequences pasted in family albums to the dogged   accumulations and meticulous filing needed for photography's   uses in weather forecasting, astronomy, microbiology, geology,   police work, medical training and diagnosis, military   reconnaissance, and art history. Photographs do more than   redefine the stuff of ordinary experience (people, things, events,   whatever we see — albeit differently, often inattentively — with   natural vision) and add vast amounts of material that we never   see at all. Reality as such is redefined — as an item for exhibition,   as a record for scrutiny, as a target for surveillance. The   photographic exploration and duplication of the world fragments   continuities and feeds the pieces into an interminable dossier,   thereby providing possibilities of control that could not even be   dreamed of under the earlier system of recording information:   writing.     That photographic recording is always, potentially, a means of   control was already recognized when such powers were in their   infancy. In 1850, Delacroix noted in his Journal the success of   some "experiments in photography" being made at Cambridge,   where astronomers were photographing the sun and the moon   and had managed to obtain a pinhead-size impression of the star   Vega. He added the following "curious" observation:     Since the light of the star which was daguerreotyped took   twenty years to traverse the space separating it from the   earth, the ray which was fixed on the plate had consequently   left the celestial sphere a long time before Daguerre had   discovered the process by means of which we have just gained   control of this light.     Leaving behind such puny notions of control as Delacroix's,   photography's progress has made ever more literal the senses in   which a photograph gives control over the thing photographed.   The technology that has already minimized the extent to which   the distance separating photographer from subject affects the   precision and magnitude of the image; provided ways to   photograph things which are unimaginably small as well as those,   like stars, which are unimaginably far; rendered picture-taking           On Photography       123       independent of light itself (infrared photography) and freed the   picture- object from its confinement to two dimensions   (holography); shrunk the interval between sighting the picture   and holding it in one's hands (from the first Kodak, when it took   weeks for a developed roll of film to be returned to the amateur   photographer, to the Polaroid, which ejects the image in a few   seconds); not only got images to move (cinema) but achieved   their simultaneous recording and transmission (video) — this   technology has made photography an incomparable tool for   deciphering behavior, predicting it, and interfering with it.     Photography has powers that no other image-system has ever   enjoyed because, unlike the earlier ones, it is not dependent on   an image maker. However carefully the photographer intervenes   in setting up and guiding the image-making process, the process   itself remains an optical-chemical (or electronic) one, the   workings of which are automatic, the machinery for which will   inevitably be modified to provide still more detailed and,   therefore, more useful maps of the real. The mechanical genesis   of these images, and the literalness of the powers they confer,   amounts to a new relationship between image and reality. And if   photography could also be said to restore the most primitive   relationship — the partial identity of image and object — the   potency of the image is now experienced in a very different way.   The primitive notion of the efficacy of images presumes that   images possess the qualities of real things, but our inclination is   to attribute to real things the qualities of an image.     As everyone knows, primitive people fear that the camera will   rob them of some part of their being. In the memoir he published   in 1900, at the end of a very long life, Nadar reports that Balzac   had a similar "vague dread" of being photographed. His   explanation, according to Nadar, was that     every body in its natural state was made up of a series of   ghostly images superimposed in layers to infinity, wrapped   in infinitesimal films.... Man never having been able to   create, that is to make something material from an   apparition, from something impalpable, or to make from           On Photography       124       nothing, an object — each Daguerreian operation was   therefore going to lay hold of, detach, and use up one of the   layers of the body on which it focused.     It seems fitting for Balzac to have had this particular brand of   trepidation — "Was Balzac's fear of the Daguerreotype real or   feigned?" Nadar asks. "It was real..." — since the procedure of   photography is a materializing, so to speak, of what is most   original in his procedure as a novelist. The Balzacian operation   was to magnify tiny details, as in a photographic enlargement, to   juxtapose incongruous traits or items, as in a photographic layout:   made expressive in this way, any one thing can be connected with   everything else. For Balzac, the spirit of an entire milieu could be   disclosed by a single material detail, however paltry or   arbitrary-seeming. The whole of a life may be summed up in a   momentary appearance.* And a change in appearances is a change   in the person, for he refused to posit any "real" person ensconced   behind these appearances. Balzac's fanciful theory, expressed to   Nadar, that a body is composed of an infinite series of "ghostly   images," eerily parallels the supposedly realistic theory expressed   in his novels, that a person is an aggregate of appearances,   appearances which can be made to yield, by proper focusing,   infinite layers of significance. To view reality as an endless set of   situations which mirror each other, to extract analogies from the   most dissimilar things, is to anticipate the characteristic form of       I am drawing on the account of Balzac's realism in Erich Auerbach's Mimesis. The   passage that Auerbach analyzes from the beginning of Le Pere Goriot (1834) — Balzac   is describing the dining room of the Vauquer pension at seven in the morning and the   entry of Madame Vauquer — could hardly be more explicit (or proto-Proustian). "Her   whole person," Balzac writes, "explains the pension, as the pension implies her person ....   The short-statured woman's blowsy embonpointis the product of the life here, as typhoid   is the consequence of the exhalations of a hospital. Her knitted wool petticoat, which   is longer than her outer skirt (made of an old dress), and whose wadding is escaping   by the gaps in the splitting material, sums up the drawing-room, the dining room, the   little garden, announces the cooking and gives an inkling of the boarders. When she is   there, the spectacle is complete."           On Photography       125       perception stimulated by photographic images. Reality itself has   started to be understood as a kind of writing, which has to be   decoded — even as photographed images were themselves first   compared to writing. (Niepce's name for the process whereby the   image appears on the plate was heliography, sun-writing; Fox   Talbot called the camera "the pencil of nature.")     The problem with Feuerbach's contrast of "original" with   "copy" is its static definitions of reality and image. It assumes that   what is real persists, unchanged and intact, while only images   have changed: shored up by the most tenuous claims to credibility,   they have somehow become more seductive. But the notions of   image and reality are complementary. When the notion of reality   changes, so does that of the image, and vice versa. "Our era" does   not prefer images to real things out of perversity but partly in   response to the ways in which the notion of what is real has been   progressively complicated and weakened, one of the early ways   being the criticism of reality as facade which arose among the   enlightened middle classes in the last century. (This was of course   the very opposite of the effect intended.) To reduce large parts of   what has hitherto been regarded as real to mere fantasy, as   Feuerbach did when he called religion "the dream of the human   mind" and dismissed theological ideas as psychological   projections; or to inflate the random and trivial details of everyday   life into ciphers of hidden historical and psychological forces, as   Balzac did in his encyclopedia of social reality in novel   form — these are themselves ways of experiencing reality as a set   of appearances, an image.     Few people in this society share the primitive dread of cameras   that comes from thinking of the photograph as a material part of   themselves. But some trace of the magic remains: for example, in   our reluctance to tear up or throw away the photograph of a loved   one, especially of someone dead or far away. To do so is a ruthless   gesture of rejection. In Jude the Obscure it is Jude's discovery that   Arabella has sold the maple frame with the photograph of himself   in it which he gave her on their wedding day that signifies to Jude   "the utter death of every sentiment in his wife" and is "the   conclusive little stroke to demolish all sentiment in him." But the           On Photography       126       true modern primitivism is not to regard the image as a real thing;   photographic images are hardly that real. Instead, reality has come   to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras. It is   common now for people to insist about their experience of a   violent event in which they were caught up — a plane crash, a   shoot-out, a terrorist bombing — that "it seemed like a movie."   This is said, other descriptions seeming insufficient, in order to   explain how real it was. While many people in non- industrialized   countries still feel apprehensive when being photographed,   divining it to be some kind of trespass, an act of disrespect, a   sublimated looting of the personality or the culture, people in   industrialized countries seek to have their photographs taken — feel   that they are images, and are made real by photographs.     A steadily more complex sense of the real creates its own   compensatory fervors and simplifications, the most addictive of   which is picture-taking. It is as if photographers, responding to   an increasingly depleted sense of reality, were looking for a   transfusion — traveling to new experiences, refreshing the old   ones. Their ubiquitous activities amount to the most radical, and   the safest, version of mobility. The urge to have new experiences   is translated into the urge to take photographs: experience seeking   a crisis-proof form.     As the taking of photographs seems almost obligatory to those   who travel about, the passionate collecting of them has special   appeal for those confined — either by choice, incapacity, or   coercion — to indoor space. Photograph collections can be used   to make a substitute world, keyed to exalting or consoling or   tantalizing images. A photograph can be the starting point of a   romance (Hardy's Jude had already fallen in love with Sue   Bridehead's photograph before he met her), but it is more   common for the erotic relation to be not only created by but   understood as limited to the photographs. In Cocteau's Les Enfants   Terribles, the narcissistic brother and sister share their bedroom,   their "secret room," with images of boxers, movie stars, and   murderers. Isolating themselves in their lair to live out their   private legend, the two adolescents put up these photographs, a           On Photography       127       private pantheon. On one wall of cell No. 426 in Fresnes Prison   in the early 1940s Jean Genet pasted the photographs of twenty   criminals he had clipped from newspapers, twenty faces in which   he discerned "the sacred sign of the monster," and in their honor   wrote Our Lady of the Flowers', they served as his muses, his   models, his erotic talismans. "They watch over my little routines,"   writes Genet — conflating reverie, masturbation, and writing — and   "are all the family I have and my only friends." For stay-at-homes,   prisoners, and the self- imprisoned, to live among the photographs   of glamorous strangers is a sentimental response to isolation and   an insolent challenge to it.     J. G. Ballard's novel Crash (1973) describes a more specialized   collecting of photographs in the service of sexual obsession:   photographs of car accidents which the narrator's friend Vaughan   collects while preparing to stage his own death in a car crash. The   acting out of his erotic vision of car death is anticipated and the   fantasy itself further eroticized by the repeated perusal of these   photographs. At one end of the spectrum, photographs are   objective data; at the other end, they are items of psychological   science fiction. And as in even the most dreadful, or   neutral-seeming, reality a sexual imperative can be found, so even   the most banal photograph- document can mutate into an emblem   of desire. The mug shot is a clue to a detective, an erotic fetish to   a fellow thief. To Hofrat Behrens, in The Magic Mountain, the   pulmonary X-rays of his patients are diagnostic tools. To Hans   Castorp, serving an indefinite sentence in Behrens's TB   sanatorium, and made lovesick by the enigmatic, unattainable   Clavdia Chauchat, "Clavdia's X-ray portrait, showing not her   face, but the delicate bony structure of the upper half of her body,   and the organs of the thoracic cavity, surrounded by the pale,   ghostlike envelope of flesh," is the most precious of trophies. The   "transparent portrait" is a far more intimate vestige of his beloved   than the Hofrat's painting of Clavdia, that "exterior portrait,"   which Hans had once gazed at with such longing.     Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as   recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge   a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote.           On Photography       128       One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by)   images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary   prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possess the   past. Nothing could be more unlike the self-sacrificial travail of   an artist like Proust than the effortlessness of picture-taking, which   must be the sole activity resulting in accredited works of art in   which a single movement, a touch of the finger, produces a   complete work. While the Proustian labors presuppose that reality   is distant, photography implies instant access to the real. But the   results of this practice of instant access are another way of creating   distance. To possess the world in the form of images is, precisely,   to reexperience the unreality and remoteness of the real.     The strategy of Proust's realism presumes distance from what   is normally experienced as real, the present, in order to reanimate   what is usually available only in a remote and shadowy form, the   past — which is where the present becomes in his sense real, that   is, something that can be possessed. In this effort photographs   were of no help. Whenever Proust mentions photographs, he   does so disparagingly: as a synonym for a shallow, too exclusively   visual, merely voluntary relation to the past, whose yield is   insignificant compared with the deep discoveries to be made by   responding to cues given by all the senses — the technique he called   "involuntary memory." One can't imagine the Overture to   Swann's Way ending with the narrator's coming across a snapshot   of the parish church at Combray and the savoring of that visual   crumb, instead of the taste of the humble madeleine dipped in   tea, making an entire part of his past spring into view. But this is   not because a photograph cannot evoke memories (it can,   depending on the quality of the viewer rather than of the   photograph) but because of what Proust makes clear about his   own demands upon imaginative recall, that it be not just extensive   and accurate but give the texture and essence of things. And by   considering photographs only so far as he could use them, as an   instrument of memory, Proust somewhat misconstrues what   photographs are: not so much an instrument of memory as an   invention of it or a replacement.     It is not reality that photographs make immediately accessible,           On Photography       129       but images. For example, now all adults can know exactly how   they and their parents and grandparents looked as children — a   knowledge not available to anyone before the invention of   cameras, not even to that tiny minority among whom it was   customary to commission paintings of their children. Most of   these portraits were less informative than any snapshot. And even   the very wealthy usually owned just one portrait of themselves or   any of their forebears as children, that is, an image of one moment   of childhood, whereas it is common to have many photographs   of oneself, the camera offering the possibility of possessing a   complete record, at all ages. The point of the standard portraits   in the bourgeois household of the eighteenth and nineteenth   centuries was to confirm an ideal of the sitter (proclaiming social   standing, embellishing personal appearance); given this purpose,   it is clear why their owners did not feel the need to have more   than one. What the photograph- record confirms is, more   modestly, simply that the subject exists; therefore, one can never   have too many.     The fear that a subject's uniqueness was leveled by being   photographed was never so frequently expressed as in the 1850s,   the years when portrait photography gave the first example of   how cameras could create instant fashions and durable industries.   In Melville's Pierre, published at the start of the decade, the hero,   another fevered champion of voluntary isolation,     considered with what infinite readiness now, the most   faithful portrait of any one could be taken by the   Daguerreotype, whereas in former times a faithful portrait   was only within the power of the moneyed, or mental   aristocrats of the earth. How natural then the inference, that   instead of, as in old times, immortalizing a genius, a portrait   now only dayalized a dunce. Besides, when every body has   his portrait published, true distinction lies in not having   yours published at all.     But if photographs demean, paintings distort in the opposite way:   they make grandiose. Melville's intuition is that all forms of   portraiture in the business civilization are compromised; at least,           On Photography       130       so it appears to Pierre, a paragon of alienated sensibility. Just as   a photograph is too little in a mass society, a painting is too much.   The nature of a painting, Pierre observes, makes it     better entitled to reverence than the man; inasmuch as   nothing belittling can be imagined concerning the portrait,   whereas many unavoidably belittling things can be fancied   as touching the man.     Even if such ironies can be considered to have been dissolved by   the completeness of photography's triumph, the main difference   between a painting and a photograph in the matter of portraiture   still holds. Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do   not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing   biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting,   implies that there will be others.     "Ever — the Human Document to keep the present and the   future in touch with the past," said Lewis Hine. But what   photography supplies is not only a record of the past but a new   way of dealing with the present, as the effects of the countless   billions of contemporary photograph-documents attest. While   old photographs fill out our mental image of the past, the   photographs being taken now transform what is present into a   mental image, like the past. Cameras establish an inferential   relation to the present (reality is known by its traces), provide an   instantly retroactive view of experience. Photographs give mock   forms of possession: of the past, the present, even the future. In   Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading (1938), the prisoner   Cincinnatus is shown the "photohoroscope" of a child cast by the   sinister M'sieur Pierre: an album of photographs of little Emmie   as an infant, then a small child, then pre-pubescent, as she is now,   then — by retouching and using photographs of her mother — of   Emmie the adolescent, the bride, the thirty-year-old, concluding   with a photograph at age forty, Emmie on her deathbed. A   "parody of the work of time" is what Nabokov calls this exemplary   artifact; it is also a parody of the work of photography.     Photography, which has so many narcissistic uses, is also a           On Photography       131       powerful instrument for depersonalizing our relation to the world;   and the two uses are complementary. Like a pair of binoculars   with no right or wrong end, the camera makes exotic things near,   intimate; and familiar things small, abstract, strange, much farther   away. It offers, in one easy, habit-forming activity, both   participation and alienation in our own lives and those of   others — allowing us to participate, while confirming alienation.   War and photography now seem inseparable, and plane crashes   and other horrific accidents always attract people with cameras.   A society which makes it normative to aspire never to experience   privation, failure, misery, pain, dread disease, and in which death   itself is regarded not as natural and inevitable but as a cruel,   unmerited disaster, creates a tremendous curiosity about these   events — a curiosity that is partly satisfied through picture-taking.   The feeling of being exempt from calamity stimulates interest in   looking at painful pictures, and looking at them suggests and   strengthens the feeling that one is exempt. Partly it is because one   is "here," not "there," and partly it is the character of inevitability   that all events acquire when they are transmuted into images. In   the real world, something is happening and no one knows what   is going to happen. In the image-world, it has happened, and it   will forever happen in that way.     Knowing a great deal about what is in the world (art,   catastrophe, the beauties of nature) through photographic images,   people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when   they see the real thing. For photographic images tend to subtract   feeling from something we experience at first hand and the feelings   they do arouse are, largely, not those we have in real life. Often   something disturbs us more in photographed form than it does   when we actually experience it. In a hospital in Shanghai in 1973,   watching a factory worker with advanced ulcers have nine-tenths   of his stomach removed under acupuncture anesthesia, I managed   to follow the three-hour procedure (the first operation I'd ever   observed) without queasiness, never once feeling the need to look   away. In a movie theater in Paris a year later, the less gory   operation in Antonioni's China documentary Chung Kuo made   me flinch at the first cut of the scalpel and avert my eyes several           On Photography       132       times during the sequence. One is vulnerable to disturbing events   in the form of photographic images in a way that one is not to   the real thing. That vulnerability is part of the distinctive passivity   of someone who is a spectator twice over, spectator of events   already shaped, first by the participants and second by the image   maker. For the real operation I had to get scrubbed, don a surgical   gown, then stand alongside the busy surgeons and nurses with   my roles to play: inhibited adult, well-mannered guest, respectful   witness. The movie operation precludes not only this modest   participation but whatever is active in spectatorship. In the   operating room, I am the one who changes focus, who makes the   close-ups and the medium shots. In the theater, Antonioni has   already chosen what parts of the operation I can watch; the camera   looks for me — and obliges me to look, leaving as my only option   not to look. Further, the movie condenses something that takes   hours to a few minutes, leaving only interesting parts presented   in an interesting way, that is, with the intent to stir or shock. The   dramatic is dramatized, by the didactics of layout and montage.   We turn the page in a photo-magazine, a new sequence starts in   a movie, making a contrast that is sharper than the contrast   between successive events in real time.     Nothing could be more instructive about the meaning of   photography for us — as, among other things, a method of hyping   up the real — than the attacks on Antonioni's film in the Chinese   press in early 1974. They make a negative catalogue of all the   devices of modern photography, still and film.* While for us       See A Vicious Motive, Despicable Tricks — A Criticism of Antonioni's Anti-China Film   "China" (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1974), an eighteen-page pamphlet (unsigned)   which reproduces an article that appeared in the paper Renminh Ribao on January 30,   1974; and "Repudiating Antonioni's Anti-China Film," Peking Review, No. 8 (February   22, 1974), which supplies abridged versions of three other articles published that month.   The aim of these articles is not, of course, to expound a view of photography — their   interest on that score is inadvertent — but to construct a model ideological enemy, as   in other mass educational campaigns staged during this period. Given this purpose, it   was as unnecessary for the tens of millions mobilized in meetings held in schools, fac-   tories, army units, and communes around the country to "Criticize Antonioni's Anti-           On Photography       133       photography is intimately connected with discontinuous ways of   seeing (the point is precisely to see the whole by means of a   part — an arresting detail, a striking way of cropping), in China   it is connected only with continuity. Not only are there proper   subjects for the camera, those which are positive, inspirational   (exemplary activities, smiling people, bright weather), and orderly,   but there are proper ways of photographing, which derive from   notions about the moral order of space that preclude the very   idea of photographic seeing. Thus Antonioni was reproached for   photographing things that were old, or old-fashioned — "he sought   out and took dilapidated walls and blackboard newspapers   discarded long ago"; paying "no attention to big and small tractors   working in the fields, [he] chose only a donkey pulling a stone   roller" — and for showing undecorous moments — "he disgustingly   filmed people blowing their noses and going to the latrine" — and   undisciplined movement — "instead of taking shots of pupils in   the classroom in our factory-run primary school, he filmed the   children running out of the classroom after a class." And he was   accused of denigrating the right subjects by his way of   photographing them: by using "dim and dreary colors" and hiding   people in "dark shadows"; by treating the same subject with a   variety of shots — "there are sometimes long-shots, sometimes   close-ups, sometimes from the front, and sometimes from   behind" — that is, for not showing things from the point of view   of a single, ideally placed observer; by using high and low   angles — "The camera was intentionally turned on this magnificent   modern bridge from very bad angles in order to make it appear   crooked and tottering"; and by not taking enough full shots — "He   racked his brain to get such close-ups in an attempt to distort the   people's image and uglify their spiritual outlook."     Besides the mass-produced photographic iconography of   revered leaders, revolutionary kitsch, and cultural treasures, one   often sees photographs of a private sort in China. Many people   possess pictures of their loved ones, tacked to the wall or stuck       China Film" to have actually seen Chung Kuo as it was for the participants in the   "Criticize Lin Piao and Confucius" campaign of 1976 to have read a text of Confucius.           On Photography       134       under the glass on top of the dresser or office desk. A large number   of these are the sort of snapshots taken here at family gatherings   and on trips; but none is a candid photograph, not even of the   kind that the most unsophisticated camera user in this society   finds normal — a baby crawling on the floor, someone in   mid-gesture. Sports photographs show the team as a group, or   only the most stylized balletic moments of play: generally, what   people do with the camera is assemble for it, then line up in a row   or two. There is no interest in catching a subject in movement.   This is, one supposes, partly because of certain old conventions   of decorum in conduct and imagery. And it is the characteristic   visual taste of those at the first stage of camera culture, when the   image is defined as something that can be stolen from its owner;   thus, Antonioni was reproached for "forcibly taking shots against   people's wishes," like "a thief." Possession of a camera does not   license intrusion, as it does in this society whether people like it   or not. (The good manners of a camera culture dictate that one   is supposed to pretend not to notice when one is being   photographed by a stranger in a public place as long as the   photographer stays at a discreet distance — that is, one is supposed   neither to forbid the picture-taking nor to start posing.) Unlike   here, where we pose where we can and yield when we must, in   China taking pictures is always a ritual; it always involves posing   and, necessarily, consent. Someone who "deliberately stalked   people who were unaware of his intention to film them" was   depriving people and things of their right to pose, in order to look   their best.     Antonioni devoted nearly all of the sequence in Chung Kuo   about Peking's Tien An Men Square, the country's foremost goal   of political pilgrimage, to the pilgrims waiting to be photographed.   The interest to Antonioni of showing Chinese performing that   elementary rite, having a trip documented by the camera, is   evident: the photograph and being photographed are favorite   contemporary subjects for the camera. To his critics, the desire   of visitors to Tien An Men Square for a photograph souvenir           On Photography       135       is a reflection of their deep revolutionary feelings. But with   bad intentions, Antonioni, instead of showing this reality,   took shots only of people's clothing, movement, and   expressions: here, someone's ruffled hair; there, people   peering, their eyes dazzled by the sun; one moment, their   sleeves; another, their trousers. . ..     The Chinese resist the photographic dismemberment of reality.   Close-ups are not used. Even the postcards of antiquities and   works of art sold in museums do not show part of something; the   object is always photographed straight on, centered, evenly lit,   and in its entirety.     We find the Chinese naive for not perceiving the beauty of the   cracked peeling door, the picturesqueness of disorder, the force   of the odd angle and the significant detail, the poetry of the turned   back. We have a modern notion of embellishment — beauty is not   inherent in anything; it is to be found, by another way of   seeing — as well as a wider notion of meaning, which   photography's many uses illustrate and powerfully reinforce. The   more numerous the variations of something, the richer its   possibilities of meaning: thus, more is said with photographs in   the West than in China today. Apart from whatever is true about   Chung Kuo as an item of ideological merchandise (and the Chinese   are not wrong in finding the film condescending), Antonioni's   images simply mean more than any images the Chinese release of   themselves. The Chinese don't want photographs to mean very   much or to be very interesting. They do not want to see the world   from an unusual angle, to discover new subjects. Photographs   are supposed to display what has already been described.   Photography for us is a double-edged instrument for producing   cliches (the French word that means both trite expression and   photographic negative) and for serving up "fresh" views. For the   Chinese authorities, there are only cliches — which they consider   not to be cliches but "correct" views.     In China today, only two realities are acknowledged. We see   reality as hopelessly and interestingly plural. In China, what is   defined as an issue for debate is one about which there are "two           On Photography       136       lines," a right one and a wrong one. Our society proposes a   spectrum of discontinuous choices and perceptions. Theirs is   constructed around a single, ideal observer; and photographs   contribute their bit to the Great Monologue. For us, there are   dispersed, interchangeable "points of view"; photography is a   polylogue. The current Chinese ideology defines reality as a   historical process structured by recurrent dualisms with clearly   outlined, morally colored meanings; the past, for the most part,   is simply judged as bad. For us, there are historical processes with   awesomely complex and sometimes contradictory meanings; and   arts which draw much of their value from our consciousness of   time as history, like photography. (This is why the passing of time   adds to the aesthetic value of photographs, and the scars of time   make objects more rather than less enticing to photographers.)   With the idea of history, we certify our interest in knowing the   greatest number of things. The only use the Chinese are allowed   to make of their history is didactic: their interest in history is   narrow, moralistic, deforming, uncurious. Hence, photography   in our sense has no place in their society.     The limits placed on photography in China only reflect the   character of their society, a society unified by an ideology of stark,   unremitting conflict. Our unlimited use of photographic images   not only reflects but gives shape to this society, one unified by   the denial of conflict. Our very notion of the world — the capitalist   twentieth century's "one world" — is like a photographic overview.   The world is "one" not because it is united but because a tour of   its diverse contents does not reveal conflict but only an even more   astounding diversity. This spurious unity of the world is effected   by translating its contents into images. Images are always   compatible, or can be made compatible, even when the realities   they depict are not.     Photography does not simply reproduce the real, it recycles   it — a key procedure of a modern society. In the form of   photographic images, things and events are put to new uses,   assigned new meanings, which go beyond the distinctions between   the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false, the useful and   the useless, good taste and bad. Photography is one of the chief           On Photography       137       means for producing that quality ascribed to things and situations   which erases these distinctions: "the interesting." What makes   something interesting is that it can be seen to be like, or analogous   to, something else. There is an art and there are fashions of seeing   things in order to make them interesting; and to supply this art,   these fashions, there is a steady recycling of the artifacts and tastes   of the past. Cliches, recycled, become meta-cliches. The   photographic recycling makes cliches out of unique objects,   distinctive and vivid artifacts out of cliches. Images of real things   are interlayered with images of images. The Chinese circumscribe   the uses of photography so that there are no layers or strata of   images, and all images reinforce and reiterate each other.* We   make of photography a means by which, precisely, anything can   be said, any purpose served. What in reality is discrete, images   join. In the form of a photograph the explosion of an A-bomb   can be used to advertise a safe.     To us, the difference between the photographer as an individual   eye and the photographer as an objective recorder seems   fundamental, the difference often regarded, mistakenly, as   separating photography as art from photography as document.   But both are logical extensions of what photography means:       The Chinese concern for the reiterative function of images (and of words) inspires   the distributing of additional images, photographs that depict scenes in which, clearly,   no photographer could have been present; and the continuing use of such photographs   suggests how slender is the population's understanding of what photographic images   and picture-taking imply. In his book Chinese Shadows , Simon Leys gives an example   from the "Movement to Emulate Lei Feng," a mass campaign of the mid-1960s to in-   culcate the ideals of Maoist citizenship built around the apotheosis of an Unknown   Citizen, a conscript named Lei Feng who died at twenty in a banal accident. Lei Feng   Exhibitions organized in the large cities included "photographic documents, such as   'Lei Feng helping an old woman to cross the street,' 'Lei Feng secretly [sic] doing his   comrade's washing,' 'Lei Feng giving his lunch to a comrade who forgot his lunch box,'   and so forth," with, apparently, nobody questioning "the providential presence of a   photographer during the various incidents in the life of that humble, hitherto unknown   soldier." In China, what makes an image true is that it is good for people to see it.           On Photography       138       note-taking on, potentially, everything in the world, from every   possible angle. The same Nadar who took the most authoritative   celebrity portraits of his time and did the first photo-interviews   was also the first photographer to take aerial views; and when he   performed "the Daguerreian operation" on Paris from a balloon   in 1855 he immediately grasped the future benefit of photography   to warmakers.     Two attitudes underlie this presumption that anything in the   world is material for the camera. One finds that there is beauty   or at least interest in everything, seen with an acute enough eye.   (And the aestheticizing of reality that makes everything, anything,   available to the camera is what also permits the co-opting of any   photograph, even one of an utterly practical sort, as art.) The   other treats everything as the object of some present or future   use, as matter for estimates, decisions, and predictions. According   to one attitude, there is nothing that should not be seen-, according   to the other, there is nothing that should not be recorded. Cameras   implement an aesthetic view of reality by being a machine-toy   that extends to everyone the possibility of making disinterested   judgments about importance, interest, beauty. (" T/iaf would make   a good picture.") Cameras implement the instrumental view of   reality by gathering information that enables us to make a more   accurate and much quicker response to whatever is going on. The   response may of course be either repressive or benevolent: military   reconnaissance photographs help snuff out lives, X-rays help save   them.     Though these two attitudes, the aesthetic and the instrumental,   seem to produce contradictory and even incompatible feelings   about people and situations, that is the altogether characteristic   contradiction of attitude which members of a society that divorces   public from private are expected to share in and live with. And   there is perhaps no activity which prepares us so well to live with   these contradictory attitudes as does picture-taking, which lends   itself so brilliantly to both. On the one hand, cameras arm vision   in the service of power — of the state, of industry, of science. On   the other hand, cameras make vision expressive in that mythical   space known as private life. In China, where no space is left over           On Photography       139       from politics and moralism for expressions of aesthetic sensibility,   only some things are to be photographed and only in certain ways.   For us, as we become further detached from politics, there is more   and more free space to fill up with exercises of sensibility such as   cameras afford. One of the effects of the newer camera technology   (video, instant movies) has been to turn even more of what is   done with cameras in private to narcissistic uses — that is, to   self-surveillance. But such currently popular uses of   image-feedback in the bedroom, the therapy session, and the   weekend conference seem far less momentous than video's   potential as a tool for surveillance in public places. Presumably,   the Chinese will eventually make the same instrumental uses of   photography that we do, except, perhaps, this one. Our inclination   to treat character as equivalent to behavior makes more acceptable   a widespread public installation of the mechanized regard from   the outside provided by cameras. China's far more repressive   standards of order require not only monitoring behavior but   changing hearts; there, surveillance is internalized to a degree   without precedent, which suggests a more limited future in their   society for the camera as a means of surveillance.     China offers the model of one kind of dictatorship, whose   master idea is "the good," in which the most unsparing limits are   placed on all forms of expression, including images. The future   may offer another kind of dictatorship, whose master idea is "the   interesting," in which images of all sorts, stereotyped and   eccentric, proliferate. Something like this is suggested in   Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. Its portrait of a model   totalitarian state contains only one, omnipresent art:   photography — and the friendly photographer who hovers around   the hero's death cell turns out, at the end of the novel, to be the   headsman. And there seems no way (short of undergoing a vast   historical amnesia, as in China) of limiting the proliferation of   photographic images. The only question is whether the function   of the image-world created by cameras could be other than it is.   The present function is clear enough, if one considers in what   contexts photographic images are seen, what dependencies they           On Photography       140       create, what antagonisms they pacify — that is, what institutions   they buttress, whose needs they really serve.     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 masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers).   The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social   change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume   a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself.   The narrowing of free political choice to free economic   consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption   of images.     The final reason for the need to photograph everything lies in the   very logic of consumption itself. To consume means to burn, to   use up — and, therefore, to need to be replenished. As we make   images and consume them, we need still more images; and still   more. But images are not a treasure for which the world must be   ransacked; they are precisely what is at hand wherever the eye   falls. The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to   lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied: first,   because the possibilities of photography are infinite; and, second,   because the project is finally self-devouring. The attempts by   photographers to bolster up a depleted sense of reality contribute   to the depletion. Our oppressive sense of the transience of   everything is more acute since cameras gave us the means to "fix"   the fleeting moment. We consume images at an ever faster rate   and, as Balzac suspected cameras used up layers of the body,   images consume reality. Cameras are the antidote and the disease,   a means of appropriating reality and a means of making it   obsolete.           On Photography       141       The powers of photography have in effect de-Platonized our   understanding of reality, making it less and less plausible to reflect   upon our experience according to the distinction between images   and things, between copies and originals. It suited Plato's   derogatory attitude toward images to liken them to   shadows — transitory, minimally informative, immaterial,   impotent co-presences of the real things which cast them. But the   force of photographic images comes from their being material   realities in their own right, richly informative deposits left in the   wake of whatever emitted them, potent means for turning the   tables on reality — for turning it into a shadow. Images are more   real than anyone could have supposed. And just because they are   an unlimited resource, one that cannot be exhausted by   consumerist waste, there is all the more reason to apply the   conservationist remedy. If there can be a better way for the real   world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not   only of real things but of images as well.             On Photography       143         A Brief Anthology of Quotations     [HOMAGE TO W.B.]       I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length   the longing has been satisfied.     — Julia Margaret Cameron       I long to have such a memorial of every being dear to me in the   world. It is not merely the likeness which is precious in such   cases — but the association and the sense of nearness involved in   the thing... the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there   fixed forever! It is the very sanctification of portraits I think — and   it is not at all monstrous in me to say, what my brothers cry out   against so vehemently, that I would rather have such a memorial   of one I dearly loved, than the noblest artist's work ever produced.     — Elizabeth Barrett   (1843, letter to Mary Russell Mitford)       Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really   sees. You may see and be affected by other people's ways, you   may even use them to find your own, but you will have eventually   to free yourself of them. That is what Nietzsche meant when he   said, "I have just read Schopenhauer, now I have to get rid of   him." He knew how insidious other people's ways could be,   particularly those which have the forcefulness of profound   experience, if you let them get between you and your own vision.         On Photography       144       — Paul Strand       That the outer man is a picture of the inner, and the face an   expression and revelation of the whole character, is a presumption   likely enough in itself, and therefore a safe one to go on; borne   out as it is by the fact that people are always anxious to see anyone   who has made himself famous .... Photography. . . offers the most   complete satisfaction of our curiosity.     — Schopenhauer       To experience a thing as beautiful means: to experience it   necessarily wrongly.     — Nietzsche       Now, for an absurdly small sum, we may become familiar not   only with every famous locality in the world, but also with almost   every man of note in Europe. The ubiquity of the photographer   is something wonderful. All of us have seen the Alps and know   Chamonix and the Mer de Glace by heart, though we have never   braved the horrors of the Channel. ... We have crossed the Andes,   ascended Tenerife, entered Japan, "done" Niagara and the   Thousand Isles, drunk delight of battle with our peers (at shop   windows), sat at the councils of the mighty, grown familiar with   kings, emperors and queens, prima donnas, pets of the ballet, and   "well graced actors." Ghosts have we seen and have not trembled;   stood before royalty and have not uncovered; and looked, in short,   through a three-inch lens at every single pomp and vanity of this   wicked but beautiful world.     — "D.P.," columnist in Once a Week   [London], June 1, 1861       It has quite justly been said of Atget that he photographed   [deserted Paris streets] like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime,   too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing   evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence           On Photography       145       for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political   significance.     — Walter Benjamin       If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug a camera.     — Lewis Hine       I went to Marseille. A small allowance enabled me to get along,   and I worked with enjoyment. I had just discovered the Leica. It   became the extension of my eye, and I have never been separated   from it since I found it. I prowled the streets all day, feeling very   strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to "trap" life — to   preserve life in the act of living. Above all, I craved to seize the   whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some   situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.     — Henri Cartier-Bresson     It's hard to tell where you leave off   and the camera begins.     A Minolta 35mm SLR makes it almost effortless to capture the   world around you. Or express the world within you. It feels   comfortable in your hands. Your fingers fall into place naturally.   Everything works so smoothly that the camera becomes a part of   you. You never have to take your eye from the viewfinder to make   adjustments. So you can concentrate on creating the picture....   And you're free to probe the limits of your imagination with a   Minolta. More than 40 lenses in the superbly crafted Rokkor-X   and Minolta/Celtic systems let you bridge distances or capture a   spectacular "fisheye" panorama. . .     MINOLTA     When you are the camera and the camera is you     — advertisement (1976)         On Photography       146       I photograph what I do not wish to paint and I paint what I cannot   photograph.     — Man Ray       Only with effort can the camera be forced to lie: basically it is an   honest medium: so the photographer is much more likely to   approach nature in a spirit of inquiry, of communion, instead of   with the saucy swagger of self-dubbed "artists." And contemporary   vision, the new life, is based on honest approach to all problems,   be they morals or art. False fronts to buildings, false standards in   morals, subterfuges and mummery of all kinds, must be, will be   scrapped.     — Edward Weston       I attempt, through much of my work, to animate all things — even   so-called "inanimate" objects — with the spirit of man. I have   come, by degrees, to realize that this extremely animistic   projection rises, ultimately, from my profound fear and disquiet   over the accelerating mechanization of man's life; and the resulting   attempts to stamp out individuality in all the spheres of man's   activity — this whole process being one of the dominant   expressions of our military-industrial society.... The creative   photographer sets free the human contents of objects; and imparts   humanity to the inhuman world around him.     — Clarence John Laughlin       You can photograph anything now.       — Robert Frank       I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their   environment. They become in a sense. . .symbolic of themselves.   I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they   would go to a doctor or a fortune teller — to find out how they   are. So they're dependent on me. I have to engage them. Otherwise   there's nothing to photograph. The concentration has to come         On Photography       147       from me and involve them. Sometimes the force of it grows so   strong that sounds in the studio go unheard. Time stops. We   share a brief, intense intimacy. But it's unearned. It has no   past. . .no future. And when the sitting is over — when the picture   is done — there's nothing left except the photograph... the   photograph and a kind of embarrassment. They leave... and I   don't know them. I've hardly heard what they've said. If I meet   them a week later in a room somewhere, I expect they won't   recognize me. Because I don't feel I was really there. At least the   part of me that was... is now in the photograph. And the   photographs have a reality for me that the people don't. It's   through the photographs that I know them. Maybe it's in the   nature of being a photographer. I'm never really implicated. I   don't have to have any real knowledge. It's all a question of   recognitions.     — Richard Avedon       The daguerreotype is not merely an instrument which serves to   draw nature. . . [it] gives her the power to reproduce herself.     — Louis Daguerre (1838, from a notice   circulated to attract investors)       The creations of man or nature never have more grandeur than   in an Ansel Adams photograph, and his image can seize the viewer   with more force than the natural object from which it was made.   — advertisement for a book of photographs by Adams (1974)     This Polaroid SX-70 photograph is part of   the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.     The work is by Lucas Samaras, one of America's foremost artists.   It is part of one of the world's most important collections. It was   produced using the finest instant photographic system in the   world, the Polaroid SX-70 Land camera. That same camera is   owned by millions. A camera of extraordinary quality and           On Photography       148       versatility capable of exposures from 10.4 inches to infinity....   Samaras' work of art from the SX-70, a work of art in itself.     — advertisement (1977)       Most of my photographs are compassionate, gentle, and personal.   They tend to let the viewer see himself. They tend not to preach.   And they tend not to pose as art.     — Bruce Davidson       New forms in art are created by the canonization of peripheral   forms.     — Viktor Shklovsky       ...a new industry has arisen which contributes not a little to   confirming stupidity in its faith and to ruining what might have   remained of the divine in the French genius. The idolatrous crowd   postulates an ideal worthy of itself and appropriate to its   nature — that is perfectly understandable. As far as painting and   sculpture are concerned, the current credo of the sophisticated   public, above all in France... is this: "I believe in Nature, and I   believe only in Nature (there are good reasons for that). I believe   that Art is, and cannot be other than, the exact reproduction of   Nature.... Thus an industry that could give us a result identical   to Nature would be the absolute of art." A vengeful God has   granted the wishes of this multitude. Daguerre was his Messiah.   And now the public says to itself: "Since photography gives us   every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really   believe that, the idiots!), then photography and Art are the same   thing." From that moment our squalid society rushed, Narcissus   to a man, to gaze at its trivial image on a scrap of metal. ... Some   democratic writer ought to have seen here a cheap method of   disseminating a loathing for history and for painting among the   people....       — Baudelaire           On Photography       149       Life itself is not the reality. We are the ones who put life into   stones and pebbles.     — Frederick Sommer       The young artist has recorded, stone by stone, the cathedrals of   Strasbourg and Rheims in over a hundred different prints. Thanks   to him we have climbed all the steeples... what we never could   have discovered through our own eyes, he has seen for us. . .one   might think the saintly artists of the Middle Ages had foreseen   the daguerreotype in placing on high their statues and stone   carvings where birds alone circling the spires could marvel at their   detail and perfection.... The entire cathedral is reconstructed,   layer on layer, in wonderful effects of sunlight, shadows, and rain.   M. Le Secq, too, has built his monument.     — H. de Lacretelle, in   La Lumiere, March 20, 1852       The need to bring things spatially and humanly "nearer" is almost   an obsession today, as is the tendency to negate the unique or   ephemeral quality of a given event by reproducing it   photographically. There is an ever-growing compulsion to   reproduce the object photographically, in close-up. . ..     — Walter Benjamin       It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer   any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.     — Dorothea Lange       If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, "I   want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me   the story of your life." I mean people are going to say, "You're   crazy." Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera   is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much   attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.     — Diane Arbus           On Photography       150       ...Suddenly a small boy dropped to the ground next to me. I   realized then that the police were not firing warning shots. They   were shooting into the crowd. More children fell. ... I began taking   pictures of the little boy who was dying next to me. Blood poured   from his mouth and some children knelt next to him and tried   to stop the flow of blood. Then some children shouted they were   going to kill me. ... I begged them to leave me alone. I said I was   a reporter and was there to record what happened. A young girl   hit me on the head with a rock. I was dazed, but still on my feet.   Then they saw reason and some led me away. All the time   helicopters circled overhead and there was the sound of shooting.   It was like a dream. A dream I will never forget.     — from the account by Alf Khumalo, a black   reporter on the Johannesburg Sunday Times,   of the outbreak of riots in Soweto, South Africa,   published in The Observer [London] ,   Sunday, June 20, 1976       Photography is the only "language" understood in all parts of the   world, and bridging all nations and cultures, it links the family   of man. Independent of political influence — where people are   free — it reflects truthfully life and events, allows us to share in   the hopes and despair of others, and illuminates political and   social conditions. We become the eye-witnesses of the humanity   and inhumanity of mankind. . .     — Helmut Gernsheim   ( Creative Photography [ 1962] )       Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter   of surrounding with a frame a portion of one's cone of vision,   while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or   writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities,   but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not   finite but infinite.       — John Szarkowski           On Photography       151       Sometimes I would set up the camera in a corner of the room, sit   some distance away from it with a remote control in my hand,   and watch our people while Mr. Caldwell talked with them. It   might be an hour before their faces or gestures gave us what we   were trying to express, but the instant it occurred the scene was   imprisoned on a sheet of film before they knew what had   happened.     — Margaret Bourke-White       The picture of Mayor William Gaynor of New York at the moment   of being shot by an assassin in 1910. The Mayor was about to   board a ship to go on holiday in Europe as an American   newspaper photographer arrived. He asked the Mayor to pose   for a picture and as he raised his camera two shots were fired from   the crowd. In the midst of this confusion the photographer   remained calm and his picture of the blood-spattered Mayor   lurching into the arms of an aide has become part of photographic   history.     — a caption in "Click":   A Pictorial History of the Photograph (1974)       I have been photographing our toilet, that glossy enameled   receptacle of extraordinary beauty.... Here was every sensuous   curve of the "human figure divine" but minus the imperfections.   Never did the Greeks reach a more significant consummation to   their culture, and it somehow reminded me, forward movement   of finely progressing contours, of the Victory of Samothrace.     — Edward Weston       Good taste at this time in a technological democracy ends up to   be nothing more than taste prejudice. If all that art does is create   good or bad taste, then it has failed completely. In the question   of taste analysis, it is just as easy to express good or bad taste in   the kind of refrigerator, carpet or armchair that you have in your   home. What good camera artists are trying to do now is to raise   art beyond the level of mere taste. Camera Art must be completely           On Photography       152       devoid of logic. The logic vacuum must be there so that the viewer   applies his own logic to it and the work, in fact, makes itself before   the viewer's eyes. So that it becomes a direct reflection of the   viewer's consciousness, logic, morals, ethics and taste. The work   should act as a feedback mechanism to the viewer's own working   model of himself.     — Les Levine ("Camera Art," in Studio International,     July/ August 1975)       Women and men — it's an impossible subject, because there can   be no answers. We can find only bits and pieces of clues. And this   small portfolio is just the crudest sketches of what it's all about.   Maybe, today, we're planting the seeds of more honest   relationships between women and men.     — Duane Michals       "Why do people keep photographs?"     "Why? Goodness knows! Why do people keep   things — junk — trash, bits and pieces. They do — that's all there   is to it!"     "Up to a point I agree with you. Some people keep things. Some   people throw everything away as soon as they have done with it.   That, yes, it is a matter of temperament. But I speak now especially   of photographs. Why do people keep, in particular, photographs ?"   "As I say, because they just don't throw things away. Or else   because it reminds them — "     Poirot pounced on the words.     "Exactly. It reminds them. Now again we ask — why? Why does   a woman keep a photograph of herself when young? And I say   that the first reason is, essentially, vanity. She has been a pretty   girl and she keeps a photograph of herself to remind her of what   a pretty girl she was. It encourages her when her mirror tells her   unpalatable things. She says, perhaps, to a friend, 'That was me   when I was eighteen. . .' and she sighs. . .You agree?"     "Yes — yes, I should say that's true enough."           On Photography       153       "Then that is reason No. 1. Vanity. Now reason No. 2.   Sentiment."     "That's the same thing?"     "No, no, not quite. Because this leads you to preserve, not only   your own photograph but that of someone else... A picture of   your married daughter — when she was a child sitting on a   hearthrug with tulle round her.... Very embarrassing to the   subject sometimes, but mothers like to do it. And sons and   daughters often keep pictures of their mothers, especially, say, if   their mother died young. 'This was my mother as a girl.'"     "I'm beginning to see what you're driving at, Poirot."     "And there is, possibly, a third category. Not vanity, not   sentiment, not love — perhaps hate — what do you say?"     "Hate?"     "Yes. To keep a desire for revenge alive. Someone who has   injured you — you might keep a photograph to remind you, might   you not?"     — from Agatha Christie's   Mrs. McGinty's Dead (1951)       Previously, at dawn that day, a commission assigned to the task   had discovered the corpse of Antonio Conselheiro. It was lying   in one of the huts next to the arbor. After a shallow layer of earth   had been removed, the body appeared wrapped in a sorry   shroud — a filthy sheet — over which pious hands had strewn a   few withered flowers. There, resting upon a reed mat, were the   last remains of the "notorious and barbarous agitator".... They   carefully disinterred the body, precious relic that it was — the sole   prize, the only spoils of war this conflict had to offer! — taking the   greatest of precautions to see that it did not fall apart.... They   photographed it afterward and drew up an affidavit in due form,   certifying its identity; for the entire nation must be thoroughly   convinced that at last this terrible foe had been done away with.     — from Euclides da Cunha's   Rebellion in the Backlands (1902)           On Photography       154       Men still kill one another, they have not yet understood how they   live, why they live; politicians fail to observe that the earth is an   entity, yet television (Telehor) has been invented: the "Far   Seer" — tomorrow we shall be able to look into the heart of our   fellow-man, be everywhere and yet be alone; illustrated books,   newspapers, magazines are printed — in millions. The   unambiguousness of the real, the truth in the everyday situation   is there for all classes. The hygiene of the optical, the health of   the visible is slowly filtering through.     — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1925)       As I progressed further with my project, it became obvious that   it was really unimportant where I chose to photograph. The   particular place simply provided an excuse to produce work....   you can only see what you are ready to see — what mirrors your   mind at that particular time.     — George Tice       I photograph to find out what something will look like   photographed.     — Garry Winogrand       The Guggenheim trips were like elaborate treasure hunts, with   false clues mixed among the genuine ones. We were always being   directed by friends to their own favorite sights or views or   formations. Sometimes these tips paid off with real Weston prizes;   sometimes the recommended item proved to be a dud. . .and we   drove for miles with no payoffs. By that time, I had reached the   point of taking no pleasure in scenery that didn't call Edward's   camera out, so he didn't risk much when he settled back against   the seat saying, "I'm not asleep — just resting my eyes"; he knew   my eyes were at his service, and that the moment anything with   a "Weston" look appeared, I would stop the car and wake him   up.     — Charis Weston (quoted in Ben Maddow, Edward Weston:     Fifty Years [1973])           On Photography       155       Polaroid's SX-70. It won't let you stop.     Suddenly you see a picture everywhere you look. . . .     Now you press the red electric button. Whirr... whoosh... and   there it is. You watch your picture come to life, growing more   vivid, more detailed, until minutes later you have a print as real   as life. Soon you're taking rapid-fire shots — as fast as every 1.5   seconds! — as you search for new angles or make copies on the   spot. The SX-70 becomes like a part of you, as it slips through life   effortlessly....     — advertisement (1975)       ...we regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object   itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there.     This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people   who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example,   would be repelled by photographs, because a face without colour   and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as   inhuman.     — Wittgenstein       Is it an instant picture of. . .     the destructive test of an axle?     the proliferation of a virus?     a forgettable lab setup?     the scene of the crime?     the eye of a green turtle?     the divisional sales chart?     chromosomal aberrations?     page 173 of Gray's Anatomy?     an electrocardiogram read-out?     a line conversion of half-tone art?     the three-millionth 8e Eisenhower stamp?     a hairline fracture of the fourth vertebra?     a copy of that irreplaceable 35mm slide?     your new diode, magnified 13 times?     a metallograph of vanadium steel?         On Photography       156       reduced type for mechanicals?     an enlarged lymph node?     the electrophoresis results?     the world's worst malocclusion?     the world's best-corrected malocclusion?     As you can see from the list... there's no limit to the kind of   material that people need to record. Fortunately, as you can see   from the list of Polaroid Land cameras below, there's almost no   limit to the kind of photographic records you can get. And, since   you get them on the spot, if anything's missing, you can re-shoot   on the spot....     — advertisement (1976)       An object that tells of the loss, destruction, disappearance of   objects. Does not speak of itself. Tells of others. Will it include   them?     — Jasper Johns       Belfast, Northern Ireland — The people of Belfast are buying   picture postcards of their city's torment by the hundreds. The   most popular shows a boy throwing a stone at a British armored   car.... Other cards show burned-out homes, troops in battle   positions on city streets and children at play amid smoking rubble.   Each card sells for approximately 25 cents in the three Gardener's   shops.     "Even at that price, people have been buying them in bundles   of five or six at a time," said Rose Lehane, manager of one shop.   Mrs. Lehane said that nearly 1,000 cards were sold in four days.     Since Belfast has few tourists, she said, most of the buyers are   local people, mostly young men who want them as "souvenirs."     Neil Shawcross, a Belfast man, bought two complete sets of the   cards, explaining, "I think they're interesting mementoes of the   times and I want my two children to have them when they grow   U P-"     "The cards are good for people," said Alan Gardener, a director   of the chain. "Too many people in Belfast try to cope with the           On Photography       157       situation here by closing their eyes and pretending it doesn't exist.   Maybe something like this will jar them into seeing again."     "We have lost a lot of money through the troubles, with our   stores being bombed and burned down," Mr. Gardener added.   "If we can get a bit of money back from the troubles, well and   good."     — from The New York Times, October 29, 1974   ("Postcards of Belfast Strife Are Best-Sellers There")       Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows   about but isn't attending to. My photographs are intended to   represent something you don't see.     — Emmet Gowin       The camera is a fluid way of encountering that other reality.     — Jerry N. Uelsmann       Oswiecim, Poland — Nearly 30 years after Auschwitz concentration   camp was closed down, the underlying horror of the place seems   diminished by the souvenir stands, Pepsi-Cola signs and the   tourist-attraction atmosphere.     Despite chilling autumn rain, thousands of Poles and some   foreigners visit Auschwitz every day. Most are modishly dressed   and obviously too young to remember World War II.     They troop through the former prison barracks, gas chambers   and crematoria, looking with interest at such gruesome displays   as an enormous showcase filled with some of the human hair the   S.S. used to make into cloth.... At the souvenir stands, visitors   can buy a selection of Auschwitz lapel pins in Polish and German,   or picture postcards showing gas chambers and crematoria, or   even souvenir Auschwitz ballpoint pens which, when held up to   the light, reveal similar pictures.     — from The New York Times, November 3, 1974 ("At   Auschwitz, a Discordant Atmosphere of Tourism")           On Photography       158       The media have substituted themselves for the older world. Even   if we should wish to recover that older world we can do it only   by an intensive study of the ways in which the media have   swallowed it.     — Marshall McLuhan       ...Many of the visitors were from the countryside, and some,   unfamiliar with city ways, spread out newspapers on the asphalt   on the other side of the palace moat, unwrapped their   home-cooking and chopsticks and sat there eating and chatting   while the crowds sidestepped. The Japanese addiction to snapshots   rose to fever pitch under the impetus of the august backdrop of   the palace gardens. Judging by the steady clicking of the shutters,   not only everybody present but also every leaf and blade of grass   must now be recorded on film, in all their aspects.     — from The New York Times, May 3, 1977 ("Japan Enjoys 3   Elolidays of 'Golden Week' by Taking a 7-Day Vacation from     Work")       I'm always mentally photographing everything as practice.     — Minor White       The daguerreotypes of all things are preserved. . .the imprints of   all that has existed live, spread out through the diverse zones of   infinite space.     — Ernest Renan       These people live again in print as intensely as when their images   were captured on the old dry plates of sixty years ago.... I am   walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and   workshops, looking in and out of their windows. And they in turn   seem to be aware of me.     — Ansel Adams (from the Preface to   Jacob A. Riis: Photographer & Citizen [1974])         On Photography       159       Thus in the photographic camera we have the most reliable aid   to a beginning of objective vision. Everyone will be compelled to   see that which is optically true, is explicable in its own terms, is   objective, before he can arrive at any possible subjective position.   This will abolish that pictorial and imaginative association pattern   which has remained unsuperseded for centuries and which has   been stamped upon our vision by great individual painters.     We have — through a hundred years of photography and two   decades of film — been enormously enriched in this respect. We   may say that we see the world with entirely different eyes.   Nevertheless, the total result to date amounts to little more than   a visual encyclopaedic achievement. This is not enough. We wish   to produce systematically, since it is important for life that we   create new relationships.     — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy ( 1925)       Any one who knows what the worth of family affection is among   the lower classes, and who has seen the array of little portraits   stuck over a labourer's fireplace. . .will perhaps feel with me that   in counteracting the tendencies, social and industrial, which every   day are sapping the healthier family affections, the sixpenny   photograph is doing more for the poor than all the philanthropists   in the world.     — Macmillan s Magazine [London], September 1871       Who, in his opinion, would buy an instant movie camera? Dr.   Land said he expects the housewife to be a good prospect. "All   she has to do is point the camera, press the shutter release and in   minutes relive her child's cute moment, or perhaps, birthday   party. Then, there is the large number of people who prefer   pictures to equipment. Golf and tennis fans can evaluate their   swings in instant replay; industry, schools and other areas where   instant replay coupled with easy-to-use equipment would be   helpful.... Polavision's boundaries are as wide as your   imagination. There is no end to the uses that will be found for   this and future Polavision cameras."           On Photography       160       — from The New York Times, May 8, 1977   ("A Preview of Polaroid's New Instant Movies")       Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera,   really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.     — Wallace Stevens       The war had thrust me, as a soldier, into the heart of a mechanical   atmosphere. Here I discovered the beauty of the fragment. I sensed   a new reality in the detail of a machine, in the common object. I   tried to find the plastic value of these fragments of our modern   life. I rediscovered them on the screen in the close-ups of objects   which impressed and influenced me.     — Fernand Leger (1923)       575.20 fields of photography     aerophotography, aerial photography     astrophotography     candid photography     chromophotography     chronophotography     cinematography     cinephotomicrography     cystophotography     heliophotography     infrared photography     macrophotography     microphotography     miniature photography     phonophotography     photogrammetry           On Photography       161       photomicrography     photospectroheliography     phototopography     phototypography     phototypy     pyrophotography     radiography     radiophotography     sculptography     skiagraphy     spectroheliography     spectrophotography     stroboscopic photography     telephotography     uranophotography     X-ray photography     — from Roget's International Thesaurus, Third Edition     The weight of words. The shock of photos.     — Paris-Match, advertisement       June 4, 1857. — Saw today, at the Hotel Drouot, the first sale of   photographs. Everything is becoming black in this century, and   photography seems like the black clothing of things.     November 15, 1861. — I sometimes think the day will come when   all modern nations will adore a sort of American god, a god who   will have been someone who lived as a human being and about   whom much will have been written in the popular press: images   of this god will be set up in the churches, not as the imagination   of each individual painter may fancy him, not floating on a           On Photography       162       Veronica cloth, but fixed once and for all by photography. Yes, I   foresee a photographed god, wearing spectacles.     — from the Journal of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt       In the spring of 1921, two automatic photographic machines,   recently invented abroad, were installed in Prague, which   reproduced six or ten or more exposures of the same person on   a single print.     When I took such a series of photographs to Kafka I said   light-heartedly: "For a couple of krone one can have oneself   photographed from every angle. The apparatus is a mechanical   Know-Thyself "     "You mean to say, the Mistake- 7 'hyseljf said Kafka, with a faint   smile.     I protested: "What do you mean? The camera cannot lie!"     "Who told you that?" Kafka leaned his head toward his   shoulder. "Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial.   For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through   the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't   catch that even with the sharpest lens. One has to grope for it by   feeling.... This automatic camera doesn't multiply men's eyes   but only gives a fantastically simplified fly's eye view."     — from Gustav Janouch's Conversations with Kafka       Fife appears always fully present along the epidermis of his body:   vitality ready to be squeezed forth entire in fixing the instant, in   recording a brief weary smile, a twitch of the hand, the fugitive   pour of sun through clouds. And not a tool, save the camera, is   capable of registering such complex ephemeral responses, and   expressing the full majesty of the moment. No hand can express   it, for the reason that the mind cannot retain the unmutated truth   of a moment sufficiently long to permit the slow fingers to notate   large masses of related detail. The impressionists tried in vain to   achieve the notation. For, consciously or unconsciously, what   they were striving to demonstrate with their effects of light was   the truth of moments; impressionism has ever sought to fix the           On Photography       163       wonder of the here, the now. But the momentary effects of lighting   escaped them while they were busy analyzing; and their   "impression" remains usually a series of impressions   superimposed one upon the other. Stieglitz was better guided.   He went directly to the instrument made for him.     — Paul Rosenfeld       The camera is my tool. Through it I give a reason to everything   around me.     — Andre Kertesz       A double leveling down, or a method of leveling down   which double-crosses itself     With the daguerreotype everyone will be able to have their portrait   taken — formerly it was only the prominent; and at the same time   everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same — so   that we shall only need one portrait.     — Kierkegaard (1854)       Make picture of kaleidoscope.       — William H. Fox Talbot   (note dated February 18, 1839)             On Photography       165         About this Title       RosettaBooks is the leading publisher dedicated exclusively to   electronic editions of great works of fiction and non-fiction that   reflect our world. RosettaBooks strives to improve the quality of   its electronic books. We welcome your comments and suggestions.   Please write to Editor@RosettaBooks.com     We hope you enjoyed On Photography. 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