The book consists of 53 excerpts of essays, interviews, and other texts from a number of prominent photographers and writers on photography, organized into four sections:
- Reflections on the Medium:What It Means to Photograph
- How Others See Them:Considering the Photographer
- Finding an Audience:Working with the Professionals
- Guides for the Uneducated:Higher Education and Photography
What follows are notes from the first third of Section One.
Alexander Rodchenko: The Paths of Modern Photography (1928)
Rodchenko argues that photography need not be a slave to the ways of painterly seeing. He rails against the Belly-Button viewpoint and posing for the photograph. He insists photography ought to see in new ways and capture life as it is lived, not as it is groomed for presentation to the camera.
“One should shoot the subject from several different points and in varying positions in different photographs, as if encompassing it—not peer through one keyhole. Don’t make photo-pictures, make photo-moments of documentary (not artistic) value.
“To sum up: in order to accustom people to seeing from new viewpoints it is essential to take photographs of everyday, familiar subjects from completely unexpected vantage points and in completely unexpected positions. New subjects should also be photographed from various points, so as to present a complete impression of the subject.”
Bernice Abbott: Photography at the Crossroads (1951)
The friend and curator of Atget argues for a commitment to realism grounded in the now. She reminds us of photography’s sentimental past, dominated by the likes of Henry Peach Robinson, whose work was based on bad painting, the trite and pretty, the sentimental, whose every image sought to flatter, who sought correct what the camera saw. His style of photography became popular because it was easy - there was nothing difficult or challenging about it. All of its images were pretty. She regrets the large influx of amateur photographers, but recognizes their importance in driving changes in manufacture and technology. She notes that too many photographers are overly concerned with darkroom technique and not enough with content.
“To chart a course, one must have a direction. In reality, the eye is no better than the philosophy behind it. The photographer creates, evolves a better, more selective, more acute seeing eye by looking ever more sharply at what is going on in the world. Like every other means of expression, photography, if it is to be utterly honest and direct, should be related to the life of the times—the pulse of today. The photograph may be presented as finely and artistically as you will; but to merit serious consideration, must be directly connected with the world we live in. What we need is a return, on a mounting spiral of historic understanding, to the great tradition of realism.”
Untitled: Henri Cartier-Bresson (1952)
The subhead here says “This is the piece that defines the ‘decisive moment,’” but it really about much more, a concise summary statement on the life of a photo-journalist. It begins with a reminiscence of childhood and his early days as a photographer. When he returns from his first trip to Africa, he finds himself stalking the streets.
“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, in the confines of one single photograph, the whole essence of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.”
He speaks of the need to be discerning in deciding when to release the shutter.
“It is essential to cut from the raw material of life—to cut and cut, but to cut with discrimination.... You must stay with the scene, just in case the elements of the situation shoot off from the core again. At the same time, it’s essential to avoid shooting like a machine-gunner and burdening yourself with useless recordings which clutter your memory and spoil the exactness of the reportage as a whole.”
He believes photographers have a responsibility to present reality, not manipulate it.
“Our task is to perceive reality, almost simultaneously recording it in the sketchbook which is our camera. We must neither try to manipulate reality while we are shooting, nor manipulate the results in the darkroom.”
He prefers the unaffected.
“I infinitely prefer, to contrived portraits, those little identity-card photos which are pasted side by side, row after row, in the windows of passport photographers. At least there is on these faces something that raises a question, a simple factual testimony—this in place of the poetic identification we look for.”
That technology is less important than the ability to see.
“...people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.”
Along the way he says of himself, that despite a quarter century of experience, he has much yto learn:
“Twenty-five years have passed since I started to look through my view-finder. But I regard myself still as an amateur, though I am no longer a dilettante.”
Minor White - The Camera Mind and Eye (1966)
White argues for the spontaneity of the photographic process. He observes that we are so conditioned to painting as the visual path to aesthetic experience, that we have trouble accepting the photograph as it’s own path, it’s own way of seeing and representing. [While this may have been so 50 years ago, my feeling is that today painting has largely been forgotten (perhaps for having been lost down the well of the conceptual and abstract).]
White notes that while painters invent, photographers are involved in a process of seeing and finding, a process no less creative or aesthetic than invention. He goes on to sketch his experience when he photographs, writing in the third person about the photographer so as to generalize (though we can assume other photographers may work somewhat differently, or have different experiences of photographing).
White was a student of Zen and while he doesn't use any Buddhist or religious terms or argue from analogy, the process appears to be meditative and mirror to a degree the Zen aesthetic traditions found in such practices as calligraphy, painting, flower arranging, or tea ceremony, among others. That is, an emptying of ego in order to permit clear seeing, to allow one to move and act spontaneously to the surrounding conditions. In other words, to allow the moment to express itself, rather than imposing ideas on the moment. The photographer approaches his work by asking, “What shall I be given today?”
He then establishes a blankness of mind.
“...this is a special kind of blank. It is a very active state of mind really, a very receptive state of mind, ready at an instant to grasp an image, yet with no image pre-formed in it at any time. We should note that the lack of a pre-formed pattern or preconceived idea of how anything ought to look is essential to this blank condition.”
He looks for other words and metaphors to explain this blankness.
“A mind specially blank—how can we describe it to one who has not experienced it? “Sensitive” is one word. “Sensitized” is better, because there is not only a sensitive mind at work but there is effort on the part of the photographer to reach such a condition. “Sympathetic” is fair, if we mean by it an openness of mind which in turn leads to comprehending, understanding everything seen.”
“Perhaps the blank state of mind can be likened to a pot of water almost at the boiling point. A little more heat—an image seen—and the surface breaks into turbulence.”
There is little to suggest how one establishes this state of mind, though he does offer at least a clue.
“Possibly the creative work of the photographer consists in part of putting himself into this state of mind. Reaching it, at any rate, is not automatic. It can be aided by always using one’s camera for serious work so that the association of the camera in one’s hands always leads to taking pictures.”
This thereby creates “ the sensation of the camera dissolving in an accord between subject and photographer.”
Irving Penn - Worlds in a Small Room (1974)
Penn was a consummate studio photographer who, on assignment from Vogue in remote parts of the world, set up makeshift studios to record the people he found there. He says shooting under natural conditions was disappointing, while working in the studio was not only revelatory, but transformative. The studio became a stage.
“Taking people away from their natural circumstances and putting them into the studio in front of a camera did not simply isolate them, it transformed them. Sometimes the change was subtle; sometimes it was great enough to be almost shocking. But always there was transformation. As they crossed the threshold of the studio, they left behind some of the manners of their community, taking on a seriousness of self-presentation that would not have been expected of simple people. As I look back through these essays I am struck by the fact that the one characteristic all these various people seem to have in common is that they rose to the experience of being looked at by a stranger, in most cases from another culture, with dignity and a seriousness of concentration that they would never have had ten or fifteen feet away, outside the studio, in their own surroundings."
"The studio became, for each of us, a sort of neutral area. It was not their home, as I had brought this alien enclosure into their lives; it was not my home, as I had obviously come from elsewhere, from far away. But in this limbo there was for us both the possibility of contact that was a revelation to me and often, I could tell, a moving experience for the subjects themselves, who without words—by only their stance and their concentration—were able to say much that spanned the gulf between our different worlds.”
David Harris - Interview with Lee Friedlander (excerpt) (1996)
The interview opens with an analogy of the sportsman to the photographer.
“If you take somebody like Michael Jordan, and if you said to him, “Michael, at a certain point when you are running down the field and the ball comes to you, what are you going to do?” he would look at you as if you were crazy. Because there are a thousand things he could do: he could move almost anywhere or he could pass off or he could shoot or he could dribble. He wouldn’t even have a clue because he would have to see what was happening. And I think that’s very similar to photography, which I don’t think is similar to painting or writing in most cases. That little tiny moment is a beginning and an end and it has something to do with the same kind of mentality that an athlete has to use. I was watching tennis, for example. The tricks that good tennis players use, especially what happens when the ball bounces and does odd things. You couldn’t predict what you’re going to do. He’s going to serve to you; what are you going to do? Try to hit it back. Not only try to hit it back, try to hit it back in a weird way. Or in some articulate way. And I think photography is stuck with those same kinds of moments, especially if you’re not a studio photographer. You don’t have much control.”
Robert Adams - Colleagues (1996)
Adams speaks as well to the spontaneity of photography, of the delight in discovering images that were not imaginable.
“When photographers get beyond copying the achievements of others, or just repeating their own accidental first successes, they learn that they do not know where in the world they will find pictures. Nobody does. Each photograph that works is a revelation to its supposed creator. Yes, photographers do position themselves to take advantage of good fortune, sensing for instance when to stop the car and walk, but this is only the beginning. As William Stafford wrote, calculation gets you just so far—“Smart is okay, but lucky is better.” Days of searching can go by without any need to reload film holders, and then abruptly, sometimes back in their own yards, photographers use up every sheet.”
He observes that photographers are generally not to be envied.
“I have to admit that there is another reason I like photographers—they don’t tempt me to envy. The profession is short on dignity: Nearly everyone has fallen down, been the target of condescension (the stereotypical image of a photographer being that of a mildly contemptible, self-indulgent dilettante), been harassed by security guards, and dropped expensive equipment. Almost all photographers have incurred large expenses in the pursuit of tiny audiences, finding that the wonder they’d hoped to share is something few want to receive. Nothing is so clarifying, for instance, as to stand through the opening of an exhibition to which only officials have come. Experiences like that do encourage defiance, however. Why quit while you’re losing?”
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