Looking at Photographs
I walked down the Somerville West Branch library in Davis Square the other day. It's a scruffy little place featuring two net kiosks, two pretty fireplaces, the usual basic reference works, and a small attic of miscelaneous nonfiction. I had two quarries: something that could help me puzzle out the mysteries of Apache's mod_rewrite and a digital camera manual. The former was no go. The latter mission scored Osborne's How to Do Everything with Your Digital Camera, which I find myself disinclined to link to until I have a more developed opinion of its merit. Also in their skimpy photography section was: Looking at Photographs : 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art by John Szarkowski, which looked edifying and undemanding, so I snagged it too while I was there.
I expected that looking at some great photographs would be rewarding, but what stunned me when I got home and started reading was the excellence of Szarkowski's prose. Each of the pictures is accompanied by a one-page essay that is a jewel of tart and lucid writing. He was director of MOMA's photography department, and he writes with the cool passion of someone who knows himself to be an expert in his field.
For a while, I read while Erika caught up on Livejournal, and I kept being unable to resist quoting the choicest passages to her. Now, I'll do the same to you:
Most of the best energy of photographers during the past seventy years has been dedicated to the task of thinning out the rank growth of information that the camera impartially records if left to its own devices, in favor of pictures which have been--for lack of a better word--simpler.
To be "taken in" is a richly ambiguous phrase, evoking both the good Samaritan and the used-car dealer, but both its meanings touch the idea of trust.
People who accept the evidence of their senses can be divided into three non-professional categories: saints, simpletons, and humorists....Those who may like this photograph and dislike the explanation are free to regard the picture as a vision, perfect nonsense, or a joke--with the understanding that they are thus clearly identifying with one of the three groups named above.
Many of Ken Josephson's pictures attempt to deal directly with the question of how photographs differ from the real world. Any philosopher will point out that to try to explore this question in photographs is a logical fallacy, if not a fool's errand. Like a good photograph, the statement is clear, but not necessarily true.
Most photographers of the past generation have demonstrated unlimited sympathy for the victims of villainous or imperfect societies, but very litle sympathy for, or even interest in, those who are afflicted by their own human frailty. Robert Doisneau is one of the few whose work has demonstrated that even in a time of large terrors, the ancient weakensses and sweet venial sins of ordinary individuals have survived. On the basis of his pictures one would guess that Doisneau actually likes people, even as they really are.
The nude torso of Weston's son Neil is not a simile but a statement of fact: the boy's flesh is not like alabaster or bronze or the cheek of a peach; his body is not formed like a stone column or a wineskin or a root vegetable. Thsi startlingly beautiful photograph is the more surprising because it describes with precision what we might have thought we already knew.
The pictures that [Eugène Atget] made...are seductively and deceptively simple, wholly poised, reticent, dense with experience, mysterious, and true.
It does seem somehow unjust that a man who was presumably disinterested in pictures as pictures made so many great ones. (It is as though the muse were a callow girl, repelled by the attentive suitor, and attracted to the one who ignores her.)
The book came out in 1973, but was reissued in '99, and is back in print.