Photographs are, of course, artifacts… 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…
Of all the nationsthe United States with veins full of poetical stuffmost need poets —and will doubtless have the greatestand use them the greatest. Of all mankind the great poet is the equitable man.Not in him but off from him things aregrotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity.Nothing out of its place is…
The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates. Photography expresses the American impatience with reality, the taste for activities whose instrumentality is the 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…
Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, or a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than one perceived by natural vision. The less doctored, the less patiently crafted, the more naïve – the more authoritative the photograph is likely to be….
The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity… nothing can make up for excess or for the lack of definiteness. To carry on the heave of impulse and to pierce intellectual depths and give all subjects their articulations are…
All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain. If greatness are in conjunction in a man or a woman It is enough… The fact will prevail through the universe… But the gaggery of gilt of a million years Will not prevail. Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost. This…
As Walt Whitmangazed 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 snobbishto make any discrimination of value, except the most generous one. All facts, even the mean ones are incandescent in Whitman’s America.p. 27 Much of modern artis…
I continue to read On Photography by Susan Sontag. Today I finished the essay entitled, America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly. There Sontag surveys the intent of a number of well known chroniclers of our grand experiment, beginning with Walt Whitman, concluding with commentary on the life work of photographer Diane Arbus. Sontag is a…
Photographs …a way of giving information to people who do not take easily to reading. In a world ruled by photographic images, all borders (“framing”) seem arbitrary. Anything can be separated, can be made discontinuous, from everything else: all that is necessary is to frame the subject differently. Photography reinforces a nominalist view of…
Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still recycling, it’s age-old habit, in mere images of truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then about everything…
