Word: photographs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...PHOTOGRAPHERS and their critics like to rank a photograph in the hierarchy of artistic quality--it's better than these, but not as good as these others. Most other people wish they could decide (and be right) that the photo they're looking at is good or bad. They shouldn...
...comparison of any two photographs on an absolute scale is practically impossible. Imagine, for example, an Ansel Adams photograph of the Rocky Mountains and a Life magazine shot of wounded soldiers in Vietnam. Even if someone comparing the two could decide that one better fulfills the photographer's purpose who could say which combination of subject matter and execution is ultimately more interesting...
Perhaps Sontag's greatest insight concerns the relationship of a photograph to its own context. She comments, "as Wittgenstein argued for words, that the meaning is the use--so for each photograph." She focuses attention on this use, to the immediate use--whether in a gallery or a newspaper, whether captioned or not--and to the societal use, to the time, place, and culture depicted in the photograph. She explores the different perspectives on photography held by people in the Fifties and the Seventies, explores the different reactions to photography in China and the United States. And she concludes that...
...ONLY does it bother Sontag that everybody takes pictures, it also bothers her that anything, anybody, can seem to have importance when photographed. "To photograph is to confer importance," she writes. But there is a different formulation of the relationship of photography to importance, a formulation that Sontag herself mentions at one point--namely, that photography does not confer importance, only discovers and communicates it. Between the two concepts lies a world of difference. If photography confers importance, this implies an importance inherent in the camera, rather than in the subject. It implies an already existing, hierarchical notion of what...
...forms are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they can complement one another quite nicely. Roy Stryker, the man who directed the Farm Security Administration photography project discovered as an economics professor at Columbia the effectiveness of photographs in making abstract economic concepts tangible for his students. In clear contrast to Sontag, he became convinced that "the photograph... that little rectangle, is one of the damnedest educational devices ever made." Sontag correctly argues that "photographs do not explain; they acknowledge." But this is no reason to disparage photography--understanding is impossible without acknowledgement...