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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 persona...
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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 eve...
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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.
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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 s...
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Photography expresses the American impatience with reality, the taste for activities whose instrumentality is a machine.
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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 themsel...
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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...
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In fact, photography first comes into its own as an extension of the eye of the middle-class flâneur, whose sensibility was so accurately charted by Baudelaire.The photographer is an armed versi...
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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, qu...
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It is photography that has best shown how to juxtapose the sewing machine and the umbrella, whose fortuitous encounter was hailed by a great Surrealist poet as an epitome of the beautiful.
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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 natur...
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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-lib...
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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 ...
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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 expli...
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Evans wanted his photographs to be "literate, authoritative, transcendent." The moral universe of the1930s being no longer ours, these adjectives are barely credible today. Nobody demands that phot...
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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; ...
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Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.
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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.
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All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or things mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, a...
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To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. J...
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The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel.
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From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carrie...
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... would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on the film -- that precise expression on the subject's face...
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While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency.
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Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out.
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Photographs really are exprience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
