Excerpts

"A photograph can be viewed on several levels. To begin with, it is a physical object, a print. On this print is an image, an illusion of a window on to the world. It is on this level that we usually read a picture and discover its content: a souvenir of an exotic land, the face of a lover, a wet rock, a landscape at night. Embedded in this level is another that contains signals to our mind's perceptual apparatus. It gives "spin" to what the image depicts and how it is organized.

A photograph print is, in most instances, a base of paper, plastic, or metal that has been coated with an emulsion of light-sensitive metallic salts or metallic salts coupled with vegetable or metallic dyes.

The formal character of the image is a result of a range of physical and optical factors. These are the factors that define the physical level of the photograph. But on the depictive level there are four central ways in which the world in front of the camera is transformed into the photograph: flatness, frame, time, and focus.

The mental level elaborates, refines, and embellishes our perceptions of the depictive level. The mental level of a photograph provides a framework for the mental image we construct of (and for) the picture.

Each level provides the foundation the next level builds upon. At the same time, each reflects back, enlarging the scope and meaning of the one on which it rests. The mental level provides counterpoints to the depictive theme. The photographic image turns a piece of paper into a seductive illusion or a moment of truth and beauty."