Summary
This reading by John Szarkowski discusses
the importance and influence that photography has had on people, especially in
relation to the art world. Though it was once seen as a mindless process of art
that is “taken” and not made (as paintings are made), it has now become a sort
of “bereft of the old artistic traditions”.
1853 was the initial rise of photography when mostly inexperienced
photographers started using it as their profession, but in 1893 photographer
became easier with more sophisticated cameras – this in a way “created an army
of photographers”. These inexperienced
photographers were the ones that initially established these qualities about
photographs – and these qualities are the “Thing Itself”, the “Detail”, the “Frame”,
“Time”, and “Vantage point”.
The Thing Itself
The thing itself is the idea of
“the world itself is an artist of incomparable inventiveness” that we ourselves
have to be intelligent enough to capture.
The camera was seen as the world’s eye, and it was the artistic
photographer’s problem to know what to capture and emphasize. The idea was that
photography can only tell the truth, and photos become reality of the present
time that is remembered through imagery. Photographs highlight the subjects in
their pictures to provide a specific and unique vision of things in the world.
The Detail
Photography of details in things
forces the facts of the imagery to tell the truth. The details of things found
in nature can provide scattered and suggestive clues to what they are or what
they mean. The details become filled with undiscovered meaning and symbols – for
example, the photograph of close-up hands highlight the details of the shades
and wrinkles in the hands, alluding to how hardworking the person may or may
not have been. The also highlight characteristics of hands that differentiate
women’s hands from men’s hands; in this case, the fragility and gracefulness of
the stance make it seem like hands belonging to a woman. The “function was to
not make the story clear but to make it real”, and this applies to both the
picture of hands and to pictures of the Civil War, the Great War, and WWII.
The Frame
The function of the frame is to
isolate certain things in order to emphasize the relationships that the things
have between each other. Shapes that are cropped or cut can help balance or
complete the image, even if at times it is unclear as to what the cropped item
may be. There are an infinite number of croppings and compositions of things in
the world, and of different ways to group them together so that we can analyze
how they relate to other things around them.
Japanese print is very influential to ways of framing a photograph
because of their once unique way of spacing things out in the same frame.
Time
Time uniquely describes a certain
period of time that it was made as the present of that time only. It was the
present of that time even though now it is part of the past for us, and in that
sense becomes a surviving relic of that time in history. Time can also be
captured with a slow shutter speed, which was standard in the past. Motion
capture was seen as a partial failures, especially to families who had
portraits taken and would have to set for a very long time, so fidgeting babies
would result in blurriness. This motion capture is now commonly seen as a
unique way of looking at motion that happens in the world. Photographs are in a
sense immobilizing thin slices of time, often at the “decisive moment”, or the
visual climax of an action.
Vantage point
Vantage points provide unique views
of the world. They make people think about the photograph; “just as nature had
once imitated art, so now it began to imitate the picture made by the
camera”. Unique views such as bird’s eye
view and worm’s eye view challenges schematized notions of reality by providing
a view that is unfamiliar. These photographs often now influence modern
painters and writers.
Personal Response
I thought the idea that all
photographers are inspired by photographs that they have seen/already exist was
really interesting and profound. We all want to seem like we have a completely
unique way of seeing the world, but in reality we are influenced positively and
negatively by images that we have already seen. In the late 1800s when
photography started to become immensely prevalent with common people, more and
more pictures were created for present photographers to be able to look at
today and in the future. More pictures of the world provide photographers the
ability to see the world in all sorts of perspectives; there’s always a new
image to be created. I also resonated with the profound importance that framing
has on a picture – when there are several elements of a picture, the way that
they are framed in relation to each other forces us to recognize these
relations, which can often be uncanny.
I believe that photography is
profoundly artistic in the sense that photos are literal captures of the way
that we see the world that we live in, through our artistic visions. I learned about
the different important aspects that make up what photography is still made up
of today. The only thing that I had slight trouble with was the comment about
the camera as the world’s eye, that only the camera can speak the truth. It is
true that photos are literal captures of that certain time in space, yet do our
eyes not see that same truth at that moment? I suppose he just means that it’s
a long-lasting truth that physical evidence.
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