On Photography (23 page)

“Yes—yes, I should say that’s true enough.”

“Then that is reason No. 1. Vanity. Now reason No. 2. Sentiment.”

“That’s the same thing?”

“No, no, not quite. Because this leads you to preserve, not only your own photograph but that of someone else… A picture of your married daughter—when she was a child sitting on a hearthrug with tulle round her. . Very embarrassing to the subject sometimes, but mothers like to do it. And sons and daughters often keep pictures of their mothers, especially, say, if their mother died young. ‘This was my mother as a girl.’”

“I’m beginning to see what you’re driving at, Poirot.”

“And there is, possibly, a
third
category. Not vanity, not sentiment, not love—perhaps
hate
—what do you say?”

“Hate?”

“Yes. To keep a desire for revenge alive. Someone who has injured you—you might keep a photograph to remind you, might you not?”

—from Agatha Christie’s
Mrs. McGinty’s Dead
(1951)

Previously, at dawn that day, a commission assigned to the task had discovered the corpse of Antonio Conselheiro. It was lying in one of the huts next to the arbor. After a shallow layer of earth had been removed, the body appeared wrapped in a sorry shroud—a filthy sheet—over which pious hands had strewn a few withered flowers. There, resting upon a reed mat, were the last remains of the “notorious and barbarous agitator”.. They carefully disinterred the body, precious relic that it was—the sole prize, the only spoils of war this conflict had to offer!—taking the greatest of precautions to see that it did not fall apart.. They photographed it afterward and drew up an affidavit in due form, certifying its identity; for the entire nation must be thoroughly convinced that at last this terrible foe had been done away with.

—from Euclides da Cunha’s
Rebellion in the Backlands
(1902)

Men still kill one another, they have not yet understood how they live, why they live; politicians fail to observe that the earth is an entity, yet television (Telehor) has been invented: the “Far Seer”—tomorrow we shall be able to look into the heart of our fellow-man, be everywhere and yet be alone; illustrated books, newspapers, magazines are printed—in millions. The unambiguousness of the real, the truth in the everyday situation is there for all classes.
The
hygiene of the optical
, the health of the visible is slowly filtering through
.

—Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1925)

As I progressed further with my project, it became obvious that it was really unimportant where I chose to photograph. The particular place simply provided an excuse to produce work.. you can only see what you are ready to see—what mirrors your mind at that particular time.

—George Tice

I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.

—Garry Winogrand

The Guggenheim trips were like elaborate treasure hunts, with false clues mixed among the genuine ones. We were always being directed by friends to their own favorite sights or views or formations. Sometimes these tips paid off with real Weston prizes; sometimes the recommended item proved to be a dud…and we drove for miles with no payoffs. By that time, I had reached the point of taking no pleasure in scenery that didn’t call Edward’s camera out, so he didn’t risk much when he settled back against the seat saying, “I’m not asleep—just resting my eyes”; he knew my eyes were at his service, and that the moment anything with a “Weston” look appeared, I would stop the car and wake him
^u
p.

—Charis Weston (quoted in Ben Maddow,
Edward Weston: Fifty Years
[1973])

Polaroid’s SX-70. It won’t let you stop.

Suddenly you see a picture everywhere you look..

Now you press the red electric button. Whirr…whoosh…and there it is. You watch your picture come to life, growing more vivid, more detailed, until minutes later you have a print as real as life. Soon you’re taking rapid-fire shots—as fast as every 1.5 seconds!—as you search for new angles or make copies on the spot. The SX-70 becomes like a part of you, as it slips through life effortlessly..

—advertisement (1975)

…we
regard
the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there.

This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without colour and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.

—Wittgenstein

Is it an instant picture of
.

the destructive test of an axle?

the proliferation of a virus?

a forgettable lab setup?

the scene of the crime?

the eye of a green turtle?

the divisional sales chart?

chromosomal aberrations?

page 173 of Gray’s Anatomy?

an electrocardiogram read-out?

a line conversion of half-tone art?

the three-millionth 8e Eisenhower stamp?

a hairline fracture of the fourth vertebra?

a copy of that irreplaceable 35mm slide?

your new diode, magnified 13 times?

a metallograph of vanadium steel?

reduced type for mechanicals?

an enlarged lymph node?

the electrophoresis results?

the world's worst malocclusion?

the world's best-corrected malocclusion?

As you can see from the list.there’s no limit to the kind of material that people need to record. Fortunately, as you can see from the list of Polaroid Land cameras below, there’s almost no limit to the kind of photographic records you can get. And, since you get them on the spot, if anything’s missing, you can re-shoot on the spot..

—advertisement (1976)

An object that tells of the loss, destruction, disappearance of objects. Does not speak of itself. Tells of others. Will it include them?

—Jasper Johns

Belfast, Northern Ireland—The people of Belfast are buying picture postcards of their city’s torment by the hundreds. The most popular shows a boy throwing a stone at a British armored car.. Other cards show burned-out homes, troops in battle positions on city streets and children at play amid smoking rubble. Each card sells for approximately 25 cents in the three Gardener’s shops.

“Even at that price, people have been buying them in bundles of five or six at a time,” said Rose Lehane, manager of one shop. Mrs. Lehane said that nearly 1,000 cards were sold in four days.

Since Belfast has few tourists, she said, most of the buyers are local people, mostly young men who want them as “souvenirs.” Neil Shawcross, a Belfast man, bought two complete sets of the cards, explaining, “I think they’re interesting mementoes of the times and I want my two children to have them when they grow up."

“The cards are good for people,” said Alan Gardener, a director of the chain. “Too many people in Belfast try to cope with th
e

situation here by closing their eyes and pretending it doesn’t exist. Maybe something like this will jar them into seeing again.”

“We have lost a lot of money through the troubles, with our stores being bombed and burned down,” Mr. Gardener added. “If we can get a bit of money back from the troubles, well and good.”

—from
The New York Times,
October 29, 1974 (“Postcards of Belfast Strife Are Best-Sellers There”)

Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn’t attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don’t see.

—Emmet Gowin

The camera is a fluid way of encountering that other reality.

—Jerry N. Uelsmann

Oswiecim, Poland—Nearly 30 years after Auschwitz concentration camp was closed down, the underlying horror of the place seems diminished by the souvenir stands, Pepsi-Cola signs and the tourist-attraction atmosphere.

Despite chilling autumn rain, thousands of Poles and some foreigners visit Auschwitz every day. Most are modishly dressed and obviously too young to remember World War II.

They troop through the former prison barracks, gas chambers and crematoria, looking with interest at such gruesome displays as an enormous showcase filled with some of the human hair the S.S. used to make into cloth.. At the souvenir stands, visitors can buy a selection of Auschwitz lapel pins in Polish and German, or picture postcards showing gas chambers and crematoria, or even souvenir Auschwitz ballpoint pens which, when held up to the light, reveal similar pictures.

—from
The New York Times,
November 3, 1974 (“At Auschwitz, a Discordant Atmosphere of Tourism”)

The media have substituted themselves for the older world. Even if we should wish to recover that older world we can do it only by an intensive study of the ways in which the media have swallowed it.

—Marshall McLuhan

.Many of the visitors were from the countryside, and some, unfamiliar with city ways, spread out newspapers on the asphalt on the other side of the palace moat, unwrapped their home-cooking and chopsticks and sat there eating and chatting while the crowds sidestepped. The Japanese addiction to snapshots rose to fever pitch under the impetus of the august backdrop of the palace gardens. Judging by the steady clicking of the shutters, not only everybody present but also every leaf and blade of grass must now be recorded on film, in all their aspects.

—from
The New York Times,
May 3, 1977 (“Japan Enjoys 3 Holidays of ‘Golden Week’ by Taking a 7-Day Vacation from Work”)

I’m always mentally photographing everything as practice.

—Minor White

The daguerreotypes of all things are preserved…the imprints of all that has existed live, spread out through the diverse zones of infinite space.

—Ernest Renan

These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on the old dry plates of sixty years ago.. I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. And they in turn seem to be aware of me.

—Ansel Adams (from the Preface to
Jacob
A.
Riis: Photographer & Citizen
[1974])

Thus in the photographic camera we have the most reliable aid to a beginning of objective vision. Everyone will be compelled to see that which is optically true, is explicable in its own terms, is objective, before he can arrive at any possible subjective position. This will abolish that pictorial and imaginative association pattern which has remained unsuperseded for centuries and which has been stamped upon our vision by great individual painters.

We have—through a hundred years of photography and two decades of film—been enormously enriched in this respect.
We may say that we see the world with entirely different eyes
. Nevertheless, the total result to date amounts to little more than a visual encyclopaedic achievement. This is not enough. We wish to
produce
systematically, since it is important for life that we create
new relationships.

—Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1925)

Any one who knows what the worth of family affection is among the lower classes, and who has seen the array of little portraits stuck over a labourer’s fireplace…will perhaps feel with me that in counteracting the tendencies, social and industrial, which every day are sapping the healthier family affections, the sixpenny photograph is doing more for the poor than all the philanthropists in the world.

—
Macmillan’s Magazine
[London], September 1871

Who, in his opinion, would buy an instant movie camera? Dr. Land said he expects the housewife to be a good prospect. “All she has to do is point the camera, press the shutter release and in minutes relive her child’s cute moment, or perhaps, birthday party. Then, there is the large number of people who prefer pictures to equipment. Golf and tennis fans can evaluate their swings in instant replay; industry, schools and other areas where instant replay coupled with easy-to-use equipment would be helpful.. Polavision’s boundaries are as wide as your imagination. There is no end to the uses that will be found for this and future Polavision cameras.”

—from
The New York Times,
May 8, 1977 (“A Preview of Polaroid’s New Instant Movies”)

Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.

—Wallace Stevens