Friday, 12 December 2014
On Photography (book)
In Plato's Cave
"photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern"
page three
"photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire."
page four
Chris Marker
film : Si j'avais quatre dromadaires (1966)
"images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less agressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class picture, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots)
Dziga Vertov
film : Man with a movie camera (1929)
Hitchcock
film : rear window (1954)
Michael Powell
film : peeping tom (1960)
not research
"photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one - and can help build a nascent one. "
page 17
nascent - a new organization with future potential
" Any photograph has multiple meanings; indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of fascination. The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: "There is the surface. Now think - or feel, intuit - what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way." Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation and fantasy "
page 23
" strictly speaking one never understands anything from a photograph. Of course, photographs fill in blanks in our mental pictures of the present and the past"
page 23
America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly
" In the normal rhetoric of the photographic portrait, facing the camera signifies solemnity, frankness, the disclosure of the subjects essence. That is why frontality seems right for ceremonial pictures (like weddings, graduations) but less apt for photographs used on billboards to advertise political candidates (For politicians the three-quarter gaze is more common: a gaze that soars rather than confronts, suggesting instead of the relation to viewer, to the present, the more ennobling abstract relation to the future.) "
page 37 / 38
The Heroism of Vision
" People want the idealized image: a photograph of themselves looking their best. "
page 85
"The news that the camera could lie made getting photographed much more popular "
page 86
" the daguerrotype portrait that "while we give it credit only for depicting the merest surface, it actually brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon, even could he detect it."
page 87
" Thus, while fashion photography is based on the fact that something can be more beautiful in a photograph than in real life; it is not surprising that some photographers who serve fashion as also drawn to the non-photogenic. "
page 104
"The traditional function of the portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it is has a much more limited career in photography considered as an art "
page 105
"photography has served to enlarge vastly our notion of what is aesthetically pleasing"
page 105
Photographic Evangels
"photographic realism can be - is more and more - defined not as what is "really" there but as what I "really" perceive. "
page 120
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