ON PHOTOGRAPHY

ON PHOTOGRAPHY

Here are two paragraphs on photography from an essay I have yet to post on the internet:

"It is not the person or thing which steps out in a photograph," wrote sociologist David Frisby(1944-2010), "but what can be stripped away from the person or thing."(1)  Instead of being an aid to memory and knowledge, photos often function to encourage the opposite tendency.  Photos, wrote Frisby that world authority on German social thought, gobble-up our world. They snatch our world from death; total presentness is established and history, paradoxically, is absent in spite of the sense of reality conveyed by the photograph. It is a reality we can no longer touch. We experience nostalgia, the inevitability of separation, mystery and, sometimes, bitterness. We experience a feeling of magic. Sometimes narcissism is fostered, Baudelaire once wrote.(2)

However critical one is of photographs, the family portrait and the photo album, and for many now their internet blog, Facebook page or computer-directory of digital photos, assume a significant place in people's homes.  Although the photo may give an undue emphasis to the outer world, it can also become part of a balanced inner and outer experience. "The best part of beauty," wrote Irish-born artist British figurative painter Francis Bacon(1909-1992), "is that which no picture can express."(3)  Photos are suggestive and, if they do not suggest much more than is in the photos, they have little use or power.  Diane Arbus(1923-1971), American photographer and writer, puts the idea in a clever way: "A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know."

------------------FOOTNOTES--------------------
(1) David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin, Polity Press, 1985, p.155.
(2) Baudelaire in Donald Kuspit, The New Subjectivism: Art in the 1980s, Da Capo Press, NY, 1983, p.404.
(3) Quotations on photography, Internet, January 2003.