Thinking About Photography

Thinking About Photography covers many aspects of the interpretation of photography through the years. It must first deal with the early controversies of photography as art, photography as document, and photography as communication. A few pulled quotes will bring light to these considerations.


'Sworn Witness' - 'The inevitable function of photograph [is] that it showed the world without contrivance and prejudice.'
This early view of photography was important because it was both insightful and inherently flawed. To assume that a photograph shows the world without prejudice is to remove the photographer from the equation altogether - a feat that cannot be performed. This view of photography operates like a traffic or dash-mounted police camera; operator free.

'...it voraciously records anything in view; in other words it is firmly in the realm of contingent.'
Here again is the camera as consumer. This is the property of photography that esteems it as scientific and tramples it as art. This is the reason that it has a foot in both worlds and causes infinitely vapid debate from both camps. Pictorialist, straight, and digital photography are all struggling with this property.

'Photography makes aware for the first time the optical unconscious, just as psychoanalysis discloses the instinctual unconscious.'
This begins the next phase of the discussion of photography. Once applied to psychoanalysis and the effects of modernism, photography was open to the entire critical debate. It was no longer simply a scientific physical tool. After years of hanging in galleries, photography was officially a part of the artistic canon and thus susceptible to the greatest of critical inquiry: psychoanalytic, postmodern, or otherwise.

As a mechanical implement which offered the oldest of human perception, this was ripe territory for inspection and analysis.