Reading Photographs

AP English

With quotations from Susan Sontag’s On Photography

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“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.” (p. 4)

Atget’s Les Halles

“It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art.” (p. 15)

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Alfred StieglitzThe Steerage1907

http://www.masters-of-photography.com

“Photographs furnish evidence.”

(p. 4)

Paul StrandBlind1916

http://www.masters-of-photography.com

“There is an aggression

implicit in every use of the

camera.” (p. 7)

Dorothea LangeMigrant Mother;Nipomo, California1936

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“In deciding how their pictures

should look, in preferring one

exposure to another,

photographers are always imposing

standards on their subjects.” (p. 6)

Walker Evans

“After the event has ended, the picture will

still exist, conferring on the event a kind of

immortality (and importance) it would never have enjoyed.”

(p. 11)

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Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967, on the cover of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph. http://photography-now.net/listings/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=350&Itemid=249

“’I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do—that was one of my favorite things about it.” – Diane Arbus (p. 12)

"Tank man" during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. This photo was taken on June 5, 1989, by Jeff Widener (The Associated Press).www.wikipedia.com

“The ethical content of photographs is fragile.” (p. 21)

Cindy Sherman

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“The ultimate wisdom of the photographic

image is to say: ‘There is the

surface. Now think--or rather

feel, intuit—what is beyond it, what

the reality must be like if it looks this

way.” (p. 23)

Resource:

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. London: Penguin, 1977.

What do you think Sontag would say about photography today?

Explore #488, March 21, 2008 

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