kitchen life # 3677-79 ~ I'd pay for that

July 31, 2020

I HAVE OFTEN THOUGHT THAT, IF a school of higher learning were to create a course of study, re: the medium of photography and its apparatus, which was built solely around multiple volumes of quotes, sans any and all reference to gear and technique, from a wide range of picture makers / critics together with a library of photo monographs from those same picture makers, there just might be a whole lot more interesting pictures to look at.

As an example ...

"One might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing. It must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others....The talented practitioner of the new discipline would perform with a special grace, sense of timing, narrative sweep, and wit, thus endowing the act not merely with intelligence, but with that quality of formal rigor that identifies a work of art, so that we would be uncertain, when remembering the adventure of the tour, how much our pleasure and sense of enlargement had come from the things pointed to and how much from a pattern created by the pointer." ~ JOHN SZARKOWSKI