all photos ~ (embiggenable)
“…. One can say then that in these photographs form and content are indistinguishable – which is to say the pictures mean precisely what they appear to mean. Attempting to translate these appearances into words is surely a fool’s errand, in the pursuit of which no two fools would choose the same unsatisfactory words.” ~ JOHN SZARKOWSKI
OVER MY MANY DECADES OF WANDERING ABOUT THE photography landscape, I have read innumerable essays / treatises / critiques, re: photographs and the medium of photography. Very few of those works were written by practicing photographers; most were written by art critics and academics. In simple terms, the latter’s writings were packed chock full of words–to include a lot of artspeak–whereas the former’s writings were proof positive that actual photographers are not people of words–they tended to allow their pictures do the “talking”.
That written, I began this entry with the Szarkowski quote, extracted from his essay / intro in William Eggleston’s Guide. That piece of writing, re: photography in general / Eggleston’s photographs in particular, is, iMo, the stand-alone, single best piece of writing on the medium of photography and a practitioner thereof ever written. However one might feel about Eggleston’s photography, the book should be at the top of one’s list of must-have books even if just for the reading of the essay alone.
All of that written, my longstanding misgivings, re: critiques of a photographer’s work(s), has always been about an excess of a critique’s emphasis on intent, meaning, and an occasional injection of art theory–aka: tying to “translate appearances into words”. Or, in other words, an attempt to explain the ineffable–something too great, intense, or beautiful to be expressed or described in words.
Indeed, iMo, a fool’s errand cuz as I continuously state, a photograph is a piece of visual art. An art that is meant to be seen and/or experienced, not heard read and/or interpreted. To paraphrase Szarkowski …. while a picture is after all only a picture, when made by a gifted practitioner of the medium, it can be an irreducible surrogate / visual analogue of an experience it pretends to record, a view one might have thought to be ineffable but nevertheless described with clarity, fullness, and elegance.
I could stretch this entry out with enough snippets of Szarkowski’s interesting words and phrases to fill a small booklet but I won’t. You’ll have to read the essay to appreciate them in context. However I will conclude with his interesting–and delightfully expressed–thought when writing about Robert Adams’ writing about form ….
“…. a photographer wants form, an unarguably right relationship of shapes, a stability in which all components are equally important. The photographer hopes, in brief, to discover a tension that so exact that it is peace.”
…. iMo, that statement is so conceptually precise, and yet so aesthetically open-ended, that it reduces all the photo–clique, art-theorist notions about composition to irrelevant and indecipherable nonsense.