The Photographer's Eye

I really love this reading by John Szarkowski. At first be begins talking about how photography could become art, "Paintings were made - [...] - but photographs, as the man on the street put it, were taken" (pg. 1). I love this quote, because it almost sounds as if he's making photography out to be a bad thing. Szarkowski goes on to say that anyone who's anyone could become a "photographer". "Silversmiths, tinkers, druggists, blacksmiths, and printers" they all learned how to use the machines like the daguerrotype and took millions of pictures. In the 19th century new advances were making photography easy. If something caught your eye, you'd take a picture, no thought about it. But is that really art?

Szarkowski explains that painting was expensive, all the materials needed, all the work put into painting something that was meaningful and important. But not the same thought was going into all the pictures being taken, "photography was easy, cheap and ubiquitous, and it recorded anything" (pg. 2). You could take more pictures in a day than a painter could paint in a year. It almost seemed like back then photography was the poor-man's version of "art" (if it even was that).

There are 5 issues that Szarkowski addresses:  The first one being the subject of the photograph. He goes on to saw that the subject and the picture were not the same thing. I agree, when you're taking pictures of something it's not always going to turn out to look exactly like it does in real life as you're standing in front of it. The second was detail. That the photographer isn't really telling a story, but more like leaving a trail of clues with his photographs. The third was frame, the photographer's subject was never fully contained in the picture, "the edges of the film demarcated what he thought most important" (pg. 4). The fourth issue was that of time. He goes on to say that photographs are moments in time, I fully agree with this. I've always thought of photography as capturing moments in time. I love the way he explains long exposures as "partial failures", because I love long exposures (when does correctly). The fifth and final issue is that of vantage point. Pictures can be taken at certain vantage points to give off different emotions and make the viewer feel a specific way. It's all about the angles and taking pictures from different views than just normal eye level.