The Photographer's Eye - Five Characteristics of Photography
These summaries are from http://tracesofthereal.com/ and can be found at: http://tracesofthereal.com/2010/02/21/introduction-to-the-photographers-eye-john-szarkowski-1966/
Photography, the thing itself –
The first of these is what he calls the thing itself. By this he means that photography provides representations of the real world, and the photographers art is one of seeking out and revealing that which is already there. An interesting dichotomy arises here between the public perception (now shattered, of course) of the photograph’s inability to lie, and the photographers awareness of this not really being the case. Szarkowski suggests that in response to this problem the photographer will often claim (somewhat disingenuously) that what the picture depicts is real but what the eye saw was an illusion. This position is given credence by the fact that images survive while memories fade, and hence the image often becomes the remembered reality.
The next inherent characteristic of the medium is the detail. Photography is tied to depicting reality and furthermore depicting reality as it happens, in the presence of the photographer. The photographer cannot ‘pose the truth’ but merely capture fragments of that truth as it unfolds before him/her. Photography therefore has to be content representing the details of a narrative or an event, rather than attempting to represent the entire thing. A useful analogy here might be that of capturing a football match. Whereas a television broadcast or a written account could claim to be capturing everything that happened, photographs can only capture discrete fragments of what happened. As such, photographs cannot tell stories, but they can capture details of things that have symbolic significance, and that might previously have been overlooked. Szarkowski claims that such details can reveal depths of undiscovered meaning that may be lost in a straight narrative account, and that the function of photography is not to tell a story, but to make a story real.
The frame refers to the edges of the photograph, and is the demarcation between the elements of the real scene that the photographer decided to include, and the elements he/she decided to leave out. The photographer can look at the world like a scroll painting, offering an infinite number of possible compositions as the lens is moved up and down, and left and right. This observation is closely related to the initial one regarding photography as a process of selection rather than synthesis, with framing being a part of the process of selection.
The fourth characteristic is that of time. Photographs are not instantaneous but rather a rendering of the scene over a discrete parcel of time. Furthermore this time is always the present, so photographs cannot directly represent the past or the future, but merely allude to it. Szarkowski describes two ways in which time exposure produces unique images and insights. The first one is when long time exposures (e.g. in the early days of slow lenses) produced images that had never been seen before – blurred figures, dogs with two heads and so on. The second is when short time exposures allowed us to see details previously lost in the blur of movement. For example, Muybridge‘s studies of galloping horses allowed us to understand the horse’s gait in a way we did not before. Similarly, Cartier-Bresson‘s notion of the decisive moment is only made possible by the ability of the camera to freeze a short parcel of time.
The final characteristic that Szarkowski identifies is that of the vantage point. The photographer has to photograph the subject from one of whatever range of vantage points happen to be available, and these may be less than ideal. Rather than this being a failing of photography however, this has proven to be a boon, as photograph has shown us the world from a variety of unusual and unique angles and perspectives, and in doing so has altered our perception of the world.
All credit to Hugh McCabe at his blog, http://tracesofthereal.com/
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