Research no. 4: Something that matters 02/25/10

" how could this mechanical and mindless process be made to produce pictures meaningful in human terms,produce pictures meaningful in human terms, produce pictures meaningful in human terms, produce pictures meaningful meaningful meaningful meaningful in human terms—pictures with clarity and coherence and a point of view? It was soon demonstrated that an answer would not be found by those who loved too much the old forms, for in large part the photographer was bereft of the old artistic traditions"

"Photography had become easy. In 1893 an English writer complained that the new situation had "created an army of photographers who run rampant over the globe, photographing objects of all sorts, sizes and shapes, under almost every condition, without ever pausing to ask themselves, is this or that artistic? …They spy a view, it seems to please, the camera is focused, the shot taken! There is no pause, why should there be? For art may err but nature cannot miss, says the poet, and they listen to the dictum. To them, composition, light, shade, form and texture are so many catch phrases…" 

"But he learned also that the factuality of his pictures, no matter how convincing and unarguable, was a different thing than the reality itself. Much of the reality was filtered out in the static little black and white image, and some of it was exhibited with an unnatural clarity, an exaggerated importance. The subject and the picture were not the same thing, although they would afterwards seem so. It was the photographer's problem to see not simply the reality before him but the still invisible picture, and to make his choices in terms of the latter."

 

" Since the photographer's picture was not conceived but selected, his subject was never truly discrete, never wholly self-contained. The edges of his film demarcated what he thought most important, but the subject he had shot was something else; it had extended in four directions. If the photographer's frame surrounded two figures, isolating them from the crowd in which they stood, it created a relationship between those two figures that had not existed before."

"There is in fact no such thing as an instantaneous photograph. All photographs are time exposures of shorter or longer duration, and each describes a discrete parcel of time. This time is always the present. Uniquely in the history of pictures, a photograph describes only that period of time in which it was made. Photography alludes to the past and the future only in so far as they exist in the present, the past through its surviving relics, the future through prophecy visible in the present. "

The Photographer's Eye by John Szarkowski

 How does one produce something meaningful. How do you make it matter? How do you show truth in one plane from 6 directions? That's the on;y thing Szarkowski seems to have overlooked, it is not four sides but SIX. 
I found this article amazing, as parts of it seem so applicable right NOW. It is incredible to think of artists being baffled by the immediacy of the photograph. The idea that in 1966 the world felt over saturated with images. He died 3 years ago, but I wonder what he thought of flickr and the changing landscape of photography in the last 15 years.