The Photographer's Eye - John Szarkowski
The history and development of photography is a unique and interesting one, which is narrated through John Szarkwoski's 'The Photographer's Eye'. The book, which contains an investigation as to what images look like and why they look as they do, underlines the invention of photography as something that has provided society a new picture making process and one that can be described as a radical change. This new process is based not on synthesis but on selection.
Those who invented photography were scientists and painters although its professional practitioners were quite different. As time progressed, photography became easier, due to the hand camera and the snapshot. In 1893, an English writer complained that these new creations had produced "an army of photographers" who simply photographed anything (objects of all sorts, sizes and shapes) without pausing to question whether what they are taking an image of is "artistic" or well thought out. Although these creations have been useful, it has led to us as photographers to require more consideration when capturing and selecting images nowadays. |
The Thing Itself
The first major factor the photographer learned was that photography dealt with 'the actual'. From this, he realised that simply the world itself is its own artist of 'incomparable inventiveness' and that in order to recognise its best works and moments, an intelligence of acuteness and suppleness is required. Furthermore, he also learned that photos, no matter how convincing and 'unarguable', they were a different thing than reality itself. This problem was solely an artistic one, although the public now believed that the photograph could not lie, and it would be much easier if that were the truth for the photographer also. However, in a sense, giving the camera image more credibility than his own eyes was right, as an image would survive the subject and become the remembered reality.
The nineteenth century began by believing that what was reasonable was true and it would end up by believing that what it saw a photograph of was true - Willian N. Ivins
The Detail
The second major factor the photographer realised was that he could not, outside the studio, pose the truth of an image. He could only recored the events as he found it, as well as isolating the fragment and documenting it. By doing so, he could claim it for some special significance, a meaning which went beyond the simple description. If photographs could not be read as stories, they could be read as symbols.
The Frame
The third major factor the photographer realised was that since the the photographers picture was not conceived but selected, his subject was never truly discrete and never wholly self-contained. The edges of every film and image underlines his idea of importance. The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces the concentration on the picture edge - the line that separates in from out - and on the shapes that are created by it. During the first half-century of photography lifetime, enlarging was impractical, meaning the photographer could not rethink his decision in the darkroom and could not increase or decrease the size of an image. The size of his frame ideally had to be the size of his final product. The edges of pictures during these days were rarely precise and many features (such as building or landscapes) were truncated. This left the shape belonging not to the subject, but to the balance and the propriety of the image. The sense of the pictures edge as a cropping device is one of the qualities that most interested the 'inventive painters' later on in the nineteenth century.
Time
The fourth major factor the photographer realised was that there was no such thing as an instantaneous photograph. Every photograph in the history of photographs (including the present day) is a time exposure of shorter or longer duration wgucg describes a discrete parcel of time. This time, is always the present. Photography is able to allude to the past and future only in so far as they exist in the present, the past through its surviving relics and the future through prophecy visible in the present. As photographic materials were made more sensitive, as well as lenses and shutters faster, photography progressed to the exploration of rapidly moving objects. Just as the naked eye is incapable of registering the single frames of a motion picture projected on a screen (at the rate of twenty-four per second), so is it incapable of following the projects of a rapidly moving subject in real life.
He discovered that there was a pleasure and a beauty in this fragmenting of time that had little to do with what was happening - (Muybridge)
Vantage Point
The fifth and final major factor that the photographer realised was that little had been said about photography's obscurity, which was that it is photography that has taught us to see from the unexpected vantage point. Photographs give us a sense of scene whilst withholding its narrative meaning. Photographers from necessity choose from the options available to them, often meaning pictures from the other side of the proscenium showing the actors' backs, pictures from the bird's eye view, or the worm's, or pictures in which the subject is distorted by extreme foreshortening, or by none, or by an unfamiliar pattern, or by a seeming ambiguity of action or gesture. The history of photography has been less a journey than a growth. Photography, and our understanding of it, has spread from a centre; it has, by infusion, penetrated our consciousness. Like an organism, photography was born whole. It is in our progressive discovery of it is that its history lies.