THE PHOTOGRAPHER'S EYE BY JOHN SZARKOWSKI
The Photographer's Eye, a book, written by John Szarkowski is an exploration into how the traditions of photography drastically changed and emerged into something new. The invention of photography and cameras provided us with a new process of picture-making, based on selection rather than synthesis. This betrayed the ethics of art and disregarded the traditional picture-making process of painting as photographs were just taken and paintings required skills and attitudes. With this difference came the argument of how this process of picture-making could generate meaningful and evident pictures in the same way that paintings had the potential to. Baudelaire - "This industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy". This argument became more prominent as methods of photography became more accessible such as with the invention of the daguerreotype. This resulted in people from other professions with no experience with photography creating their own pictures with lack of meaning and thought which stripped away the true purpose of photography even more. Having said that, more consideration should be used when taking and selecting photographs today.
THE THING ITSELF
The first major factor that the photographer had learned was that photography dealt with 'the actual' and that the world itself is an artist of incomparable inventiveness. The factuality of pictures are different to reality as a lot of it was filtered out, which indicates that the subject and the picture are not the same thing, no matter how convincing the picture itself is to begin with. This constructed an artistic problem not a scientific one as the public believed that a picture could not lie. Hawthorne Holgrave - "We give credit only for depicting the merest surface, but it actually brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon..."
THE DETAIL
The second factor is that the photographer was tied to the facts of things and it was his problem to force the facts to tell the truth. He was unable to pose the truth as it was only possible to record things in the way he found them. Therefore his work was interpreted as scattered and suggestive clues, not as a full story. With this fragment, he could isolate, document and claim it special significance. With the past century declining a creation of a narrative in a painting, has been ascribed to the rise of photography, this relieving the painter from having a story to necessarily tell. Robert Capa - "If your pictures aren't good enough you're not close enough".
THE FRAME
The third factor is that the photographer's picture is not conceived but selected, the subject is never truly discrete, never wholly self-contained. The act of choosing and eliminating is important as it forces a concentration on the picture edge, the line that separates in from out. During the first half of the century of photography's lifetime, all photographs had to be printed as the same size as the exposed plate. A disadvantage was that enlarging was actually quite impractical as it meant that the photographer could not change his mind to only use a fragment of the picture, whilst in the darkroom.
TIME
The fourth factor is that there is 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. Photography alludes to the past and 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. In the days of slow films and slow lenses, photographs described a time segment of several seconds or more. Incapacitating these thin slices of time has caused fascination and allowed discovery of the beauty in fragmenting time.
VANTAGE POINT
The fifth factor is that photography has taught us to look for beauty of a subject from an unexpected vantage point, and has shown us pictures that give the sense of the scene, while withholding its narrative meaning. Ivins - "At first the public had talked a great deal about what it called photographic distortion... [But] it was not long before men began to think photographically, and thus to see for themselves things that it had previously taken the photograph to reveal to their astonished and protesting eyes. Just as nature had once intimidated art, so now it began to imitate the picture made by the camera".