Howard W. French (http://www.howardwfrench.com)

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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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Maintained by: Professor William A. Joseph
Department of Political Science
Created By: Giuliana Funkhouser ‘04 and Joyce Hsu ‘05; revised by Devyani Parameshwar ‘06 and Mimi Lai ‘06

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Copyright The Daily Beast

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Copyright The Online Photographer

Apropos the video we linked the other day, I would just like to throw this out there for what little it’s worth…if any young or beginning photographer of real ambition within the sound of my voice would like to radically improve his or her photography quickly and efficiently, I suggest shooting with nothing but a Leica and one lens for a year. Shoot one type of black-and-white film (yes, even if you’re completely devoted to color and digital, and hate film and everything it stands for. You don’t have to commit to this forever; it’s an exercise). Pick a single-focal-length 50mm, or 35mm, or 28mm. It doesn’t have to be a “good” lens—anything that appeals to you and that fits the camera will do. Carry the camera with you all day, every day. Shoot at least two films a week. Four or six is better (or shoot more in the spring and fall and less in the dead of summer and winter). The more time you spend shooting, the better. The amount of film you shoot is related but not so important. (Photographing is like jogging: benefit accrues to time spent doing it, not how fast you go or how much ground you cover.)

Proof the rolls of film by contact and file them sequentially in a notebook. Get or make between one and six workprints per roll, however you choose to do it (even if you scan your picks and look at the pictures on a computer screen), and, every five or ten rolls or so, have one nice print made, or make it yourself. Craft well, but don’t crop and don’t fuss; just take what the camera gives you.

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Some of my photography, nicely organized:
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I’m in the midst of a major update of my website: howardwfrench.net. Stay tuned.

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A link to Bill Jay’s writings on photography.
Bill, a real force for the medium, died recently.

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Copyright The New York Times

Published: April 24, 2009

“LISTEN, do I have time to feed my pig?” the photographer Danny Lyon asked, picking up the telephone one morning at his home in rural New Mexico. “It will only take about 10 minutes. I’ll call you back,” he said, adding: “That way I can start the day with a clean conscience.”

Among a group of revolutionaries whose work rose to prominence in the late 1960s and ’70s and transformed the nature of documentary photography — a group that includes friends and colleagues of Mr. Lyon’s like Mary Ellen Mark and Larry Clark — the idea of conscience has been imbedded more deeply in Mr. Lyon’s photographs than in those of all but a few of his contemporaries.

At a time when picture magazines were still a holy grail for young photographers, Mr. Lyon, self-taught, began his career as the first staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. A week after hitchhiking south in 1962 at the age of 20 he was in jail with other protesters in Albany, Ga., next to the cell of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And Mr. Lyon’s first book, the classic “Bikeriders,” made after spending more than two years as a member of the Outlaws motorcycle gang, was not just a pioneering example of New Journalism but, as he later described it, an attempt “to destroy Life magazine” and what he saw as its anodyne vision of American life.

His newest book, “Memories of Myself,” published this month by Phaidon Press, seems on its face to be the kind of comfortable, coffee-table retrospective that a revered 67-year-old artist receives at this point in his life. It is a selection of self-assigned — and largely unpublished — photo essays that he made while wandering from Chicago to Galveston, Tex., to Brooklyn to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, over almost four decades. But even this book is a product of political calculus, as Mr. Lyon described it. He has been traveling for many years to photograph a remote, impoverished region of China with a book in mind but with little idea of who would be interested in it.

“It’s not always easy to get these things published,” he said. “I’m pretty uncompromising and not very commercial.” So when Phaidon approached him a few years ago with the idea of a career survey, he offered a deal. “I basically said, ‘If you do the China book, you can do the retrospective.’ ” (Phaidon, which does not comment on its negotiations with authors, would say only that it plans to publish two books by Mr. Lyon, in addition to “Memories of Myself,” calling him a “great photographer.”)

It is the kind of bargain Mr. Lyon has been striking his whole life, especially during years when he was supporting a family of four while insisting on making the kind of work he wanted to make, a stubborn vision that has probably contributed to his photographs and independent films not being better known. Even now, with his work in important museum collections around the country, a survivor’s hustle remains and sometimes still comes in handy: a few weeks ago, at his dentist’s office in Albuquerque, he traded a nice print for a root canal. “The market has taken a body blow, and I needed the dental work,” he explained, adding, “I was so happy to do it.”

Like Mr. Clark, who blurred the line between observer and participant and wanted to confront middle-class viewers with the American underclass, Mr. Lyon has made a peripatetic attempt to photograph people who are generally unseen or unwanted, even hated, and he has never been able to approach it with a journalist’s distance. When he began his motorcycle work in the mid-1960s while at the University of Chicago, he writes in the new book, “I was a bike rider, a photographer and a history student, probably in that order.”

When he became involved in what many critics consider his most powerful work, “Conversations With the Dead,” based on more than a year photographing inside the Texas prison system in the late 1960s, he developed deep bonds with several inmates, including one who had been convicted of rape. Another, James Ray Renton, a talented escape artist who was later convicted of killing an Arkansas police officer, became an unlikely friend and devoted correspondent for more than 30 years. (In “Like a Thief’s Dream,” Mr. Lyon’s book about their relationship, he describes testifying as a character witness for Mr. Renton at his murder trial in 1979 and, in addition to his testimony, offering Mr. Renton some marijuana during a courtroom recess. Mr. Renton declined.)

“To some, he’s idealizing people who really are not good people at all — they’re just criminals,” said Larry McMurtry, who was teaching at Rice University in Houston in the 1960s and befriended Mr. Lyon while he was there working on the prison book. “But to Danny maybe they’re good people who just never had a chance.”

“He hasn’t really changed his principles any at all since he was young, when I first met him,” Mr. McMurtry added. “He’s an idealist, to a large extent.”

In a long, animated, tangent-filled telephone interview after he went to feed his pig (which turned out to be not his but a neighbor’s, borrowed to entertain Mr. Lyon’s visiting granddaughter), Mr. Lyon more or less agreed with Mr. McMurtry and asked: “Is there something wrong with me because of that? I don’t know.”

Raised in Kew Gardens, Queens, where his father, Ernst, an immigrant from Germany, was a doctor (one of his patients in New York was Alfred Stieglitz), Mr. Lyon ached to flee the conformity of an upper-middle-class life. He discovered “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” at a formative age and was fired by the intensity of James Agee’s prose even more than by Walker Evans’s pictures.

“Agee was a stone realist, and that had a huge impact on me,” he said. One of the new book’s more lyrical essays is a series of portraits Mr. Lyon took after driving to Knoxville, Tenn., in the late 1960s simply because he wanted to see Agee’s birthplace.

Click to read more and to see some of Danny’s work

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Copyright The New York Times

By MARGARETT LOKE
Published: March 30, 2009

Helen Levitt, a major photographer of the 20th century who caught fleeting moments of surpassing lyricism, mystery and quiet drama on the streets of her native New York, died in her sleep at her home in Manhattan on Sunday. She was 95.
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© Estate of Helen Levitt

Helen Levitt in 1963.
© Estate of Helen Levitt

Bubbles capture the attention of four girls in a photograph by Helen Levitt, who had an eye for the vignettes of New York streets.

Her death was confirmed by her brother, Bill Levitt, of Alta, Utah.

Ms. Levitt captured instances of a cinematic and delightfully guileless form of street choreography that held at its heart, as William Butler Yeats put it, “the ceremony of innocence.” A man handles garbage-can lids like an exuberant child imitating a master juggler. Even an inanimate object — a broken record — appears to skip and dance on an empty street as a child might, observed by a group of women’s dresses in a shop window.

As marvelous as these images are, the masterpieces in Ms. Levitt’s oeuvre are her photographs of children living their zesty, improvised lives. A white girl and a black boy twirl in a dance of their own imagining. Four girls on a sidewalk turning to stare at five floating bubbles become contrapuntal musical notes in a lovely minor key.

In Ms. Levitt’s best-known picture, three properly dressed children prepare to go trick-or-treating on Halloween 1939. Standing on the stoop outside their house, they are in almost metaphorical stages of readiness. The girl on the top step is putting on her mask; a boy near her, his mask in place, takes a graceful step down, while another boy, also masked, lounges on a lower step, coolly surveying the world.

“At the peak of Helen’s form,” John Szarkowski, former director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, once said, “there was no one better.”

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Copyright Dante Stella

From a very affecting essay. Follow the link below.

…When the world is gone, or when I am gone from the world, I will miss a great many things. It could be the smell of rain, the pink light of a northern sunset, or the intoxicating smell of perfume when I was sixteen years old. But what I might miss most is the smell of a roll of 120 film, pushing the paper tongue thumbwise into a plastic takeup spool, or the whirring of an old Rolleiflex.

We don’t have it now, the gelatin or the silver or the sucking sound of a metal shutter flattening reality into a still frame. There is no struggling in the dark with loading film into developing reels or the surprise of seeing that the negatives actually came out. We don’t have the magic anymore. For the would-be chemists and physicists, there was so much documentation, the disintegrating, mildewy Kodak data guides that showed curves in so much precision and told us what to do, at what temperature, and for how long: it was all method to tame the magic. Today you can find those booklets in the free bin at the front of King’s. But for all of the technique, all of the numbers and the graphs, there was always the faith of Tri-X Safety Film: you take the picture, we do the rest…

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Copyright N+1

The Complete Centerfolds is a coffee-table book compiling every Playboy centerfold published from the magazine’s inception in 1953 until 2007. Six short essays preface the decades, but there is no other text. As you might expect, the pleasures of the book are instant and visual. My favorite Playboy centerfold is Miss September 1983, dressed for a college football game in striped socks and a tartan scarf. She has a flask, a fuzzy wool cap, and a team pennant. Her neo-Gothic surroundings are meant, I think, to evoke Yale. A single branch of ivy cascades next to her, and a textbook lies abandoned at her feet. She is naked. It sounds funny in writing, but somehow there’s nothing funny about the photograph, or about any of the photographs in The Complete Centerfolds. Is laughter an anti-aphrodisiac?

The first thing that strike the casual reader is the anatomical variety among bunnies. Nipples, for one thing. Some are as big as cupcakes, others are the size of a penny. They are occasionally erect and come in a range of colors as varied as drugstore lipsticks. Pubic hair is another delight to behold, appearing first in 1971 and thriving until 1997. Gauzy coronas of pubic hair, technicolor dreampubes of every shade. You forget how assertive a healthy growth of hair can look. It comes as a pleasant shock in the midst of a creamy-smooth expanse.

Pubic hair diminishes as the nineties draw to a close. Neat triangles turn to Band Aid-sized strips, which become little Hitler mustaches or nothing at all. The modern crotch is a bit prim, a bit less forthright. You’d think that depilation would lend a youthful look to the genitals but it has the opposite effect instead, making the girls look older and slightly jaded. (Intimate grooming signals forethought.) The youthful quality of the early centerfolds disappears.

A 1956 memo to Playboy photographers listed Hefner’s criteria for the centerfolds. The model must be in a natural setting engaged in some activity “like reading, writing, mixing a drink.” She should have a “healthy, intelligent, American look—a young lady that looks like she might be a very efficient secretary or an undergrad at Vassar.” Many centerfolds feature the implied presence of a man: a flash of trouser leg in the corner, a pipe left on a table. These props transform the pinups into seduction scenarios. Their premise is simple: by identifying with the absent man, a viewer can enter the scene.

The centerfold’s signature is what we might call the “Playboy aesthetic”—something responsible both for Playboy’s long run of success and its schmaltziness. As Hefner put it in a letter to Russ Meyer (director of Faster, Pussycat! Kill Kill!), the ideal centerfold is one in which “a situation is suggested, the presence of someone not in the picture.” The goal was to transform “a straight pinup into an intimate interlude, something personal and special.” Playboy readers are meant to be participants, not voyeurs. Hefner’s vision of American sexuality was a distinctly pasteurized one—sex cleansed of its ugly (and often exciting) power plays. “Clean sex,” he insisted, “has greater appeal than tawdry sex.” Strippers, threesomes and S&M had no place in his magazine. The Playboy centerfold was a world away from the European ideal of a sexually-sophisticated temptress. Hefner’s girls were always girls, first of all, or bunnies— not women. There was no knowing gleam in a centerfold’s eye.

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Copyright Slate

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A very compelling take on Chongqing, one of my favorite places in China:

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Copyright The Wall Street Journal

The photographer William Eggleston has always depended on the kindness of editors. This shy, dissolute Southern cavalier (soon to be 70 years old) has almost never held a job or selected his own work for a book or an exhibition. It’s as though reading a storyline into the tens of thousands of images he has shot around the world since the 1960s were superfluous or vulgar, something for others to bother with.

At the beginning of his career he left that task to two of the most capable minds in American art: Walter Hopps, who discovered him in 1970 when he was director of the Corcoran Gallery; and John Szarkowski, who as director of the Department of Photographs at the Museum of Modern Art gave Mr. Eggleston a one-man show in 1976 that changed the course of photography as an art.

That controversial exhibition and its peculiar catalog, “William Eggleston’s Guide,” legitimized color photography, overturning a hierarchy that had favored black-and-white since the medium’s invention. Unlike artists of earlier generations, Mr. Eggleston did not use color for freakish or decorative effect but with a natural ease, “as though the blue and the sky were one thing,” in Mr. Szarkowski’s appreciative phrase.

Editing Mr. Eggleston is vital, and this function, even before the deaths last year of Messrs. Hopps and Szarkowski, had passed in this decade to the German curator and writer Thomas Weski. Deputy director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, he organized “Los Alamos,” the sprawling 2003 exhibition of photographs that Mr. Eggleston took around the U.S. between 1964 and 1974, and he is co-curator, with Elizabeth Sussman, of “Democratic Camera,” the retrospective now at the Whitney Museum through Jan. 25.

Mr. Eggleston’s temperament is that of a boulevardier. His books seldom have a single theme and never feature a group of identifiable characters. They don’t even confine themselves to a single city, state or country. Instead, his international oeuvre — mainly shot with small-format cameras in available light — consists of tiny epiphanies that correlate only if you want them to. The seeming randomness of the artist’s attention, as much as the color, is what baffled many viewers back in 1976.

What were the connections, if any, between places and people? Did the dog sipping from a puddle in the road have anything to do with the naked man standing in a red room with graffiti on the walls? Were the green-tiled shower and the interior of the oven in the same house? (I once asked Mr. Eggleston if he had ever photographed methodically. “I’ve taken a few stabs at it and it’s just not me,” he replied.)

Mr. Weski and Ms. Sussman have kept things loosely chronological but not imposed too much order. A room of his grainy black-and-white photos from the 1960s conveys ambiguous reactions to his native South undergoing suburbanization. Another room features a legendary black-and-white video he made in 1973-74. “Stranded in Canton,” as he titles it, offers a peek at the artist’s bizarre and fluid social world and his nonjudgmental attitude toward what his camera sees. Shot mainly at night in New Orleans, it has appearances by Delta bluesman Furry Lewis, a man biting the head off a chicken, and numerous rambling monologists.

The rest of the show is color, done with the fresh, restless eye for which Mr. Eggleston is renowned. He should be a hero to any artist opposed to the pompous or monumental. During the ’70s and ’80s he looked at things few had noticed before — the objects that collect under a bed, the strange emptiness of a suburban garage, an evening meal set for one — and he discovered therein unique harmonies and discontinuties that only a color photographer could grasp.

Many photographers since Walker Evans have focused on decaying structures and mourned the replacement of the ramshackle cabin with the new mall. Mr. Eggleston shares that sensibility. But when he switched to color in the late ’60s and early ’70s, first with transparencies and then with print film, he also recorded the wide range of hues unique to the industrial age: the faded paint of automobiles and storefronts, the many shades of gray and brown in cement and macadam, the bold solids and stripes of manufactured clothing.

Against these synthetic dyes, he has often contrasted a girl’s red hair or dark skin, a scruffy patch of grass, a pattern of sun across a sink, a startling blue sky. Such combinations of manmade and natural color exist everywhere and help to define the look of our time, even if most of us have failed to pay attention.

Looking inside a freezer, he finds that ice has a lavender tinge. A woman’s hand stirring a drink aboard an airplane seems to turn it into gold as sun through the window strikes the glass. Many artists have fallen for early morning dappled light. But in his photograph of a phone off the hook on a flowered sheet, the sun at that hour gives extra temporal mystery to a scene of a conversation interrupted for reasons we are not privy to…

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Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

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My photography of Shanghai is included, along with an essay, in a forthcoming book of essays bearing this title.

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Copyright The Guardian

In 1998, I met an ex-professional boxer and martial-arts expert in Japan, and we became friendly. He introduced me to these two yakuza, and we went for dinner in a small tempura place in the Ginza district of Tokyo.

My father was a racketeer type, so they got along with me and I got along with them.

I know their background of respect, and generally they’re polite. Some of the low-level yakuza that I’ve seen in an area of Tokyo called San’ya are really nasty and vicious, though - not nice people, and quite dangerous.

The guy who is having his cigarette lit is about 5ft 6in tall, and just as wide. When I first saw him, he was wearing a bright yellow suit. The other guy invited me to his house and told me all about his wife, who was a model and had just come back from Paris. He also told me that he can never get into the US because he’s got tattoos all over, and they don’t want yakuza in the country.

I don’t know exactly what these two guys do. I think they must keep order in the area. They work for some upper-echelon boss, and I’m sure they make good money. They have to cut their own finger joints off if they do something wrong, and my boxer friend was missing a piece of his finger. I didn’t look to see if these guys were, and you can’t quite tell in the picture.

After dinner, we went to a coffee shop, and I saw them lighting cigarettes. I took a picture with a Leica M6 and a hand-held flash while they were doing it, and then I asked them if they could repeat the gesture and I took three or four more. The big guy having his cigarette lit has the most fantastic expression. That’s what I love about it. The way he’s looking at us, like he’s looking right through us. You just know that these are tough guys.

Click to see the Gilden image

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Copyright The New York Times

Thirty years ago photography was art if it was black and white. Color pictures were tacky and cheap, the stuff of cigarette ads and snapshot albums. So in 1976, when William Eggleston had a solo show of full-color snapshotlike photographs at the august Museum of Modern Art, critics squawked.

It didn’t help that Mr. Eggleston’s pictures, shot in the Mississippi Delta, where he lived, were of nothings and nobodies: a child’s tricycle, a dinner table set for a meal, an unnamed woman perched on a suburban curb, an old man chatting up the photographer from his bed.

That MoMA’s curator of photography, John Szarkowski, had declared Mr. Eggleston’s work perfect was the last straw. “Perfectly banal, perfectly boring,” sniffed one writer; “erratic and ramshackle,” snapped another; “a mess,” declared a third.

Perfect or not, the images quickly became influential classics. And that’s how they look in “William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008,” a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art that is this artist’s first New York museum solo since his seditious debut.

Naturally we see the work more clearly now. We know that it was not cheap. The dye transfer printing Mr. Eggleston used, adapted from advertising, was the most expensive color process then available. It produced hues of almost hallucinatory intensity, from a custard-yellow sunset glow slanting across a wall to high-noon whiteness bleaching a landscape to pink lamplight suffusing a room.

And compositions that at first seemed bland and random proved not to be on a 2nd, 3rd and 20th look. The tricycle was shot from a supine position so as to appear colossal. The woman on the curb sits next to a knot of heavy chains that echoes her steel-mesh bouffant. The affable guy on the bed holds a revolver, its barrel resting on his vintage country quilt.

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Copyright Vanity Fair

In the seven decades since his mysterious death, bluesman Robert Johnson’s legend has grown—the tragically short life, the “crossroads” tale of supernatural talent, the genuine gift that inspired Dylan, Clapton, and other greats—but his image remains elusive: only two photos of Johnson have ever been seen by the public. In 2005, on eBay, guitar maven Zeke Schein thought he’d found a third. Schein’s quest to authenticate the picture only led to more questions, both about Johnson himself and about who controls his valuable legacy.
by Frank DiGiacomo November 2008

In June 2005, Steven “Zeke” Schein was killing time on his home computer when he logged on to eBay and typed “old guitar” into the auction site’s search engine. Classically trained as a guitarist, Schein had turned his longtime passion for the instrument into a profession when, in 1989, he had joined the sales force at Matt Umanov Guitars, in Manhattan’s West Village. In the more than 15 years that Schein had worked there, he had cultivated a regular clientele that included Patti Smith, ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, and record producers Daniel Lanois and John Leventhal; he had also sold guitars to Bob Dylan, Pete Townshend, Brad Pitt, and Johnny Depp, among other celebrities. His job had also exposed him to the painstaking, detail-oriented detective work that often goes into identifying and authenticating vintage guitars. Even when the make, model, and serial number of an instrument are apparent, pinpointing its age and value sometimes requires scrutinizing the idiosyncrasies of its construction. The design of the instrument’s tailpiece, its headstock, the number of frets embedded in its neck, its paint job or finish—all could be identifying factors.
Possibly a photo of Robert Johnson, left, and fellow bluesman Johnny Shines

The photograph bought on eBay by Zeke Schein, who believes it depicts Robert Johnson, left, and fellow bluesman Johnny Shines. © 2007 Claud Johnson.

Schein enjoyed this aspect of the business, and when he had nothing better to do, he would sometimes log on to eBay to test his knowledge against the sellers who were advertising vintage guitars on the Web site. At the very least, he found it amusing that some people had no idea what they were selling.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-claxton13-2008oct13,0,4633702.story

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2008/10/william-claxton.html

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article4936102.ece

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Copyright The New York Times

Published: November 6, 2006

During the winter of 1942, in the first heated months of America�s war with Japan, the United States government ordered tens of thousands of people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them American citizens, to report to assembly centers throughout the West for transfer to internment camps. The infamous episode has been widely chronicled in books and memoirs, as well as in famous photos by Ansel Adams.

But now close to 800 new images from the period by the photographer Dorothea Lange have been unearthed in the National Archives, where they had lain neglected for a half-century after having been impounded by the government.

Adams portrayed the internees in the now-infamous camp at Manzanar, Calif., in heroic poses, lighted against the backdrop of the majestic Sierras mountains. Lange�s images � nearly a hundred of which are being published for the first time � tell a starkly different story.

The pictures in �Impounded� (W. W. Norton) bear the hallmarks of Lange�s distinctive documentary style. (She is best known from her photographs of migrant farmers in the Depression for the Farm Security Administration.) Seemingly unstaged and unlighted, the pictures of the internees compress intense human emotion into carefully composed frames.

For the complete article, please see the link below.

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Copyright - The Boston Review

8 In 1846, Charles Baudelaire wrote a little essay called �What is the Good of Criticism?� This is a question that virtually every critic asks herself at some point, and that some have answered with hopelessness, despair, even self-loathing. Baudelaire didn�t think that criticism would save the world, but he didn�t think it was a worthless pursuit, either. For Baudelaire, criticism was the synthesis of thought and feeling: in criticism, Baudelaire wrote, �passion … raises reason to new heights.� A few years later, he would explain that through criticism he sought �to transform my pleasure into knowledge��a pithy, excellent description of critical practice. Baudelaire�s American contemporary Margaret Fuller held a similar view; as she put it, the critic teaches us �to love wisely what we before loved well.�

By �pleasure� and �love� Baudelaire and Fuller didn�t mean that critics should write only about things that make them happy or that they can praise. What they meant is that a critic�s emotional connection to an artist, or to a work of art, is the sine qua non of criticism, and it usually, therefore, determines the critic�s choice of subject. Who can doubt that Edmund Wilson loved literature�and that, to him, it simply mattered more than most other things in life? Who can doubt that Pauline Kael found the world most challenging, most meaningful�hell, most alive�when she sat in a dark movie theater, or that Kenneth Tynan felt the same way at a play? For these critics and others�those I would consider at the center of the modern tradition�cultivating this sense of lived experience was at the heart of writing good criticism. Randall Jarrell, certainly no anti-intellectual, wrote that �criticism demands of the critic a terrible nakedness … All he has to go by, finally, is his own response, the self that makes and is made up of such responses.� Alfred Kazin agreed; the critic�s skill, he argued, �begins by noticing his intuitive reactions and building up from them; he responds to the matter in hand with perception at the pitch of passion.�

The great exception to all this is photography criticism. There, you will hear precious little talk of love or passion or terrible nakedness. There, critics view emotional responses�if they, or their readers, have any�not as something to be experienced and understood but, rather, to be vigilantly guarded against: to these writers, criticism is a prophylactic against the virus of sentiment. When we enter the world of photography criticism we travel far from Baudelaire�s exploration of his pleasure; for there is little pleasure to be had, and even that is condemned as voyeuristic, pornographic, or exploitative. Put most bluntly, for the past century most photography critics haven�t really liked photographs, or the experience of looking at them, at all. They approach photography�not specific photographs, or specific practitioners, or specific genres, but photography itself�with suspicion, mistrust, anger, and fear. Rather than enter into what Kazin called a �community of interest� with their subject, these critics come armed to the teeth against it. For them, photography is a powerful, duplicitous force to be defanged rather than an experience to embrace.

* * *

Susan Sontag�s On Photography was published in 1977, and it remains astonishingly incisive. It has been, rightly, immensely influential on other photography critics. And immensely influential, too, in setting the particularly reproachful tone of photography criticism. Look, for instance, at Sontag�s description of photography in the first chapter of the book, which establishes a voice, an attitude, an approach that is maintained throughout. Sontag describes photography as, among other things, �grandiose,� �treacherous,� �imperial,� �voyeuristic,� �predatory,� �addictive,� �reductive,� and �the most irresistible form of mental pollution.� A typical sentence reads, �The camera doesn�t rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate�all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment.� Metaphor indeed! On Photography was written by a brilliant skeptic.

So, too, was Roland Barthes�s Camera Lucida, first published in France in 1980. Delicate and playful, this book is a love letter to the photograph. Barthes celebrates the quirky, spontaneous reactions that photographs can inspire�or at least the quirky, spontaneous reactions they inspire in him: � A photograph�s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).� Still, Camera Lucida is a very odd valentine, for Barthes describes photographers as �agents of Death� and the photograph as a �catastrophe�; also as �flat,� �platitudinous,� �stupid,� �without culture,� and�most unkind�� �undialectical.� The photograph �teaches me nothing,� Barthes insists: it �completely de-realizes the world of human conflicts and desires.�

Continuing this classic-modern tradition of photography criticism is John Berger, the most urgent, morally cogent critic that photography has produced. �My first interest in photography was passionate,� Berger has written (as a young man, he wanted to compose a book of love poems illustrated with photos), and when you read him, you believe him. Berger has frequently worked with photographs, producing, among other works, four books with the Swiss documentarian Jean Mohr. More important, he has argued that photographs represent an �opposition to history� by affirming the subjective experiences of ordinary people that modernity, science, and industrial capitalism have done so much to crush: �And so, hundreds of millions of photographs, fragile images, often carried next to the heart or placed by the side of the bed, are used to refer to that which historical time has no right to destroy.�

And yet in Berger�s canonical photography essays he took a decidedly dark view of the practice. Photographs of political violence, he insisted, were at best useless and at worst narcissistic, leading the viewer not to enlightenment, outrage, or revolution but instead to a sense of �his own personal moral inadequacy.� (In Sontag�s last book, Regarding the Pain of Others, she softened her stance toward photography, but she too concluded that photographs of war do nothing to bridge the chasm between victims and voyeurs: �We don�t get it… . Can�t understand, can�t imagine.�) More generally, Berger described the photograph�all photographs�as a form of �violence� and, drawing on a metaphor clearly derived from the atom bomb, as a �fission whereby appearances are separated by the camera from their function.� Berger allowed that photography is a �god,� but he called it the most �cynical� one�and one that, he believed, made amnesiacs rather than critical thinkers of us all.

In the 1980s, the postmodern children of Sontag, Berger, and company transformed this skepticism into outright antipathy. Indeed, for the postmoderns, suspicion of the photograph was an ethical stance, though I see it as closer to a pathological one. For these critics, the photograph was simply a tool of late capitalism, exploiting its subject and duping its viewer. Thus, Abigail Solomon-Godeau charged, the documentary photo�or what she grandly called �the regime of the image�� commits a �double act of subjugation� in which the hapless subject is victimized first by social forces, then by the photographer and viewer. John Tagg went further: photography, he wrote, is �ultimately a function of the state,� deeply implicated in the ruling class�s �apparatus of ideological control� and its �reproduction of … submissive labour power.� (In an interview, Tagg explained that he drew on the work of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault to formulate his ideas, though it is not clear why these two theorists were the best guides to understanding a photograph.) And it was not fashion or art photographers who incited the wrath of these critics but, rather, socially conscious photojournalists, with their foolish belief in such old-fashioned fictions as progress, truth, and justice. �The liberal documentary assuages any stirrings of conscience in its viewers the way scratching relieves an itch,� Martha Rosler scoffed in a seminal, oft-quoted piece. �Documentary is a little like horror movies, putting a face on fear and transforming threat into fantasy.�

Most important, these critics denied that a scintilla of autonomy�for either photographer or viewer�was possible; denied, that is, that the photographer could ever offer, or the viewer could ever find, even a moment of surprise, originality, or insight through looking at a photograph. To think otherwise was to partake in a sham: �The wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene is a projection, a refusal of an impoverished reality in favour of an imaginary plenitude,� Victor Burgin wrote. In the view of these critics, it was impossible to ever see the world anew, for the gaze of both the photographer and his audience was predetermined, and irreparably infected, by reactionary ideological forces beyond our control; in their scheme, we are all simply helpless spiders caught in capitalism�s web, which is spun, apparently, not of silk but of iron. (As Berger would tartly note, �Unlike their late master, some of Barthes� structuralist followers love closed systems.�) Indeed, Burgin condemned the actual activity of looking�an odd stance, one would think, for a photography critic: �Our conviction that we are free to choose what we make of a photograph hides the complicity to which we are recruited in the very act of looking,� he insisted. In short, these critics regarded the photograph as a prison and the gift of vision as a crime. �Abandon hope, all ye who enter here� might well have been the epigraph to their books, which are no fun at all to read.

Compare all this�this obsession with victimization and predetermination, this utter refusal of freedom, this insistent moroseness�to the opening pages of Pauline Kael�s essay �Trash, Art, and the Movies,� written in 1969. Kael, too, set a certain tone, both for her readers and for numerous other critics. Here it is:

A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can … make you care, make you believe in possibilities again… . The movie doesn�t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy of just a good line. An actor�s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense.

Kael continued, �Because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions�� that is, the reactions of the moviegoer sitting in front of the screen�� can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable.� � Trash, Art, and the Movies� was written by a brilliant lover.

Kael had two great insights in this piece. One is that trash, far from blinding viewers to art, actually prepared them for it; or, rather, that through understanding one�s visceral enjoyment of trash, a viewer could begin to formulate her own, independent aesthetic that could lead to an equally visceral enjoyment of art. Kael�s second truth was that the only capacious and intelligent way to experience movies was to combine one�s deepest emotional reactions�which should never be disowned�with a probing analysis of them. She did not, as some have mistakenly thought, champion unadulterated emotion or unexamined fandom; on the contrary, she insisted that the viewer who approaches movies in such unthinking ways �does not respond more freely but less freely and less fully than the person who is aware of what is well done and what badly done in a movie, who can accept some things in it and reject others, who uses all his senses in reacting, not just his emotional vulnerabilities.� But this, after all, is the same insight that Baudelaire had come to when he wrote of seeking �the why of his pleasure�; it was the view of Randall Jarrell when he wrote that the good critic combines the �sense of fact� with the �personal truth�; it was what Alfred Kazin meant when he wrote that �the unity of thinking and feeling actually exists in the passionate operation of the critic�s intelligence.� It is this quest for the synthesis of thought and feeling�and the essentially comradely, or at least open, approach to art that it implies�that photography critics reject. The question is: why?

* * *

Photography is a modern invention�one that, from its inception, inspired a host of conflicts and anxieties. Indeed, when we talk about photography we are talking about modernity; the doubts that photography inspires are the doubts that modernity inspires. Photography is a proxy for modern life and its discontents.

What are some of these troubles? From the first, the essential nature of photography was puzzling. It tended to blur categories�which can be both exciting and unsettling. Was photography a kind of art? of commerce? of journalism? of science? of surveillance? Was it a form of creativity, a way of bringing newness into the world, or was its relation to reality essentially mimetic or, even, that of a parasite?

One thing was clear, early on: photography was, and perhaps still is, the great democratic medium. Baudelaire, who launched his famous diatribe against photography in 1859, hated the new form for many things, one of which was certainly its populist character. �In these deplorable times,� Baudelaire warned, �a new industry has developed,� one supported by what he called the �stupidity of the masses.� Like an Old Testament prophet, he railed,

An avenging God has heard the prayer of this multitude; Daguerre was his messiah… . Our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on the metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism, took hold of these new sun-worshippers.

Almost from the beginning, it was clear that every butcher, baker, and candlestick maker�at least in developed countries such as England, Germany, France and the United States�would be able to purchase photographic reproductions. But with the introduction of lighter, cheaper cameras, which began in the late 19th century and continued throughout the 20th, it became clear that the butcher and baker could not only purchase photos but could make them, too. Even more startling: they could make good photos. This is one of several things that sets photography apart from the other arts. Most people, after all, can�t paint a wonderful painting or compose a wonderful poem or write a wonderful play. But lots of ordinary people�with no training, no experience, no education, no knowledge�have taken wonderful photos: better, sometimes, than those of the great artists. Yet this, too�and the leveling tendencies it implies�is troubling. (This is what Sontag meant, I think, when she wrote of the �disconcerting ease with which photographs can be taken.�) For where such egalitarianism dwells, can the razing of all distinctions be far behind? Who can admire an activity�much less an art�that so many people can do so damn well? Photography�s democratic promise has always been photography�s populist threat.

Then, too, photography stirs up our anxieties about, our love�hate relationship to, technology. Unlike painting, writing, dancing, music making, and storytelling, photography began not thousands of years ago with innocent, primitive man but less than 200 years ago with compromised, modern man; and unlike those other arts, it is dependent on a machine. It is, therefore, an impure and highly contingent art, and we have approached it with that trepidatious mixture of expectation and distrust, of glorious hope and tremendous gloom, with which we approach the machine age itself.

Yet beyond all this, there is something else at the heart of photography criticism�s peculiarities. Most photography critics�Sontag, Berger, Barthes, and certainly the postmoderns�were heavily influenced by the Frankfurt School critics: especially Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin and, through him, Bertolt Brecht, who was Benjamin�s friend and comrade. In fact, none of these men wrote mainly about photography, but what they did write has been treated with biblical respect�and undergone hermeneutical scrutiny�by late-20th-century critics.

It would be false to say that Benjamin and Kraucauer hated photographs. On the contrary: as great dialecticians, they (and especially Benjamin) believed the photograph held out liberating, indeed revolutionary, possibilities. In his now enormously influential essay �Little History of Photography,� originally published in 1931, Benjamin argued that photography had created a �new way of seeing� and would enable people �to achieve control over works of art.� Several years later he wrote of the ways that film and photography contributed to the smashing of tradition: �Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual… . Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice�politics.�

Equally important, Benjamin understood the subjective power of the photograph, its spooky ability to make us want to enter into the world and even, sometimes, change it. For Benjamin, the photo wasn�t a dead thing; on the contrary, it could embrace not just the past but the future. Looking at one photograph�a 19th-century portrait of a man and his fianc�e (she would later commit suicide)�he mused.

Immerse yourself in such a picture long enough and you will realize to what extent opposites touch, here too: the most precise technology can give its products a magical value, such as a painted picture can never again have for us… . The beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.

At the same time, these critics were highly suspicious of photography and the passive, aestheticized society they feared it would help create. Benjamin wrote that mass events�including �monster [political] rallies, … sports events, and … war�� were all �intimately connected with the development of the techniques of reproduction and photography.� He believed that photography was a form of mystification, for it �can endow any soup can�� did he foresee the age of Warhol?�� with cosmic significance but cannot grasp a single one of the human connections in which it exists.� And he charged�somewhat bizarrely�that with the rise of photography �a new reality unfolds, in the face of which no one can take responsibility for personal decisions.� (Instead, �One appeals to the lens.�) Both he and Kracauer regarded the photograph as a kind of diminution: �The photograph is not the person but the sum of what can be subtracted from him or her,� Kracauer wrote. �The photograph annihilates the person.� And while many artists and journalists working in Weimar Berlin�s cacophonous, newly uncensored press�notable for its plethora of heavily illustrated publications�viewed the photograph as a harbinger of modernity, Kracauer was decidedly unimpressed. �The flood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory,� he charged. �Never before has a period known so little about itself. In the hands of the ruling society, the invention of illustrated magazines is one of the most powerful means of organizing a strike against understanding… . The �image-idea� drives away the idea.�

Most of all, though, I believe it is Brecht whose shadow hangs over photography criticism. Brecht, it�s fair to say, really did dislike photographs, or at best deeply distrust them; in 1931 he described them as �a terrible weapon against the truth.� In �Little History,� Benjamin quotes Brecht: �Less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG� the massive German armaments and electric companies, respectively� tells us next to nothing about these institutions.�

These two sentences have been quoted ad infinitum and launched a million Ph.D. theses. And on one level, there is no doubt that Brecht was right. Photographs don�t explain the way the world works; they don�t offer reasons or causes; they don�t tell us stories with a coherent, or even discernible, beginning, middle, and end. Photographs live on the surface: they can�t burrow within to reveal the inner dynamics of historic events. And though it�s true that photographs document the specific, they tend, also, to blur�dangerously blur�political and historic distinctions: a photograph of a bombed-out apartment building in Berlin, circa 1945, looks much like a photograph of a bombed-out apartment building in Hanoi, circa 1969, which looks awfully similar to a photograph of a bombed-out apartment building in Baghdad from last week. Yet only a vulgar reductionist�or a complete pacifist�would say that these three cities, which is to say these three wars, are fundamentally the same cities or the same wars. Still, the photos look the same: there�s a very real sense in which if you�ve seen one bombed-out building you have indeed seen them all. (�War is a horrible repetition,� Martha Gellhorn wrote, and this is even truer of photographs than of words.) It is this anti-explanatory, anti-analytic quality of the photograph�what Barthes called its stupidity�that critics have seized on with a vengeance and that they cannot, apparently, forgive.

But the problem with photographs is not only that they fail to explain the world. A greater problem, for Brecht and his followers, is what photographs succeed in doing, which is to offer an immediate, emotional connection to the world. People don�t look at photographs to understand the inner contradictions of monopoly capitalism or the reasons for the genocide in Rwanda. They�we�turn to photographs for other things: for a glimpse of what cruelty, or strangeness, or beauty, or suffering, or love, or disease, or natural wonder, or artistic creation, or depraved violence, looks like. And we turn to photographs, also, to find out what our intuitive reactions to such otherness might be. (This curiosity is not, as the postmoderns have charged, an expression of �imperialism,� racism,� or �orientalism�: the peasant in Kenya and the worker in Cairo are as fascinated�if not more so�by a picture of New Yorkers as we are by an image of them.) None of us is a creature solely of feeling, and yet there is no doubt that we approach photographs, first and foremost, on an emotional level.

For Brecht, of course, this was the worst possible approach to anything. Brecht�s entire oeuvre is an assault not just on sentimentality but on sentiment itself; indeed, for Brecht, the two were synonymous. Brecht regarded all feeling�any feeling�as dishonest and dangerous; he associated emotion with the chaos and irrationality of capitalism. As George Grosz once remarked, Brecht �clearly would have wanted a sensitive electric computer instead of a heart.� And George Grosz was a friend.

There is much that is bracing, and revelatory, and so wonderfully challenging about Brecht�s emotional astringency. Who can not admire a man who, in one of his very first poems, announces to the women in his life, �Here you have someone on whom you can�t rely.� What is often forgotten, however, is that Brecht�like Moses�was a particular man who lived in a particular time and place and who observed particular things. Brecht�s time and place was Weimar Germany, and he saw�correctly�that his compatriots were drowning in a toxic bath of unexamined emotion: of rage over their defeat in World War I, of ressentiment against Jews and intellectuals and others, of self-pity, of bathos, of fear. Brecht saw�correctly�that this poisonous mix of increasingly hysterical feeling, and the voodoo conspiracy theories to which it lent itself, was the perfect incubator for fascism.

Like Brecht, we live in dark times, which is to say times of confusion, violence, and injustice. And yet there are real differences between our darkness and Brecht�s. We do not�unlike Brecht�live in a society that is the precursor, much less the architect, of Treblinka and Sobibor. Brecht�s relentless war on emotion was ethically, politically, and artistically necessary for him, but it has been taken up in an all too uncritical way by Anglo-American photography critics working in very different times and places and facing a very different set of challenges.

For the entire article, please see the link below.

Susie Linfield is the associate director of the cultural reporting and criticism program at New York University.

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