Authors: Susan Sontag
On Photography (24 page)
The war had thrust me, as a soldier, into the heart of a mechanical atmosphere. Here I discovered the beauty of the fragment. I sensed a new reality in the detail of a machine, in the common object. I tried to find the plastic value of these fragments of our modern life. I rediscovered them on the screen in the close-ups of objects which impressed and influenced me.
—Fernand Leger (1923)
575.20 fields of photography
aerophotography, aerial photography
astrophotography
candid photography
chromophotography
chronophotography
cinematography
cinephotomicrography
cystophotography
heliophotography
infrared photography
macrophotography
microphotography
miniature photography
phonophotography
photogrammetry photomicrography
photospectroheliography
phototopography
phototypography
phototypy
pyrophotography
radiography
radiophotography
sculptography
skiagraphy
spectroheliography
spectrophotography
stroboscopic photography
telephotography
uranophotography
X-ray photography
—from
Roget’s International Thesaurus, Third Edition
The weight of words. The shock of photos
.
—
Paris-Match,
advertisement
June 4, 1857.—Saw today, at the Hotel Drouot, the first sale of photographs. Everything is becoming black in this century, and photography seems like the black clothing of things.
November 15, 1861.—I sometimes think the day will come when all modern nations will adore a sort of American god, a god who will have been someone who lived as a human being and about whom much will have been written in the popular press: images of this god will be set up in the churches, not as the imagination of each individual painter may fancy him, not floating on a Veronica cloth, but fixed once and for all by photography. Yes, I foresee a photographed god, wearing spectacles.
—from the
Journal
of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
In the spring of 1921, two automatic photographic machines, recently invented abroad, were installed in Prague, which reproduced six or ten or more exposures of the same person on a single print.
When I took such a series of photographs to Kafka I said light-heartedly: “For a couple of krone one can have oneself photographed from every angle. The apparatus is a mechanical
Know-Thyself.”
“You mean to say, the
Mistake-Thyself,”
said Kafka, with a faint smile.
I protested: “What do you mean? The camera cannot lie!”
“Who told you that?” Kafka leaned his head toward his shoulder. “Photography concentrates one’s eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can’t catch that even with the sharpest lens. One has to grope for it by feeling.. This automatic camera doesn’t multiply men’s eyes but only gives a fantastically simplified fly’s eye view.”
—from Gustav Janouch’s
Conversations with Kafka
Life appears always fully present along the epidermis of his body: vitality ready to be squeezed forth entire in fixing the instant, in recording a brief weary smile, a twitch of the hand, the fugitive pour of sun through clouds. And not a tool, save the camera, is capable of registering such complex ephemeral responses, and expressing the full majesty of the moment. No hand can express it, for the reason that the mind cannot retain the unmutated truth of a moment sufficiently long to permit the slow fingers to notate large masses of related detail. The impressionists tried in vain to achieve the notation. For, consciously or unconsciously, what they were striving to demonstrate with their effects of light was the truth of moments; impressionism has ever sought to fix the wonder of the here, the now. But the momentary effects of lighting escaped them while they were busy analyzing; and their “impression” remains usually a series of impressions superimposed one upon the other. Stieglitz was better guided. He went directly to the instrument made for him.
—Paul Rosenfeld
The camera is my tool. Through it I give a reason to everything around me.
—Andre Kertesz
A
double leveling down, or a method of leveling down which double-crosses itself
With the daguerreotype everyone will be able to have their portrait taken—formerly it was only the prominent; and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same—so that we shall only need one portrait.
—Kierkegaard (1854)
Make picture of kaleidoscope.
—William H. Fox Talbot (note dated February 18, 1839)
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