Reading #6

John Szarkowski teach us very important ways of understanding photographs and photography. I underlined a few interesting phrases from this reading.

“The subject and the picture were not the same thing, although they would afterwards seem so.”

- I feel like “photography = reality” is the most misunderstood concept of photography. Even so-called documentary photographs are just as interpretive as paintings or any other visual art. In fact, it surprisingly distorts reality so much. By freezing one moment on a piece of paper (or on a screen), it completely ignores the context of what happened in reality.

“The decline of narrative painting in the past century has been ascribed in large part of the rise of photography, which “relieved” the painter of the necessity of story telling.”

- It is always interesting to see how photography has changed the way we look at the world. Just anything “visual” has changed because of photography. Did photography really get rid of painters’ burden? Is photography a big influence on abstract paintings?      

“ . . . the decisive moment, but the phrase has been misunderstood; the thing that happens at the decisive moment is not a dramatic climax, but a visual one. The result is not a story but a picture.”

- This well-known term “the decisive moment” is still quite vague to me.  However, reading Szarkowski, I can understand that the result is really just the photograph, not a story. I remember the guest photographer we had a few weeks ago, David Farmerie was very focused on having a story in photographs. Does a photograph tell you a story, or is it just a photograph?