âSzarkowski, John, The Photographerâs Eye, Secker & Warburg, 1964âČ
Personal deeper analysis on weekly essential reading âSzarkowski, John, The Photographerâs Eye, Secker & Warburg, 1964âČ , addressed to have a better understanding of the theme Iâm developing for my 2500 word essay.
The Photographerâs Eye provides a series of images which have in common photography itself. Photographers while practicing, investigating, all together worked on the problem of photography.
The passage discuss how five issues - not to be considerable autonomous but to be regarded along with each others- are considered through the analysis of photography.
1. The thing itself: the world itself is an artist and it takes shrewdness to include it intelligently in a photograph. However the factuality of a picture wasnât reality itself because the subject and the photograph were two different things in contrary to what could seem. People believed photography couldnât lie but there were such many ways of manipulating and the photographer had to be honest about his work. What a person sees is an illusion but what the camera sees is truth, so the lens is impartial as it documents whatâs in front. 'In a sense Holgrave was right in giving more credence to the camera image than to his own eyes, for the image would survive the subject, and become the remembered realityâ. by John Szarkowski, The Photographerâs Eye âThere is a terrible truthfulness about photography. The ordinary academician gets hold of a pretty model, paints her as well as he can, calls her Juliet and puts a nice verse from shakespeare underneath, and the picture is admired beyond measure. The photographer finds the same pretty girl, he dresses her up and photographs her, and calls her Juliet but somehow it is no good- it is still Miss Wilkins, the model. It is too true to be Juliet.â George Bernard Shaw, Wilsonâs Photographic Magazine, LVI, 1909ââ by John Szarkowski, The Photographer's Eye
2. The detail: the photographer couldnât pose the truth but only record as he found it. The truth could be found in nature as a clue (not explicit) not as a story because narrative wasnât feature of photography. The photographer could isolate, document and claim a meaning beyond description. The compelling clarity of photographic images was feature only of the photographic medium.Â
Photographs could not be stories but could be read as symbols. So pictures canât make stories clear but can make it real.
3. The frame: since photography isnât a process of synthesis but selection -choosing and eliminating- the frame, in contrary to the impartiality of the lens is partial, selecting suggests decision have been taken. The definition of a good frame stays in it sense of proportion, creating a symmetry which is organized to make it rhythmic. Everything inside the picture is organized.   Â
4. Time: the camera transforms reality into a picture, each photograph describes a fraction of time, this time is always the present because images can only describe the present. The human eye isnât capable of capturing the single frame of time of a moving object, Muybridge in 1878 with his studies of movement photographed a horse galloping and showed how photography is capable of capturing the single frame of time. Against the usual interpretation of Henri Cartier Bressonâs âdecisive momentâ, which was referring to the time of the external event, with John Szarkoski thinking the decisive moment is decisive because âThe flux of changing forms and patterns was sensed to have achieved balance and clarity and orderâ and the image for an instant became a picture. The decisive moment is a visual one.
5. Vantage point: from photography is possible to learn unusual vantage points, where from a photographer shoots is fundamental, subject cannot be moved but camera does in order to find the best angle. I see the vantage point easily to be confused for the frame, so I do see these issues linked together somehow.
