In Plato’s Cave - Bulletpointed
Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still revelling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth.
Just about everything has been photographed.
Photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.
The image is also an object.
Photographs really are experience captured.
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.
Photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation.
Anyone can make or acquire.
For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs.
A photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does.
But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books.
Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.
The camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture.
A painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation
In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects.
Photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.
The point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters.
Taking photographs had no clear social use.
It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art.
