#szarkowski

Personal deeper analysis on weekly essential reading ‘Szarkowski, John, The Photographer’s Eye, Secker & Warburg, 1964′ , addressed to have a better understanding of the theme I’m developing for my 2500 word essay.

The Photographer’s 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 wasn’t reality itself because the subject and the photograph were two different things in contrary to what could seem. People believed photography couldn’t 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 what’s 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 reality’. by John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye ‘There 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.’ George Bernard Shaw, Wilson’s Photographic Magazine, LVI, 1909”― by John Szarkowski, The Photographer's Eye

2. The detail: the photographer couldn’t 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 wasn’t 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. 

Photographs could not be stories but could be read as symbols. So pictures can’t make stories clear but can make it real.

3. The frame: since photography isn’t 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.      

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 isn’t 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 Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’, which was referring to the time of the external event, with John Szarkoski thinking the decisive moment is decisive because ‘The flux of changing forms and patterns was sensed to have achieved balance and clarity and order’ and the image for an instant became a picture. The decisive moment is a visual one.

A sampling of Szarkowski’s wisdom

Read this while leafing through my copy of “William Eggleston’s Guide”.

[I] have observed that the poem or picture is likely to seem a faithful document if we get to know it first and the unedited reality afterwards – whereas a new work of art that describes something we had known well is likely to seem as unfamiliar and arbitrary as our own passport photos.” – Szarkowski, introduction to the…

Screen Door, Hudson, Wisconsin

The Photographers Eye – Szarkowski

I read in this book I found online The Frame Since the photographer’s picture was not conceived but selected, his subject was never truly discrete. never wholly self-contained. The edges of his film demarcated what he thought most important but the subject he had shot was something else: it had extended in four directions. If the photographer’s frame surrounded two figures, isolating them from…