Snapshots: Quotations about Photography
“Thus the mind has gone where vision pointed.” Hans Jonas
Welcome to Ever Not Quite—essays about technology and humanism.
This post is a follow-up to my latest essay about the history of photography and the rise of algorithmic images which I released serially over the last two weeks. This subject has captured my imagination for some months now, and during that time I have continued to be drawn into the mysterious implications of the simple invention of the camera. While I was writing that essay, I began to gather a collection of the quotations about photography that spoke to me and which seemed to capture some element of this elusiveness and intrigue. There is of course nowhere near enough space in a single essay to work all of these in, so I thought I would share some of them here, in one last post on this topic.
There’s a bit of precedent for this which runs through several of the figures who were most instructive to me as I thought about the meaning of photography: Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, and David Levi Strauss. In her biographical essay about Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt wrote that:
[N]othing was more characteristic of him in the thirties than the little notebooks with black covers which he always carried with him and in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of ‘pearls’ and ‘coral.’ On occasion he read from them aloud, showed them around like items from a choice and precious collection.
Endorsing this practice, Sontag later added in her essay, “Melancholy Objects”:
In a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.
And so, in 1977, Sontag concluded On Photography with her own collection of quotations—with “Homage to W. B.” In 2020, David Levi-Strauss again concluded his long essay, “Photography and Belief”, with yet another short anthology of quotations.
So here is my contribution to what has become something of a tradition among writers who take up this subject. I have ordered these quotations in such a way as to suggest the faint outline of an argument or narrative—if only apparent when read through squinted eyes—while also allowing space for a polyphonic statement that includes the divergences and contradictions which the history of thinking and writing about photography has yielded.
This will be all from me on this subject, at least for the foreseeable future. I hope to have a new post on an entirely separate topic ready in a few weeks. Until then, if you find value in the newsletter, please share it with others—it’s the best way for new readers to discover it!
[T]he greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion—all in one.
John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Volume III
The artist sees more than the nonartist, not because he has a better vision, but because he does the artist’s work, namely, remaking the things he sees: and what one makes he knows.
Hans Jonas, “Image-Making and the Freedom of Man”
The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
I say then that likenesses of things and their shapes are given off by things from the outermost body of things, which may be called, as it were, films or even rind, because the image bears an appearance and form like to that, whatever it be, from whose body it appears to be shed, ere it wanders abroad. That we may learn from this, however dull our wits.
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans., Cyril Bailey
We have got the fruit of creation now, and need not trouble ourselves with the core. Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth.
The consequence of this will soon be such an enormous collection of forms that they will have to be classified and arranged in vast libraries, as books are now. The time will come when a man who wishes to see any object, natural or artificial, will go to the Imperial, National, or City Stereographic Library and call for its skin or form, as he would for a book at any common library.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph”
The camera was invented in 1839. Auguste Comte was just finishing his Cours de Philosophie Positive. Positivism and the camera and sociology grew up together. What sustained them all as practices was the belief that observable quantifiable facts, recorded by scientists and experts, would one day offer man such a total knowledge about nature and society that he would be able to order them both. Precision would replace metaphysics, planning would resolve social conflicts, truth would replace subjectivity, and all that was dark and hidden in the soul would be illuminated by empirical knowledge. Comte wrote that theoretically nothing need remain unknown to man except, perhaps, the origin of the stars! Since then cameras have photographed even the formation of stars! And photographers now supply us with more facts every month than the eighteenth century Encylopaedists dreamt of in their whole project.
John Berger, “Appearances”
One man invents printing with movable type, another photography, a third screen printing and stereotype, the next electrotype, phototype, the celluloid plate hardened by light. Men still kill one another, they have not yet understood how they live, why they live; politicians fail to observe that the earth is an entity, yet television (Telehor) has been invented: the “Far Seer”—tomorrow we shall be able to look into the heart of our fellow man, be everywhere and yet be alone; illustrated books, newspapers, magazines are printed—in millions. The unambiguousness of the real, the truth in the everyday situation, is there for all classes. The hygiene of the optical, the health of the visible is slowly filtering through.
László Moholy-Nagy, “Typophoto”
At first, the secularization of the capitalist world during the nineteenth century elided the judgement of God into the judgement of History in the name of Progress. Democracy and Science became the agents of such a judgement. And for a brief moment, photography, as we have seen, was considered to be an aid to these agents. It is still to this historical moment that photography owes its ethical reputation as Truth.
John Berger, “Uses of Photography”
You might say, “Can’t we explain what we mean by ‘is true’? For example, to say that p is true means that it corresponds with reality, or that it is in accordance with reality.”
Saying this need not be futile at all.—“What is a good photograph?” “One which resembles a man.” We explain the words “good photograph” by means of “resemble”, etc. This is all right if we know what “resemble” means. But if the technique of comparing the picture with reality hasn’t been laid down, if the use of “resembles” isn’t clear, then saying this is no use. For there may be many different techniques of comparison and many different kinds of resemblance. For instance, one thing may be said to resemble another if it is a projection of it; but there are many different modes of projection—of representing an object.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics
Photographs, it is said, tell the truth. From this simplification, which reduces the truth to the instantaneous, it follows that what a photograph tells about a door or a volcano belongs to the same order of truth as what it tells about a man weeping or a woman’s body.
If no theoretical distinction has been made between the photograph as scientific evidence and the photograph as a means of communication, this has been not so much an oversight as a proposal.
John Berger, “Appearances”
The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, that has become an objective reality.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
The miracle of photography, of its so-called objective image, is that it reveals a radically nonobjective world. [...] Through its unrealistic play of visual techniques, its slicing of reality, its immobility, its silence, and its phenomenological reduction of movements, photography affirms itself as both the purest and the most artificial exposition of the image.
Jean Baudrillard, “Photography or The Writing of Light”
Ever since instantaneous photography demonstrated that the movements of animals are really quite different from the impression which they gave to the eye, the suggestion has been made with more or less persistence that artists should change their representations in conformity with the verities recorded by the camera. Recently, in a contemporary, writes the London Telegraph, the Earl of Mount Edgcumbe has proposed that a cinematograph should be mounted on a motorcar and used in taking a series of photographs of horses in motion, so as to show which positions are the least fleeting, and therefore have the truest pictures of what the eye can see. The artist would then be enabled to select those attitudes most suitable to his purpose; but while achieving truth in a mechanical direction, would he not be forsaking it in another? His purpose is to depict his subjects as they are presented to the eye; and as the eye retains no impression of such movements as the camera records, the pictures would in reality be false.
The Kincaid Dispatch, Friday, December 26, 1902
It is the artist who is truthful, while the photograph is mendacious; for, in reality, time never stops cold.
Auguste Rodin, Art: Conversations with Paul Gsell
Our oppressive sense of the transience of everything is more acute since cameras gave us the means to “fix” the fleeting moment.
Susan Sontag, “The Image-World”
I long to have such a memorial of every being dear to me in the world. It is not merely the likeness which is precious in such cases—but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing … the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! It is the very sanctification of portraits I think—and it is not at all monstrous in me to say, what my brothers cry out against so vehemently, that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest artist’s work ever produced.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1843 letter to Mary Russell Mitford
Even an adult will hesitate to step on an image or photograph; if he does, it will be with aggressive intent. Thus not only is the consciousness of the image slow in developing and subject to relapses, but even for the adult the image is never a simple reflection of the model; it is, rather, its “quasi-presence”.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception
It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. An ugly or grotesque subject may be moving because it has been dignified by the attention of the photographer. A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.
Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave”
It is another nature that speaks to the camera than to the eye.
Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography”
There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment
Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one’s cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.
John Szarkowski
The photographer creates, evolves a better, a more selective, more acute seeing eye by looking ever more sharply at what is going on in the world. Like every other means of expression, photography, if it is to be utterly honest and direct, should be related to the life of the times—the pulse of today. The photograph may be presented as finely and artistically as you will; but to merit serious consideration, must be directly connected with the world we live in.
Berenice Abbott, “Photography at the Crossroads”
But for me photography is essentially not about art, society, or representation; I find seeing is essentially solitary, and photography is one of the emblems of that solitude.
James Elkins, What Photography Is
Photography and cinema contributed in large part to the secularization of history, to fixing it in its visible, “objective” form at the expense of the myths that once traversed it. Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what it itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable. Any description in words, or even any inert picture exists in the mind. But on the screen the whole process of observing, describing, reporting, and then imagining, has been accomplished for you.
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion
Our unbridled belief in the primacy of technology has caused a concomitant decline in our belief in human desires and capabilities.
Historically, beliefs do not disappear. Instead, they are projected onto different objects. We no longer believe in gods and heroes, but we believe in celebrities. We no longer believe in magic, but we believe in technology. We no longer believe in reality, but we believe in images.
David Levi-Strauss, Photography and Belief
The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes past.
Berenice Abbott
The camera is the eye of history.
Mathew Brady
The media have substituted themselves for the older world. Even if we should wish to recover that older world we can do it only by an intensive study of the ways in which the media have swallowed it.
Marshall McLuhan
With the loss of memory the continuities of meaning and judgments are also lost to us. The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.
John Berger, “Uses of Photography”
If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug a camera.
Lewis Hine
Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn’t attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don’t see.
Emmet Gowin
Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.
Paul Valéry, “The Conquest of Ubiquity”. Later used by Walter Benjamin in the epigraph to “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility”
When tools in the usual sense became machines, their relationship to human beings was reversed. Prior to the Industrial Revolution the human being was surrounded by tools, afterwards the machine was surrounded by human beings. Previously the tool was the variable and the human being the constant, subsequently the human being became the variable and the machine the constant. Previously the tool functioned as a function of the human being, subsequently the human being as a function of the machine. Is the same true for the camera as for the machine?
Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography
We can no longer escape the suspicion that the rising tide of copied reality contains an element of self-deception. As they are reproduced in millions, the reality behind these pictures wears thin, turns vague and the old charm evaporates. The photographic techniques continue to function with undiminished excellence and mechanical dependability. But man changes. It is quite conceivable that we may grow tired of the mere copies of things which alone photography is able to supply.
Friedrich Georg Jünger, The Failure of Technology
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.
Søren Kierkegaard
The alienation of the spectator, which reinforces the contemplated objects that result from his own unconscious activity, works like this: the more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator does not feel at home anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and a means of making it obsolete.
Susan Sontag, “The Image-World”
It is also commonly understood that human beings today consume more technical images than at any previous time. This is certainly, objectively, numerically true, but I would argue that this consumption is different in kind from that of an earlier time. Images that appear on the screens of our devices go by in a streaming flow. Individual images are seldom apprehended separately, as a singular trace. Singular, still images operate very differently on the mind. The images consumed in a flow are seldom dwelled on, so their individual effect is limited, creating instead a disproportionately generalized effect. This generalized effect has been under-theorized, just as the effect of words and images working together has been. It can further be argued that this flow of images has a less concentrated, singular effect than previous practices that involved discreet images being viewed repeatedly over time.
David Levi-Strauss, Photography and Belief
Thus the mind has gone where vision pointed.
Hans Jonas, “The Nobility of Sight”
I love these quotes and your thoughts on the implications of photography! Fascinating! I will come back to reread - there is so much wisdom. My favorite quote so far is: "The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way... To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion—all in one."
Very cool! I too have long been interested in the implications of photography, and especially lately, as we confront so much digitization, machine learning, AI, etc. You've done a great job bringing a lot together. Thank you.