How seriously are we to take the droppings of a gluttonous voyeur who spent the last seven years of his life producing a third of a million negatives without bothering to look at any of them, much less analyze them critically? This was not a photographer; this was a shooter, afflicted with a textbook case of terminal distraction, the quintessence if not the prototype of the dreaded “Hand With Five Fingers” you have surely seen in camera ads on TV. […]
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Globally, there is now an enormous population of camera users, only a tiny fraction of which actually practices photography. The two functions, initially integral to each other, have been severed in what I can only suggest is the photographic equivalent of pre-frontal lobotomy. […] Photographers on every level, from the rankest amateur to the most experienced professional, are being offered something that’s coming to be known generically as “decision-free photography.” I’m surely not the only one who finds this phrase unnerving. Decision-free information? Decision-free perception? Decision-free self-expression? Decision-free communication? By their nature, these cannot be decision-free — at best, the decisions they involve can be deferred, left in the hands of others. […] Photonic impaction, the problem with lenses created by the accumulation over time of stray photons, afflicts lens instruments other than cameras. While the problem is well-known among astronomers (related, perhaps, to the still-hypothetical photon belt), it does not occur ― save in rare cases ― in the field of microscopy. Simply put, lenses pointed up appear prone to impaction, while lenses pointed down generally do not. […] |
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Time Capsule 1973: Collier’s Encyclopedia Yearbook
Rereading this encyclopedia entry on the year 1973 in photography at a remove of four decades, I find it pleasantly surprising to see what a diversity of issues I managed to address (even if fleetingly) in the stripped-down style mandated by the encyclopedia’s editorial guidelines. Some of the ideas alluded to here in miniature would ripen into substantial future essays: on the autobiographical mode in photography, censorship in photographym, and the definition and integrity of the body of work. […]