On photogrpahy--a book full of non-sense??

"It never hurts to have knowledge."

As a teacher, I could never argue against such a statement, but what we're talking about are critical essays - someone's opinion. There's a difference.
 
FrankS said:
"It never hurts to have knowledge."

As a teacher, I could never argue against such a statement, but what we're talking about are critical essays - someone's opinion. There's a difference.
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Yes, absolutely. I certainly agree with you. But isn't history for instance, someone's opinion?

These essays are there to make us think. That's all. This is important. One does not live and work in a vacumn, no matter how much one believes they work decisively or intuitively.

:)
 
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Actually, my comment on Sontag's book comes in the context of having read a fair amount of art criticism over many years including the writers you mention (except Julia Scully). ie: Grunberg writing for the NY Times and elsewhere, Barthes writing for himself (literally), Adams "Beauty in Photography", etc.

The writers on art and photography who most interest me most (off the top of my head), however, have been James Agee, Jack Kerouac, Suzanne Langer, Meyer Schapiro, E.H. Gombrich, Robert Coles and, naturally, Ben Lifson.

So, while you may disagree with my view, know that it's been formed in that context.

Sean
 
jlw said:
Sontag's overall intellectual posture was as a social critic -- specifically, a leftist, feminist social critic..
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Oh oh, for some "heads" of a certain kind of american journaille this comes close to their worst case which is a gay jewish communist !

No wonder that the book provoked some BS comments . But now you made me curious, I'll try to get a translated copy :D

Best,
Bertram
 
Much of the writing that's been helpful to me as a photographer hasn't been about photography at all. Frank and I have both stated in another thread (a couple months ago) that we thought "On Photography" was a terrible book.

A couple posts above someone asked for a bibliography of suggested books and that's a great constructive direction for a thread like this to head in so I'll put in my two cents about the writing I do think is good:

The best writing I've ever read on photography is James Agee's introduction to Helen Levitt's "A Way of Seeing". Helen didn't choose him by accident. Also great is Jack Kerouac's introduction to Robert Frank's "The Americans". Once again, that pairing was no accident. Basil Davidson wrote very well for Paul Strand's "Tir A Mhurain" but that writing is more about the subject than about photography. Meyer Schapiro rarely wrote about photographers but his essay in Robert Bergman's "A Kind of Rapture" is worth reading, I think. Otherwise, Meyer Schapiro on anyone is worth reading. E.H. Gombrich's "The Story of Art" is wonderful. Back to Agee, his writing on the same subject as Walker Evans' pictures in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" is beautiful and rings true to me. Walker Evans own writing on his own work is great reading. Ben Lifson (http://www.benlifson.com) is worth reading on anyone, especially on Atget, Kertesz and Winogrand. He's getting even better with age of course and his new book on the history of photgraphy (understood as a visual art) is going to be a fascinating read, based on the drafts I've seen so far. People can read his column for free right now on-line and that writing is, in my mind, truly helpful to serious photographers. All of these people write, first and foremost about "the thing itself" (to borrow and re-apply from Szarkowski): about art, artists and subject. The writing is not a means of advancing an agenda, per se.

In terms of true philosophy with respect to visual art, I don't know of anything better than Suzanne Langer's "Feeling and Form". In my mind, it's everything Sontag's writing isn't. Her writing, sometimes very dense, is truly rigorous and fair and honest. There's no smoke and mirrors such as we sometimes see when an author uses a nominal subject as a "Trojan Horse" for an entirely different kind of agenda. ie: Contrary to Sontag's assertions, the camera is certainly not a phallus, by any stretch of the imagination.

Back to the list of great writing on photography, I'm sure I've overlooked some and will post again if my my memory clears.

Sean
 
weston's daybooks are reading that i enjoyed and learned from also, more about life than shooting.

ralph steiner wrote an article for a now long dead mag that hit home. it was a bit about other photographers he had known and more about aging and shooting/darkroom work.

joe
 
Other great non-photo reads are Balzac's "The Unknown Masterpiece"., followed by Dore Ashton's "A Fable of Modern Art". These should be read together. Ashton's book attempts to trace the origins of modern art in painting, writing, music, and sculpture. Quite thought provoking.
 
Great, guys! Now I need even more time than my day has hours! :p

I've been wondering about Weston's daybooks. I haven't been able to find a copy I can afford, though.

For a while I've been reading monographs on famous photographers, hoping to find some snippets of information on how they themselves looked at their work and "methods". Needless to say that I've been disappointed quite a bit. :)

I'll try to find at least a few of the books that were (and perhaps will be) mentioned in this thread. At least I'll have a few new books to read before going to sleep. :)
 
i can't find the old thread, must have been deleted....

anyhow, i've since finished reading weston's daybooks. i'm kinda POed that he burnt what may have been the most interesting part of his daybooks, from when he wasn't "fully formed", sprung like athena out of zeus's head. once he found his style/voice/groove, the only things he really worries about are money and getting out of commercial work. i want to read about the time he wasn't so sure about what he wanted to do! ugh!

sontag's book is fun. you'll go "yeah, that's it!" on every other page, and "hmm, not so sure" in between.
 
Altough I enjoy reading practically on any subject and frequently do so (I don't have TV, DVD or Video) I found the book written in a style which is way beyond the Ivory tower, it was more like listening to a conversation between two drunk wanna be's in an overpriced uptown sceny/trendy/arty cafe .. It didn't tell me anything worthwhile, I didn't learn anything from it and I found most statements, well "empty" and obvious ... You will miss nothing by not reading this book (my opinion)
 
Sean Reid said:
Contrary to Sontag's assertions, the camera is certainly not a phallus, by any stretch of the imagination.
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That notion wasn't original to Sontag, or very isolated. There's a whole subcategory of academic feminist literature dealing with this idea of camera as phallus and photography as "sublimation of the male gaze."

[I'd be inclined to write off the whole corpus as B.S., if it weren't for the fact that a few years ago in Kansas City a female photographer friend and I went to a group showing consisting entirely of photos of nudes, and both of us noticed independently that the female photographers represented were the only ones whose nudes were NOT crap.]​

The result of having to wade through all this stuff in my formative art-critic years is that anymore I don't read much of anything written by anyone except Jane Austen and P.G. Wodehouse, both of whom have the advantage of having certifiably nothing to do with photography (except for a very funny short story titled "Romance of a Bulb-Squeezer" written by the latter.) This may make me a somewhat unintelligent photographer -- but to quote P. J. O'Rourke (before I stopped reading him, too) "Sometimes intelligence is useless until you shine the cold, hard light of stupidity on it."
 
Well, I read _On Photography_ twice, and have also read its 1997 sequel, _Regarding the Pain of Others_, which concentrates on war photography. I must say these books have some very important ideas in them (see below for examples). The fact that Sontag was not a photographer adds what I think is a very productive critical distance to her analysis of the medium. Of course _On Photography_ is really mainly "on Susan Sontag", and so the title is very misleading if it gives anyone the impression that this book is a good introduction to photography. However, if read simply as a postmodernist philosophical treatise that takes photography as its subject (in the same way that Jacques Derrida's philosophical writings centered around his own circumcision), I find it a very compelling read.

"Memory freeze-frames; its basic unit is the single image. In an era of information overload, the photograph provides a quick way of apprehending something and a compact form for memorizing it. The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall." (_Regarding the Pain of Others_, paperback edition, page 22)

"Photography, though not an art form in itself, has the peculiar capacity to turn all its subjects into works of art." (_On Photography_, paperback edition, page 149)

By the way, Sontag's companion of many years was the famous photographer Annie Leibovitz, so I'm guessing she did have ready access to technical and inside information.
 
I'm with Jarvis on this one. The title, I felt, was profoundly misleading. Better titles would have been 'On Susan Sontag's Agenda' and 'On Pseudo-Analysis'. I don't mind 'difficult' books; hell, I'm still trying to read Keynes's General Theory. But it seems to me that hers was an extraordinarily one-dimensional analysis of a very complex subject, written from a position of profound ignorance and bias. It was like reading a commentary on the Kama Sutra by the Pope, or a Chinese history of Tibet.

I have friends who have a higher opinion of it, though even they say that it was at most a long magazine article stretched intolerably to book length. Unfortunately I can't re-read it because I gave my copy away (with alacrity) to someone who said they wanted to read it. That must have been over 20 years ago, and I'm certainly not going to pay good money to read it again.

Note: the above was written at the same time as another post that said the book was really 'On Susan Sontag': I was surprised to see it already in use when I posted my views. Interesting that substantially the same phrase must have been written twice within seconds of one another.

Cheers,

Roger
 
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jlw said:
That notion wasn't original to Sontag, or very isolated. There's a whole subcategory of academic feminist literature dealing with this idea of camera as phallus and photography as "sublimation of the male gaze."

[I'd be inclined to write off the whole corpus as B.S., if it weren't for the fact that a few years ago in Kansas City a female photographer friend and I went to a group showing consisting entirely of photos of nudes, and both of us noticed independently that the female photographers represented were the only ones whose nudes were NOT crap.]​
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I imagine it wasn't but its widespread use doesn't make it any less ridiculous. It's a theory where the Emperor has no clothes. And that theory is just the tip of the iceberg with respect to Sontag's nonsense. The extent to which the ideas she wrote about were not her own doesn't affect her accountability for using them.

How does the fact that the women in that show made better nudes (if indeed that was the case) have any relationship to this idea of camera as phallus? I don't see the connection you're making.

Cheers,

Sean
 
I am more than willing, anxious in fact, to give away my copy of this book. Anyone want it? Trade you for a roll of B+W film.
 
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