Quote / Prairie / Robert Adams / Denver Art MUSEUM/1978

Mystery in this landscape is a certainty, an eloquent one. There is everywhere silence- a silence in thunder, in wind, in the call of doves, even a silence in the closing of a pickup door. If you are crossing the plains, leave the interstate and find a back road on which to walk; listen.


Foreword/ R.A.

Quote/Setting Sun

One step after the next, step after step, a familiar place takes form, accompanied by the sound of foot falls. While my body and soul are so steeped in the everyday that I might drown, still I somehow manage to earn a living, have tea or a drink with friends, experience new meeting and partings with an indeterminate array of individuals, all colored with feeling of happiness or sadness or anger.

The familiar place, the familiar street corner, provides limitless possibilities for the discovery of scandalous crime articles, dubious advertisements, fashions sweet and soft, quick chats held in a patch of sunlight. There are countless examples.

Sometimes , in the background behind the varied surface of the everyday, the inexplicable shadow of human existence creeps in like a fog. This shadow gets trapped at the barrier between what is expressible through words and what is not, accumulating like an unanswered riddle in the hollow of spreading emptiness, as if it is becoming some sort of creature that continues to multiply within the opaque whirlpool that is the everyday.

.....

Photography provides a verisimilar "other reality." No matter how much one might say that it presents pure fantasy or delusion, photography is about capturing an image of the outside world, which means that a photograph is only possible if it uses reality as a go-between. The life of a photograph, reborn by passing through this interactive relationship with reality, can have a powerful impact on us.


Photography as another reality / Shigeo Gocho / P52

Quote/SIGNS / Walker Evans / Andrei Codrescu


The twentieth century is- or maybe I should say was- the American century: demotic, technological, robust, full of bluster, simultaneously naive and cunning. The first half of it was ruled by the newspaper and the cinema. It was aso the time of popular writing, of huge advertisements, of lettering that invaded every nook and cranny and even wrote the skyline. America wrote big, with bold new alphabets, in lightbulbs, in neon, in smoke.
Walker Evans pursued this text in all its variations, from modestly scrawled shopkeeper advertisements of the 1930s to the purely abstract graffiti of the 1970s. /P5

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At the same time, to the recently Paris-imbued traveler, it must have been an aesthetic gesture, as well as a homecoming. While language itself is turned into an image, other pieces of the landscape are turned into language. The early New York pictures find endless pleasure in uncovering shapes produced by anonymous industrial-age artisans, as well as random instances of city life. Letters, grids, scaffolding, fire escapes, windows and window shutters, chains, lunch counters with their repeated shapes of cups, plates and saucers, rows of people, smokestacks, P7

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America's signs in their sophistication or awkwardness inscribe the story of a giving, an urging to partake in the constant overproduction of goods. And it may be precisely in exploring the gap between the cheerful optimism of advertising propaganda and the reality of Depression-stricken America the Evans found his art. / P10

Quote/SETTING SUN

Landscape is thus not considered static, but transient, ephemeral, never stopping.

p42

It is therefore from the gap between perceptions of cruel reality and his weltanschanuung - in other words , from inter play between the extremes of the real and the ideal, as they are juxtaposed in his shutter- that meaning arises.

It is without question precisely in this juxtaposition that one can find the potential relevance of photography to history, culture and politics most closely approaching the realm of probability. One may never be able to discover anything so enigmatic as "the truth" in a photograph, but if one were to settle for something close to it , it maybe that it consists of neither an absolute affirmation nor an absolute denial anything, but something between the two. For example, if one were to photograph a single tree as an absolute instance of a tree and at the same time doubt the established concept of "tree-ness" itself, and see it as a physical entity that is something other than a tree, then one would begin to realize the necessity of having multiple vantage points.

The Decision to Shoot / Daido Moriyama / p34

Quote//Between the Eyes / Dvid Levi Strauss

It is partly the politics of images , the way they are organized , has changed, and this has acted to erode their effectiveness, and their power to elicit action. .... But there has always been something about "real pictures" of real violence that undercuts their political effect, and separates them from experience.

Roland Barthes addressed this lack of effect. "It is not enough for the photographer to signify the horrible for us to experience it," he wrote. These images, intended to convey horror, fail to do so "because , as we look at them , we are in each dispossessed of our judgement: someone has shuddered for us, reflected for us, judged for us; the photographer has left us nothing- except a simle right of intellectual acquiescence... "
Such images do not compel us to action, but to acceptance. The action has already been taken , and we are not implicated. Our complicity is concealed, intact. "The perfect legibility of the scene, its formulation, dispenses us from receiving the image in all its scandal; reduced to the state of pure language , the photograph does not disorganize us; We are not disorganized because news images operate within a perfectly organized rhetoric of consumption, the pure language of the spectatorship under which we now live. Images of suffering and misery elsewhere in the world are used as reminders of what we are free from. They operate in the greater image environment of consumption to offset images of contentment, to provide the necessary contrast. Their use value, and their effect, is palliative. This effect is far-reaching and one of the histories thus buried was that of Rwanda.

A SEA OF GRIEFS IS NOT A PROSCENIUM/ P81-82

Quote/Between the eyes / David Levi Strauss

It's effectiveness- the only applicable measurement of propaganda- derives from the historical amnesia of most Americans and the perennial desire to reduce the scale and significance of atrocities by attributing them to lone, monstrously evil madmen. The New Public's image contains everything one needs to know about the analogy for it to be effective, and reflects the subtle manipulations of that analogy visually. Saddam Hussein is Hitler. What's not to believe?

But belief itself is vulnerable to the kind of massive propaganda assault and general degradation of information that accompanied ( and will certainly follow) the Gulf War. The crisis of belief we are experiencing is much larger than a simple mistrust of photographs. It involves the wholesale, active relinquishing of our public right to know. When the manipulation and control of all forms of public imaging have become this pervasive, this complete, it is more than ever necessary to resist, to reassert individual initiative in the production, reception and use of images, and to find new ways to reinvest images with "believability" -before belief itself becomes part of the collateral damage.


P78/Photography and Belief


If material conditions need to be redescribed, more painstakingly and in novel forms, in order to be reinvested with " believability," then we can surely develop the form- and the means of dissemination- to do so.
- Martha Rosler, "Image Simulations, Computer Manipulations: Some Ethical Considerations"

P71/Photography and Belief

Quote / Setting Sun

In novels, fiction is a given;
In paintings, a subjective re-composition ( or else the fabrication of fantasy) is the motif;
In theater or film, the actor's performance as imitation is understood.
But only Photographic Realism - which has its basic tenet the absolutely upstaged snapshot - has the potential to connect directly with societal reality.
In photography, there cannot be anything more impure or self-destructive than to imitate a painting , or to have a model pose.
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Photographic Realism and the Salon Picture/ p24 /Ken Domon


A photographer is both a passerby and a dweller. That said, regardless of the condition with which he looks, the process of continuing to look doesn't change. A photographer cannot cure like a doctor, cannot defend like a lawyer, cannot analyze like a scholar, cannot support like a priest, cannot bring about laughter like a comic storyteller, cannont entertain like a singer, but can merely look. That's good enough. Well, no, that's all there is. A photographer looks at everything, which is why he must look from beginning to end. Face the subject head-on, stare fixedly, turn the entire body into an eye and face the world. The human who bets on looking - that's is a photographer.
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The man who said I SAW IT I SAW IT and passed it by / p28-p29/ Shomei Tomatsu