quote /Photography is a foreign language/ Peter Galassy
....whatever else might be said about Winogrand's work, it is unsurpassed for its voracious curiosity about life at large. Winogrand turned that voracity into a highly self-conscious artistic style but, like Evans before him, he regarded photography primarily as a tool for engaging the inexhaustible reality of experience.
Evans never tired of pointing out that in respect to photography the term "documentary" properly refers not to a claim on moral truth but to an artistic style, based upon the illussion that the photograph is a transparent window on reality: the viewer stands where the photographer once stood. Nevertheless, many prefer to take the illusion for reality, looking right through the picture and seeing only its subject matter: standing there, anyone would have made the same photograph. This die-hard habit, born of endless everyday encounters with photography, renders invisible the artifice of the documentary style. As diCorcia puts it, "photography is a foreign language everyone thinks he speaks "
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What is distinctive, and essential to grasping the originality of diCorcia's work, is the degree to which he showed sympathetic curiosity for two divergent understandings of photography. The one taking the impersonal power of popular and commercial culture as a given, approached photography as a realm of fiction and duplicity. The other, devoted to the authenticity of individual perceptions, approached photography as a way of interpreting experience. In the 1980s as that divergence evolved into open opposition, diCorcia was making art the gap between the two.
Photography is a foreign language / p10
....whatever else might be said about Winogrand's work, it is unsurpassed for its voracious curiosity about life at large. Winogrand turned that voracity into a highly self-conscious artistic style but, like Evans before him, he regarded photography primarily as a tool for engaging the inexhaustible reality of experience.
Evans never tired of pointing out that in respect to photography the term "documentary" properly refers not to a claim on moral truth but to an artistic style, based upon the illussion that the photograph is a transparent window on reality: the viewer stands where the photographer once stood. Nevertheless, many prefer to take the illusion for reality, looking right through the picture and seeing only its subject matter: standing there, anyone would have made the same photograph. This die-hard habit, born of endless everyday encounters with photography, renders invisible the artifice of the documentary style. As diCorcia puts it, "photography is a foreign language everyone thinks he speaks "
------------
What is distinctive, and essential to grasping the originality of diCorcia's work, is the degree to which he showed sympathetic curiosity for two divergent understandings of photography. The one taking the impersonal power of popular and commercial culture as a given, approached photography as a realm of fiction and duplicity. The other, devoted to the authenticity of individual perceptions, approached photography as a way of interpreting experience. In the 1980s as that divergence evolved into open opposition, diCorcia was making art the gap between the two.
Photography is a foreign language / p10
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