Sometimes I forget about Avedon’s early work.  Photography is inherintly explotative but…and maybe it’s just the romantic in me…but it seems like these photos are some of the least explotative ever.

I should have been doing work instead of taking screen grabs from a documentary about Rich Avedon.

To see more of how I wasted my time in the library check out my other other tumblr (astute readers will pick up on that Kanye reference).  saidandseenplus.tumblr.com

Insofar as photography does peel away the dry wrappers of habitual seeing, it creates another habit of seeing: both intense and cool, solicitous and detached; charmed by the insignificant detail, addicted to incongruity.  But photographic seeing has to be constantly renewed with new shocks, whether of subject matter or technique, so as to produce the impression of violating ordinary vision.

more from Susan Sontag’s On Photography.

What the world looks like photographed, by Garry Winogrand, in color.

From Arena Edition’s posthoumously published book “Winogrand 1964”

(© Garry Winogrand . All rights reserved. All images © copyright the photographer and/or publisher)

Errol Morris

     Photographs attract false beliefs the way flypaper attracts flies.  Why my skepticism?  Because vision is privileged in our society and our sensorium.  We trust it; we place our confidence in it.  Photography allows us to uncritically think.  We imagine that photographs provide a magic path to the truth. 

     What’s more, photographs allow us to think we know more than we really do.  We can imagine a context that isn’t really there.  In the pre-photographic era, images came directly from our eyes to our brains and were part of our experience of reality.  With the advent of photography, images were torn free from the world, snatched from the fabric of reality and enshrined as separate entities.  They became more like dreams.  It is no wonder that we really don’t know how to deal with them.

- Errol Morris from his new book “Believing is Seeing”

Duane Michals. Foto Follies How Photography Lost It's Virginity On The Way To The Bank

Two pages from the 4 page list in Duane Michal’s Foto Follies How Photography Lost It’s Virginity On The Way To The Bank 

When I first saw this I was deep into my time at art school and thought it was hilarious.  I’m surprised how little press it has received over the years for it’s condemnation of some of art photography’s heavy hitters.  Of course when the book is reviewed it is always called “parody” which seems to be a little less searing of a tone than Foto Follies actually takes on. 

I have looked through the images from Winogrand’s The Animals countless times.  Recently, I read Szarkowski’s outro.  I don’t know how I missed it.  It is one of the best accompaniment’s to a photography book I’ve ever read; interesting in and of itself, appropriate to the imagery and insightful without being reductive. 

When we lived in the right part of town my wife and I often had breakfast at the zoo, and afterwards walked in the fresh morning sunlight and contemplated the noble wild beasts. That is what we expected to find there, so that is what we found. The quality of the zoo then seemed a blend of Kipling, the Book of Genesis, and Bemelmans: it was orderly, slightly quaint and reassuring.  The animals knew their place and I knew mine. In the ecologist’s term, ours seemed a symbiotic relationship, and the zoo as a whole was a satisfying detail in the master plan worked out by God and Fredrick Law Olmstead.

Even it it was a figment of my imagination, I preferred that zoo to the one described by Garry Winogrand.  If my zoo was a fairy tale, it was at least a happy one.  Winogrand’s zoo, even if true, is a grotesquery.  It is a surreal Disneyland where unlikely human beings and jaded careerist animals stare at each other through bars, exhibiting bad manners and a mutual failure to recognize their own ludicrous predicaments. 

  If others feel a similar sense of loss at being deprived of their own imaginary zoos, we might justifiable call Winogrand to account.  Is he intentionally being a spoilsport, or does he really think it funny, or edifying, to see a full grown elephant humiliate himself for the sake of a peanut?  It is unlikely that we would get a responsive answer.  the photographer, like everyone else, would claim that he is simply telling it like it is.  He would also remind us that he did not invent the zoo.

If others feel a similar sense of loss at being deprived of their own imaginary zoos, we might justifiable call on Winogrand to account.  Is he intentionally being a spoilsport, or does he really think it funny, or edifying, to see a full grown elephant humiliate himself for the sake of a peanut?  It is unlikely that we would get a responsive answer.  The photographer, like everyone else, would claim that he is simply telling it like it is.  He would also remind us that he did not invent the zoo.
- John Szarkowski from Garry Winogrand’s The Animals

More from Lee Friedlander’s Letters from the People.  Poorly reproduced. Still amazing. Friedlander’s ability to take such a seemingly silly idea and make it so engaging both visually and conceptualy is incredible.  Underappreciated by photographers, artists, and anthropologists alike.  Rare books like this are reason enough to join the library.

(© Lee Friedlander . All rights reserved. All images © copyright the photographer and/or publisher)

On Photography

Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph.  Of course, photographs fill in blanks in our mental pictures of the present and the past…Nevertheless, the camera’s rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses….In contrast to the amorous relation, which is based on how something looks, understanding is based on how it functions.  And functioning takes place in time, and must be explained in time.  Only that which narrates can make us understand.

Susan Sontag. On Photography.