| title | Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values |
|---|---|
| author | Robert Adams |
| year | 1981 |
| isbn | 9780893813680 |
- 8 - "If, as a personal matter, I have chosen not to make color pictures, it is because I have remembered how hard it is to write good free verse, with which color photography has some similarities, both being close to what occurs naturally."
- 14 - "Unspooiled places sadden us because they are, in an important sense, no longer true."
- 14 - landscape pictures have 3 truths: geography, autobiography, and metaphor
- 15 - "There is always a subjective aspect in landscape art, something in the picture that telss us as much about who is behind the camera as about what is in front of it."
- 15 - artist's decisions reflect personal experience, without which no way to know if scene is true
- 15 - "Making photographs has to be, then, a personal matter; when it is not, the results are not persuasive. Only the artist's presence in the work can convince us that its affirmation resulted from and has been tested by human experience."
- 16 - gardens like photographs - "sanctuaries not from but of truth"
- 16 - paradise comes from persian word meaning walled enclosure - best synopsis of what photographer sees through ground glass
- 19 - dag hammarskjold poem ends like this:
The seasons have changed
And the light
And the weather
And the hour
But it is the same land.
And I begin to know the map
And to get my bearings.
- 23 - "No ideas but in things." "Generalizations are impermissible unless they emerge before our eyes from specifics, from concrete evidence, from things."
- 23 - philosophy too easily foresakes details of experience
- 23 - discipline of aesthetics not helpful - "many writers and painters have demonstrated that thinking long about what art is or ought to be ruins the power to write or paint."
- 24 - "The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputible fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope."
- 25 - form has beauty bc helps us meet fear that life is chaos, suffering is without meaning
- 25 - "We are compelled to understand Form by its fragmentary reflection in the daily objects around us; art will never fully define light."
- 25 - art abstracts, simplifies - "It is never exactly equal to life. In the visual arts, this careful sorting out in favor of order is called composition, and most artists know its primacy."
- 26 - ozu didn't care about continuity, said that nobody pays attention and that he should just focus on composition
- 26 - "Art takes liberties, then, to reveal shape."
- 26 - "I doubt that any great photographer ever starts because of amazement over his camera"
- 27 - how do we judge art? "by whether it reveals to us important Form that we ourselves have experienced but to which we have not paid adequate attention. Successful art rediscovers Beauty for us."
- 27 - dead end of romantic vision is incoherence, of traditional values is cliche
- 28 - success of art can be judged by "the apparent ease of its execution. An artwork should not appear to have been hard work."
- 30 - little great art from tele lenses - "Instead their work is usually marked by an economy of means, an apparently everyday sort of relationship with their subject matter."
- 30 - most great work looks uncontrived, this is hardest work. why do it? "the deception is necessary if the goal of art is to be reached: only pictures that look as if they had been easily made can convincingly suggest Beauty is commonplace."
- 34 - art is only "partly sufficient" for dealing with suffering. it helps, but it's not all that matters.
- 34 - beauty can be alienating, sometimes just have to leave - "Sometimes it has been enough to search out a cafe blessed with jukebox, rattling dishes, and human voices. Family and friends are better though. What a relief there is in an anecdote, a jumping dog, or the brush of a hand. All these things are disorderly, but no plan for survival stands a chance without them."
- 52 - "The money problem sours a lot. Not long ago I discovered that it would be possible for me to earn an adequate living by lecturing about photography; at the same time I knew that it remained impossible to survive by photographing, by doing what I was to lecture about. Irony of this sort does not sweeten life."
- 52 - hard to establish recognizable style in photography -> leads to desperate efforts to establish a style at any cost
- 53 - critics should want to help art - if they have to cull bad art, then they also have to nourish good art
- 53 - talking about sincerity isn't useful when it comes to criticism
- 55 - "If pictures cannot be understood without knowing details of the artist's private life, then that is a reason fro faulting them; major art, by definition, can stand independent of its maker." i don't take such a hard line here, but interesting to see it spelled out
- 55 - "As the years pass I hope that critics will also drop as much of the heavy academic machinery as is consistent with getting at the truth." elaborate schemes usually lead away from work itself and so oversimplify it.
- 55 - orwell: "one can only 'interpret' a poem by reducing it to an allegory – which is like eating an apple for the seeds"
- 57 - if you're going to write critically "then one's first obligation is absolute clarity. Much criticism is apparently based on the mistaken notion that, because art is mysterious, criticism should be too. But criticism and art are not synonymous. Criticism's job is to clarify art's mystery without destroying it."
- 58 - henry james says 3 questions matter: "What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing?"
- 59 - szarkowski's writing successful bc "he writes only about what he likes... to be clear about how and why something works is difficult, wheras just to turn one's animosity loose on something weak is both fun and safe (who can accuse you of being sentimental?)... Weak pcitures drop away of their own weight, as does discussion of them, but the puzzle of stronger work remains; we are always grateful to the person who can help us see it better."
- 59 - best criticism comes from "the deepest commitment to sharing the picture with others. Anything less than that means defeat, calling attention not to the picture but to the critic."
- 60 - "A good picture powerfully vindicates itself in time; it is far stronger than a mistaken critic."
- 68 -"The point of art has never been to make something synonymous with life, however, but to make something of reduced complexity that is nonetheless analagous to life and that can thereby clarify it."
- 69 - hopper didn't really engage with the depression. if he had, he would have neglected "the beauty of light on buildings"
- 69 - "static visual arts are not well suited to the direct exploration of evil."
- 70 - "And though poems and pictures cannot by themselves save anyone – only people who care for each other face to face have a chance to do that – they can strengthen our resolve to agree to life." - i like this but i also don't. ironic that there's such discomfort of abstraction from a photographer. perhaps not though. mostly like that it says that art isn't the best way to change the world. i like that. dislike emphasis on face to face. bad side of jesuit vibes
- 74 - "When we are young, we want art that is filled with the bitter facts, because we believe that evil can be overcome if we face it; when we grow older and begin to doubt this optimistic belief, we want art that does not simply reinforce the pain of our disillusionment. In pictures like those by Hine the requirements of young and old are both met; the photographs urge reform, but seem to suggest that the need for it is not the most important thing to be said of life."
- 77 - "as some have tried to sell art as if it were a constantly upgraded piece of technology, the public has had the good sense to suspect them of innocence or deception, and art's stock has fallen even lower."
- 78 - on contemporary art: "we are asked to take it seriously because it is unlike anything we have seen before."
- 78 - "If we could clarify the ways in which art can and cannot be new, we could, for example, make it harder for those dealers who sell art like cars. We might additionally do a better job of interesting an audience in actually looking at pictures instead of reading about trends." even more important could help young photographers find their direction with less pain
- 79 - only thing new in art is example, message broadly speaking is the same, "The example changes profitably, I think, because the span of our interest is fleeting, our imaginations are weak, and our historical perspectives are short; we respond best to affirations that are acheived within the details of life today, specifics that we can, to our surprise and delight and satisfaction, recognize as our own."
- 81 - many artists' best efforts done after their fourties
- 82 - no serious artist "set our simply to repeat another." - revivals have to be different
- 82 - artist "commits himself to art precisely because he believes that he sees what others have not" - if discover a vision that aligns perfectly, become critic or collector. otherwise has to make own work. "New pictures are the only way to avoid exile from himself." otherwise has to live by others' views that must seem inaccurate
- 83 - shakespeare plays may be modern lit but if someone else can show "The texture of the world is an important part of art's subject, and aspects of that texture do change."
- 84 - photography has advantage over other mediums bc you can't escape the world, requires "worshipful attention to the concrete"; easy in painting / sculpture to become too abstract or "lounge flabbily around as ornament"
- 85 - anecdote about ad for photojournalist with like 75 categories available "hell-for-leathers list"; "I know that photojournalism is not necessarily art, but without some of that man's spirit art is itself not very likely."
- 88 - t.s. eliot in "east coker":
...Each venture
Is a new beginning...
...what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate – but there is no competition –
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again
- 91 - can't talk someone into liking a picture, just happens "when a picture or a recollection of it aligns with the person's experience."
- 93 - writers struggle against urge to write allegory "airy stuff where characters walk stiffly around wearing signs, instead of slouching ambiguously past like our neighbors, and only afterward coming to represent more than just themselves"; strength of art over allegory is that abstraction / truths only show up from specifics
- 97 - "miracles alone, without the norm, are not really miracles at all"
- 100 - took photos after tornado; wire photos showed wreckage; golkhe's show order too: "His composition implies a belief in the endurance of shape: the pictures are a metaphor, an assertion of meaning within the apocalypse."
- 104 - "Contrary to popular expectations, many of the best nature pictures – often the truest and finally most reassuring – do contain people and their works."; by showing people, can see scale of nature
- 108 - "We end with a paradox: in some nature pictures, it is precisely the troublesome, intrusive people who disclose nature's best truths."