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[OM] photography = truth?

Subject: [OM] photography = truth?
From: "William Sommerwerck" <williams@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 4 Jan 2003 04:26:38 -0800
"Only with effort can the camera be forced to lie. Basically it is an honest
medium, so the photographer is much more likely to approach nature in a
spirit of inquiry, of communion, instead of with the saucy swagger of
self-dubbed 'artists'."
     -- Susan Sontag

What a total load of crap. This kind of pretentious BS is the result of a
knowledge of photography restricted to P&S cameras and bad family photos.
Did the photos of the Civil War battlefields with carefully arranged corpses
speak with a truth not to be found in a painting?


Uh -- yes. A photograph is assumed to be a literal representation (which it
usually is). Drawings and paintings are not.

Photography is a fundamentally mechanical medium. A camera renders what is
in front of it with a high degree of accuracy, without any conscious or
unconscious intervention on the part of the photographer. It is precisely
this lack of human interaction that caused people to say "photography is not
and cannot be art" for almost 100 years.

I was not aware that Brady and his assistants repositioned rotting corpses
to get a better shot. What is your reference for this?


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