Janet Malcolm
[Writer, b. 1934, Prague, Czechoslovakia, lives in New York.]
[Richard Avedon’s] camera dwells on the horrible things that age can do to people’s faces—on the flabby flesh, the slack skin, the ugly growths, the puffy eyes, the knotted necks, the aimless wrinkles, the fearful and anxious set of the mouth, the marks left by sickness, madness, alcoholism, and irreversible disappointment.
[In embracing snapshots,] the attributes previously sought by photographers—strong design, orderly composition, control over tonal values, lucidity of content, good print quality—have been stood on their heads, and the qualities now courted are formlessness, rawness, clutter, accident, and other manifestations of the camera’s formidable capacity for imposing disorder on reality...
(1976)
[The] arresting of time is photography’s unique capacity, and the decision of when to click the shutter is the photographer’s chief responsibility.
Straight photography—whatever it is—is hardly exemplified by peppers like clenched fists, thighs like shells, shells like vulvas, cloud formations like elongated torsos, palm trunks like industrial smokestacks—forms that [Edward] Weston saw because he had seen modern art.
Photography perhaps more readily than any other medium complies with the Duchampian Dictate—“If I call it art, it becomes art”... The dullest, most inept and inconsequential snapshot, when isolated, framed (on a wall or by the margins of a book), and paid attention to, takes on all the uncanny significance, fascination, and beauty of R. Mutt’s fountain or the bicycle wheel or the bottle rack.
Photography went modernist not, as has been supposed, when it began to imitate modern abstract art but when it began to study snapshots.
If the “camera can’t lie,” neither is it inclined to tell the truth, since it can reflect only the usually ambiguous, and sometimes outright deceitful, surface of reality.
...[Edward] Weston’s work presents one of the strongest cases there is for viewing photography as an ancillary rather than primary form—one that is tied to painting and sculpture and always a few steps behind them.
