Response to The Photographer's Eye

I enjoyed the part in the introduction, where Szarkowski states, "If photography was a new artistic proble, such men [non-artists recently discovering the camera] had the advantage of having nothing to unlearn." It must be great to be handed a medium with no history of it's own and no real precedents to uphold. Everything you could think to do with it could be considered ground-breaking.
It made me think how influenced I have been by the photographs, even films, that I have seen since I was born. From Orson Welles, tilting the camera up towards the ceiling in Citizen Kane, to David Bradford shooting stills from the driver seat of his New York City taxi, to family portraits and snapshots by friends and to the digitial airbrushing on magazine covers. We certainly are not the first generation to have to come to photography with something to unlearn.

This reading also reminded me heavily of the text by Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: the extensions of man. Szarkowski mentions the possible influence of the use of frame in photography on late-nineteenth century painters and the West's appreciation of Japanese and Chinese arts, particularly printing. This is one way in which McLuhan would talk about the medium of photography being the message. It is not the subjects any particular photographs, but the underlying nature of the form photographs take, which created this influence. This is just related to the aspect of the frame, completely aside from the effect the ability to make instant images had.

I also found the statement, "If photographys could not be read as stories, they could be read as symbols," interesting in the context of documentary photography. I think this was in some ways evident in the images we talked about on Monday. We were able to create narratives around the images; we were reading into them, rather than from them. In this way, they acted as symbols. Symbols of struggle, of solitude, adventure, ostracization, celebration, but never accounts or recollections of them- that is, unless we were there when it was happening.