kukkurovaca

The eternal bickering between photographic cliques depresses me. The documentarian versus the creator of the abstract; the commercial man versus the purist; the camera club sentimentalists versus the F-64 man. Each type of work has its meaning. True, the level of meaning varies from the insignificant to the important in any type; but may we have them all? Please?

Wynn Bullock, “Porftolio,” Aperture Anthology: The Minor White Years, p. 167

I’ve always thought it would be a great idea to have a rigid camera with a fixed rise, for use in situations where you routinely are shooting up at things. An architectural photographer’s snapshooting camera, as it were.

Well, @PeterDixie pointed out that there is at least one example — the Linhof Technorama 612.

Better still, there’s even an extra tripod socket on top so that you can flip the camera upside down when you need fall instead of rise! Fantastic idea.

Of course, it’s a $5,000 camera… ::sigh::

As early as 1860 Sir John Herschel, one of the pioneers in photography and the inventor of its name, speculated on the possibility at some future time of being able to take photographs at one tenth of a second, “as it were, by snapshot,” but this was a figure of speech depending for its effect upon the reader’s familiarity with hunters’ lingo. (p. 404)

We do not yet realize, I think, how fundamentally snapshots altered the way people saw one another and the world around them by reshaping our conceptions of what is real and there of what is important. We tend to see only what the pictorial conventions of our time are calculated to show us. From them we learn what is worth looking for and looking at. The extraordinary thing about snapshots is that they teach us to see things not even their makers had noticed or been interested in. (p 405)

Before photography, reality was history, and history was very largely something untrustworthily reported that happened long ago. Thanks, or no thanks, to the snapshot, we live in a historical reality from the moment we are old enough to look at a Polaroid picture taken two minutes ago.

John A. Kouwenhoven, “The Snapshot”, 1974, in Aperture Anthology: the Minor White Years, (p. 406)

That last part reminds me of this, esp. the bit that goes:

The logic of the camera is that reality is real only to the extent that it is photographable. It pulls individuals out of the moment and makes them see it (and themselves) as an object for the future as well as always already of the past.

I could take a cow and implant a camera in it and let it amble around in the city or in its own domain (I say a cow because a human being I would not trust). If the camera was programmed to go off at an indeterminate series of moments, the samplings would be fantastic.

Frederick Sommer, “An Extemporaneous Talk,” 1971, in Aperture Anthology: The Minor White Years. (p. 382)

Maybe the reason we are interested in art is that it gives us the great sense of the aliveness of change, growth, development, revelation; all these things in half an hour. Maybe the only trouble with our times is that people have been trying to reduce the half-hour to a half-minute. (p. 375)

I’m interested in sensitized surfaces. In an age where sense perception is the thing that is either making us all or killing us all, we are obsessed with it in one way or another. (p. 375)

Art is the condition that you and I bring about. If we are artists and make a few good moves, maybe this is art. But we cannot make aesthetics. Here is the peculiar phenomenon: these deadly machines, which everyone knows have no feeling, can be feelingly taken into our concerns. So I’ve been impressed with the real asset, with the real advantage, and with the real comfort that comes with simply accepting that certain processes work for me. (p. 377)

Frederick Sommer, “An Extemporaneous Talk,” in Aperture Anthology: The Minor White Years.

All of us know that some very small planets move at the extreme limits of larger interrelated sets of orbits. So, if you are very small, you will have to move away from a great influence or be pulled into it and disappear. If something is too influential, it will gobble us up in a lifetime, or it can happen in a flash. We can get gobbled up by ideas that are too big, and ours will disappear within them.

Frederick Sommer, “An Extemporaneous Talk,” in Aperture Anthology: The Minor White Years, (p. 373)