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a way of seeing...
helen levitt
new york, c.1939 i visited a museum with a cousin of mine (i can't quite remember which one--museum, that is) but i do remember the distinct moment she strolled through one of the galleries, barely looking at what was on the walls and said plainly that photography didn't do much for her. she didn't appreciate it on the level of "art." i didn't really pursue this with her--seemed to me, like any art, photography moves you or it doesn't. but it stung me that an entire discipline could be so easily dismissed. i also didn't have the language to defend it, and i was disappointed with myself on that score.recently, i interviewed a comedian, who is also a photography enthusiast, and i asked him a very basic, but perhaps unkind question. the kind of question he's either been dying for someone to ask, or that he's been avoiding: what is it that you love about taking photos? he told me it was a legitimate question, but tough, and that he'd get back to me a couple of days. i was on a deadline, so it turned out i wasn't going to be able to pursue this with him. i was disappointed, but completely understood. how do you explain photography? the things you see and feel that compel you? for some of us, if you haven't been forced to articulate it, and you care to get it "right," it doesn't quite roll off the tongue.last night, i was reading the introduction that james agee wrote for helen levitt's collection of lyrical photographs, a way of seeing. and he gives me some of language that i've been looking for, speaks to some of the questions and feeling i've been trying to sort through, and offers much else to consider. if you are so inclined...here are a few snippets:"In every other art which draws directly on the actual world, the actual is transformed by the artist's creative intelligence, into a new and different kind of reality: aesthetic reality. In the kind of photography we are talking about here, the actual is not at all transformed; it is reflected and recorded, within the limits of the camera, with all possible accuracy. The artist's task is not to alter the world as the eye sees it into a world of aesthetic reality, but to perceive the aesthetic reality within the actual world, and to make an undisturbed and faithful record of the instant in which this movement of creativeness achieves its most expressive crystallization...
It would be mistaken to suppose that any of the best photography is come at by intellection; it is, like all art, essentially the result of an intuitive process, drawing on all that the artist is rather than on anything he thinks, far less theorizes about. Almost no photographer whose work is preeminently worth looking at has managed to produce more than a small fraction of the work he was capable of, and the work, as a rule, has remained virtually unknown except to a few friends and fellow artists. This is true to a great extent, of course, of artists who work in any field. Yet distinctions, standards, and assumptions exist and have existed for centuries which guarantee a good poet or painter or composer an audience, if generally a small one; and these are not yet formed in relation to photographs..."
read the full essay here...