Beauty in Photography - Robert Adams. Aperture.
Questions to ask of a work:
Essay: Civilizing criticism
Essay: Photographing evil
Essay: Making Art New - pg75
Essay: Photography is new
Questions to ask of a work:
- What is the artist trying to do?
- Does he do it?
- Was it worth doing?
- Did i reveal form that is beauty?
- Was it fresh, did it make old truths new?
Essay: Civilizing criticism
- Read John Szarkowsi’s writings about photography, an amazing, he always writes about what he likes which is a secret to his success.
- The best journal is full of pictures because they are the point.
- “No subject matter is unimportant and no human response to it is unworthy of our attention” - pg60
- “A painter has no real enemy but his own bad painting” - Matisse
Essay: Photographing evil
- Look at Lee Friedlander
- Cheifly because of the widespread supposition that photographers want to and can give us objective truth the word documentary has abated the prejudice.
- People like to look at what is beautiful, they don’t like evil.
- All art is a product of concern, they believe as a consequence that it has a social utility — pg 70
Essay: Making Art New - pg75
- Coherence form meaning is art
- Our interest is fleeting, out imaginations weak and our historical perspective short - pg79
- The main thing to be said however about specific theologies and philosophies as they are embedded in art is that, while the outline is important, their detail is not crucial to the greatness of work.
- Art does not grow under, it recapitulates Degas. - pg 80
- Isn’t it necessary for it to be, particularly in the age of art book publishing different from what has gone before. Fresh
- Every serious artist borrows not only from those conventions but from the particular insights of individuals he admires. - pg 81
- Mark Toby quotes “No young artist can grow unless he emulates someone bigger than himself." - pg 81
- I am worried by the amount of time spent by photographers in trying to revive nineteenth century technology. - pg 82
- The results can be momentarily charming but they are often finally sad a footnote to history, arcane and a little saccharine.
- “Art has to be reborn”
- We as an audience know it too, and waste little attention to the copier in front of the museum masterpiece - pg 82
- The texture of the world is an important part of arts subject and aspects of that texture change
- All man made things die away
- Art is an invention of sybmbols
- Eventually the symbols to outlast their original context that they no longer effectively point anywhere becoming instead only artifacts for the documentation of cultural history. - pg 83
Essay: Photography is new
- Dorothea Lange notes - "photography today appears to be in a state of flight, the familiar made strange the unfamiliar grotesque, the amateur forces his sunday into a series of unnatural poses" - pg84
- Most expressive discoveries are made in old familiar subject matter
- The really original artist does not try to find substitute for girl meets boy, but creates the illusion that no boy ever met a girl before.