Recently, I read a book – Mary Price’s The Photograph: A Strange Confined Space (1994) – that immediately went into my personal anthology of great photography writing, joining Susan Sontag’s On Photography, Janet Malcolm’s Diana & Nikon, Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment, and Michael Fried’s Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before.
In her book, Price advances two main arguments: (1) that “language of description is deeply implicated in how a viewer looks at photographs”; and (2) that “the use of a photograph determines its meaning.”
She discusses Walter Benjamin’s description of Eugène Atget’s and August Sander’s photographs, George Santayana’s theory of photography, the nudes of Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, the comparison between Rembrandt’s paintings and Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs, the notion of the photo as a transcription of the real, the notion of the photo as mask, Proust’s use of the photograph as metaphor, Barthes’ search for the photograph of his mother that captures her “essential identity,” “the aura of reality,” “the pleasures of factuality,” and many other illuminating ideas, as well.
What I relish most about Price’s view is her emphasis on description. She says,
Describing is necessary for photographs. Call it captioning, call it titling, call it describing, the act of specifying in words what the viewer may be led both to understand and to see is as necessary to the photograph as it is to painting. Or call it criticism. It is the act of describing that enables the act of seeing.
I agree. It’s tonic to read a critic who touts description as a form of meaning-making.
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