The New Yorker & Me: Does Photography Describe?

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Tuesday, August 25, 2020

Does Photography Describe?

Eugène Atget, Café, Boulevard Montparnasse (1925)

Does photography describe? Kevin Moore says it does. In his Old Paris and Changing New York (2018), he says of Eugène Atget, “His images of Paris architecture, street vendors, shop windows, and parks were pure description, full of detail and information, so unlike the highly mannered, posed, and soft-focused art photography of the time.” He says it again later in his book, this time in reference to Berenice Abbott: “The Salon de l’Escalier crystallized for Abbott something she had already grasped intuitively: an idea of photography as an artistic medium that was unconditionally descriptive.”

I think I know what Moore is trying to get at – photography as an act of concentrated attention (“Atget stopped to absorb the detail that others failed to notice” – Anthony Lane, “A Balzac of the Camera,” The New Yorker, April 25, 1994). But I’m not sure “description” is the right word for it. Writing describes; painting describes. Photography transcribes. “A representation emphasizes the identity of its subject, hence it may be called a likeness; a photograph emphasizes the existence of its subject, recording it, hence it is that it may be called a transcription”: Stanley Cavell, “What Photography Calls Thinking” (Cavell on Film, 2005).