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).