The photographer was thought to be an acute but non-interfering observer—a scribe, not a poet. But as people quickly discovered that nobody takes the same picture of the same thing, the supposition that cameras furnish an impersonal, objective image yielded to the fact that photographs are evidence not only of what's there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation of the world. * It became clear that there was not just a simple, unitary activity called seeing (recorded by, aided by cameras) but "photographic seeing," which was both a new way for people to see and a new activity for them to perform.
A Frenchman with a daguerreotype camera was already roaming the Pacific in 1841, the same year that the first volume of Excursions daguerriennes: Vues et monuments les plus remarquables du globe was published in Paris. The 1850s was the great age of photographic Orientalism: Maxime Du Camp, making a Grand Tour of the Middle East with Flaubert between 1849 and
The restriction of photography to impersonal seeing has of course continued to have its advocates. Among the Surrealists, photography was thought to be liberating to the extent that it transcended mere personal expression: Breton starts his essay of 1920 on Max Ernst by calling the practice of automatic waiting "a true photography of thought," the camera being regarded as "a blind instrument" whose superiority in "the imitation of appearances" had "dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as poetry." In the opposing aesthetic camp, the Bauhaus theoreticians took a not dissimilar view, treating photography as a branch of design, like architecture—creative but impersonal, unencumbered by such vanities as the painterly surface, the personal touch. In his book Painting, Photography, Film (1925) Moholy-Nagy praises the camera for imposing "the hygiene of the optical," which will eventually "abolish that pictorial and imaginative association pattern...which has been stamped upon our vision by great individual painters." 1851, centered his picture-taking activity on attractions like the Colossus of Abu Simbel and the Temple of Baalbek, not the daily life of fellahin. Soon, however, travelers with cameras annexed a wider subject matter than famous sites and works of art. Photographic seeing meant an aptitude for discovering beauty in what everybody sees but neglects as too ordinary. Photographers were supposed to do more than just see the world as it is, including its already acclaimed marvels; they were to create interest, by new visual decisions.
There is a peculiar heroism abroad in the world since the invention of cameras: the heroism of vision. Photography opened up a new model of freelance activity—allowing each person to display a certain unique, avid sensibility. Photographers departed on their cultural and class and scientific safaris, searching for striking images. They would entrap the world, whatever the cost in patience and discomfort, by this active, acquisitive, evaluating, gratuitous modality of vision. Alfred Stieglitz proudly reports that he had stood three hours during a blizzard on February 22, 1893, "awaiting the proper moment" to take his celebrated picture, "Fifth Avenue, Winter." The proper moment is when one can see things (especially what everyone has already seen) in a fresh way. The quest became the photographer's trademark in the popular imagination. By the 1920s the photographer had become a modern hero, like the aviator and the anthropologist—without necessarily having to leave home. Readers of the popular press were invited to join "our photographer" on a "journey of discovery," visiting such new realms as "the world from above," "the world under the magnifying glass," "the beauties of eveiy day," "the unseen universe," "the miracle of light," "the beauty of machines," the picture that can be "found in the street."
Everyday life apotheosized, and the kind of beauty that only the camera reveals—a corner of material reality that the eye doesn't see at all or can't normally isolate; or the overview, as from a plane—these are the main targets of the photographer's conquest. For a while the close-up seemed to be photography's most original method of seeing. Photographers found that as they more narrowly cropped reality, magnificent forms appeared. In the early 1840s the versatile, ingenious Fox Talbot not only composed photographs in the genres taken over from painting—portrait, domestic scene, townscape, landscape, still life—but also trained his camera on a seashell, on the wings of a butterfly (enlarged with the aid of a solar microscope), on a portion of two rows of books in his study. But his subjects are still recognizably a shell, butterfly wings, books. When ordinary seeing was further violated—and the object isolated from its surroundings, rendering it abstract—new conventions about what was beautiful took hold. What is beautiful became just what the eye can't (or doesn't) see: that fracturing, dislocating vision that only the camera supplies.
In 1915 Paul Strand took a photograph which he titled "Abstract Patterns Made by Bowls." In 1917 Strand turned to close-ups of machine forms, and throughout the twenties did close-up nature studies. The new procedure—its heyday was between 1920 and 1935—seemed to promise unlimited visual delights. It worked with equally stunning effect on homely objects, on the nude (a subject one might have supposed to be virtually exhausted by painters), on the tiny cosmologies of nature. Photography seemed to have found its grandiose role, as the bridge between art and science; and painters were admonished to learn from the beauties of microphotographs and aerial views in Moholy-Nagy's book Von Material zur Architektur, published by the Bauhaus in 1928 and translated into English as The New Vision. It was the same year as the appearance of one of the first photographic best-sellers, a book by Albert Renger-Patzsch entitled Die Welt ist schon (The World Is Beautiful), which consisted of one hundred photographs, mostly close-ups, whose subjects range from a colocasia leaf to a potter's hands. Painting never made so shameless a promise to prove the world beautiful.
The abstracting eye—represented with particular brilliance in the period between the two world wars by some of the work of Strand, as well as of Edward Weston and Minor White—seems to have been possible only after the discoveries made by modernist painters and sculptors. Strand and Weston, who both acknowledge a similarity between their ways of seeing and those of Kandinsky and Brancusi, may have been attracted to the hard edge of Cubist style in reaction to the softness of Stieglitz's images. But it is just as true that the influence flowed the other way. In 1909, in his magazine Camera Work, Stieglitz notes the undeniable influence of photography on painting, although he cites only the Impressionists—whose style of "blurred definition" inspired his own." And Moholy-Nagy in The New Vision correctly points out that "the technique and spirit of photography directly or indirectly influenced Cubism." But for all the ways in which, from the 1840s on, painters and photographers have mutually influenced and pillaged each other, their procedures are fundamentally opposed. The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. That is, the identification of the subject of a photograph always dominates our perception of it—as it does not, necessarily, in a painting. The subject of Weston's "Cabbage Leaf," taken in 1931, looks like a fall of gathered cloth; a title is needed to identify it. Thus, the image makes its point in two ways. The form is pleasing, and it is (surprise!) the form of a cabbage leaf. If it were gathered cloth, it wouldn't be so beautiful. We already know that beauty, from the fine arts. Hence the formal qualities of style—the central issue in painting—are, at most, of secondary importance in photography, while what a photograph is of is always of primary importance. The assumption underlying all uses of photography, that each photograph is a piece of the world, means that we don't