Status Updates From Über Fotografie

"Abracadabrant" = belonging to no known language, Henry James

Now thinking about accessibility to what is seen. Accessibility as a modality in photography.

"What is surreal is the distance imposed, and bridged, by the photograph: the social distance and the distance in time."

"But essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own."

"The error of Surrealist militants was to imagine the surreal to be something universal, that is, a matter of psychology, whereas it turns out to be what is most local, ethnic, class-bound, dated."

"In the fairy tale of photography the magic box insures veracity and banishes error, compensates for inexperience and rewards innocence."

"Surrealism has always courted accidents, welcomed the uninvited, flattered disorderly presences." Kuleshov effect?

"What is safe no longer monopolizes public imagery. The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally vacant are seen daily on newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair."

"Arbus's view that self-revelation is a continuous, evenly distributed process is another way of maintaining the Whitmanesque imperative: treat all moments as of equal consequence."

"Steichen's choice of photographs assumes a human condition or a human nature shared by everybody. ... denies the determining weight of history - of genuine and historically embedded differences, injustices, & conflicts. Arbus's photographs undercut politics just as decisively, by suggesting a world in which everybody is an alien, hopelessly isolated, immobilized in mechanical, crippled identities and relationships."

"By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is."

"Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from /not/ accepting the world as it looks."

"Photographs are valued because they give information. They tell one what there is; they make an inventory. ... [T]heir value is inestimable. ... The information that photographs can give starts to seem very important at that moment in cultural history when everyone is thought to have a right to something called news." Thinking about this + social media + pseudo-events.

"A photograph is not just the result of an encounter between an event and a photographer; picture-taking is an event in itself, and one with ever more peremptory rights - to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on."

"Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation."

"As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure."