Status Updates From On Photography: FSG 80th An...

"Quisiera tener un recuerdo conmemorativo semejante de todos y cada uno de los seres que he querido en el mundo. (...) el hecho de que la sombra misma de la persona esté allí, fija para siempre."

"Pocas personas comparten en esta sociedad el temor primitivo ante las cámaras que proviene de considerar la fotografía como parte material de ellas mismas. Pero algunos vestigios de la magia perduran: por ejemplo, en nuestra renuencia a romper o tirar la fotografía de un ser querido, especialmente si ha muerto o está lejos. Efectuarlo es un despiadado gesto de rechazo."

"Las cámaras reducen la experiencia a miniaturas, transforman la historia en espectáculo. Aunque crean simpatía, también la interrumpen, enfrían las emociones. El realismo de la fotografía crea una confusión acerca de lo real que resulta (a largo plazo) moralmente analgésica y además (a corto y a largo plazo) sensorialmente estimulante. "

"Photographers, operating within the terms of the Surrealist sensibility, suggest the vanity of even trying to understand the world and instead propose that we collect it."

"Reality is summed up in an array of casual fragments - an endlessly alluring, poignantly reductive way of dealing with the world."

"[Photographs are] also an invitation to sentimentality. Photographs turn the past into an object of tender regard, scrambling moral distinctions and disarming historical judgments by the generalized pathos of looking at time past."

"abracadabrant" = belonging to no known language (implication that it does /belong/ but by something undefined, not that it does not belong) - 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."