Hera’s Reviews > On Photography > Status Update

"[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."