Hera’s Reviews > On Photography > Status Update

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

"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."