The Photograph by Graham Clarke - A Review

I found the way this book was written very hard to read, and had been picking it up reading a few paragraphs and putting it down again.  This last week while our systems were down at work I had no excuse and read it through.

The first few chapters were particularly tough going, not that their content is uninteresting, I think it is more the writing style and the way the photograph through the book are analysed. 

For example take the ‘Overhead Crosswalk with Clock’ by Andre Kertesz in which some of the comments about this include:

“The builds are all encompassing but ambiguous, they are monumental presences but status remains on the surface.  The clock dominates as an icon of meaning but is also meaningless.  The rubbish, the car, the birds carry a weight of meaning never to be known”

Instead could Andre not have been trying to capture the street scene as it was to preserve a record of it.  Why do photographs have to have all these meanings behind them?  Why can’t we photography cities like this just as a record to show how they are in our lifetime, because it means something to us e.g. a route we travel frequently or just a favourite spot, something/somewhere we like.  Could it be by even saying this I’m showing how shallow I am?

If I look around my house at the photographs on display, it’s not because they have all these hidden depths, they simply mean something to me.  The display of family portraits, people that mean the most to me and that I want to keep close, holiday photographs that bring back special memories and finally the photographs I’m most proud of where I perhaps captured the scene the best I could on that day or I’ve managed to get a different take on a commonly photographed subject/place.

Back to the book, the chapters I found of most interest was the photograph as fine art, the city in photography and landscape in photography.  Images that I particularly liked and would aspire to include Pool in a Brook by Eliot Porter and Peeling Paint on a Iron Bench by Ernst Haas.  Other favourites would be Bowery Mission Breadline by Lewis Hine which I find powerful because the way the men in the photograph still maintain dignity despite their situation.  Also Circle Line Ferry, New York, by Garry Winogrand, I like that the emphasis is on the people travelling on the ferry.