I must admit that when I received this book with my course materials, I had a cursory glance through it, felt it contained a lot of words and put it down for another day.
Well that that day came at the beginning of 2013. I have been struggling ever since to get to grips with the text, it had taken until yesterday to read the first four chapters. Although I knew of some of the history of photography from studying for a GCSE, and then A level (did not finish the A level) many years ago, I felt the text within this book hard to understand and difficult to read. It did not hold my attention.
Within Chapter 2 on how to read a photograph there are two images by Diane Arbus (pg28 and 31). Mr Clake waxes lyrically about the photo of the twins on page 28 on how its simplicity belies it explicit complexity. Sorry, but this and the family on page 31 im sure are similar of many “snapshots” found in many photo albums around the world.
Yesterday I made a concerted effort and read chapter five through to the end of the book. In chapter 5 there is a photograph of “The Flat Iron” in New York by Alfred Stieglitz. The caption attached to this image concludes “Note how the tree in the foreground replicates the map of Broadway and Fifth Avenue where the building is situated” Viewing the photograph on its own I would have no idea of this connotation. So this leads me to comment on how do you read an image if you have no knowledge of the area it is taken in, you can only judge this image as a stand alone object.
It was not until chapter 9, The Photograph as Fine Art”that things started to look up for me. The image at the start of of the chapter is a crop of an Ernst Haas photograph shown whole on page 180. To me the cropped version is a far more interesting image than the whole. I found this chapter far more interesting than the whole of the proceeding eight.
Chapter ten “The Photograph Manipulated” is a reminder to all of those who feel “photoshopping” a digital image is cheating, that image manipulation to fit the photographers vison for the image has been around for many years. Indeed the 1858 image by Henry Peach Robinson on page 44 is a composite of many images.
Overall I did not enjoy this book. It did not hold my attention, indeed I have noted one of the chapters as “boring”. I feel that a lot of the text is OTT and that makes the book harder to follow for the non art historian than it needs to be, particularly as a level one text.
Having said that there are a few photographers contained within text that I will research further.
Perhaps as my knowledge and photographic style develops I will come back to this one day and think “yes I understand now”.
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