Writing and the Popularization of Photography

It was provocative for me to read the Adams piece as someone who is interested in combining poetry/other forms of text with photography in book form. Adams seems to see text as secondary to photography, and not something that can stand on its own, although he has gone to great lengths to create this standalone book with no images in it. He describes mostly the effect of text that serves to describe the intent or content of images. Adams does not discuss text that branches off of photography to create a new art form, or serves to expand on the photograph in a creative manner.

It is strange to me that he discusses creating text as mainly an act of “saying something worse,” or being used because the picture doesn’t say enough on its own, but then also discusses the writing process as “opening a vein,” which is very personal, intimate, and expressive. Adams seems to have ambiguous feelings about text, but writes mainly to say that words are inferior to images. However, it seems that he has much more to say, and that his actual experience with text and photography is more complex. I would have appreciated it if he had gone into a deeper and more philosophical argument about text and its relationship to photography, rather than discounting text so outright. This is good for prompting debate on the subject, but it also seems like he is a very intellectual person sidestepping the challenge of delving into the relationship deeper. I would have been more interested in reading a more complex evaluation of the different ways text and photography have been used in conjunction with each other.

I found the “Genius of Photography” video that we watched to be incredibly interesting – mostly, seeing how high-end photography and the business of auctioning works. I didn’t know that this was so organized and expensive a business, and this film clarified a lot for me. I liked that it discussed the differences in value between images printed through an actual piece of film by the photographer (“vintage prints”) and images copied from other prints. I also found the part where the photograph from the early 20th century sold for 2.6 million to be fascinating – due to the rarity of this print, as well as the rarity of photographs using this early technique.

I thought it was interesting that this very recent increase in the value of photography is largely attributable to the baby boomer generation that grew up with the explosion in photography, who have now become adults involved in the purchasing of famous and valuable photographs. The technological boom and commercialization of photography caused more widespread appreciation for the medium. The baby boomers grew up in this age of appreciation, and really allowed photography to become accepted as an art. Even photographs that had been taken much earlier on and were not considered art are now deemed not just valuable art, but incredibly important from a cultural and historical perspective.

In thinking about the reading and the film together, prior to the 60’s or 70’s, photography generally was not considered a higher art form than writing. It is only after the rather recent popularization of photography that an argument like Adams would even be considered. If the argument was between painting/other older visual art forms and writing, there might have been more of an argument, but an argument weighing photography over writing would not have had much force. Recent trends and societal patterns have a huge influence on how we view different art forms, alone and in combination.

I don’t think that writing will ever be “replaced” with photography and film, even though I have heard some people say this. Despite the growing popularity in photography and film, writing is such an integral force even in images (Facebook, for example) and things such as television advertisements. Written language is such an important way of communicating information that it should not be undervalued. Photography can often stand alone, and there is great value to the individual’s own interpretation of a photograph without added textual information. However, text allows us to talk about photographs from a historical and cultural perspective, as well as enabling us to discus where photographs lie theoretically in the arena of art. Without text and verbal discussion, I think that art just wouldn’t be as interesting, and art theory wouldn’t exist. The appreciation of art would be something that people never discussed, but experienced only in isolation. We could never branch out of our own interpretations and learn through others, thus limited in the knowledge we could gain.