The Document 17.11.'10

"Still there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photography people is to violate them, by seeing them as they see themselves, by having knowledge of them as they can never be; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photography someone is a sublimated murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time' (Sontag 1979:15)

Sontag (1979) 'On photography', UK, Penguin

Further Reading
Bathes, R (1982) 'Camera Lucida', UK, Hill & Wang
Clarke, G (1997) 'The Photograph', UK, Oxford University Press
Edwards, S (2006) 'Photography: a very short introduction'
Wells, L (2008) 'Photography: A Critcal Introduction', London, Routledge, pp.

Key Photographers Mentioned in Lecture

James Nachtwey

• war photography
• shake people of their indifference
• the anitdote to war - taking a political position. Acting with the force to expose war for humanity.
• political humanist agenda
• Debunks the idea as photographs as 'neutral'

William Edward Kilburn

• much more stepped back, held back, not a part of the action
• neutral
• photos become our history

Joseph Nicephore Niepce

• (1826) One of the first photos. View from LaGras' 
• Transcend previous technologies to re create the world

Jacob Riis

• Middle class social campaigner.
• photographs squalor and poverty - symbol of horror
• morbid curiosity from the rich - looking at these images of "The other Half"
• voyeurism, allowing the rich to spy on the poor
• Not the visible eye, 1888 'Bandits Roots' all men are posing
• Neither how the photographer of the people themselves want them to appear

Lewis Hine

• Subtle, greater use of empathy, humanity, neutrality
• Either stamp your image on people, or get the peoples image out

Humphrey Spender

Margaret Bourke-White

Dorothea Lange

Walker Evans

Robert Frank - flip side of American dream

Cesare Lombroso

Henri-Cartier Bresson

Robert Capa

Don McCullin

Robert Klein

Bernd & Hilda Becher

Don McPhee

Andreas Gursky

Allan Sekula

Gillian Wearing