On Photography

It is common for those who have glimpsed something beautiful to express regret at not having been able to photograph it. So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

Photography is the inventory of mortality.

Photography has become the quintessential art of affluent, wasteful, restless societies —an indispensable tool of the new mass culture that took shape here after the Civil War, and conquered Europe only after World War II, although its values had gained a foothold among the well-off as early as the 1850s when, according to the splenetic description

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past but the one who invents it.

American photographers are often on the road, overcome with disrespectful wonder at what their country offers in the way of surreal surprises.

In photography’s early decades, photographs were expected to be idealized images. This is still the aim of most amateur photographers, for whom a beautiful photograph is a photograph of something beautiful, like a woman, a sunset.

The limit of photographic knowledge of the world is that, while it can goad conscience, it can, finally, never be ethical or political knowledge.

That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.