Photographs testify to the relentless effacements of time. I say "inevitably" because the photographer has little to say about it. No matter what the conceptual intent of the photographer - whether it be "serious" image-making or family snapshots - the camera renders, first and foremost, and with indisputable sufficiency, the details and lineaments of its subject: a smooth, fresh, laughing face, the sleek angularity of a new building, a dotted veil worn by a woman coming out of church. Years later - when the young face is wrinkled and the modern building looks corny and nobody wears veils anymore - these photographs tell a story. And who could have guessed what that story would be? The melancholy of Time inheres in photographs, in the resemblance that no longer resembles.

Ideas, from The National Humanities Center

I’m not a documentary photographer. You need "objectivity" to make documentary photographs. But how can you possess objectivity if you seek something, need something? As I walked the streets of Manhattan in the early 70’s I’d say to myself, "What are you doing?" and I’d answer, "I’m documenting the city" which I realize now was both a stupid and hilarious answer. You can’t document a city like New York. You can document your friends’ lives or your neighborhood, but not the city. The city is an Idea, and the idea is pluralism, which always represents itself to consciousness, like democracy, as a constantly disappearing kind of beauty. Objectivity has nothing to do with it.

NPR Commentary

It's worth remembering that whether it is Percy Shelley who finds in the "great Mountain" of Mont Blanc "a voice to repeal large codes of fraud and woe," or Ansel Adams imaging the heroic interplay of the elements in Yosemite, the artist who pursues sublimity has separated himself from that world-mocking cynicism which has robbed so many contemporary artists of their right to be serious, and reduced so much of current artistic activity to the sort of joking around best understood by graduate students.

I used to think that photographs were "composed." This made photography sound very unexuberant, as if it was primarily a deliberate act. Such a notion suggests that a photographer stands in front of an inviting landscape, arranges a composition, and then takes the picture. And it's true that many photographers work that way. Of course, if photographs can be composed, then there must be rules of composition, such as: the subject should never be dead center. But why not? I used to think you could learn how to be a photographer by learning the rules of composition and how to use a camera. Now I think just the opposite: if you have to learn rules, then it's already too late. The elements of a design can make a photograph bearable and inoffensive, but they will not make a photograph compelling. We are compelled by photographs which, within the limits of an objectively appropriate form, manage to offer us something that touches on authentic concerns - our happiness or unhappiness, our fidelities, our modern war with perplexity. The balance between design and content must be there because design by itself is not interesting and pure content is merely assertive.

A question that doesn't get asked is : If there is a beautiful side to misery, then do we want to do without misery? Frequently, photography represents the misery of the world purified of its disturbing elements, which is to say, the surface of misery without the political reasons why misery exists, and without the general human context in which misery keeps occurring.

Sometimes it’s hard not to think of photography as an act of aggression. You’re stopping people from the flow of their lives, you’re cropping them from the space in which they live and have their meaning, you’re juxtaposing them to something they didn’t know they were next to. You’re objectifying them according to your terms, not theirs - for who would choose to be objectified? It’s very complicated, but the fact is, most photographs reduce us. It’s very easy to photograph a man and then later say, "This man represents the homeless." Too easy.

"The Ethics of Photography," Interview with John Rosenthal
by Michael Read, Coraddi.

Atget was seventy when he died, still a photographer. Did he too believe, as he made his solitary way through the streets of pre-industrial Paris, that "everything had changed"? Atget's early twentieth-century Paris was still a city full of dusty light and robust trees and little gardens and cobblestone courtyards and medieval ornamentation. And yet, looking at Atget’s photographs, it seems clear to me that Atget must have known that something was coming; and he must have known - he, who fell in love with the tender, specific beauties of an ancient city - that this something would change everything.

Sometimes a photograph offers the photographer a gift he didn't expect, a marvelous detail - what the eye longing for meaning sees unconsciously, and includes. How wonderful it is that the decision to take a photograph is mysterious - giving us, like love, more than we bargained for.

"Design as Meaning: An Artist's View of His World and His Art." NCArts