“As a way of beginning, one might compare the art
of photography to the act of pointing. All of us, even the best-mannered of us,
occasionally point, and it must be true that some of us point to more
interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others. It is
not difficult to imagine a person – a mute Virgil of the corporeal world – who
might elevate the act of pointing to a creative plane, a person who would lead
us through the fields and streets and indicate a sequence of phenomena and aspects
that would be beautiful, humorous, morally instructive, cleverly ordered,
mysterious, or astonishing, once brought to our attention, but that had been
unseen before, or seen dumbly, without comprehension. This talented
practitioner of the new discipline (the discipline a cross between theater and
criticism) would perform with a special grace, sense of timing, narrative
sweep, and wit, thus endowing the act not merely with intelligence, but with
that quality of formal rigor that identifies a work of art, so that we would be
uncertain, when remembering the adventure of the tour, how much of our pleasure
and sense of enlargement had come from the things pointed to and how much from
a pattern created by the pointer.”
— John
Szarkowski
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