Why Photography Matters

Nonfiction, Art & Architecture, Photography
Cover of the book Why Photography Matters by Jerry L. Thompson, The MIT Press
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Author: Jerry L. Thompson ISBN: 9780262316873
Publisher: The MIT Press Publication: August 23, 2013
Imprint: The MIT Press Language: English
Author: Jerry L. Thompson
ISBN: 9780262316873
Publisher: The MIT Press
Publication: August 23, 2013
Imprint: The MIT Press
Language: English

A lucid and wide-ranging meditation on why photography is unique among the picture-making arts.

Photography matters, writes Jerry Thompson, because of how it works—not only as an artistic medium but also as a way of knowing. With this provocative observation, Thompson begins a wide-ranging and lucid meditation on why photography is unique among the picture-making arts. He constructs an argument that moves with natural logic from Thomas Pynchon (and why we read him for his vision and not his command of miscellaneous facts) to Jonathan Swift to Plato to Emily Dickinson (who wrote “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant”) to detailed readings of photographs by Eugène Atget, Garry Winogrand, Marcia Due, Walker Evans, and Robert Frank. Forcefully and persuasively, he argues for photography as a medium whose business is not constructing fantasies pleasing to the eye or imagination, but describing the world in the toughest and deepest way.

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A lucid and wide-ranging meditation on why photography is unique among the picture-making arts.

Photography matters, writes Jerry Thompson, because of how it works—not only as an artistic medium but also as a way of knowing. With this provocative observation, Thompson begins a wide-ranging and lucid meditation on why photography is unique among the picture-making arts. He constructs an argument that moves with natural logic from Thomas Pynchon (and why we read him for his vision and not his command of miscellaneous facts) to Jonathan Swift to Plato to Emily Dickinson (who wrote “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant”) to detailed readings of photographs by Eugène Atget, Garry Winogrand, Marcia Due, Walker Evans, and Robert Frank. Forcefully and persuasively, he argues for photography as a medium whose business is not constructing fantasies pleasing to the eye or imagination, but describing the world in the toughest and deepest way.

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