Why Photography Matters - Hardcover

Thompson, Jerry L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262019280 ISBN 13: 9780262019286

Publisher: Mit Pr, 2013

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Jerry L. Thompson is a working photographer who also writes about photography. He worked as Walker Evans's principal assistant from 1973 to Evans's death in 1975. He is the author of The Last Years of Walker Evans and Truth and Photography.

Review

How photographs work is the challenging subject of Jerry Thompson's radiant new book. Once considered revolutionary in their illumination of the world, photographs have long since been reconceived as prestigious aesthetic objects. Against this turn Thompson argues reflectively and philosophically for a restored sense of need and purpose. The book offers a stunning recovery of the original raison d'être of camera work as revelation and knowledge.

(Alan Trachtenberg, Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies, Yale University; and author of Reading American Photographs and other books)

It would be hard to imagine a more effective and refreshing demonstration of why photography matters than Jerry Thompson's book of that title. It is demonstrative as reasoning and also as a display of the way photographs can awaken and engage all the human powers of intellect and sensibility. To look along with the author is to embark on a dialectical path that describes a long arc through regions rarely embraced in one view.

(Joe Sachs, translator of Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Physics)

In photography, content is often confused with aesthetics. In his concise and focused study, Jerry L. Thompson, gifted with an artist's eye and a philosophical mind, requires but a few examples -- from Atget to Evans -- to illustrate what remains when all narrative has been exhausted: the true essence that turns a photographic image into a work of art.

(Heinz Liesbrock, Director of the Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop)

Edition details

• Publisher: Mit Pr
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0262019280
• ISBN 13: 9780262019286
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 92