A Photograph is a Photograph

Apropos of two of Levi’s recent posts about materialism and fictions, I thought I’d share this excerpt from an interview with photographer Tod Papageorge. He’s responding to a question about the need for photography to have a moral responsibility, something Susan Sontag had suggested.

It’s always been puzzling to me that capacious minds like Sontag’s, to say nothing of those of almost every art historian, look at a photograph and see not a picture, but the literal world held in their palm. With that, they’re revealing themselves to be no more sophisticated than the proverbial tribesman who believes that a photograph made of him steals a piece of his soul. There seems to be no cure for this universal form of innocence, or ignorance, but it is, to put it mildly, frustrating to spend years working as a photographer and writer about photography and realise that this misunderstanding is as prevalent today as it was the day I first saw those Cartier-Bresson photographs—and recognised them as picture-poems.

Later, Papagorge offers a nice summary that I find compatible with the weird mereology Levi and I advocate: “Ontologically, a photograph is a unique kind of picture, but a picture nonetheless, one that has radically transformed the piece of the world it describes, whether for artistic or journalistic or any other ends, but (obviously) has not transported it out of its picture-state into some nebulous truth-state.”