This week has been good for catching up on some background reading.
David Campany: On Photographs
One of the books I’ve been looking through is David Campany’s book “On Photographs”1. Over 100 photographs are presented, always in the same format, with text on the left-hand page, and the photograph on the right. The text is not an “explanation” of the photograph. As Campany puts it “it is a book concerned less with what we think about photographs than with how we think about them; and less with photographer’s intentions than with what happens when we look”2.
However the text does provide some biographical background on each photographer, and helps to “place” the photograph, by providing history and context for its origins. Saul Leiter’s “Café, Paris, 1959”3is a typical example. Leiter came to New York as a painter, and although he took up photography there as well, Campany discusses how colour plays an integral role in the final look of the image and how this relates to Leiter’s artistic background – “…in some of Leiter’s most consummate photographs, it feels as if he could be experiencing the colour abstractly, responding to it almost independently of the subject matter”4. I have always like the Leiter’s photographs, particularly as I am also heavily influenced, for example, by the use of colour in Impressionism, but Campany has pinned this relationship down in a precise way that I had not thought of, and my understanding of the photograph is enhanced all the more for it.
I was also struck by a photograph by Irving Penn “Frozen Foods, New York, 1977”5. Irving is best known for his fashion photography for Vogue spanning a career working with them of over 60 years. As Campany says: “He was attentive to the qualities the were specific to the medium: light, description, illusionism, and the camera’s way of taking a slice of the world from one place and putting it in another”6. His photograph of frozen food typifies this and is exquisite. It’s the kind of picture that makes you say – why didn’t I think of doing that. And that’s the difference.
Notes
1. Campany, D. (2020) On Photographs. London: Thames and Hudson.
2. ibid pp9.
3. ibid pp98.
4. ibid pp98.
5. ibid pp114. 6. ibid pp114