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Combining the Viewer's and the Artist's Standpoints Printed in (2004) Art Criticism, 19(1), 63-74 |
Status of Photography
Paul Weiss, in his book Nine Basic Arts, classifies the nine basic arts as architecture, sculpture, painting, musicry, story, poetry, music, theater, and dance. Obviously, photography is not highly regarded by Weiss. In the last chapter he says, "They (photographers) have little and sometimes even no appreciation of the aesthetic values of experience. And when they do have such appreciation it is rarely relevant to their purposes. One need not...be an artist to use a camera with brilliance."1
Despite
the fact that painters such as Manet and Degas were highly influenced
by photography, throughout art history photography has been considered
less valuable and less important than painting, sculpture, dance, and
drama. When photography appeared in the last two centuries, it was
hardly recognized as fine art. Around the l850s a cartoonist named
Nadar drew a humorous spoof of photography in which Mr. Photography
asks for just a little place in the exhibition of fine arts and Mr.
Painting kicks Mr. Photography out angrily.2
In
1859 the French government finally yielded to consistent pressure from
the Society of French Photographers and its supporters, and a salon of
photography became part of the yearly exhibitions held in Paris. The
photographs were described as though they were works created by hand,
compared with paintings and held to the same standards of appraisal. A
landscape photograph, noted one critic, had the elegant look of a
Theodore Rousseau. Another Photographer's work was likened to the
pictures of Holman Hunt.3
The status of photography as fine art continued to be challenged in the late 19th and early 20th century. When Alfred Stieglitz introduced photography as a form of fine art, a director of a major art museum was skeptical: "Mr. Stieglitz, do you seriously think that photography is fine art?"4 The rejection of Stieglitz's work by painters was even more blatant. Stieglitz said, "Artists who saw my early photographs began to tell me that they envied me; that my photographs were superior to their paintings, but that unfortunately photography was not an art...I could not understand why the artists should envy me for my work, yet, in the same breath, decry it because it was machine-made."5 In order to free photography from the shadow of painting, Stieglitz encouraged photographers to use their work to emphasize what the medium of photography could do best, and not "prostitute" the medium by trying to do what other media could do easily.6
Besides
Stieglitz, some other photographers also defended photography as a type
of fine art. In the beginning of the 20th century, Man Ray
went even further, abandoning painting and devoting himself entirely to
photography. He said, "I began as a painter. In photographing my
canvases I discovered the value of reproduction in black and white. The
day came when I destroyed the painting and kept the reproduction."7
Henri Cartier-Bresson is another example. At first he was trained to be
a painter, but after taking pictures in Africa, he switched his medium
to photography because "the adventure in me felt obligated to
testify with a quicker instrument than a brush to the scars of the
world."8 Undoubtedly, Alfred Stieglitz, Man Ray, Henri
Cartier-Bresson, and many others deserve credit for making photography
a school of art.
Today many art history books have little or no mention of those great masters. If I ask art majors or art history majors to what school Picasso belongs, every one of them can answer "Cubism" immediately. But if the same question is asked about Henri Cartier-Bresson, few of them have ever heard of "Photography of Decisive Moment." Further, it is currently acceptable if an art school does not offer a photography emphasis, but painting is required. When photography courses are offered, they are electives, whereas painting courses are mandatory. Painting overwhelmingly dominates many art magazines such as American Artists and Art in America. Although there are several photographic magazines such as Popular Photographer and Outdoor Photographer in the market, they feature the technical aspects instead of the aesthetic. Taking all of the above into consideration, it is necessary to build a theory of the aesthetics of photography.
Few philosophers of art address the aesthetics of photography. Even if the topic is addressed, the way of studying photography by most photographers relies mainly upon showing. For example, in 1977 a group of photographers held an exhibition and published a book entitled Reading Photographs: Understanding the Aesthetics of Photography. They proclaimed that "what we need, above everything else, is an informed and interested public that is aware of the scope and the nature of photography and consequently cares to go and see the best examples."9 In fact, the lower status of photography is not due to the lack of good examples, but to the lack of an aesthetic theory that describes the nature and scope of photography in terms of its relations with the artist's inner life, symbols, and reality.
Since the last decade of the 20th century, the advance of digital photography has added more complexity to this issue. Digital photography is perceived as hindering rather than helping the status of photography. While conventional photography is regarded as the result of a mechanical process, digital photography is considered the result of an electronic process. Many believe that with more advanced machines, the creativity in the work declines. While further discussion of digital photography is out of the scope of this article, the preceding misperception, which can be found in both conventional and digital photography, will be a focal point here.
Throughout history, many philosophers of art have aimed to develop universal theories that could be applied well to all arts. However, when those philosophers developed a "universal" theory, they relied on only one or two media, thus creating biases . For instance, Aristotle based his theory on tragedy and claimed it as the highest form of art. Susanne Langer, one of the most prominent philosophers of art in the 20th century, says in her book Feeling and Form that the symbolic function of arts is the same in every kind of artistic expression, though she realizes that every art is different.10 Scholz argues that Langer's theory of art would have been very different if she had used music instead of poetry as her starting point.11 Nevertheless, in Problems of Art Langer says that her approach to interrelation among the arts has been to look at each art autonomously and ask what it creates, what its principles of creation are, and what its scope and possible materials are.12
A close cousin of universal aesthetical theory is "pictorialism," in which photographs are judged in the same way that other pictures are.13 Unlike universal aesthetic theory that can be applied to visual art, performing art, and literature, pictorialism confines the criteria of judgment within pictures. Pictorialism views photography as a means and art as the end, and de-emphasizes the unique intrinsic value of photography. To rectify the situation, this paper will describe the uniqueness of photography as a medium.Audience's Standpoint on Art
There are two ways to approach the aesthetics of photography: we can look at photography from the perspective of the audience or from the viewpoint of the artist.
Collingwood tends to evaluate art in terms of its effect on the viewer. He states that art is not simply amusement but a "magic" that can bring the audience an emotional current to keep their lives going.14 I appreciate Collingwood's effort to distinguish amusement-focused art that only emphasizes mere sensuous pleasure from the genuine arts--art proper. However, how can we measure an emotional current? How can we know how the audience's lives have been moved by the art? A picture that is an amusement for one person may be art proper to another.
Furthermore, Collingwood asserts that art is the primary and fundamental activity of the mind. Art arises of itself and does not depend on the previous development of any other activity. It is not a modified perception. He is disappointed at the nature of our education because it is an education in facing facts; it is designed to lead us away from the world of imagination in which the child lives. In his view, imagination is sharply opposed to thinking. To imagine is to isolate the object; to think is to place it in a world of objects with which it is continuous. He concludes that each work of art is an object of imagination.15 The point Collingwood makes about imagination can be applied to both artists and viewers, but he emphasizes the audience. He says that an object is only beautiful to a person who looks at it imaginatively, and that the kind of beauty that he finds there depends on the intensity and character of his own imaginative activity.
I agree that art is an activity of the imagination. A perceiver needs to imagine the implications beyond the words, the sound, or the scene bound by the frame. However, it is questionable to regard thinking as the opposite of imagination. This theory can hardly be applied to journalistic and high tech photography, such as that capturing images of the subatomic world. His assertion is inevitably contradictory: his purpose in writing books on aesthetics is likely to discover proper ways for the reader to appreciate art; therefore his writing is philosophical and the result of thinking! Also, I do not agree that Western education reduces imagination. From my own standpoint as an artist, imagination and thinking are complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Imagination must be based on facts. No matter how "otherworldly" artistic creation is, it must rely on the facts of our real world order. As I mentioned, the viewer's standpoint is one-sided. I suggest that combining the audience's and the artist's standpoints will improve the study of the aesthetics of photography.
Expression of Idea of Emotion
Langer tends to view art from the artist's standpoint. She declares that art is an expression of the idea or the knowledge of emotion through symbols.16 However, my experience as a photographer leads me to believe that expression through the camera is based on the knowledge of both my emotion and the emotion of others. For instance, in my photograph "Japanese girl," a girl was blowing bubbles while I took her picture. The image of the girl and the bubbles conveys both emotion and meaning. Although her emotion dominates, my perception of her emotion drove me to add a Hoya Fog B filter on the lenses to amplify her emotion, and thus, the photo is an expression of the idea of both her and my emotions.
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Langer holds that neither the external world nor the inner life of humans is itself intelligible and therefore comfortable: one comes to terms with the world and oneself by imposing symbolic forms, or patterns, which are themselves orderly and therefore intelligible. She asserts that every work of art, in whatever medium, is a "semblance" or an "appearance" through symbols.17 As mentioned in the discussion regarding thinking and imagination, I hold the position that they are not mutually exclusive. Langer seems to concur that emotive expression and logical conception can coexist. She regards artistic expression as a form of "logical expression." To be specific, "emotion is logically expressed when symbols are devised through which the emotion can be conceived, and the emotion is conceived when it is contemplated objectively so that its form becomes apparent."18
Sparspott argues that Langer's theory "just leaves us right where we started in our quest for the proper way of describing a work of art."19 Although the concept of "symbol" seems to be a tautology, it is still a usable term for understanding the aesthetics of photography. Because the photographic image looks real, many viewers tend to forget that it is a semblance and overlook the symbolic nature of photography. Many times I have heard tourists complain, "The pictures of the place are very beautiful, but when I went there, I was very disappointed."
Sontag
points out that photography is a "semblance of knowledge" or
a "semblance of wisdom." The camera's rendering of reality
must always hide more than it discloses. Thus, photography is
"knowledge at bargain price."20 In regarding
photography as art, we must not engage the "tourist attitude"
of viewing photos; rather, we must regard photos as a semblance or a
symbol. To be specific, a photographer cannot take the subject as it
is, and the viewer should not assume that what s/he sees is what it
seems. In art there is something more than the appearance--the power of
symbol. As Turner said, "Photography can use fact as a metaphor to
create new fact."21 Another well-known photographer,
Jonathan Bayer, said, "Good photographic images intrigue, present
a mystery, or demand to be read. They are constructs of frustrations
and ambiguities which force the viewer to actively interact with the
photograph."22 Prominent art critic Berger holds a similar
view that photography is a "quotation from appearance rather than
a translation," because extraction from context produces a
discontinuity, which is reflected in the ambiguity of a photograph's
meaning.23
Imitation of Reality
Humans tend to organize the disorderly world in an intelligible way, as Langer says, but sometimes we reverse the process in an attempt to disintegrate the world order into disorder. Sigmund Freud made an insightful point that humans have both life and death instincts--the tendency to create and to destroy. Does the world have an order? What is the relation between art and reality? These questions are important for us in defining what photography should be.
In Bell's well-known book Art, he refers to painting as creation and to photography as imitation.24 However, imitation is a strength of photography rather than a weakness. When painters regard painting as a creation, they treat the artistic realm as a self-sufficient world without any reference to reality. Painters dare to ignore the existing world order and form their own.
There is a controversy as to whether a universal world order exists, as Kant, Hegel and Leibniz found, or there is no order and all things "just happen," as Humes and the existentialists suggested. Nevertheless, in everyday life we must assume that there is an order in reality or we cannot function in this world at all. Although modern artists are so revolutionary as to break many traditional rules of composition and color harmony and do strange things such as gluing broken glass on a canvas, they cannot make paint float in the air, use paper as a stretched bar, or thin oil paint with water.
In fact, nature, or the spatial reality, is full of order, though it has terror and ugliness. Artistic creation should be based on the real world rather than ignoring it. Photography is an imitation of reality. No matter how non-representational a photographic image is, the photographer must take a subject from reality. For example, once Grobe made a fabulous abstract image of a matrix of circles, which is actually a magnification of integrated circuits .25 The image of a painting can be constructed through a pure mental process, but when a picture has been taken, it means that the subject represented by the image really existed. Therefore, the beauty of photography is derived from the existing world. A photographer can distort the scene with various filters, lenses, darkroom techniques, and/or digital retouching, but the skills are only enhancing the natural order--making the color more saturated, polarizing the contrast, and so forth.
Art, especially photography, has the power to show the terror, ugliness, disorder and absurdity of the world. Sontag says that photography can reveal an "anti-hero.26 In her view, American photography aspires to demystify; some photographers use the medium to level the gaps between the beautiful and the ugly. A picture of an athlete could be taken at the moment that he falls. A photo of a beautiful woman could be taken while her makeup is messed up by rain. The camera has the power to catch so-called normal people in such a way as to make them look abnormal.
However, even if you want to expose the terror and ugliness of reality, there will still be an order to that terror and ugliness. Collingwood goes even further to say, "It is impossible to imagine anything that is not beautiful...ugliness is a low degree of beauty."27 For example, war is terrible, but Wessing presented the horror in an order. One of his famous pictures is a scene of soldiers and nuns walking in different directions, which constructs a beautiful composition and implies a political or even a philosophical theme. In another picture showing a corpse and his weeping mother, Wessing wisely uses a high angle to form two diagonal lines amplifying the helplessness of the people. "Death of a Loyalist Soldier" by Capa is another good example of how the terror of death can be presented in a beautiful and orderly manner. The off-center composition and the decisive moment of the soldier's falling reveals that it is a picture by control rather than by luck.
When one judges a photographic image, reality should be as a reference. It doesn't mean that the viewer should look at how sharp the picture is or how well the skin tone on the photo matches the real person. Instead, one should ask, "If the image on the photograph occurred in reality, will the viewer think the image is beautiful and prefer it to the original one?" For instance, I have added a polarizer and a sepia filter on the lenses to shoot a sunset scene; the contrast is sharper and the red is more saturated. I love a sunset like that, though this enhanced scene would never happen in the physical world.
One may question, "Do you want the terror of war and the pain of death shown in Koen Wessing and Robert Capa to occur in this world again?" In photography showing tragic subjects, I don't wish the incident to occur again, but the judgment should still refer to reality. Do we want to reduce war and death to "just happen," or do we want to know why it happens and what we can do to prevent them from occurring? The order, composition, contrast, and color of the picture give meaning to the incident and invite us to think about our world deeply. Unlike the mere imagination that Collingwood spoke of, it is imagination with philosophical contemplation.
Photos by Non-Artists
Besides the reality that can be perceived by our eyes, there are other levels of "reality," which are revealed by high technology such as thermography and microscopic photography. However, can these photos made by non-artists for practical purposes qualify as art? News photos taken by reporters, microscopic photos taken by doctors, thermography made by physicists, mapping satellite pictures for geographical study, and computer enhanced pictures of planets taken by the probe "Voyager" and the Hubble telescope all fall into this category. Although these pictures are extraordinarily beautiful, certainly they are made by scientists for non-artistic purposes.
First, we look for the answer from the artist's standpoint. According to Langer, art is the creation of expressive forms to present ideas of feeling, or what is called inner life. A work of art will carry "vital import," which is the element of felt life objectified in the work.28 The high tech photographic methods such as thermography and micrography are applied by a few special effects photographers. Although they may do it for illustration, they still have a "vital import," for their fabulous images demonstrate the confidence of human wisdom, as well as the courage of exploring and demystifying the deeper structure of reality. Every kind of art should have "vital import," but certainly high tech photography imports the felt life of solid facts, a reference to reality that is beyond our eyes.
When
we see those photos created by non-artists through the viewer's
perspective, the answer is still the same. Barthes discussed
photography in his book Camera Lucida, which overwhelmingly
centers on journalistic or realist photography. He says that the
attraction certain photographs have for him is adventure. As a
spectator he is interested in photography for sentimental reasons. He
states that some journalistic pictures, such as the one by Koen Wessing
showing soldiers and nuns marching in Nicaragua, urges him to think
about ethics and politics. Barthes uses the Latin term
"Studium" to describe this kind of enthusiastic commitment.29
As Collingwood says, art proper is a magic that stimulates our morale to keep our lives going. Some journalistic photos can provoke us to think about our existence and our world. Moreover, scientific photos made with high technology undoubtedly increase our morale tremendously. Mythology is an expression of our dreams and desires, and science fiction is considered a modern mythology. If science fiction, though we know that it is not real, can inspire us to human wisdom and courage, then scientific photos, which bring us closer to reality and expand our imagination in the form of Langer's "logical expression," should lead to a positive psychological impact. With high tech photographic equipment, we are able to see where no one has seen before on both micro and macro scales. We can magnify a cell 50,000 times, detect the variation of heat of any surface, scan the inner structure of a human brain, see the earth in a high latitude, and even reach out to the galaxy. It is apparent that those are surrealist pictures because we cannot see them with our naked eyes only. They are actually realist pictures and they give us "emotional current" more than science fiction.
Appreciation of Process
By looking closely at the nature of photography, we might question whether art appreciation is only limited to what the work is, or extended to how it is made. The former concern is more from the viewer's side while the latter is more on the artist's side. Interestingly enough, photography is more likely to stimulate the viewer to ask about the artist's process than painting is.
When viewers look at my painting, they rarely ask me what brushes and paints I used. However, when people look at my photographs, they tend to ask, "What lenses did you use? What film is that? Did you retouch it on the computer?" Probably they think that the credit of a good painting should go to the painter, while the photographic and computing equipment did the work in photography. Some of them even go further to think that if they have the same equipment, they can make the same pictorial effect. Actually, better equipment does not necessarily produce a better picture, although it increases the chances of creating a good photograph. Prominent photographer Middleton made a valid point:
"I'll get better photos with a more expensive camera. Wouldn't this be nice if it was true? Then all the best photographers would be the ones with the most money. Wouldn't that be simple? Alas, the world of photography doesn't work this way. Give John Shaw a $200 camera outfit, and his photos would still be phenomenal. Remember, it's not the equipment, it's the operator. No one ever asked Van Gogh what kind of brush he was using and, if you're always asking pros what kind of cameras they're using, you're missing the point."30
Because some people credit the photographic equipment, they regard those who do their own processing and printing as "advanced photographers." When I was a painter, no one asked me whether I framed my works. However, after people noticed that I was a photographer, almost every of them asked me whether I did my own processing and printing. Indeed, to my experience, the darkroom work could be as routine and non-creative as using a one-touch camera. Nonetheless, when one assesses the aesthetic value of a photo, is it wrong to ask such questions as "What lenses did you use?" "What film is that?" "Do you use Adobe PhotoShop?" or "Do you do your own processing and printing?" One could ask those questions if one doesnˇ¦t give the credit to the equipment and the photo lab. The technical information can enrich our aesthetic experience. This suggestion contradicts the aesthetic theory that insists on feeling the art instead of thinking about it. However, the mind of the audience has both functions: feeling and thinking. It is absurd to demand the viewer to shut off the intellectual faculty and just feel the art. Even if it could be done, the viewer might reorganize the feeling by thinking after he/she had felt the art! If the viewer wants to share feelings about the art with his/her friends, he/she will present it in a systematic or at least comprehensible way. The process of conveying the feeling is no doubt an intellectual activity!
Likewise, one must comprehend technical information in a scientific mode of thinking, but the thought may turn into a feeling, and eventually, an aesthetic experience. The technical information of photography is the process of production, which qualifies as an art itself. The quotations "love is an art" and "management is an art" do not mean that love or management creates any physical appearance. Instead, these phrases suggest that the process creates the appearance. Consider cooking as a metaphor. In an authentic Chinese restaurant, especially those that provide Beijing dishes, the chef cooks in front of customers. The ends (the food) and the means (the cooking techniques) are equally appreciable to the Chinese.
Besides the effect on the picture, the skill of operating the equipment is also beautiful. Most people do not see how I make a picture. When I describe the process, you only can imagine it. The fascination of the skills could be viewed as an aesthetic experience.
Previsualization
The above observation is from the viewer's standpoint. Now we switch to the artist's viewpoint to see the role of technical knowledge in photography.
Edman defines art as "the realm of all controlled treatment of material, practical or other".31 Good art reveals the artist's control. Compared with other media such as painting, writing and composing music, photography may involve more difficulty in gaining precise control. If a painter works on a painting, he/she will postvisualize the image--he/she sees what he/she is doing immediately. If the color is not good, he/she can paint over it. A composer and a writer can also enjoy the same kind of advantage.
For a photographer, the story is entirely different. Often someone asks me, "The image looks great on the viewfinder; why is the print so terrible?" I always answer, "Don't trust the viewfinder. You must previsualize the image by technical know-how." For instance, a sunset or a sunrise scene carries high color contrast. The range of brightness will not fit into the film's latitude. In this case, I should add a neutral density filter for compensation. The eyes, hair and skin of a white model are very reflective. In order to create a nice looking skin tone on the picture and avoid the red eye effect, I should use off-camera flashing, or umbrella lighting. The above examples are simple ones for the convenience of illustration. I often encounter more complicated situations and have to consider many factors to predict what the picture will look like. Darkroom work, by the same principle, is also a work of previsualization backed by technical knowledge.
There are two exceptions. A Hasselblad camera can attach to a Polaroid magazine. With this configuration, the photographer can take an instant picture to preview the possible outcome of the image before he has used the print or slide film. Also, photographers who use a digital camera can preview the just-taken picture on a LCD display.
Aesthetics is not simply a judgment of beauty. As I mentioned before, the more control the artist has, the more respectable his work. Technical information may seem irrelevant to aesthetics, but in fact it is important for us to judge whether the photograph is a work of control or a work of chance. It is a serious challenge for the artist when he/she cannot see what he/she is doing.
Conclusion
Affirming the status of photography in fine arts should be accomplished by exploring its aesthetics rather than by only showing good photos. Neither constructing a universal theory of art nor applying pictoralism to claim that photography is like painting can help. Collingwood's theory of art as emotion and imagination is the view of only the audience; thus it fails to analyze the medium's uniqueness.
Combining the viewer's and the artist's standpoints is a more appropriate approach for the study of aesthetics of photography. Unlike the claim by Collingwood that imagination and thinking are mutually exclusive, Langer views art as a logical expression of the idea of emotion. This is certainly true. A photographer must start with knowledge or ideas. Besides the knowledge of emotions, s/he should also have the knowledge of world order and technical information. The former helps both the photographer and the viewer to use reality as a reference, while the latter empowers the photographer to previsualize the image and lead the audience to an appreciation of the process.
Notes
1. Paul Weiss, Nine Basic Arts (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961), 216, 218. See also Patrick Maynard , "Photography," The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. ed. Berys Gaut & Dominic Mclver Lopes (London: Routledge, 2001), 477-490. Maynard described how photography as a form of fine art is neglected by saying, "a bibliography of philosophical writing on photography could be printed on a single page, with little of that about art photography. Not only in philosophy, but in aesthetics generally, cinema is a far more developed topic: indeed, some of the better known 'aesthetic' essay on photography are prefaces to film theories" (p. 477).
2. Naom Rosenblum, A World History of Photography (New York: Abbeville, 1984).
3. Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography (New York: Penguin, 1986).
4. Public Broadcasting Services, American Photography: A Century of Image (Alexandria, VA: Public Broadcasting Services, 2000).
5. Robert Leggat, A history of Photography. (2001) [On-line] Available: http://www.rleggat.com/photohistory/
6. Kathleen Kadon Desmond, Photography as a Function of Visual Aesthetic Judgement, 1976, p.54.
7. National Museum of Art/Aperture, Man Ray's Man Ray (West Palm Beach, FL, 1994), 7.
8. Carel Squies, "HCB--The Decisive Moment," American Photography, September/October 1997, 48.
9. Photographers' Gallery, Reading Photography: Understanding the Aesthetics of Photography (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 7.
10. Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Scriber, 1957).
11. Bernhard Scholz, "Discourse and Intuition in Susanne Langer's Aesthetics of Literature," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 31 (1972).
12. Susanne Langer, Problems of Art: Ten Philosophical Lectures (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1957).
13. Kathleen Kadon Desmond, Photography as a Function of Visual Aesthetic Judgement, 1976, & Albert Sadler, "Objective vs Subjective." PSA Journal, 61, (1995): 10-11.
14. R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon, 1950).
15. R.G. Collingwood, Essays in the Philosophy of Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964).
16. Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Scriber, 1957).
17. Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Scriber, 1957).
18. A. Berndtson, "Semblance, Symbol, and Expression in the Aesthetics of Susanne Langer," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 14 (1956): 498.
19. F.E. Sparshott, The Structure of Aesthetics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 425.
20. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 23-24.
21. Photographer's Gallery, 77.
22. Photographer's Gallery, 9.
23. John Berger and Mohr Berger, Another Way of Telling (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 128.
24. Clive Bell, Art (New York: Frederick Strokes, 1921).
25. Kathryn Livingston, Special Effects Photography: The Art and Techniques of Eight Modern Masters (New York: American Photographic Book, 1985).
26. Sontag, 29.
27. Collingwood, Essays, 61-62.
28. Langer, Feeling and Form, 60.
29. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucids: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
30. Maynard, Patrick , "Photography," The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. ed. Berys Gaut & Dominic Mclver Lopes (London: Routledge, 2001), 477-490 .
30. David Middleton, "Subdue These Creativity Killers," Outdoor Photography 13, no. 3 (1997): 47.
31. Susanne Langer, Problems of Art: Ten Philosophical Lectures. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1957).
Bibliography
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Middleton, David. "Subdue These Creativity Killers." Outdoor Photography 13, no. 3 (1997): 44-47.
National Museum of Art/Aperture. Man Ray's Man Ray. West Palm Beach, FL, 1994.
Photographers' Gallery. Reading Photography: Understanding the Aesthetics of Photography. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.
Public Broadcasting Services American Photography: A Century of Image. Alexandria, VA: Public Broadcasting Services, 2000.
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Sadler, Albert. "Objective vs Subjective." PSA Journal, 61, (1995): 10-11.
Scharf, Aaron. Art and Photography. New York: Penguin, 1986.
Scholz, Bernhard. "Discourse and Intuition in Susanne Langer's Aesthetics of Literature." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 31 (1972): 215-226.
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Weiss, Paul. Nine Basic Arts. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961.Navigation
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