Photo Book Reviews – Inside the Photograph
Author: Peter C. Bunne
Publisher: Aperture
Review by Conrad J. Obregon
I have found that one of the best ways for photographers and photography viewers to discover and engage the photogenic is with the help of a guide, or critic. (A critic is different from a reviewer. The reviewer’s job is to describe a work or body of work so that the reader can decide whether they want to engage it. The critic’s job is to explain how an image works so that the viewer can better engage it.)
Peter Bunnel would seem to be an ideal guide. He is a graduate in photography of the Rochester Institute of Technology, and has been a curator of photographs at the Museum of Modern Art and a professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art at Princeton. The essays in this book are mostly from dozens of exhibition catalogs. The essays deal with photographers from Stieglitz to Michael Kenna, and often include photographers whose work, while considered interesting by Bunnell, seem to have vanished from the current canon.
Occasionally some of the essays are quite interesting, as when the author explains the lack of acclaim for Diane Arbus during her lifetime because of her unwillingness to print images except in response to sales. As interesting is a discussion where he suggests that great photographers recognize not only the denotation of the subject but also the connotation to the viewer.
Unfortunately, with a single exception, each of the essays includes only a single image from the photographer which means that we must rely upon our guide to tell us in words what makes a picture great. Perhaps because most of these essays were meant to accompany catalogs and exhibits where the photographers work would be before the viewers’ eyes, the essays speak mostly in laudatory praise, without really explaining how the content is related to and explicates the meaning. Certainly Bunnell’s mentor, John Szarkowski, was able to do this with far fewer words in “The Photographer’s Eye” and “Looking at Pictures”.
One might hope that the combination of all these essays might have some synergistic effect so that one might be able to derive some overarching ideas about the nature of photography, especially given the book’s title. Unfortunately this is not so. Instead we merely have a collection of catalog essays that serve more as a tribute to the author than as an explanation of the artists.
______________________________________________
This site is made possible by sponsorship from:
Lensbaby
Comments are closed.