Why Photography Matters

by Jerry L. Thompson

Overview

A lucid and wide-ranging meditation on why photography is unique among the picture-making arts.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262316873
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	08/23/2013
Series:	The MIT Press
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	98
File size:	4 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

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.

What People are Saying About This

Heinz Liesbrock

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.

Alan Trachtenberg

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.

Endorsement

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

From the Publisher

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

Joe Sachs

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.

Editorial Reviews

09/16/2013
This concise and confident text argues on behalf of photography as a medium for creating a dialectic between the self and the world. Thompson (Truth and Photography), who is a writer and photographer, constructs his argument out of both his experience creating images and the Western literary tradition. He favors a style of photography that he considers more robust than the style in which the medium is commonly used and described by contemporary artists and thinkers. He sees the best photography as an exploration of logic, championing the material experience of returning to a subject matter again and again throughout time, over subjects merely entangled in personality and celebrity. Thompson's argument is often insightful and convincing to a degree, although his choice to dismiss so much modern thinking and artwork in a field as broad and broadly important as photography stunts the text. For example, he gets so caught up in an argument with a Susan Sontag straw woman that he distracts from the central argument. Despite the stuffy tone, Thompson manages to hit some important points, and his enthusiasm for the simple act of taking a photo is catching. 7 black and white illus. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly