Classic Essays on Photography

by Alan Trachtenberg

Containing 30 essays that embody the history of photography, this collection includes contributions from Niepce, Daguerre, Fox, Talbot, Poe, Emerson, Hine, Stieglitz, and Weston, among others.

Genres: Photography, Art, Nonfiction, Theory, History, Essays

300 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1980

About the author

Alan Trachtenberg was Neil Gray, Jr., Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies at Yale University.

Reviews

[Daniel Rainer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent, but dated—in desperate need of an expanded second edition. I found the essays by Emerson, Kracauer, Barthes, and Berger to be the most useful and interesting.

[Catherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great theory, great history, just a really solid intro to the subject overall.

[Eric Cartier · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very fine selection of essays spanning the 1830s through the 1970s. The writers present a variety of viewpoints, definitions, justifications, theories, historical contexts, opinions, and judgments about photographers, the practice of photography, and photographs themselves. I'm grateful to have acquired the withdrawn copy from my library, as that allowed me to heavily mark it up; I'll keep it as a reference book.

Eight of the 30 essays were especially interesting to me:

"Report" (1839) by Dominique Francois Arago
"The Stereoscope and the Stereograph" (1859) by Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Photography and the New God" (1922) by Paul Strand
"Mechanism and Expression" (1929) by Franz Roh
"The Age of Light" (1934) by Man Ray
"New Reports and New Vision: The Nineteenth Century" (1953) by William M. Ivins, Jr.
"Photography" (1960) by Siegfried Kracauer
"Rhetoric of the Image" (1977) by Roland Barthes

Perhaps someday I'll go back and add an excerpt or three from each of them. All I'll note now is I saved Barthes for last, and those 17 pages, which took two hours to read, demanded my complete attention and energy. Here's a bit of it (emphases in the original):

The type of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed truly unprecedented, since it establishes not a consciousness of the being-there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there. What we have is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then. It is thus at this level of the denoted message or message without code that the real unreality of the photograph can be fully understood: its unreality is that of the here-now, for the photograph is never experienced as an illusion, is in no way a presence (claims as to the magical character of the photographic image must be deflated); its reality that of the having-been-there, for in every photograph there is the always stupefying evidence of this is how it was, giving us, by a precious miracle, a reality from which we are sheltered.

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very dated. Published in 1980, but even the more recent essays could have been written 100 years ago. There were many developments in the 1960s and 70s that would have been interesting to read about.

[Andrew]

As with most volumes of selected essays by various authors, the collection is uneven. The first several essays, while clearly historically important primary sources, are mostly technical documentation of minimal interest to the modern reader. And a lot of the 19th Century stuff is likewise dull as hell, other than a missive by a predictably but entertainingly bitchy, melodramatic Baudelaire. It's the 20th Century essays, many of them by various members of the European intellectual all-star team-- Benjamin, Barthes, Valéry-- that really shine.

[Alex]

Classic Essays on Photography by Alan Trachtenberg (1981)

[Cecelia]

I found the essays to be very interesting but some what dense so it was hard for me to read more than a couple at a time.