Reading American Photographs Quotes

“Somewhere between what the lens depicts and what the caption interprets, a mental picture intervenes, a cultural ideology defining what and how to see, what to recognize as significant.”
― Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History: Mathew Brady to Walker Evans

“The daguerreotype reproduces what appeared before a lens at a particular moment and never again-its appearance is simultaneous with its disappearance, its death.”
― Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History: Mathew Brady to Walker Evans

“Reading American photographs is also a way of reading the past-not just the scenes recorded and the faces immobilized into permanent images, but the past as culture, as ways of thinking and feeling, as experience”
― Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History: Mathew Brady to Walker Evans