This richly evocative study of photography has two major emphases. The first is that the language of description (be it title, caption, or text) is deeply implicated in how a viewer looks at photographs. The more detailed the description, the more precisely the viewer's observation is directed. This leads to the second emphasis, that the use of a photograph determines its meaning. For example, a newspaper photograph with a caption may be later exhibited in an art gallery with additional or different information. The news photograph will look as it did originally, but instead of being seen as news may be seen in terms of history, sociology, or art.
The author first engages the problem of defining the value of a photograph, not in terms of its commercial or monetary value but of its actual or potential use. Walter Benjamin's influential writings on photography are discussed, notably his complex metaphor of "aura" as applied to both handmade art (such as painting and sculpture) and the photograph, with the author challenging Benjamin's contention that works of art do not require titles, whereas photographs do.
Actual descriptions of photographs are used to show that the descriptions modify and enlarge interpretation and often establish the use of photographs. The author then investigates the many definitions of the photograph that invoke the metaphor of the "mask," followed by a look at the history of reflective images (mirror, water) and Benjamin's uses of aura, the returned gaze, and memory. The imaginative use of photographs as metaphor is further explored in works of literature by Marcel Proust, Robert Lowell, Roland Barthes, and Robert Musil.
The author concludes that although no photograph has the sacred aura of the unique work of art, many photographs have a secular aura constituted by use, familiarity, description, and interpretation.
Industry Reviews
"This dense, subtle, provocative book considers the question of how photographs mean in relation to the uses made of them. Unlike most critics of photography, Price makes language a subject vital to her deliberations... The book builds a complicated argument about the nature of meaning and about relations between word and image, image and viewer." - Patricia Meyer Spacks, University of Virginia "In this serious, densely textured meditation on photography (which is a study of meanings, value, and discourse as well), Price writes jargon-free prose full of wit, insight, and grace. Besides discussing photographs in their various settings, she studies the use of photographs in literary works by such writers as Proust, Lowell, Barthes, and Musil... Price maintains that 'photographs without our appropriate descriptive words are deprived and weakened,' and she illuminates her idea of the photograph by enlarging on metaphors such as mask, language, and aura, the last a concept introduced by Walter Benjamin, one of the book's guiding figures. We learn much about the early practitioners of photography. (Price's analysis of Julia Margaret Cameron, whose work she studies alongside a painting by Rembrandt, is worth the price of the book.) And as an aesthetician, Price is interested in such questions as moral values (she disagrees with Sontag's condemnation of photography), authenticity, and how the mechanical aspects of the art condition the way we approach it." - Choice
