LEGACIES OF THE LENS

...Yet these images—these ironic modern counterparts of Keats's Grecian Urn produced by a burgeoning technology for an ever-expanding mass market—should tease us into and out of thought...

...The photos are the best part of Thomas's book: his well informed, interesting, and readable (if hobbled by nostalgic doodads of dead Victorian style) commentary tells us little about the nature of the photographic image itself, its problematic relation to the world and to our own problematic psyches...

...the uncandid camera did not seek to capture personality but to make individuality fit genteel stereotypes...

...Alienating us from direct experience, the photo provides a more intense second-hand experience, an illusion of knowledge...

...A splendid performance—intellectual pinball on the French model where the goal is to keep a subject in play for as long as possible, racking up a brilliant score of cultural references and profound (if somewhat obscure) mots...

...And now we live not only amid, but through these images, scarcely noticing them...

...Now all art aspires to the condition of photography...

...Along with modernizing and surrealizing our perspective on reality, however, the camera also consumerizes it...

...or puritanical proscription (only the pure may survive...

...Time in a Frame presents 147 lovely nineteenth century photos, ranging from well-known shots by Matthew Brady, Julia Cameron and other professional or amateur practitioners whose work is as artistic as anyone could wish, to shots of unknowns by unknowns: views of tacky tourist attractions, portraits from family albums, shots of exotic places and people, or pictures of domestic degradation intended to provoke noble sentiments as well as amelioration...

...Matthew mestrovic, a longtime contributor, is on the faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey...

...Robert phillips's Lewis Carroll study, Aspects of Alice, has just been reissued in a new Vintage paperback...

...Even outdoors, amid a more random reality, the conventional mindsets of studio and society often persisted: visiting dignitaries arranged in drawingroom poses at construction sites, nostalgic genre shots—fishermen (those hardy elemental types of the solid Briton), cottagers and farmers (simple and vanishing ways of life), sentimentalized visions of the city poor (street urchins on the model of Dickens's Jo from Bleak House) or of moral themes like "Youth and Age* and "Innocence" (complete with spiritual maiden and caged dove...

...father john jay hughes, Adjunct Professor of History at St...

...To collect photographs is to collect the world...

...3 February 1978: 88 than that...

...steve lawson is Literary Advisor to both Circle in the Square and the Williamstown Theatre...

...There are no illustrations here, just lean prose studded with tight-mouthed, provocative aphorisms (the intellectual's equivalent of the stand-up comic's oneliners) : "All photographs are memento mori...

...Louis University, is the author of numerous books and articles...

...On Photography's analytical expose of the dynamics and extent of our addiction should serve as a definition by example of such an ecology...

...essentially discrete, disjunct, mute, ahistorical, the photo cannot tell the truth that comes only from words and narration...

...The last sentences of Sontag's book call for an ecology of images without specifying the meaning of that term...

...Sontag's six essays—really linked meditations or even prose poems—all take up these themes again and again, placing them in progressively more complex contexts, squeezing (now and then with visible strain) every bit of significance out of each disquieting aspect of the photographic image and its ambiguous but potent force in the modern consciousness...

...Susan Sontag insistently explores these considerations...

...Whatever the photograph, Thomas turns it into an occasion for historical reconstruction...

...it recorded a reality habitually manipulated and framed according to preconceived notions...

...Riis and others brought the smug face to face with unvarnished poverty...

...Pound would have called it an ideogram...

...more disenchanted with pure esthetics, less against interpretation than one might have expected...

...To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability...

...All these images, no matter how irrelevant, generate a strong fascination for, as Alan Thomas notes, they enable us "to see as far back as the 1840's—to see the streets of London and Paris, the dress of the people and the details of furnishings depicted with an openness and exactitude no earlier period can match...

...His main concern is social-historical explication: polishing the panes of our magic casements to an absolute transparency so that the photographs and all their carefully catalogued equivocations disappear into that familiar metamorphosis of novels, diaries, and historical data of all kinds which we call "the nineteenth-century mind...

...Rather than mindless delight and preservation (save the seals...

...It is, finally, a moralistic (Marxist persuasion) indictment of our common lot as "image junkies...

...Indeed, like magic casements opening onto preternaturally clear scenes of an enchanted world, nineteenth century photographs freeze everything and everybody forever in their proper places...

...And at the end of the book is a short collection of bits about photography from camera ads, philosophers, poets, etc...

...To photograph is to confer importance...

...Photography levels hierarchies, fosters seeing for seeing's sake, "the didactic cultivation of perception, independent of notions of what is worth perceiving, which animates all modernist movements in the arts...

...victor a. kramer teaches at Georgia State University and is currently writing a book about the literary career of Thomas Merton...

...But essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own...

...Social conventions ruled the studio where ladies and gentlemen were posed in a decorous repertoire of stock attitudes and drawingroom surroundings...

...In this well ordered world, the camera didn't lie...

...For her, photography is an aggressive, appropriating act (one shoots/takes a picture) which "makes reality atomic, manageable, opaque . . . denies interconnectedness, continuity . . . confers on each moment the character of a mystery...

...Sontag got the idea of criticism through such suggestive juxtaposition of quotations from Walter Benjamin...

...FATHER RAYMOND A. SCHROTH, S.J., is associate editor of Commonweal...

...BOOKS LEGACIES Or THE LENS RICHARD KUCZKOWSKI On Photography SUSAN SONTAG Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $7.95 Time in a Frame ALAN THOMAS Schocken, $17.95 Shortly after the invention of photography, the world was engulfed by a deluge of heterogeneous images, a tide which has constantly risen since the camera's Victorian infancy...

...Yet On Photography is less self-consciously self-advertising richard kuczkowski teaches English and is book review editor of New York Arts Journal...

...But even the most carefully controlled lens often caught and preserved unidealized, unsettling aspects of all sorts of things: the routine boredom of war or of a hanging, the very phoniness of poses...

...And from its beginning, but more insistently as it became more portable and flexible, the camera brought subversive visions of reality home to the Victorians: Muybridge's studies of animal locomotion showed that horses (and men) do not move as they were painted...

...The stiffness comes as much from the camera's early clumsiness and inability to handle motion as from our Victorian ancestors' obsession with society and propriety...

...those of bourgeois heroes—all sorts of "Men of Mark" from royalty to statesmen, jurists, poets laureate, politicians, and Commonweal: 87 T members of the fashionable and wealthy world—were widely sold and avidly collected by a population eager to emulate the public poses of their betters in their own family albums...

...save the snapshots...

...These disruptive elements don't interest Alan Thomas much except as the beginnings of an artistic, scientific, or humanitarian documentary realism...

...The world becomes "a department store or museumwithout-walls in which every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption, promoted into an item for aesthetic appreciation...

...Portrait photos were immensely popular...

...And governments exploit the photographic image as another medium for capitalist ideologies—stimulating artificial appetites to consume, replacing real political change by a change of images, and keeping populations under surveillance...