Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

When reading this article I was reminded of the phrase "a picture is worth one thousand words." The initial article was so densely descriptive it was difficult to finish and even harder to understand the objective in describing a picture.  The initial writing, which was purely descriptive, seemed wasteful in an essay as Agee and Evans could have simply included the photograph and left out the description.  The reader would have been able to ascertain the same information from looking at the picture as they would have from reading the description.  However, reading photographic prose, as opposed to simply looking at a picture, forces the reader/voyeur to think about the picture as not simply a snapshot in time, but more so as a complicated and detailed event.  It draws out the process of objectively observing a picture so that each detail is weighted and important.  This seemed reminiscent of the early days of photography when the photograph was thought of as an isolated work of technology that should be appreciated as the work of a machine with little human interaction.  The very matter-of-fact diction and lack of details, focusing instead on visual product, indicated a severance of the connection with humanity that is elaborated further in the second piece.

The second piece offers a more artistic view of the piece by adding value judgements to the photograph creating a sense that the author is critiquing a piece of art rather than describing a photograph.  This seemed to align with the movement to view photography not as "the pencil of nature" but more so as the product of a planned, set-up frame.  Although the photographer did not move objects to "create" a shot, they waited for the right moment to take the shot.  This movement views photography as artistic rather than objective.

I thought it was very interesting to have both writing styles in a side-by-side comparison.  For me, it starkly contrasted both perspectives of photography and allowed me to appreciate how photography is much more than an objective view of the world, it is in fact, more of an art.  The relationships between objects in the photography as well as the personal interaction each viewer has with a photo is evocative and can not be dismissed with a simple description.