The Photographer and the Viewer

To me, the set of essays by Moholy-Nagy and Ray is concerned with the relationships which the individual viewers create with photographs. Moholy-Nagy contends that photography helps to create an “objective vision” that can “complete or supplement… the eye” by freezing time through movement studies or enlarging space through microscopic photographs. On the other hand, painting relies on the optical perception of the human eye its interpretation by the human brain. However, even though photography is able to help supplant the viewer’s vision by illuminating previously unobservable worlds, these images are only capable of being interpreted in the light of the viewer’s understanding of optics and the outside world. This reminds me of the enormous image of an atomic resolution electron micrograph that is on display in the lobby of the de Young Museum. To the ordinary viewer this image may appear simply to be lattices of grey fuzzy spheres, but to scientists the arrangement of these atoms represents something more. Thus, to Moholy-Nagy, simply creating and capturing photographic images does not allow the viewer to understand photography completely. Only through the understanding of the optical process can the viewer truly appreciate and create “new relationships” with photographs. A similar connection between the photograph and the viewer is expressed by Ray. To Ray, a photograph is akin to “the undisturbed ashes of an object consumed by flames.” It is up to the viewer to reconstruct the actual experience through the optical history of the film. However, Ray argues that this reconstruction is not only colored by the optical history of the exposure but also the personal history of the viewer. As a result, Ray argues that in order to fully understand and appreciate the photography the eye (and the brain) must “train itself to see… without prejudice or restraint.” Through their arguments both Moholy-Nagy and Ray both suggest that a photograph and its interpretation depends as much on the record of light created by the photographer as the scientific understanding and personal history of its viewer.