ABSTRACT
Immediately we are thrown into a debate between the photographer’s intention in taking the photograph and the viewer’s understanding and interpretation of the image. This said, it remains one of the essential problems of photography that, in comparison with other media, photographers seem exceedingly reluctant to theorise about their own
practice. This leaves the impression that they photograph by instinct, that photography is an innate ability, and because photographers are born with photographic vision, they do not need to think about what they do. After all, it is considered that the photographs speak for themselves. I hope that this book will remedy such misconceptions. For example, by means of contrast, writing on the relative merits of painting and photography as far back as 1911, Alvin Langdon Coburn suggested:
we shall find that the essential difference is not so much a mechanical one of brushes and pigments as compared with a lens and dry plates, but rather a mental one of a slow, gradual, usual building up, as compared with an instantaneous concentrated mental impulse, followed by a longer period of fruition.
