ABSTRACT
The things you do know about what the photograph is likely to look like are, on the whole, exactly those things that will appear because of photography’s automatic capacity for what I am calling gross depiction-the achievement of easily recognized likenesses. My idea is that this achievement dislocates the value of representation, especially relative to its value in other kinds of pictures. It is an old idea that photography freed painting from the burden of representing. I think this old idea is backwards. It is photography which is freed of this burden, just because it is no burden in photography. Contrary to Susan Sontag, for instance, I think that one’s informed attention when looking at photographs tends to go elsewhere than to what is (grossly) depicted. . .
