Postcards are, in many ways, the opposite of snapshots. They are carefully timed, sometimes staged, usually aspirational scenes. I say aspirational because they project a longed-for and idealized experience. They also tend to homogenize our experiences of a place, produced as they are by a tourism industry that seeks to commodify and promote particular destinations. […]
Snapshots don’t receive the love and affection they deserve. Snapshots, those quick photos dashed off with little thought or planning. They are often out of focus, not level, too bright or too dark, and poorly composed, if at all. Faded, bent, and torn snapshots fill equally faded albums and dusty boxes on the top shelves […]
In 1974 Susan Sontag published her “Shooting America,” which included a critique of Bob Adelman’s Down Home and Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip. Along with Sontag’s reflections on documentary photographers’ predilection for the poor, she comments on the growing preference for “raw unliterary record” in both photography and writing. The emerging literary taste for “unedited […]
I was excited to see one of my photos on the cover of the latest volume of History and Technology. I also wrote a short reflection on the role of the photographer in shaping what we think is history. Fortunately, both the full-size image and the essay are freely available: “On the Cover.”