diptych # 74 ~ some stuff / on safari

green bottle / floor sweepings ~ Au Sable Forks, NY - in the Adirondack PARK / Chaffey's Lock, CA • click to embiggenre: my green bottle / floor sweepings diptych:

Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty ... what motivates people to take photographs is finding something beautiful ... Nobody exclaims, "Isn't that ugly.! I must take a photograph of it." Even if someone did say that, all it would mean is: "I find that ugly thing ... beautiful." ~ Susan Sontag from her essay, The Heroism of Vision

In her essay, The Heroism of Vision - one of her better essays, re: photography - Susan Sontag got a lot right (IMO) about the medium of photography and its apparatus*:

There is a particular heroism abroad in the world since the invention of cameras: the heroism of vision. Photography opened up a new model of freelance activity - allowing each person to display a certain unique, avid sensibility. Photographers departed on their cultural and class and scientific safaris, searching for striking images. They would entrap the world, whatever the cost in patience and discomfort, by this active, acquisitive, evaluating, gratuitous modality of vision. Alfred Stieglitz proudly reports that he had stood three hours during a blizzard on February 22, 1893, "awaiting the proper moment" to take his celebrated picture, Fifth Avenue, Winter. The proper moment is when one can see things (especially what everyone has already seen) in a fresh way.

While I don't necessarily agree with every point Sontag makes in this particular essay, there is much to agree with (like the preceding excerpts). And even with those ideas and notions which seem a bit over the top / a bit of a stretch, there is, at the very least, considerable food for thought.

*apparatus = conventions, vernacular, and traditions - not gear)