the habit of photographic seeing—of looking at reality as an array of potential
photographs—creates estrangement from, rather than union with,
nature.Photographic seeing, when one examines its claims, turns out to be mainly
the practice of a kind of dissociative seeing, a subjective habit which is
reinforced by the objective discrepancies between the way that the camera and
the human eye focus and judge perspective. These discrepancies were much
remarked by the public in the early days of picture-taking. Once they began to
think photographically, people stopped talking about photographic distortion, as
it was called. (Now, as William Ivins, Jr., has pointed out, they actually hunt
for that distortion.) Thus, one of the perennial successes of photography has
been its strategy of turning living beings into things, things into living
beings. The peppers Weston photographed in 1929 and 1930 are voluptuous in a way
that his female nudes rarely are. Both the nudes and the pepper are photographed
for the play of forms—but the body is characteristically shown bent over upon
itself, all the extremities cropped, with the flesh rendered as opaque as normal
lighting and focus allow, thus decreasing its sensuality and heightening the
abstractness of the body’s form; the pepper is viewed close-up but in its
entirety, the skin polished or oiled, and the result is a discovery of the
erotic suggestiveness of an ostensibly neutral form, a heightening of its
seeming palpability.
