The best writing on photography has been by moralists—Marxists or would-be
Marxists—hooked on photographs but troubled by the way photography inexorably
beautifies. As Walter Benjamin observed in 1934, in an address delivered in
Paris at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, the camera is now incapable of
photographing a tenement or a rubbish-heap without transfiguring it. Not to
mention a river dam or an electric cable factory: in front of these, photography
can only say, ‘How beautiful.’ … It has succeeded in turning abject poverty
itself, by handling it in a modish, technically perfect way, into an object of
enjoyment.
Moralists who love photographs always hope that words will save the picture.
