In this century, the older generation of photographers described photography as
a heroic effort of attention, an ascetic discipline, a mystic receptivity to the
world which requires that the photographer pass through a cloud of unknowing.
According to Minor White, “the state of mind of the photographer while creating
is a blank … when looking for pictures … The photographer projects himself into
everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and
to feel it better.” Cartier-Bresson has likened himself to a Zen archer, who
must become the target so as to be able to hit it; “thinking should be done
beforehand and afterwards,” he says, “never while actually taking a photograph.”
Thought is regarded as clouding the transparency of the photographer’s
consciousness, and as infringing on the autonomy of what is being photographed.
Determined to prove that photographs could—and when they are good, always
do—transcend literalness, many serious photographers have made of photography a
noetic paradox. Photography is advanced as a form of knowing without knowing: a
way of outwitting the world, instead of making a frontal attack on it.
