Where the claims of knowledge falter, the claims of creativity take up the
slack. As if to refute the fact that many superb pictures are by photographers
devoid of any serious or interesting intentions, the insistence that
picture-taking is first of all the focusing of a temperament, only secondarily
of a machine, has always been one of the main themes of the defense of
photography. This is the theme stated so eloquently in the finest essay ever
written in praise of photography, Paul Rosenfeld’s chapter on Stieglitz in Port
of New York. By using “his machinery”—as Rosenfeld puts it —“unmechanically,”
Stieglitz shows that the camera not only “gave him an opportunity of expressing
himself” but supplied images with a wider and “more delicate” gamut “than the
hand can draw.” Similarly, Weston insists over and over that photography is a
supreme opportunity for self-expression, far superior to that offered by
painting. For photography to compete with painting means invoking originality as
an important standard for appraising a photographer’s work, originality being
equated with the stamp of a unique, forceful sensibility. What is exciting “are
photographs that say something in a new manner,” Harry Callahan writes, “not for
the sake of being different, but because the individual is different and the
individual expresses himself.” For Ansel Adams “a great photograph” has to be “a
full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the
deepest sense and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in
its entirety.”
