Volume 21, Number 19 · November 28, 1974
Photography: The Beauty Treatment
By Susan Sontag
William H. Fox Talbot: Inventor of the Negative-Positive Process
by André Jammes
Macmillan, 96 pp., $5.95 (paper)
French Primitive Photography
introduction by Minor White, commentaries by André Jammes, by Robert Sobieszek
Aperture, unpaged pp., $6.95 (paper)
Paul Strand: A Retrospective Monograph, Vol. I, The Years 1915-1946; Vol. II, The Years 1950-1968
by Paul Strand
Aperture, unpaged pp., $40.00 the set
The Daybooks of Edward Weston, Vol. I, Mexico
by Edward Weston
Aperture, 214 pp., $30.00 the set
The Daybooks of Edward Weston, Vol. II, California
by Edward Weston
Aperture, 290 pp., $17.50 the set (paper)
Except for those situations in which the camera is used to document or to mark social rites, what moves people to take photographs is finding something beautiful. (The name under which Fox Talbot patented the photograph in 1841 was the calotype: from kalos, beauty.) 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.'
Review, 4908 words
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