Volume 23, Number 21 & 22 · January 20, 1977
Photography in Search of Itself
By Susan Sontag
Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art
by John Szarkowski
Museum of Modern Art, 216 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Like other steadily aggrandizing enterprises, photography has inspired its leading practitioners with a need to explain, again and again, what they are doing and why it is valuable. The era in which photography was widely attacked (as parricidal with respect to painting, predatory with respect to people) was a brief one. Painting of course did not expire with the advent of the camera in 1839, as one French painter hastily predicted; the finicky soon ceased to dismiss photography as menial copying; and by 1854 Delacroix graciously declared how much he regretted that 'such an admirable discovery should have come so late.'
Review, 8615 words
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