Susie Linfield
[Writer and critic, New York, lives in New York.]
Why are photographs so good at making us
see cruelty? Partly, I think, because photographs bring home to us the reality of physical suffering with a literalness and an irrefutability that neither literature nor painting can claim.
Photographs illuminate the terribly damaged family of man to which, I’m afraid, we all belong.
The best photographic portraits, like the best painted portraits, present us not with biographical information but with a soul.
...we’re still not at all sure what photography is: is it news, art, entertainment, documentation, science, or surveillance? It tends to blur all those boundaries, which is exciting, but also bewildering and confusing.
…it is the camera—the still camera, the film camera, the video camera, and now the digital camera—that has done so much to globalize our consciences; it is the camera that brought us the twentieth century’s bad news. Today it is, quite simply, impossible to say, “I did not know”: photographs have robbed us of the alibi of ignorance.
It’s hard to resist the thought that a very large number of photography critics—including the most influential ones—don’t really like photographs, or the act of looking at them, at all.
…many things in life are deeply disappointing; in this sense photographs, far from being magic, are pretty much like everything else, and the attempt to punish them for their shortcomings seems less and less fruitful.
The photograph of suffering presents us, too, with the specific,
individual experience of suffering.
