Pierre Bourdieu
[Sociologist, b. 1930, Denguin, France, d. 2002, Paris.]
The photographic act in every way contradicts the popular representation of artistic creation as effort and toil.
…ordinary [photographic] practice seems determined, contrary to all expectations, to strip photography of its power to disconcert; popular photography eliminates accident or any appearance that dissolves the real by temporalizing it.
Photography itself is most frequently nothing but the reproduction of the image that a group produces of its own integration.
In stamping photography with the patent of realism, society does nothing but confirm itself in the tautological certainty that an image of reality that conforms to its own representation of objectivity is truly objective.
With the following subjects, is a photographer more likely to produce a beautiful, interesting, meaningless, or ugly photo?: a landscape; a car crash; a little girl playing with a cat; a pregnant woman; a still life; a woman breastfeeding; a metal structure; tramps quarreling; cabbages; a sunset over the sea; a weaver at his loom; a folk dance; a rope; a butcher’s stall; the bark of a tree; a famous monument; a scrapyard; a first communion; a wounded man; a snake; an ‘old master’.
