题目内容

Picture-taking is a technique both for reflecting the objective world and for expressing the singular self. Photographs depict objective realities that already exist, though only the camera can disclose them. And they depict an individual photographer"s temperament, discovering itself through the camera"s cropping of reality.【F1】That is, photography has two directly opposite ideals: in the first, photography is about the world and the photographer is a mere observer who counts for little; but in the second, photography is the instrument of fearlessness, questing subjectivity and the photographer is all.【F2】These conflicting ideals arise from uneasiness on the part of both photographers and viewers of photographs toward the aggressive component in "taking" a picture.Accordingly, the ideal of a photographer as observer is attracting because it implicitly denies that picture-taking is an aggressive act. The issue, of course, is not so clear-cut. What photographers do cannot be characterized as simply predatory or as simply, and essentially, benevolent. As a consequence, one ideal of picture-taking or the other is always being rediscovered and championed.An important result of the coexistence of these two ideals is a recurrent ambivalence toward photography" s means.【F3】Whatever are the claims that photography might make to be a form of personal expression just like painting, its originality is closely linked to the power of a machine.The steady growth of these powers has made possible the extraordinary informativeness and imaginative formal beauty of many photographs, like Harold Edgerton"s high-speed photographs of a bullet hitting its target or of the swirls and eddies of a tennis stroke.【F4】But as cameras become more sophisticated, more automated, some photographers are tempted to disarm themselves or to suggest that they are not really armed, preferring to submit themselves to the limit imposed by pre-modern camera technology because a cruder, less high-powered machine is thought to give more interesting or emotive results, to leave more room for creative accident.For example, it has been virtually a point of honor for many photographers, including Walker Evans and Cartier Bresson, to refuse to use modern equipment. These photographers have come to doubt the value of the camera as an instrument of "fast seeing". Cartier Bresson, in fact, claims that the modern camera may see too fast.This ambivalence toward photographic means determines trends in taste. The cult of the future(of faster and faster seeing)alternates over time with the wish to return to a purer past when images had a handmade quality.【F5】This longing for some primitive state of the photographic enterprise is currently widespread and underlies the present-day enthusiasm for daguerreotypes and the work of forgotten nineteenth-century provincial photographers.Photographers and viewers of photographs, it seems, need periodically to resist their own knowingness. 【F4】

查看答案

搜索结果不匹配？点我反馈

更多问题

Picture-taking is a technique both for reflecting the objective world and for expressing the singular self. Photographs depict objective realities that already exist, though only the camera can disclose them. And they depict an individual photographer"s temperament, discovering itself through the camera"s cropping of reality.【F1】That is, photography has two directly opposite ideals: in the first, photography is about the world and the photographer is a mere observer who counts for little; but in the second, photography is the instrument of fearlessness, questing subjectivity and the photographer is all.【F2】These conflicting ideals arise from uneasiness on the part of both photographers and viewers of photographs toward the aggressive component in "taking" a picture.Accordingly, the ideal of a photographer as observer is attracting because it implicitly denies that picture-taking is an aggressive act. The issue, of course, is not so clear-cut. What photographers do cannot be characterized as simply predatory or as simply, and essentially, benevolent. As a consequence, one ideal of picture-taking or the other is always being rediscovered and championed.An important result of the coexistence of these two ideals is a recurrent ambivalence toward photography" s means.【F3】Whatever are the claims that photography might make to be a form of personal expression just like painting, its originality is closely linked to the power of a machine.The steady growth of these powers has made possible the extraordinary informativeness and imaginative formal beauty of many photographs, like Harold Edgerton"s high-speed photographs of a bullet hitting its target or of the swirls and eddies of a tennis stroke.【F4】But as cameras become more sophisticated, more automated, some photographers are tempted to disarm themselves or to suggest that they are not really armed, preferring to submit themselves to the limit imposed by pre-modern camera technology because a cruder, less high-powered machine is thought to give more interesting or emotive results, to leave more room for creative accident.For example, it has been virtually a point of honor for many photographers, including Walker Evans and Cartier Bresson, to refuse to use modern equipment. These photographers have come to doubt the value of the camera as an instrument of "fast seeing". Cartier Bresson, in fact, claims that the modern camera may see too fast.This ambivalence toward photographic means determines trends in taste. The cult of the future(of faster and faster seeing)alternates over time with the wish to return to a purer past when images had a handmade quality.【F5】This longing for some primitive state of the photographic enterprise is currently widespread and underlies the present-day enthusiasm for daguerreotypes and the work of forgotten nineteenth-century provincial photographers.Photographers and viewers of photographs, it seems, need periodically to resist their own knowingness. 【F3】

Gandhi"s pacifism can be separated to some extent from his other teachings.【F1】Its motive was religious, but he claimed also for it that it was a definitive technique, a method, capable of producing desired political results.【F2】Gandhi"s attitude was not that of most Western pacifists. Satyagraha, the method Gandhi proposed and practiced, first evolved in South Africa, was a sort of non-violent warfare, a way of defeating the enemy without hurting him and without feeling or arousing hatred.It entailed such things as civil disobedience, strikes, lying down in front of railway trains, enduring police charges without running away and without hitting back, and the like. Gandhi objected to "passive resistance" as a translation of Satyagraha: in Gujarati, it seems, the word means "firmness in the truth".【F3】In his early days Gandhi served as a stretcher-bearer on the British side in the Boer War, and he was prepared to do the same again in the war of 1914-1918, even after he had completely abjured violence he was honest enough to see that in war it is usually necessary to take sides.【F4】Since his whole political life centred round a struggle for national independence, he could not and, indeed, he did not take the sterile and dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference who wins.Nor did he, like most Western pacifists, specialize in avoiding awkward questions.In relation to the late war, one question that every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer was: "What about the Jews Are you prepared to see them exterminated If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war"【F5】I must say that I have never heard, from any Western pacifist, an honest answer to this question, though I have heard plenty of evasions, usually of the "you"re another" type.But it so happens that Gandhi was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 and that his answer is on record in Mr. Louis Fischer" s Gandhi and Stalin. According to Mr. Fischer, Gandhi" s view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which "would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler"s violence." 【F2】

Gandhi"s pacifism can be separated to some extent from his other teachings.【F1】Its motive was religious, but he claimed also for it that it was a definitive technique, a method, capable of producing desired political results.【F2】Gandhi"s attitude was not that of most Western pacifists. Satyagraha, the method Gandhi proposed and practiced, first evolved in South Africa, was a sort of non-violent warfare, a way of defeating the enemy without hurting him and without feeling or arousing hatred.It entailed such things as civil disobedience, strikes, lying down in front of railway trains, enduring police charges without running away and without hitting back, and the like. Gandhi objected to "passive resistance" as a translation of Satyagraha: in Gujarati, it seems, the word means "firmness in the truth".【F3】In his early days Gandhi served as a stretcher-bearer on the British side in the Boer War, and he was prepared to do the same again in the war of 1914-1918, even after he had completely abjured violence he was honest enough to see that in war it is usually necessary to take sides.【F4】Since his whole political life centred round a struggle for national independence, he could not and, indeed, he did not take the sterile and dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference who wins.Nor did he, like most Western pacifists, specialize in avoiding awkward questions.In relation to the late war, one question that every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer was: "What about the Jews Are you prepared to see them exterminated If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war"【F5】I must say that I have never heard, from any Western pacifist, an honest answer to this question, though I have heard plenty of evasions, usually of the "you"re another" type.But it so happens that Gandhi was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 and that his answer is on record in Mr. Louis Fischer" s Gandhi and Stalin. According to Mr. Fischer, Gandhi" s view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which "would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler"s violence." 【F1】

Picture-taking is a technique both for reflecting the objective world and for expressing the singular self. Photographs depict objective realities that already exist, though only the camera can disclose them. And they depict an individual photographer"s temperament, discovering itself through the camera"s cropping of reality.【F1】That is, photography has two directly opposite ideals: in the first, photography is about the world and the photographer is a mere observer who counts for little; but in the second, photography is the instrument of fearlessness, questing subjectivity and the photographer is all.【F2】These conflicting ideals arise from uneasiness on the part of both photographers and viewers of photographs toward the aggressive component in "taking" a picture.Accordingly, the ideal of a photographer as observer is attracting because it implicitly denies that picture-taking is an aggressive act. The issue, of course, is not so clear-cut. What photographers do cannot be characterized as simply predatory or as simply, and essentially, benevolent. As a consequence, one ideal of picture-taking or the other is always being rediscovered and championed.An important result of the coexistence of these two ideals is a recurrent ambivalence toward photography" s means.【F3】Whatever are the claims that photography might make to be a form of personal expression just like painting, its originality is closely linked to the power of a machine.The steady growth of these powers has made possible the extraordinary informativeness and imaginative formal beauty of many photographs, like Harold Edgerton"s high-speed photographs of a bullet hitting its target or of the swirls and eddies of a tennis stroke.【F4】But as cameras become more sophisticated, more automated, some photographers are tempted to disarm themselves or to suggest that they are not really armed, preferring to submit themselves to the limit imposed by pre-modern camera technology because a cruder, less high-powered machine is thought to give more interesting or emotive results, to leave more room for creative accident.For example, it has been virtually a point of honor for many photographers, including Walker Evans and Cartier Bresson, to refuse to use modern equipment. These photographers have come to doubt the value of the camera as an instrument of "fast seeing". Cartier Bresson, in fact, claims that the modern camera may see too fast.This ambivalence toward photographic means determines trends in taste. The cult of the future(of faster and faster seeing)alternates over time with the wish to return to a purer past when images had a handmade quality.【F5】This longing for some primitive state of the photographic enterprise is currently widespread and underlies the present-day enthusiasm for daguerreotypes and the work of forgotten nineteenth-century provincial photographers.Photographers and viewers of photographs, it seems, need periodically to resist their own knowingness. 【F2】