Alec Soth just posted an interview with Ted Papageorge. It’s pretty interesting throughout, although my attention definitely spiked at this:
AS: You’ve said that you see photography as ‘at least as close to writing as the other visual arts.’ Are you talking about a specific kind of writing (poetry, journalism, fiction)?
TP: Poetry, because it and photography can both be similarly condensed.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about connections between writing and photography, although for different reasons. From a post here last month:
I don’t think of photography as a creative art (I don’t generally stage pictures or engineer situations for taking them), but more as an analytic craft, like non-fiction writing; it is more a matter of peeling away what does not belong than of putting in what does.
And from an email on creativity and authorial genius:
I’m probably being influenced right now by some of the thinking I’ve been doing about photography and non-fiction writing. Excluding the form of photography where you build stuff just to take pictures of it, neither is a “creative art” in the sense of causing or even pretending to cause something “new” to be. The point is not to create the newest thing but to make as clear as possible (not necessarily as accurate; that’s another, more loaded issue) a description of something that already exists. In my head, I had separated creative writing from non-fiction writing when I started thinking about this, but maybe I was wrong to do so; maybe fiction as much as nonfiction consists of only of clear vision of or into existing ideas, phenomena, whatever, and only the clarity and usefulness of the description provide measures of its comparative worth.
Reading over these things, it seems almost that I’m talking about the question of representation; that tells me I need to refine my language. “Describe” in particular is probably at fault; it harkens back to the idea that writing is meant to recapitulate ideas or facts previously known by the writer, which I think is seriously problematic. If I begin writing something and end up with what I thought at the beginning I would have, I’ve failed.
Writing and photography should not, I think, be considered primarily methods of representations, but methods of perception; the camera and the pen alike are more essentially sense organs than they are tools of production.