Neil Selkirk
Timely and essential, Why Photographs? is meant for anyone interested in discovering how to really look at a photograph. According to Neil Selkirk’s book, almost since the beginning, most of us have had it all wrong. Insofar as art is the pursuit of human self-knowledge, then photography, from its invention, should have been recognized as a direct route to enlightenment. Beginning with the fact that painters start with a blank canvas and photographers start with a full one, the two media have never had anything meaningful in common. The photograph’s delight in riveting detail, spontaneity, evident credibility, and its embrace of chance--radical new characteristics immediately recognized by its inventors--were promptly pounced on and denounced as unartistic by an establishment that correctly recognized photography as an existential threat to painting. That establishment’s failed attempts over the next one hundred and fifty years to belittle the legitimacy of the new medium did however succeed in confusing and muddying the process of looking. Why Photographs? is a defense of straight photography, offered at a moment when the photograph as a simple, credible document is facing obsolescence. Since the earliest days, independent minds have seen through the smokescreen to the pictures themselves: the essays, poems, and one-liners gathered here are nothing less than a celebration of the rewards of simply looking. Why Photographs? illuminates those long-camouflaged secrets, which are in fact photography’s unique gift to us all. 6
