Hello fellow artists,

Nancy Newhall (1908 - 1974) was a photography critic and colleague of some of the masters of photography who were making waves 1940 - 1970. She edited books of photographs by Ansel Adams, Paul Strand and Edward Weston and was a founder and regular contributor to Aperture, which was and still is devoted to fine art photography. The following is by Nancy Newhall and published in Aperture, v. 1 #1, 1952.

Her words are prescient, given how much time we devote to visual media -- television, movies and the Internet.

"Perhaps the old literacy of words is dying and a new literacy of images is being born. Perhaps the printed page will disappear and even our records be kept in images and sounds. Perhaps the new photography-writing -- so new we have no word for it -- is a transition form, and perhaps, instead, it is, in embryo and by virtue of principles now being discovered and applied, the form through which we shall speak to each other, in many succeeding phases of photography, for a thousand years or more.

We are not yet taught to read photographs as we read words. Only a few thousands, among our hundreds of millions, have trained themselves like photographers and editors to read a photograph in its multilayered significance. Yet more and more photographers have discovered that the power of the photograph springs from a deeper source than words --the same deep source as music. At birth we begin to discover that shapes, sounds, lights, and texture have meaning. Long before we learn to talk, sounds and images form the world we live in. All our lives, that world is more immediate than words and difficult to articulate. Photography, reflecting those images with uncanny accuracy, evokes their associations and our instant conviction. The art of the photographer lies in using those connotations, as a poet uses the connotations of words and a musician the tonal connotations of sounds."

For more about how to read visual images, see my information package on symbolism and tomorrow's blog entry.

Technorati Tags: Aperture magazine, visual literacy, photography, symbolism

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