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Nothing is
poeticized
-Whitman, 1870, discussing Leaves of Grass.
The company returns from its excursion, the darkey brings up the rear and bears the well-riddled
target,
The squaw wrapt in her yellow-hemmed cloth is offering mocassins and beadbags for sale,
The connoisseur peers along the exhibition-gallery with halfshut eyes bent sideways,
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The pedlar sweats with his pack on his backthe purchaser higgles about the odd cent,
The camera and plate are prepared, the lady must sit for her daguerreotype,
The bride unrumples her white dress, the minutehand of the clock moves slowly,
The opium eater reclines with rigid head and just-opened lips,
The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck
(Leaves of Grass 38)
For a couple of krone one can have oneself photographed from every angle. The
apparatus is a mechanical Know-Thyself.
You mean to say, the Mistake-Thyself, said Kafka, with a faint smile.
I protested: What do you mean? The camera cannot lie!
Who told you that? Kafka leaned his head toward his shoulder. Photography
concentrates ones eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life
which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One cant
catch that even with the sharpest lens. One has to grope for it by feelingThis
automatic camera doesnt multiply mens eyes but only gives a fantastically simplified
flys eye view.
--Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka
This is no book,
Who touches this, touches a man
(Is it night? Are you alone?)
It is I you hold, and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms
(1860 Leaves of Grass)
... photography first comes into its own as an extension of the eye of
the middle-class flneur [...]. The photographer is an armed version of the
solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the
voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous
extremes.
(Sontag, On Photography 55)
The point was, how much better it would often be, rather than having a lot of
contradictory records by witnesses or historianssay of Caesar, Socrates,
Epictetus, othersif we could have three or four or a half a dozen portraits
very accurateof the men: that would be historythe best historya history
from which there would be no appeal.
-Whitman to William Brady
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