Why Photography Matters
Thompson, J.L. (2016) Why photography matters. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Why Photography Matters
by Jerry L. Thompson
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Here's a review by Catherine Allerton, anthropologist at the LSE.
As mentioned in the blog, I happened upon this in a small Waterstones on 3Sep18. Thompson was an assistant to Walker Evans for the last few years of his life and the book is in some ways a paean to Evans' work and values and a defence to Susan Sontag's criticism of him. The front cover is Evans' Burroughs fireplace.
After that introduction I proceded to write a 3,000 word précis of the book. That has now been binned and a brief summary, together with some choice quotes, follow.
Serious Photography has lost its direction and commercialisation of the craft ("prestigious museums and lavish publications" and galleries dealing in "decorative self-indulgence") is largely to blame. Celebrity photographers deal in style rather than substance and fail to engage with their subjects. Academic criticism of photography (especially Sontag's of Evans) has become tangential.
Fox Talbot - "It frequently happens … - and this is one of the charms of photography - that the operator himself discovers on examination, perhaps long afterwards, that he has depicted many things he has no notion of at the time. Sometimes inscriptions and dates are found upon the buildings, or printed placards most irrelevant, are discovered upon their walls: sometimes a distant dial-plate is seen, and upon it - unconsciously recorded - the hour of the day at which the view was taken." [1]
Walker Evans:
1. "swift chance, disarray, wonder and experiment". [2]
2. "[My] work is in the field of non-scholarly, non-pedantic sociology. It is a visual study of American civilisation of a sort never undertaken at all extensively by photographers who are all either commercial, journalistic or "artistic." … [My book] may call attention to the seriousness in certain small things; it may reveal the emptiness of certain big things." [3]
and several (that I think are from) from Thompson himself:
a. much of modern photography is complacent, "prestigious museums and lavish publications" dealing in "decorative self-indulgence" [4]
b. the "chaotic intrusion of random details captured by an indiscriminate lens" [5]
c. "the wildness of the lens's promiscuous harvest" [6]
1. Fox Talbot, W.H. (1844-46) The pencil of nature. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans
2. Evans, W. (1931) The Reappearance of Photography, Hound and Horn. 5(1), p. 126
3. Evans, W. (1960) letter to the Ford Foundation. Cited in Thompson, J.L. Why Photography Matters, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, pp.75-76
4. Thompson, J.L. Why Photography Matters, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, p.4
5. ibid. p. 11
6. ibid. p.
11