The Photographer’s Eye Creative Writing Essay Paper

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The photographer’s eye
The photographer’s eye by John Szarkowski is a book that tries to offer an overview of the fundamental challenges and opportunities of the photographic medium. The introduction of The photographer's eye offers a brief historical overview of photography concerning how it has evolved and how it is viewed as a unique artistic medium. The outlook on photography is the difference that it has from other artistic media. It differs from other artistic media since it is based on selection and not synthesis since the photographer takes elements of the real world in pictures but a painter makes the elements of a picture. A creative dilemma of creating meaningful pictures came into existence was attempted to be answered by a rag-tag group of commercial photographers, armature fanatics and casual snapshooters. They solved it unconsciously and had accomplished to evolve a visual practice that defines photography.
In my opinion, Szarkowski differentiates professional an amateur photographer by showing how they carry themselves in photography and their work. Many photographers are seen as artistically ignorant individuals who did not have old allegiances to traditional pictorial standards, (Szarkowski 1966). There are thousands of individuals who have practiced photography since its early days without having classical training. The individuals are unaware of each other's work and consider their work to be either a science, an art or a form of entertainment. Professionals of photography were the individuals that produced their work based on knowledge and skill. They also involved sensibility and invention in their work, while armatures of photography produced their work by accident through improvisation, and empirical experimentation.
Five characteristics are specific to photography which Szarkowski mentions which make a case for photography to be seen as a form of art which is on the same level as other artistic media like a painting. The first characteristic is known as the thing itself. I believe that by this, Szarkowski means that photography offers a representation of the real world. The work of a photographer is to seek out and reveal that which already exists. However, a contradiction arises between the public perception of the photograph’s inability to lie and the awareness of the photographer of it not being the case, (Szarkowski 1966). Therefore, a photographer can claim that the picture depicts reality while the eye sees an illusion. The image is often ...