October 26, 2004

Loud As A Moth

"His voice, as his editor on Picture Post remarked, was 'as loud as a moth'". –- Paul Delany on Bill Brandt in The Grauniad Weekly.

Also: "Brandt quoted Andre Breton's remark that the person in a portrait should be 'an oracle one questions'". (More fully: "Speaking of portraiture, Brandt said in 1948: 'Andre Breton once said that a portrait should not only be an image but an oracle one questions, and that the photographer's aim should be a profound likeness, which physically and morally predicts the subject's entire future.'" in http://previewct.com/gbase/Arts/content.html?oid=oid:14774).

Typically Oracular, I guess, and so typically authoritarian (there's no speaking back here), but we tend to see such photos in retrospect, almost always as an act of postdiction rather than prediction, and the nice image of drawing out the future loses some of its power. And the image itself so often influences the future of the sitter...

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