Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/09/26
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]>Austin, what do you mean by "received ideas" in this context? Arthur Arthur, "ideas or notions generally accepted as true" -- without necessarily being true. I've anglicized the Gallicism "idees recues". What Honore de Balzac collected, as a kind of deadpan satire, in his "Dictionnaire des Idees Recues". Since they're generally accepted as true, they're rarely if ever examined; people who do dare to examine them often catch hell for it. On Photography made a splash when it came out, but not for what Sontag said, which was mostly a recitation of what many people had been thinking about the subject at the time (i. e., received ideas, and banal if not actually obvious). That's beside the point. What was important at the time was that a respected American intellectual had deigned to talk about photography at all. At the time it was not considered, in the academy, as a subject for the same kind of serious study as painting. Indeed, there was no real agreed-upon vocabulary or language for such discourse. And it wasn't fair, or accurate, or useful to use the same terms of art which had been developed for painting. So she and other writers of the time who chose to treat the subject, made tentative steps towards developing a scholarly discourse about photography. Of course I've simplified this (don't want to start a flame war), but that's the gist. As I see it. As a photographer I was pleased that my practice had been given such attention as a serious activity. What specifically was said was, and is, banal and not useful to me trying to understand the deepest parts of the art. But at least it provided a starting-point for talking about it with others for whom making photos is not a daily concern. AUSTIN A. B., Semiotics, Brown '82