Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/09/26

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Subject: Re: [Leica] Suzy Q, again
From: Austin Burbridge <Austin.Burbridge@Alumni.Brown.edu>
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 15:20:40 -0700
References: <28.b26dc74.27025e8a@aol.com>

>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

Replies: Reply from Mark Rabiner <mark@rabiner.cncoffice.com> (Re: [Leica] Suzy Q, again)
In reply to: Message from ARTHURWG@aol.com (Re: [Leica] Suzy Q, again)