In preparation for revamping the introductory articles about photography that appear on this website (linked below), I spent a couple of hours this morning delving into my collection of old photographic books, magazines, and manuals. The wonderful time-lapse photograph shown above, made by Neil Montanus, appears in the 1979 edition of The Joy of Photography. Produced by the editors of the Eastman Kodak Co., this book contains hundreds of black-and-white and colour photographs that are both beautiful and instructional, and also includes special portfolios by Gordon Parks and former Magnum President, Ernst Haas. I relished flipping slowly through the pages, taking my time to study each of the prints and to read the accompanying text. Unlike digital images on a screen, which are aggressively sharp and bright, the prints, had an alluring, laid-back, painterly quality that invited me in. I felt at home among them.
Under the piano/Across the street /
Untitled diptych /
The Categorical vs. the Incremental /
“The vocabulary of the ‘anointed’ is filled with words reflecting their rejection of incremental trade-offs and advocacy of categorical ‘solutions.’ This is most clear in the law and in writings among the legal intelligentsia, where individual and social trade-offs are transformed into categorical legal ‘rights.’ Ronald Dworkin perhaps best expressed this view when he said: Individual rights are political trumps held by individuals. Just as the smallest trump beats the highest card in any other suit, so these ‘rights’ take precedence over the weightiest other considerations which are not in the form of rights. Thus the ‘rights’ of criminals take precedence over crime control, the ‘right’ to various social ‘entitlements’ takes precedence over the interests of taxpayers, the ‘rights’ of those entitled to compensation for past injustices take precedence over the interests of displaced contemporaries who complain of ‘reverse discrimination,’ and so on. Rights trump interests in this vision.”
