The Currency of the Photograph

Abstract

On 6 October 1951 Berenice Abbott took part in a conference on photography at the Aspen Institute, Colorado. Here, she put forward her view that photography has a strong affinity to writing and that, in the USA, this is to ‘a glorious tradition of unsurpassed realist writers’.2 In the course of her argument she reminded her audience that: ‘Jack London in his powerful novel Martin Eden pleads not only for realism but impassioned realism, shot through with human aspirations and faith, life as it is, real characters in a real world — real conditions.’ She asked: ‘Is this not exactly what photography is meant to do with the sharp, realistic, image-forming lens?’ And a little later, as if in answer, she concluded: ‘Photography cannot ignore the great challenge to reveal and celebrate reality.’3

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 83 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.