The Photographer's Eye

There are in this country over 30,000,000 camera operators but only a handful of outstanding photographers. This is an indication that, despite the more or less automatic character of its technique or techniques, the art of photography is a difficult one.The making of a photograph depends in the first instance on an act of selection—the photographer chooses some particular configuration of things in the world round-about and records it. This is the characteristic method of working, even though photographers frequently do create their own compositions by deliberately arranging the objects, colors and lighting which constitute the subject material of their pictures. The photographer, typically, is far more dependent upon existing visual phenomena of the external world than the painter. When the latter draws upon these visual phenomena he is free to change them in any way which suits him in order to heighten their effect and he very often does, in fact, alter the forms, colors, and arrangement of the things ...