Basic Critical Theory for Photographers

13 Robert Adams’, John Baldessari’s and Peter Godwin’s Analysis of Particular Photographs

In this chapter there are three un-summarised responses to three different photographs by three different people. They can all be regarded as examples of photographic criticism. The writers react strongly to the images, but substantiate their opinions with information from the photographs. Robert Adams is a photographer, John Baldessari, an artist and Peter Godwin, a writer. They have all achieved international recognition in their own fields.

John Baldessari (See Fig. 38)

I buy a lot of pictures nobody wants, odd movie publicity stills that used to be ten cents a piece, and are now up to twenty-five cents each. I started looking at these kinds of pictures ...