May 2016
Beginner
296 pages
10h 54m
English
16 Is the camera an extension of the photographer?
Martin Lister
I wish to offer a reading of an image, if only to leave it behind. My reason for doing this – both the ‘reading’ and the ‘leaving behind’ is to engage with the idea contained in the title of this part of the book: that the camera can be thought of as an extension of the photographer. It also allows me to mark a current shift in how we are thinking about photography: the turn away from a long dominant preoccupation with photography as representation. The image is Andreas Feininger’s 1951 photograph entitled ‘The Photojournalist’. It is an image that invites thought about the mechanical extension of the human while hinting at the limits of the idea.