SZARKOWSKI'S 5
Journal #2


The Thing Itself
According to Szarkowski, photography deals with the actual. This being true he goes on to say that the photograph is a different thing than the reality. Szarkowski says that the photograph "was likely to claim that what our eyes saw was an illusion, and what the camera saw was the truth."

The Detail
"The photographer was tied to the facts of things," Szarkowski says. Detail is something that is recorded by photography. Pictures can record things with such detail that, according to Szarkowski, can make the trivial things be filled with undiscovered meaning.

The Frame
The idea of the frame being an element of photography is because the frame has the ability to "create a relationship between two figures that had not existed before," says Szarkowski. The frame in photography puts a border on reality. In a way it limits a photographers ability to accurately record reality because it limits the amount of information that can fit into a picture. The frame crops things out and creates new shapes at the boarders of a picture.

Time
Szarkowski says, "all photographs are time exposures, of a shorter or longer duration." No picture is static but rather a moment in time. It could be a couple of seconds, couple of fractions of a second, or a couple of minutes.

Vantage Point
Vantage point is the use of different angles of sight. Photography doesn't have to be just our normal 5 to 6 foot high straight on view but rather it could be an ants view or a birds eye view. Szarkowski says, "[photography] has taught us to see from the unexpected vantage point."