“WORDS NOT SPENT TODAY BUY SMALLER IMAGES TOMORROW”: READING PHOTOGRAPHS AND THE EMERGENCE OF POSTWAR PHOTOGRAPHIC CRITICISM IN THE USA

Abstract

This article examines the idea of ‘reading photographs’ as it circulated in postwar American criticism. It looks principally to the work of Henry Holmes Smith and Minor White and the way in which they deployed the idea, as well as the institutional framework of photographic journals in which their writing circulated. The essay examines the role that the concept played in helping establish photo-criticism as an established genre of writing, and explores particular emphases in that writing that proceeded from the claim audiences ‘read photographs’; of these emphases, the most important and germinative ones centered around photographic traditions and their capacity to establish the parameters of the photographic medium itself. From the vantage delineated above, the essay also situates photo-criticism in a larger universe of postwar concern, one that centered on the mutual convertibility of pictorial and linguistic forms: the development of ‘visual literacy’ discourse, protocols for training photographers as these emerged in the 1960s, and broader agendas in the postwar American university system, with all their interest in visual pedagogy.