4 May 2008
TWIP Photo Book Reviews #5 - Criticizing Photographs
Posted by Scott under: Photo Book Reviews .
Criticizing Photographs (Fourth Edition) by Terry Barrett
Published by McGraw-Hill
Review by Conrad J. Obregon
When I reviewed the third edition of this book several years ago, I didn’t rate it highly, but I thought that perhaps the fourth edition might be a better book, and it is.
Despite its subtitle, which might lead you to believe it is about understanding pictures, the bulk of this book is directed at formal criticism of photographs. After an introductory chapter on the nature of criticism, Barrett suggests a process for criticizing photographs that includes description, interpretation and judgment. The author also suggests a classification scheme for photographs which he believes could be useful in forming judgments, although I found it no better then many other taxonomies and at times difficult to apply to many photographs. Throughout he mentions many schools of analysis, like formalism and feminism and shows how these schools might influence criticism. He then launches a foray into photographic critical theory which is concise but accurate and which deals with such questions as the truth and morality of photography. He finally talks about the act of writing criticism and also about critiquing photographs.
Barrett illustrates his points with many helpful examples of written criticism. Most of the examples deal with pictures of the modern or postmodern school, but the information is transferable to other kinds of photography. The book is illustrated with both color plates and black and white plates, although the black and white plates are spread throughout the book, which leads to a lot of page flipping. It would be nice if the next edition included a page number when these plates are referred to.
The subtitle, “An Introduction to Understanding Images” might lead one to expect that there would be some insights into how and why photographs work but I became aware that Barrett presumed his audience would have some prior knowledge of this. Thus while he spoke of the importance of a photographer’s technique in understanding a photo, there was no mention of how technique might be used to convey a photographer’s vision. In the earlier edition, I found this a serious weakness, but it now seems clear that the author expects that this kind of information will come from somewhere else. On the other hand, the careful reader will derive some idea of what to look for in a photograph by reading the many examples.
No one wanting to come to an understanding of how to read a photograph from a single volume will learn to do so from this book. In fact, no one volume is likely to do that, although a book like “The Photographer’s Eye” by John Szarkowski would be a good place to start. On the other hand, for the individual who knows something about the nature of photography, or within the context of a larger course of study, this is a good book to begin to learn how to write photographic criticism.
