Excerpt from ”Tod Papageorge on Robert Adams - The Missing Criticism- What We Bought ” By Tod Papageorge
Photography is of course an analytic, not a synthesizing, medium: photographs are
commonly produced all-at-once, as light strikes a piece of film. This is unlike the other visual arts, where paintings and related kinds of pictures (including the most rapidly sketched drawing), are built through a process of accretion, stroke by stroke. Writers, too, even the most fluent, parallel these synthesizing procedures as they shape their texts one draft after another, but their practice at least suggests that of photographers, since it involves, in part, an editing process applied to words — and, by extension, to the things that words signify. As W.H. Auden put it, “it is both the glory and the shame of poetry that its medium is not its private property, that a poet cannot invent his words,” an observation also true when applied to photography and the photographer’s inability to invent his “worlds.”
But where a poet combines, over time (be it minutes or years), the words of a shared
language to make a poem, a photographer combines, instantaneously, a jumble of things out- there (which often share little more than their adjacency) to make a picture. Individual photographs, then, are less like poems than unique ideograms, or picture-complexes, that freeze the moment when the objects, air, and dimension framed in a viewfinder are incorporated and fixed together in an unalterable mix by being exposed on film.
