Gerald Bivens

The urge to create, the urge to photograph, comes in part from the deep desire to live with more integrity; to live more in peace with the world, and possibly to help others do the same...¹

The depth of the automatism of photography is to be read not alone in its mechanical production of an image of reality, but in its mechanical defeat of our presence to that reality. The audience in a theater can be defined as those to whom the actors are present while they are not present to the actors. But movies allow the audience to be mechanically absent. The fact that I am invisible and inaudible to the actors, and fixed in position, no longer needs accounting for; it is not part of a convention I have to comply with; the proceedings do not have to make good the fact that I do nothing in the face of tragedy, or that I laugh at the follies of others. In viewing a movie my helplessness is mechanically assured: I am present not at something happening, which I must confirm, but at something that has happened, which I absorb (like a memory). In this, movies resemble novels, a fact mirrored in the sound of narration itself, whose tense is the past.²

There was a time when one looked over one’s shoulder with an ironical smile at the photographer and when photography as a profession seemed almost invariably a target for ridicule. That time is now over. A whole number of people of cultivated taste, technical ability and well-developed formal talent have made photography into a matter of serious artistic concern.

The question of whether photography can be regarded as art or not has given rise to much verbal and written discussion. However, it seems pointless to me to attempt to determine the question either way. After all, one can prove everything: that it is art and that it is not, that it assumes an intermediate position, that one must extend the concept of art to take account of photography, and so on. Basically that is a question which, for reasons of organization, might interest the editor of an encyclopedia of conversation, but it has nothing to do with the real issues. Therefore we shall refrain from any attempt at classification.

But photography exists and has done so for nearly a hundred years now. It has acquired an immense significance for modern man, many thousands of people live from it and through it, it exerts an immense influence on wide sections of the population by means of film, it has given rise to the illustrated press, it provides true-to-life illustrations in most works of a scientific nature, in short, modern life is no longer thinkable without photography.³