| "[Photography]
makes its images by means anybody and everybody uses for the banal purposes,
just as poetry makes its structures, its indivisibilities of music and
meaning, out of the same language used for utilitarian purposes, for idle
chatter, or for uninspired lying. Because of this resemblance in the conditions
of the two arts—because the camera, like language, is put to constant
nonartistic use, quotidian use by nonspecialists, as the painter’s materials
(though often misused) are not—a poet finds, I think, a kind of simulation
and confirmation in experiencing the work of photographic artists that
is more specific, closer to his poetic activity, than the pleasure and
love he feels in looking at paintings." |