Born 1946, — British
The Pleasures of Good Photographs is an intellectual and aesthetic excursion led by Gerry Badger, one of the field's eminent critics and popular writers and the author of more than a dozen books including both volumes of The Photobook: A History. In this new volume of essays, Badger offers insight into some of his favorite images, artists and themes, drawing upon nearly three decades of experience writing and thinking about photography. With deep discernment and a readable blend of scholarly finesse and wit, Badger elucidates works by dozens of photographers, from Dorothea Lange and Eugène Atget to Martin Parr, Luc Delahaye, Susan Lipper and Paul Graham. Among the broader topics discussed are the photobook, where Badger believes photography sings its loudest and most complex song, and Photoshop's role in art-making. An interlude at the heart of the book pairs the author's evocative meditations with nearly a dozen particular images. Alongside some of Badger's classics, The Pleasures of Good Photographs showcases primarily new essays, making it an important addition to the canon of photographic writing.
This was a book I found myself constantly digging into on my MFA. Gerry's writing is so easy to read yet he is so provocative in his thinking.
If looking at photographs is a pleasurable activity, it is pleasurable in a complex, transformative, frequently unsettling sense. It is not pleasure unalloyed, for no profound pleasure is pure…Like many truly enriching pleasures…photography has its dark, troubling, even dangerous aspects. Gerry Badger
The battle between the formalist and the contextualist
The master of writing was John Szarkowski, who probably learnt from Walker Evans, who may have learnt from Lincoln Kirstein.
All photographs are memento mori – Susan Sontag.
If you photograph dwarves you don’t get majesty and beauty, you get dwarves. – Sontag
‘The pleasures of good photographs are the pleasures of good photographs, whatever the particulars of their makeup.’ – Lee Friedlander
Sontag questioned photography as an art and the photographer as an auteur.
Contextualists are concerned with subject, more than subject matter. Form vs content?
Photographs provide a memory trace. – John Stathatos.
‘The first great quality of photography, therefore, is a quality I would term thereness.’ – Walker Evans.
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