Normally, I try not to reblog anything, but I wanted to make an exception for a recent
piece by David Campany. The short essay appears on
Still Searching, the
Fotomuseum Winterthur's excellent blog. Campany is currently their visiting blogger. The whole post is great, but I was particularly struck with the end.
The discourse of photography has a habit of seeing its own present
problems as unique, and its own moment as the most intellectually
nuanced and radical. This failing leads it to underestimate continually
the sophistication of its past, and to see itself as entirely separate
from it. I am reminded of a suggestive and elegant reply Umberto Eco
once made to the question about the merits of study:
"We often have to explain to young people why study is useful. It’s
pointless telling them that it’s for the sake of knowledge, if they
don’t care about knowledge. Nor is there any point in telling them that
an educated person gets through life better than an ignoramus, because
they can always point to some genius who, from their standpoint, leads a
wretched life. And so the only answer is that the exercise of knowledge
creates relationships, continuity and emotional attachments. It
introduces us to parents other than our biological ones. It allows us to
live longer, because we don’t just remember our own life but also those
of others. It creates an unbroken thread that runs from our adolescence
(and sometimes from infancy) to the present day. And all this is very
beautiful."
Umberto Eco, “It’s not what you know …” The Guardian, April 3, 2004
Read the entire piece
here, as well as Campany's other recent entries.
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