Why Photographs?

Timely and essential, Why Photographs? is meant for anyone interested in looking at a photograph. According to Neil Selkirk’s book, almost since the beginning, most of us have had it all wrong. If art is the pursuit of human self-knowledge, then photography, from its invention, should have been recognized as a direct route to enlightenment. Beginning with the fact that painters start with a blank canvas and photographers start with a full one, the two media have never had anything meaningful in common.

The photograph’s delight in riveting detail, spontaneity, evident credibility, and its embrace of chance, which was immediately recognized by its inventors, was promptly pounced on and denounced as unartistic by the art establishment which correctly believed that photography represented an existential threat. That establishment’s ultimately unsuccessful attempts over the next one hundred and fifty years to smother and dismiss the legitimacy of the new medium did however succeed in muddying the simple process of looking.

Why Photographs? is a historically based defense of straight photography, offered at a moment when the photograph as a credible document is facing obsolescence. Since the earliest days, independent minds, a number of whom are contributors to this book, have seen through the establishment’s smoke screen to the pictures themselves: the essays, poems, and one-liners gathered here are nothing less than a celebration of the rewards of simply looking. Why Photographs? illuminates those long-camouflaged secrets which are in fact photography’s unique gift to us all.

Neil Selkirk is a British-born photographer whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Interview, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Vogue and the premier issues of Wired, Paper, Colors, Spy, and other publications. He is the only person authorized to make posthumous prints of the photographs of Diane Arbus. Selkirk’s books include See No Evil, Lobbyists, and Certain Women, as well the ongoing photographic projects, Security Matters, and Out of Darkness. Selkirk lives and works in New York City and the Hudson Valley.