5 ideas
Malcolm sets photography's development beside painting's turn away from representation, but she does not present the two as a tidy exchange of roles. In her account, photography's own modernism came from accepting the camera's peculiar effects, the distortions and accidents visible in snapshots, rather than from taking over the ground painting had left.
Serious photographers deliberately took on the marks of amateur snapshots: tilted horizons, bad cropping, blur, flash glare, and the cheap plastic Diana toy camera. What had been failure became a sign of authenticity and modernity. Once equipment quality (Diana versus Nikon) stopped separating art from non-art, the photographer's intention and context had to do that work instead.
Curators, exhibitions and critics bring into the museum photographs made for documentation, commerce or family memory, and Malcolm watches that reclassification happen. She also holds that anonymous photographs can already equal acknowledged masterpieces aesthetically, so admission names and frames their value without fully explaining it.
In Mexico and California during the 1920s and 1930s, Edward Weston made extremely sharp close-ups of peppers, shells, and nudes, and presented them as revealing 'the thing itself.' His Daybooks show a restless, self-dramatizing man who agonized over these still lifes and whose photographs often read as sculpture or bodies more than vegetables. The case tests the claim that straight photography simply records what is in front of the lens.
The solemn language that came with photography's move into museums, about vision, truth, and the photographer's eye, tends to replace close looking with reverence. Exact description of a particular print often shows it to be more ordinary, or stranger, than its promoters claim. Humor about the pieties therefore works as a critical method, not just a matter of tone.