Comment 84766

By Shawn Selway (anonymous) | Posted January 07, 2013 at 00:46:00 in reply to Comment 84696

Bare images are also notoriously ambiguous. You really need to know eg on which side of the barbed wire the people in the photograph are standing, the inside or the outside.

But I agree that it is misleading to call this piece a photo-essay, although not for your reason. Photo essays usually result from a journalistic assignment, while Fenton does both journalism and its reverse at the same time - the reverse being something, well, French, that gets going around 1780 with Rousseau's final effort, Reveries of a Solitary Walker.

Here's a random bit from a page of Nadja (Andre Breton 1928, with 44 images, many of them street scenes in Paris.)

"...almost forbidden world of sudden parallels, petrifying coincidences, and reflexes peculiar to each individual, of harmonies struck as though on the piano...I am concerned with facts of quite unverifiable intrinsic value, but which, by their absolutely unexpected, violently fortuitous character, and the kind of associations of suspect ideas they provoke...I am concerned, I say, with facts which may belong to the order of pure observation, but which on each occasion present all the appearances of a signal, without our being able to say precisely which signal, and of what; facts which when I am alone permit me to enjoy unlikely complicities, which convince me of my error in occasionally presuming I stand at the helm alone... "

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