Quicker
Like everyone else in the well-branded world, The New York Times has been selling off its peripheral assets peripherally, without reducing the value of core possessions. Retaining copyrights, it can afford to offer beautifully framed, matted, and suitably expensive prints of photographs from its archives without actually losing anything - that's the miracle of modern marketing, and I for one intend to wait and see what the consequences turn out to be (that is, I'm not going to predict them in dire terms.) Forty years ago, only weirdos wanted to "own" photographs that had appeared in the newspaper. (Young 'uns, I kid you not.) Ten years earlier, however, The New Yorker discovered a robust market for its cartoon collections, and there's nothing about the Christmas cartoon plates, via Restoration Hardware, that a very good friend gave me this evening, that is going to get the high and mighty in me all roared up. Adorno would have had a fit. Let him.
But I took exception, going through old newspapers for clippings this evening, to the following header, launched beneath the arresting aerial photograph from which the detail above has been taken. The Times, I think, ought not be shouting to the world that "Photography speaks louder than words." It's a dreadful put-down of its own principal product, which is still very much the Grey Lady's pile-up of black words on white sheets. We all know what "louder" is supposed to mean in this sentence: "better." And photographs do not speak "better" than words.
They speak faster. That's the problem. They speak much too much faster. And here we have to think a little about the history of reading. Until photography came along, reading was a straightforward perversion of vision. That was its power, and that was its liability. When you read, you don't see with your eyes. You're not (I hope) looking at "California" as an interesting arrangement of shapes. "California" is a key that your imagination turns into special suites that only you could design. Even if you were to say, "I like this Gill Sans typeface" (do I wish, or what), you would not tumble into the Underground. You would go to California, if only in your mind. Words, in a word, take you to places that you can't, in fact, see. No wonder that reading is so suspect. And let readers never forget that there are almost as many people out there who don't like to read: their imaginations are dangerously rusty.
When photographs began to appear in the newspapers, the logic of reading was altered. Now one could see, and then not see. But what one saw in the newspapers always counted for more. Editors learned this right away. They could "play" a photograph that made its subject look - look like whatever the editors wanted it to. Social scientists will be studying images of Messrs Clinton and Bush (I hope) for years, in order to unearth the tendentious use to which odd shots were been used to ridicule their subjects.
The phrase that the Times has puffed up is, of course, "actions speak louder than words." Photographs are not actions in this sense. They are shortcuts. Look at the Times of my grandfather's day, and you will see hardly any photographs at all. Reading was still the deal in those days. You let the words guide your imagination, even if, like the Judge, you would have killed anybody who accused you of having an imagination. I don't propose a return to simpler times. Photographs are amazingly effective amplifiers. But they never announce their own meaning. Their meaning still has to be got from paragraphs of, one hopes, well-written prose. Photographs will never supply that meaning. And in the absence of well-written prose, the meaning will come from demagogues.
