Bruce Jackson is SUNY Distinguished Professor and James Agee Professor of American Culture at University at Buffalo. Some of his books are Places: Things heard, things seen (BlazeVox, 2019) Inside the Wire: Photographs from Texas and Arkansas Prisons (Texas, 2013), Being There: Bruce Jackson Photographs 1962-2012 (Burchfield Penney Art Center, 2013).

Thoughts On Photography Table of Contents

Go to Thread #1

Against Photography: What Sontag Actually Wrote

On Photography ignores almost entirely the materiality of the craft. Making photographs isn’t theoretical, and neither are photographic prints. The first is a behavior in the real world; the second a fact of it.

Walker Evans’s Polaroids

“People ask me what camera I
use.  Its not the camera … its the eye and the brain”

 Go to thread #2

“All my books”: Paul Strand’s Arc

Paul Strand, the greatest of the modernist photographers, was born in New York City in 1890.  Strand, Alfred Steiglitz and Edward Weston were the three photographers most responsible for getting photography accepted as an art form in the United States.

Go to third thread

Intermezzo:
Notes on words and process

“I want to take a break in this series looking at the work of other people to clarify my use of certain terms and say a few things about my sense of the photographic process.

Go to 4th thread

December 2023

Walker Evans: Public Photographs 1935-37

Walker Evans was perhaps the most influential American photographer of the Twentieth century. The work of Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, David Plowden and Diane Arbus is inconceivable without his photographs and vision.

Go to the fifth thread