Here's an interesting quote from Helen Vendler's "Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology" that I think is relevant to this discussion. I think you could fairly substitute "photograph" for "poem" and "photographer" for "poet":
"Life itself is a continuation of successive moments in one stream. Art interrupts the stream and constructs one segment or level of the stream for processing. In a single act, it describes, analyzes, and confers form on that segment. The form it confers by its ways of organizing the poem makes visible the contour of that life-moment as the poet perceives it. The poet discovers the emotional import of that life-moment by subjecting it to analysis; the analysis then determines how the moment is described, and the invented organizational form that replicates it�
Just as an archaeologist studies ruins, while the rest of us simply walk through Pompeii not understanding much of what we see, a student of poetry becomes more than simply a reader.
You become more like a conductor who studies the musical score before conducting the piece in performance...Through we almost always respond first to the quickly sensed "message" of a poem, the reason for our response (even if we do not at first know this) is the arrangement of the message (on many intersecting planes) into a striking and moving form. To give a poem its due as a work of art, we need to be able to see it as an arranged message."
Bored by Photography
in The History & Philosophy of Photography
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Here's an interesting quote from Helen Vendler's "Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology" that I think is relevant to this discussion. I think you could fairly substitute "photograph" for "poem" and "photographer" for "poet":
"Life itself is a continuation of successive moments in one stream. Art interrupts the stream and constructs one segment or level of the stream for processing. In a single act, it describes, analyzes, and confers form on that segment. The form it confers by its ways of organizing the poem makes visible the contour of that life-moment as the poet perceives it. The poet discovers the emotional import of that life-moment by subjecting it to analysis; the analysis then determines how the moment is described, and the invented organizational form that replicates it�
Just as an archaeologist studies ruins, while the rest of us simply walk through Pompeii not understanding much of what we see, a student of poetry becomes more than simply a reader.
You become more like a conductor who studies the musical score before conducting the piece in performance...Through we almost always respond first to the quickly sensed "message" of a poem, the reason for our response (even if we do not at first know this) is the arrangement of the message (on many intersecting planes) into a striking and moving form. To give a poem its due as a work of art, we need to be able to see it as an arranged message."