Photographing Generic Love Goddesses
… Photographer’s for the most part are creatures of their environment, and it would be unreasonable to criticize them for having so often failed, in recent decades, to photograph what we would have wished, and for having instead made endless numbers of virtually indistinguishable photographs of generic love goddesses, or of fringe royalty holding wine glasses, or of politicians shaking hands, or of the displaced young, attempting to look simultaneously uninvolved and avant. There is no end of such stuff, but good photographs of commercial fishing (or wheat farming, logging, mining, teaching, keeping house, keeping books, etc.) are distressingly rare. This is partly because photographs of such subjects are more difficult to make, but it is also true that there has been little economic incentive to photograph anything except those subjects that are potentially interesting to everyone. Such subjects tend to produce photographs that are not very interesting to anyone …
Introduction To A Maritime Album, by John Szarkowski & Richard Benson
