Documentary as style
p16. Documentary? .... The term should be documentary style. An example of a literal document would be a police photograph of a murder scene. You see a document has a use, whereas art is really useless. Therfore art is never a document, though it certainly can adopt that style (Walker Evans).

Landscape:
p18 it seemed... that no real models existed for treating the built environment as a subject in and of itself. ...available precedents portrayed untrammeled wilderness, emphasized human despoliation, or aspired to formal abstraction... The built environment as depicted by Paul Caponigro, a leading landscape photographer of the day, was more likely to be Stonehenge than suburbia.


p19. Deal: he began to step back and show more space around the buildings… Sought out "more ordinary, contemporary structures".


p21. In the 1970s, just as the representatives of new cultural landscape studies questioned their professors' nostalgic idealization of the American small town and instead insisted on examining the inner cities and suburbs of their own day, photographers likewise went to these decidedly unpicturesque places for new kinds of surveys.


p22 When NT photographers made pictures of ordinary houses, there was no ready pictorial formula for portraying their ordinariness.

Attention/Looking:
p21 Investment of attention, if not emotion - in the everyday was a critical outlet for those who had lost faith in the grand plan but who still believed that individuals bore responsibility for social equity and environmental sustainability.

p31. For Schott, the viewe camera satisfied an aspiration to make pictures that were both anti-expressive and about looking

Reaction to Modernism
p16. Rethinking the meaning of documentary.... William Stott’s book: ... along with his dismantling of the assumption that certain subject matter (hardship and inequity) dictated consistent responses (sympathy and activism) opened up new critical possibilities for a genre previously considered unambiguous in its communicative intent.



p17. More over, detachment threatened to undermine generations of effort to establish photography's expressive capacity, a modernist tenant promoted by Stieglitz, Adams, Minor White... Robert Frank

p17
- Deal: (reponding to Ansel Adams) When I actually went to Yosemite, it was like seeing everything in quotation marks
- Nixon: "Ansel Adams, Minor White seemed sappy" infused with sentiment.
- Baltz: criticized dramatic high-contrast printing style

They (modernist) seemed overdetermined, overblown and embarrassingly self-conscious.


p19. Staunch modernist in particular found it difficult to relinquish notions of transcendence and subjectivity and easy to focus on issues of design and technique. Jenkins and Deal hoped to question these dominant criteria

Distance/Detachment/Ambiguity

p17. By adopting a detached stance - by "taking great pains to prevent the slightest trace of judgement or opinion from entering their work" ... photographers can foster ambiguity around the issue of attachment: the pictures’s attachment to the world, the maker’s attachment to a particular subject, and the viewer’s attachment to the transparency of both these relationships.



p30 Deal@New Mexico: Deal had o interest in condemning the process or results of aggressive development... he soon realized he would have to devise a way of photographing the new subject matter to avoid satirizing it.. "I was up on a hill and looked down and could see the houses in the context of the landscape rather than just singling out the details of the architecture. I could get more distance and there was a feeling of greater objectivity in doing that"

p36. Yet the fact that so many artists of the time cultivated a detached stance suggests its expressive power, or (more cynically) a lack of viable alternatives.

Detail
p42 on the other hand, the system excluded "personal intrusion whether it be formal or judgmental." while on the other it included detail "from edge to edge so [the frame] is dense with information"

p42 For Deal, this lensbased vision was totally non-hierarchical: within each frame, all details have equal value: no one viewpoint is better than another he could have obtained by stepping to the right or left: and finally no single image in the series offers more or less than its counterparts

Seriality:
p28. Ruscha’s seriality "The whole notion of series allows you to see that a fairly coherent formal position was being worked out despite his disclaimers. He might say anyone could take the pictures - but Ansel Adams couldn’t. The series is what gives the individual photograph its interest, although parking lots for example are interesting in themselves because there is variation. Tiny details within them become very interesting."