Chiaroscuro

Photography is receiving a greater public audience at the moment. What are your thoughts on this and how do you think the increasing public awareness should develop?
Photography is a visual language and it has been with us for quite awhile now. People are used to using images and they are beginning to understand - probably since Stieglitz - the quality of the print as an art expression in itself. It's also suffering the pangs of inflation - collecting for value - the thing that painting went through a century ago. Obviously the more people see good photographs the better photographs will be made, but it's a strange thing that as techniques develop the materials, the lenses, the cameras, get more accurate and perfect, the quality of perception and execution goes down, because they count on the machine to do it. It goes back to Eastman, "You press the button and we do the rest." Now people buy cameras and they think they are buying creativity. They go to college and take a course in poetry and they become poets now. They may have a wonderful memory and quote all of Paradise Lost, but it doesn't mean that they are poets.
Ansel Adams

Dialogue with Photography, Paul Hill & Thomas Cooper

PS: The book is over know. I always feel a little bit empty when a book I like a lot ends.