“I Hate Photographers: The Photographer as Villain”
"Odio a los fotografos: el fotografo como villano"
Résumé
It is possible to see now that the attitude of Sontag and Barthes was not original but part of a tradition that included Paul Valéry, Charles Baudelaire, Alphonse de Lamartine, Thomas Hardy, E.W. Hornung, Henri Céard and Cornelia Pratt. They had been concerned with the camera rather than the operator, with the possibilities of the camera as a dehumanizing instrument, encouraging voyeurism, detachment, mechanisation, inhumanity. To conclude: it is the camera’s influence on the operator, the camera’s domination of the operator, that has to a large extent determined the way the photographer has been portrayed in the literary imagination. When Henri Cartier-Bresson said that his Leica was “the extension of his eye”, it came after a hundred years of writers saying that photographers were the extension of their cameras, a little like Sweeney Todd holding his cut-throat razor at arm’s length towards the moon and howling: “Now my arm is complete!”