What Photography Is by James Elkins

I enjoyed this book so much more after he stopped rambling about Camera Lucida and just started writing his thoughts.

Some Quotes:

It is important not to forget the billion of photographs that aren't saved or printed. They are the population of photography, just as a count of living things shows bacteria are incomprehensibly more numerous than the kind of life we end up noticing. -p.95

I selected them, and brought they into this book, they are "found photography": they aren't quite art, but they are also no longer what they once were. -p.101

I see these people's lives as if they are covered with an old veil: they feel dank. Nostalgia self is stale, and this is second-hand nostalgia. A breath of someone else's life, breathed out into my mouth. -p.107

That searching for memories in photographs was therefore a flash solace, in which I had fooled myself into thinking that my own memories, which are naturally growing fainter and more inaccurate with each passing day, are not ruined and ultimately erased by the force of the particular faces captured in photographs, but that somehow, paradoxically, those memories could actually be strengthened by reviewing those same images. But photographs of people I know and love are actually a poison to memory, because they remain strong while my memories weaken. The more often I look at a photograph of someone I loved who is no longer alive, the more my own faltering memory tries to accommodate itself to the unchanging images, accurate by distorting itself, harming itself, conforming to what they photograph continues to present, until my memory is nothing but a tattered shadow clinging to the photograph. - p. 114-115