Why Most Landscapes Suck

Every art form has its unique strengths. A gifted oil painter can show us our wordless unconscious. We can climb the crystalline ladder of a Bach cello sonata to a place of eternal peace, light, and harmony. We can live, love, suffer, and die with Raskolnikov and Othello; such is the power of the arts of words. The power of photography is to show us what is underneath the skin of the world: to discover that which is hidden in plain sight. It is the human-scale art form.

Mother and daughter. Beirut , 2002.

Photography is uniquely connected to the world. The distinction between the image and the object is blurred in photography more than in any other art, perhaps with the exception of its close cousin, cinema. It is difficult to disentangle the emotional power of the photograph and its subject. However, the distinction between a great photograph and a mediocre one is that a mediocre one diminishes its subject, while a great one moves us more than a casual encounter with the thing it depicts. Herein lies the power of works like Andres Serrano's Nomads or Mark Maher's American Polaroids.