To confront or criticize is a form of exercising leadership or power. The exercise of power is nothing more and nothing less than an attempt to influence the course of events, human or otherwise, by one’s actions in a consciously or unconsciously predetermined manner. When we confront or criticize someone it is because we want to change the course of the person’s life. It is obvious that there are many other, often superior, ways to influence the course of events than by confrontation or criticism: by example, suggestion, parable, reward and punishment, questioning, prohibition or permission, creation of experiences, organizing with others, and so on. Volumes can be written about the art of exercising power. For our purposes, however, suffice it to say that loving individuals must concern themselves with this art, for if one desires to nurture another’s spiritual growth, then one must concern oneself with the most effective way to accomplish this in any given instance. Loving parents, for example, must first examine themselves and their values stringently before determining accurately that they know what is best for their child. Then, having made this determination, they also have to give greater thought to the child’s character and capacities before deciding whether the child would be more likely to respond favorably to confrontation than to praise or increased attention or storytelling or some other form of influence. To confront someone with something he or she cannot handle will at best be a waste of time, and likely will have a deleterious effect. If we want to be heard we must speak in a language the listener can understand and on a level at which the listener is capable of operating. If we are to love we must extend ourselves to adjust our communication to the capacities of our beloved.

It is clear that exercising power with love requires a great deal of work, but what is this about the risk involved? The problem is that the more loving one is, the more humble one is; yet the more humble one is, the more one is awed by the potential for arrogance in exercising power. Who am I to influence the course of human events? By what authority am I entitled to decide what is best for my child, spouse, my country or the human race? Who gives me the right to dare to believe in my own understanding and then to presume to exert my will upon the world? Who am I to play God? That is the risk. For whenever we exercise power we are attempting to influence the course of the world, of humanity, and we are thereby playing God. Most parents, teachers, leaders - most of us who exercise power - have no cognizance of this. In the arrogance of exercising power without the total self-awareness demanded by love, we are blissfully but destructively ignorant of the fact that we are playing God. But those who truly love, and therefore work for the wisdom that love requires, know that to act is to play God. Yet they also know that there is no alternative except inaction and impotence. Love compels us to play God with full consciousness of the enormity of the fact that that is just what we are doing. With this consciousness the loving person assumes the responsibility of attempting to be God and not to carelessly play God, to fulfill God’s will without mistake. We arrive, then, at yet another paradox: only out of the humility of love can humans dare to be God.

- Morgan Scott Peck

Excerpt from his book The Road Less Traveled, 1978

Suggested by Mark Uzmann

Artists feared it would replace painting; it did in fact replace the itinerant portrait painter. “From this day painting is dead,” declared the painter Paul Delaroche in 1839 - painting’s highest aspiration being the faithful reproduction of the world. Well, painting still has a lot of life in it. But it is hard to comprehend how profoundly photography has affected both art and vision. We look at art - indeed, at the visible world - differently because we can hold its simulacrum in our hands.

When photography was born, mechanical efficiency was much on everybody’s mind. A number of observers though photographs would be great time savers for artists: make more studies than they could ever make, catch details they’d missed. We know now that artists relied heavily on photographs, but kept mum about it. Too embarrassing. The hand and eye were supposed to be enough; mechanical intervention was suspect. Yet Renoir, and later Picasso, said boldly that photography had freed painting for other tasks. If this machine could bring back nature as it was (only a few doubted that it really did that), maybe art didn’t have to bother. Photography, however, wanted everything, its own natural province and any other it could attain. Almost as soon as it became clear that art could do without the everyday world altogether, photography tried to follow suit. The camera had already been flirting with abstraction for some time when, in 1917, Alvin Langdon Coburn took his first non-objective photographs.

Photography’s relation to the other arts has always been equivocal. It was clear right away that the new medium would broaden general knowledge of art. In the nineteenth century, a thoughtful man like M. A. Root could assume that a wide dissemination of images would increase happiness and improve taste. In our own day we are less certain about happiness and taste; the glut of images threatens to reduce nearly everything to the same measurable staleness. What we appreciate and how we see have doubtless changed, for better or worse, because of photographs. William Ivins, an expert on prints, pointed out how limiting was the syntax of the graphic arts, which had been the only transmitters of painting and sculpture, and how photography made available certain styles, certain eras that could not be perceived clearly before.

Photography and art were always tangled, are tangled still. D. O. Hill doctored his photographs to make them more painterly. Illustrators were soon forced to copy photographs. The pictorialists fiddled with gum prints till they looked like chalk drawings, charcoals, anything but photographs. Today painters from Rauschenberg to Warhol appropriate photographs, which they use as freely as palette knives. The photo realist painters make a virtue of looking merely photographic. The holograph approaches sculpture.

Is photography among the fine arts? Once that was a burning question; it smolders in some spots even now. In 1857, Lady Eastlake wrote that what photography does best is “beneath the doing of a real artist at all.” Two years later Baudelaire stormed against the heartless bourgeois ‘facticity’ of the camera. Critics said photography was art if the photographer’s hand tinkered heavily with the print in the darkroom. Illustrators cried shame, humbug, and mechanical besides. Then Stieglitz took to the battlements to proclaim that a true artist could produce art no matter what the medium. In a typical fencing posture, George Bernard Shaw announced that photography was not only an art but a better one than painting. Eventually, the proponents of straight photography decided that photographs were art only if they were pure: no laying on of hands, no tinkering.

All that is clear is that the question is unclear. Probably it doesn’t matter. The way the issue is usually put, it excludes news, fashion, advertising photographs, and of course snapshots.  In the 1970s, the surging popularity (and marketability) of photography brought all these maverick forms into the fold, at least temporarily.  These forms - and passport photographs, police photographs, x-ray, microscopic, and telescopic photographs, not to mention film and television - influence the way we dress, eat, vote, think, live, and even die. We have no appropriate definition for photography yet. Possibly it is so complex we never will. Lady Eastlake offered a good starting point when she spoke of a “new form of communication between man and man = neither letter, message, nor picture, which now happily fills up the space between them.”

- Vicki Goldberg

Excerpt from the introduction to Photography In Print, 1981