2. 外语
  3. Picture-taking is a technique both for annexing the objective world and for expressing the singular self. Photographs depict obj

Picture-taking is a technique both for annexing the objective world and for expressing the singular self. Photographs depict obj

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问题     Picture-taking is a technique both for annexing the objective world and for expressing the singular self. Photographs depict objective realities that already exist, though only the camera can disclose them. And they depict an individual photographer’s temperament, discovering itself through the camera’s cropping of reality. That is, photography has two antithetical ideals: in the first, photography is about the world and the photographer is a mere observer who counts for little; but in the second, photography is the instrument of intrepid, questing subjectivity and the photographer is all.
    These conflicting ideals arise from a fundamental uneasiness on the part of both photographers and viewers of photographs toward the aggressive component in "taking" a picture. Accordingly, the ideal of a photographer as an observer is attractive because it implicitly denies that picture-taking is an aggressive act. The issue, of course, is not so clear-cut. What photographers do cannot be characterized as simply predatory or as simply, and essentially, benevolent. As a consequence, one ideal of picture-taking or the other is always being rediscovered and championed.
    An important result of the coexistence of these two ideals is a recurrent ambivalence toward photography’s means. Whatever the claims that photography might make to be a form of personal expression on a par with painting, its originality is inextricably linked to the powers of a machine. The steady growth of these powers has made possible the extraordinary informativeness and imaginative formal beauty of many photographs, like Harold Edgerton’s high-speed photographs of a bullet hitting its target or of the swirls and eddies of a tennis stroke. But as cameras become more sophisticated, more automated, some photographers are tempted to disarm themselves or to suggest that they are not really armed, preferring to submit themselves to the limits imposed by premodern camera technology because a cruder, less high-powered machine is thought to give more interesting or emotive results, to leave more room for creative accident. For example, it has been virtually a point of honor for many photographers, including Walker Evans and Cartier-Bresson, to refuse to use modem equipment. These photographers have come to doubt the value of the camera as an instrument of "fast seeing." Cartier-Bresson, in fact, claims that the modem camera may see too fast.
    This ambivalence toward photographic means determines trends in taste. The cult of the future(of faster and faster seeing)alternates over time with the wish to return to a purer past — when images had a handmade quality. This nostalgia for some pristine state of the photographic enterprise is currently widespread and underlies the present-day enthusiasm for daguerreotypes and the wok of forgotten nineteenth-century provincial photographers. Photographers and viewers of photographs, it seems, need periodically to resist their own knowingness.
The author is primarily concerned with______.
选项 A、establishing new technical standards for contemporary photography
B、analyzing the influence of photographic ideals on picture-taking
C、tracing the development of camera technology in the twentieth century
D、describing how photographers’ individual temperaments are reflected in their work
答案B
解析 本题为主旨题。通读全文可知，这篇文章主要关于拍照的两种不同的观点。第一段阐述了这两种观点；第二段讲述了为何会产生这两种不同的观点；第三段讲述了这两种观点对人们的影响；以及这两种观点何者占上风的原因。由此可知，作者的主要意图是分析这两种观点对人们产生的影响。因此，B项正确。
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