Misunderstandings (A Theory of Photography) (1967-1970)

a work by Mel Bochner

Originally published by Multiples Inc. New York as part of "Artists and Photographs" (1970). The project consists of ten photo-offset prints on note cards (5x8 in each)

(handwritten)
(apparently three of these may not be not true quotes, but he may have made them up)

"I would like to see photography make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable" - Marcel Duchamp

"I want to reproduce the objects as they are or as they would be even if I did not exist" - Taine

"Photography cannot record abstract ideas" - Encyclopedia Britannica

"Let us remember too, that we don't have to translate such pictures into realistic ones in order to 'understand' them, any more than we need to translate photographs into colored pictures, although black-and-white men or plans in reality would strike us as unspeakable strange and frightful. Suppose we were to say at this point: 'something is a picture only in a picture language'" - Ludwig Wittenstein

"The true function of revolutionary art is the crystallization of phenomena into organized forms" - Mao Tse-Tung

"In my opinion, you cannot say you have thoroughly seen anything until you have a photograph of it" - Emile Zola

"Photography is the product of complete alienation" - Marcel Proust

"The photography keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping of time" - Maurice Merleau-Ponty

"Photographs provide for a kind of perception that is mediated instead of direct....what might be called 'Perception at Second Hand'" - James J. Gibson