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Bakó, Krisztián Zsolt Image and Meaning:

An Interpretation of Barna Burger’s Photo Album New York

© Krisztián Zsolt Bakó, ELTE BTK: seas3.elte.hu/angolpark

Warning: If you would like to use this text, you have to give proper references. Quoting from this text without mentioning its origin is considered plagiarism and will be severely punished.

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Bakó Krisztián Zsolt

Image and Meaning: An Interpretation of Barna Burger’s Photo Album New York

Photodream It was Sunday at dawn. He has been driving for seven hours. Like many others he arrived in the unknown

metropolis in a rented car. He glimpsed the city at dawn from New Jersey. Everything was orange, as the rising sun lit the

skyscrapers, just like in the movies. He didn’t know then that an everlasting love can begin in such a dauby way.

Of course, he stopped the car there on the overpass. People in other vehicles gave him strange looks. But he got out and took a photograph of what he saw.

He had been waiting for a long time to see this city with his own eyes. He felt he loved it.1

Introduction

One of the menaces of modern times is that the world as we have perceived it for centuries

might vanish without a trace. Reality is a term of plastic qualities, a term which defies

definition—so far, however, its very flexibility has also saved it from total disintegration.

In the big city reality gets reinterpreted and redefined. Without any doubt, it has been

an intriguing challenge for artists in general to excavate the abundant reservoir of images

offered by the urban environment. Painters, poets, authors, musicians and philosophers have

hated and loved the city, and have put on display all that is so characteristic of it: Plato’s

Republic (ca. 360 BC), Saint Augustine’s City of God (413-26), and the architect Le

Corbusier’s Radiant City (1930-35) are just a few of the examples that could be mentioned

here. In their views, cities are built on solid foundations of human grandness, worthy hopes

for a better future, and man’s sheer inventiveness to contrive plans for an environment in its

own right. For them the city of mankind manifests itself as a grand utopian vision, “an

imaginary land where everything is supposed to be perfect”.2 In other words, the city is the

ideal setting where the divine and the mundane can reside side by side in perfect harmony and

understanding.

Newcomers to the city anticipate it as a world of endless opportunities, idealised and

idolised simultaneously as the ultimate haven where anything is possible, a place where 1 Burger, Barna. In New York, Barna Burger, trans. Mátyás Salamon with Peter Doherty. Budapest: STRAM-AVANT MÉDIA Ltd., 1999, p. 102. 2 Zeleny, Robert O., ed. The World Book Encyclopedia U-V. Chicago: World Book, Inc., 1992, p. 269.






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dreams come true. The presence of utopia, as probably our very first urban impression,

automatically gives birth to dystopia, since where there is dreaming there must be

disillusionment, too—one simply cannot exist without the other. Utopias and dystopias

correlate in the city: it is this precarious balance between dreaming and disillusionment that

forms our perception of urban reality.

According to Jonathan Raban, who also points out this peculiar duality in his

definitive non-fiction entitled Soft City (1974), “[t]he city has always been an embodiment of

hope and a source of festering guilt: a dream pursued, and found vain”.3 Raban suggests that

today it is our formless self-indulgence that shapes our limited perception of the world and

that we are suffering from an irredeemable delusion of grandeur. To us, constructors of cities,

it seems rather painful to accept the fact that “we have grown used to looking for Utopia only

to discover that we have created Hell”.4 Raban’s ultimate claim is that dystopia has already

taken the place of utopia and has such a great influence on our perception of modern reality

that the Augustinian utopian vision seems to have been washed away for good. While for

Saint Augustine (354-430) “[t]he city of man ought to be a harmonious reflection of the city

of God; in actuality, it is vulgar, lazy and corrupt, a place so brutish that it lacks even the

dignity of the Satanic”.5

As a potential reference to Raban’s argumentation and a reverse of the Augustinian

heritage, the nineteenth-century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

throws light on reality from a staggering angle with his bold proclamation: ‘God is dead’. He

enunciates his vision in his infamous parable of the madman:

Have you not heard of the madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!” –As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. […] The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. […] God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”6

Throughout his life Nietzsche refused the idea of a single knowable deity and engaged in a

witty act of defiance both against religion, Christianity in general, and the very foundations of

Western morality. Nietzsche persistently questioned the dichotomy of good and evil, and also 3 Raban, Jonathan. Soft City. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1975, p. 17. 4 Ibid., p. 17. 5 Raban., p. 21. 6 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974, p. 181.






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envisioned the individual as lord of his own land. What he implies is that “there is no longer a

transcendental structure, a priori synthesis or metaphysical guarantee to protect us from

ourselves and the world we have made”.7 God was dethroned long ago, and now it is us

humans who rule as false deities over our dismal lands. Consequently, if we follow the

Nietzschean argumentation the final conclusion that “[t]here exists no reality beyond

appearances” and that “behind the mask there is nothing” leaves us with the text only.8

Our text is the city itself: an imminent, closed microcosm detached from the original

divine power, a clear vertical creation craving for transcendence but never being able to reach

it. The city lies there before us and we tend to read it as a real text day by day and disregard it

as something unreal, falsely enough indeed. In fact, it is in the city that the borderline

between reality and unreality becomes a territory of its own with ups and downs, insides and

outsides, divine and mundane no longer being unambiguous qualities. And to see a confident

Augustinian utopian vision and a resigned Nietzschean demolition theory coexist in the big

city is probably one of its greatest mysteries.

Photographing the City

The urban challenge still holds on, persistently, and proves irresistible to many. There is no

denying it that encountering the big city is a lifelong collective experience, yet whatever the

response might be depends solely on the individual. Some develop a deep attachment towards

this unique secular milieu, a love of their lifetime, while others get utterly repelled by it.

Amongst other artists, photographers have also been divided by this characteristic

urban duality: some got admittedly hooked upon the subject while others never or seldom felt

the inclination to capture urban images. Great photographers like Ansel Adams or Edward

Weston, for instance, almost never took photos of the city, Robert Capa rarely touched upon

the subject either but Eugène Atget, Berenice Abbott and Henri Cartier-Bresson, among many

others, heavily exploited whatever the city had at its disposal, and they did so according to

their personal views. Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), as a further example, consciously focused

on the delightful and clinically sterile side of urban reality and “brought to the city an

idealism which bordered on the spiritual, seeking to find in New York an image of America’s

7 Chambers, Ian. Border Dialogues: Journeys in Postmodernity. London & New York: Routledge, 1990, p. 4. 8 Chambers, p. 4.






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promise as a dynamic and modern culture, aligning it with a romantic idealism in which the

city was alive with spiritual possibility”.9 As opposed to Stieglitz’s approach to an imaginary

perfect city, Lewis Hine (1874-1940) took on showing whatever was hiding behind the scenes

in a sincere manner. In fact, their different approaches are rather definitive, “[w]here Stieglitz

sought the long look, so Hine makes the street and the figure absolutely central” [fig.1&2].10

While the former is the photographer of a utopian urban vision, in many ways an unrealistic

one indeed—“a made world always hovering on the edge of meaninglessness”—the latter

tenaciously reveals reality in the city, a dystopian universe of human faces half hidden in a

bleak background.11 Between Stieglitz and his subject there is always a certain distance, Hine,

on the other hand, never minds getting down there and be part of it all.

In order to honour the heritage of great city photographers like Stieglitz and Hine but

also to put some of their views to test, I have chosen the work of a young Hungarian

photographer, Barna Burger, as my main reference. His black-and-white photo album New

York (1999) follows very much in the line of distinguished urban images by well-known

photographers but also contains pictures with surprising deviations from the so-called main

track. Burger does broaden the range of the image collections of New York in his own way, as

Peter Tufo, US ambassador to Budapest writes in his introduction to the Burger photo album:

“through the eyes of the camera, the Central European artist sees, and makes us see as well,

the irresistible, harmonious, great variety of New York”.12

For Barna Burger New York is a feeling rather than a place. Strictly speaking every

city retains its own personality, no doubt about that, and the photographer’s task is to grasp its

ever-changing mood and freeze it within the boundaries of the picture image. According to

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004), arguably one of the greatest photographers ever, taking

perfect photographs “is putting one’s head, one’s eye, and one’s heart on the same axis”.13

When the feeling of the city and that of the photographer correlate that is the moment when

the photo must be taken—snap—at ‘the decisive moment’. Whether Burger succeeds in

capturing New York’s true splendour and its grim sides as well at the decisive moment is also

a question of cardinal value hereby.

9 Clark, Graham. The Photograph. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 79. 10 Ibid., p. 83. 11 Clark, p. 80. 12 Tufo, Peter. In New York, Barna Burger, trans. Mátyás Salamon with Peter Doherty. Budapest: STRAM-AVANT MÉDIA Ltd., 1999, p. 9. 13 Cartier-Bresson, Henri. The Mind’s Eye. London & New York: Aperture, 1999, p. 16.






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In order to find satisfactory answers to such questions I will heavily rely on

comparisons with other photographers’ images, canonised ones without fail. Looking out for

differences and similarities, striking ones at times, ought to give us a good enough base for

some critical insight into Burger’s urban vision. However, I also have the more ambitious aim

of trying to shed light on the universal qualities of photography through looking at Burger’s

pictures of New York. Consequently, what interests me is whether they still retain those

indispensable elements that make great photography instantly recognisable. A further question

to be addressed is whether photography is a self-organising system with set rules and patterns,

and whether there is a universal guideline for taking and analysing photographs? And also

what is the role of words in understanding and interpreting visual images?

Strictly speaking Burger’s photos of New York are not part of the established

photographic corpus, in fact, they are virtually unknown outside the borders of Hungary. This

particular characteristic feature gives further legitimacy to the intriguing challenge whether an

uncanonised European photographer will prove able to capture the decisive moments in the

life of America’s number one metropolis. One thing is certain: Burger loves his subject, his

New York. And finally, it must be borne in mind that New York is to be looked upon as the

city analogous with all cities, a place that musters up all things urban and presents those as its

adapted own.

Space Reinterpreted —It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world.14

In his essay entitled What the Eye Does Not See the Russian critic Ossip Brik makes an

obscure comparison between the camera and the naked eye. He claims that “[t]he task of the

cinema and of the camera is not to imitate the human eye, but to see and record what the

human eye normally does not see”.15 Brik is absolutely persistent when he reminds us that

“[t]he cinema and the photo-eye can show us things from unexpected viewpoints and in

unusual configurations, and we should exploit this possibility”.16 To him whatever is observed

from an everyday viewpoint appears secondary. A good number of Barna Burger’s photos

14 Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 1972, p. 7. 15 Brik, Ossip. “What the Eye Does Not See”, in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells. New York: Routledge, 2003, p. 90. 16 Ibid., p. 90.






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nevertheless do favour the position of the human eye and exploit its possibilities to a great

extent.

The stereotypical flâneur in the big city views urban sights from an angle explicit to

the human eye. Therefore, Burger tends to take photos of New York’s huge buildings and

skyscrapers from street level, looking upwards towards the sky where America’s proud

monsters of steel and iron point. For him these well-known and much photographed buildings

carry a feeling of curiosity, and thus he likes to look at them accordingly, i.e. with a tilted

head. As a result, the camera captures its subject matter from a slant angle thus charging it

with unfamiliar possibilities. Perhaps the best example here is his image of the Flatiron

building, with the same caption [fig.3]. Undoubtedly, the Flatiron remains one of New York’s

most definitive symbols and by capturing its rangy silhouette Burger answers the challenge

after such famous photographers as Edward Steichen, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and Berenice

Abbot, who all photographed the Flatiron in 1905, 1912 and 1938 respectively. Yet the first

great image of the building originates from Alfred Stieglitz, who contributed to the New York

photographic scenario in 1903 with his black-and-white photo captioned The Flatiron [fig.4].

Stieglitz approaches his photographic subject matter with a slight touch of utopia:

besides the meticulous composition, clarity of subject, and impeccable lighting he also pays a

great deal of attention to the natural elements within the city. His Flatiron image portrays the

building surrounded by nature as if one of the first skyscrapers in New York was a secondary

visual experience.17 Consciously enough, Stieglitz “lays stress on the natural elements within

the scene: trees, snow, and the sky” whereby “[t]he urban scene, as it were, is reduced to a

minimum”.18 He sees the Flatiron as an archetypal icon of urban America, “an image of the

‘new America still in the making’” and trusts the future of his country according to placid

early twentieth-century values.19 Throughout his professional career he could not alleviate the

tension between his optimistic utopian vision and the stark realities of urban New York.

As opposed to Stieglitz’s state of mind, Barna Burger views the Flatiron building not

as a symbol of the new modernity yet to come but as a heritage of old values, a queer

reminder of the past. Whereas Stieglitz looks ahead into a hazy future through the Flatiron’s

outline, Burger looks at the same building and sees an America that was. He sees it as a

17 The Flatiron meant an everyday visual experience to Stieglitz since it was built close to his famous 291 Gallery on Fifth Avenue. 18 Clark, p. 79. 19 Ibid., p. 79.






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reminder of how it all began. Burger does not position his subject in a pale utopian

background as Stieglitz does, but rather he looks at it face to face, quite closely from street

level. The building forces the photographer to aim upwards. Tall as it might be, the size of the

Flatiron is negligible today compared to its more recent descendants of gigantic magnitude.

The outlandish presence of a historical relic attracts special attention, even if it is measured in

the scale of a relatively young country like the United States—or perhaps exactly because of

that. When Ossip Brik says that ideally the camera is not to imitate the human eye he proves

oblivious of the fact that in some cases, exactly in the big city, the desired image can only be

achieved from the level of passers-by.

In short, what Burger achieves through his Flatiron image is a reinterpretation not only

of space but also of time.

Image and/as Text —It is almost as unusual to pass a day without seeing a photograph as it is to miss seeing writing.20

Words often accompany visual images to support interpretation. Further, it is not groundless

to say that photographs by themselves are texts. Victor Burgin in his essay entitled Looking at

Photographs asserts that “photographs are texts inscribed in terms of what we may call

‘photographic discourse’” and goes further by saying that “this discourse, like any other,

engages discourse beyond itself, the ‘photographic text’, like any other, is the site of a

complex ‘intertextuality’, an overlapping series of previous texts ‘taken for granted’ at a

particular cultural and historical conjuncture”.21 It is intriguing to see that embedded in this

multilayered intertextuality, texts in general do reach back to what Burgin calls “prior texts”

and indeed these are “presupposed by photographs”.22 If we take it for granted that

photographs are texts themselves there must be some existing texts, ones that are already there

for reading, they tend to approve of. Consequently, similarities between a number of Barna

Burger’s photos and images by great, established photographers of the past are clearly visible,

20 Burgin, Victor. “Looking at Photographs”, in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells. New York: Routledge, 2003, p. 130. 21 Ibid., p. 131. 22 Ibid., p. 131.






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too. Burger’s image of the United States banner in front of a New York high-rise building

captioned Stripes and Stars is a prime example of this observation [fig.5].

In order to make an obvious comparison we need to recall one of the groundbreaking

photos by the Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank (1924- ): Parade – Hoboken, New

Jersey [fig.6]. In the centre of both images there is the American flag, controversially, in a

peripheral portrayal. Frank never allows the flag to take the bulk of his photograph, rather he

portrays it as accidentally covering the figures peeping through their windows, while Burger

positions the flag right at the bottom, thus achieving almost the same effect. As if the United

States banner, the very first emblem cherished by millions of Americans, suddenly became a

secondary subject matter, some kind of a photographic persona non grata. However, such an

intrusion hardly seems accidental at all. Frank included this particular photograph in his

intriguing volume The Americans (1959), the approach of which, to quote Graham Clarke

again, “was felt so radical that it could not find an American publisher”.23 His photos capture

the so-called “traditional American icons: the flag, the road, portraits of former presidents,

fast food, television, diners, and so on: the symbolic paraphernalia of American identity,

especially in the post-war period”, and they consciously defy these icons with calm

bitterness.24

But Burger still believes in a proud America. For him it is the Stars and Stripes that

personalise the blank bulk of the skyscraper in the background. It is this unmistakably

American symbol that designates the building from amongst its myriads of other siblings, that

gives meaning to it, and that endows the scene with a particular American feel. Indeed, the

flag functions as a label, like the ones on quality clothing carrying a special brand. Its very

marginality places special emphasis on its presence, what is absolutely compelling is its sheer

thereness. Part of what is radical in this image is its viewpoint: Burger looks at his subject

with a tilted head, slightly askew, even askance. The horizontal stripes of the flag

counterbalance the overwhelming presence of the grim concrete lines coupled with alternating

glass surfaces. Whereas the solid magnitude of the huge building is rendered inert, the

weightless flag happily celebrates motion, versatility, and pride. Captured side by side, the

American skyscraper and the American national banner strengthen each other even further

23 Clark, p. 155. 24 Clark, p. 155.






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and form a perfect couple. They symbolize the American nation as a whole: its irrefutable

grandness, fearful presence, and vitality. Hand in hand, the two seem almost invincible.

The Human Element Otherwise, how is it possible to understand the embarrassment, the worry, even the panic, which often assails people when they are being photographed?25

People have always liked to take pictures of famous sites. Utilized on postcards, some sights

have even become commonplace. Hardly ever does a tourist return from America without

photos of its most recognizable symbols. Besides the American flag, Statue of Liberty images

are apt to find their way into most family albums, and they are far from being marginalised.

For the myriads of immigrants that flocked from Europe to the New World, the Statue

of Liberty was the first image they saw of America. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photo of “a

transatlantic arriving in the harbour” [fig.7], so the caption goes, portrays this particular

emotion. Taken in 1959, this is a quintessential photograph of the decisive moment, the phrase

Cartier-Bresson coined in the early 1950s and which also became the title of his first book.

This is an impressive image capturing the archetypal moment in a feeling that immigrants

might have experienced when laying eyes on the New World for the first time: a mingled

emotion of amazement and awe at the site of the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline.

Graham Clarke emphasizes the overwhelming effect of “the moment as crucial to the meaning

of an image” when he claims that “Cartier-Bresson, of course, made this the very foundation

of his own approach and philosophy, so that ‘the decisive moment’ became a cliché of

photographic practice […] clearly it is basic to the terms by which any documentary

photographer must work”.26

I will use this particular Cartier-Bresson image as my sole reference to yet another

Burger photograph, Lady With Book And Torch [fig.8]. Here the connection is not similarity

but it is based rather on complements: what we visually miss from the Cartier-Bresson photo

is captured on the Burger one, and vice versa. They are flawless complementary visions,

mirror images of each other.

Everything is perfect on Cartier-Bresson’s photo: the immigrant does not catch the eye

of the photographer while staring at the awesome sight of the Statue of Liberty, an apparent

25 Berger, John, Jean Mohr. Another Way of Telling. New York: Vintage, 1995, p. 38. 26 Clark, p. 157.






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symbol of America’s unstoppable craving towards freedom and grandeur; the leather band

running across his black coat matches one of the ship’s iron cables in a parallel form of

symmetry; and the reversed image in the window pane carries the meaning that photography

is but a reflection of reality with the photographer in the midst of it all. Cartier-Bresson’s clear

sense of geometry, refined sensitivity, and a discipline of mind are all at hand here, whatever

he writes about is indeed there embedded in his pictures.

His determination to “‘trap’ life—to preserve life in the act of living” shines through

this particular photo as well.27 Such an endeavour requires a great many things simultaneously

present, of which Cartier-Bresson lacked none. Above all, he managed to stay a shrewd

observer, which is probably the most important factor in, as he put it, seizing the whole

essence of some situation. Quite characteristically, for instance, he consciously turns his look

towards his prime subject, i.e. humans. Here, too, he turns his back on the Statue of Liberty

and focuses on more attentive themes, such as emotions on human faces. It is there that he

discovers reflections: the whole myth of American existence is legible on the immigrant’s

face, imprinted in emotions. Thus Cartier-Bresson aims beyond the obvious reflections on the

windowpane and goes further by grasping the essence of America in a single photograph. The

telling story of a grand American vision is the immigrant’s arrival into the land of

opportunities. Like a dream coming true, this is exactly what was unrolling itself before the

photographer’s eyes inspiring him to trap and preserve the fugitive moment in its entirety.

András Heltai also has history in mind when he writes about immigrants in his text

accompanying the Burger photograph:

This is, of course, the Statue of Liberty, a gift from the revolutionary French for the American revolutionaries who triumphed over the British. From this angle, it’s fascinating: this is how our grandparents saw it, when their ship moored alongside the neighbouring islet, called Ellis Island. For exactly seventy years from 1880, this was the Gate to Paradise for millions of European immigrants.28

Burger reconstructs whatever the archetypal immigrant saw over a hundred years ago when

entering the New World and he does so by placing himself in a newcomer’s position, both

mentally and physically. Burger’s experience of the city is a constant feeling rather than a

moment. In his interpretation, the Statue of Liberty is rendered more than an icon, it becomes

27 Cartier-Bresson, p. 22. 28 Heltai, András. In New York, Barna Burger, trans. Mátyás Salamon with Peter Doherty. Budapest: STRAM-AVANT MÉDIA Ltd., 1999, p. 13.






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a metaphor—a metaphor of all texts American. From Burger’s viewpoint American reality

may either be a liberating utopia or a threatening dystopia. In short, both photographers’

images document a reality that used to linger there in the eager hearts of immigrants when

entering ‘the land of endless opportunities’.

Conclusion

Whether photographs are fraught with implied meaning of any sort has always been a prime

question of photography theory. By now photography has become an acknowledged member

of high art but at the same time also managed to retain its capacity to capture events without

the want to smuggle artistic tendencies into documentation. These two lines of interpretations

tend to saturate critical readings of photographic texts.

When Allan Sekula meditates on the invention of photographic meaning in his essay

with the same title, he concludes that “[t]he task here is to define and engage critically

something we might call the ‘photographic discourse’”.29 What he implies is that the

photograph, by its very nature, engages in a communication with its onlooker inviting the

other party to be fully active in the process of meaning creation. This is Sekula on discourse:

A discourse can be defined as an arena of information exchange, that is, as a system of relations between parties engaged in communicative activity.30

Clearly in the case of Barna Burger’s photo collection the so identified mutual communicative

activity never ends while studying his images. As a result we can conclude that Burger’s

photographs of New York do carry with them some widely hailed photographic techniques,

visions and tendencies and that photographs as texts also communicate with one another

through a refined intertextual network. Further, Sekula insists that in order to make sense of

photographic texts, in short to ‘read’ them, we need to make use of our individual

combinatory abilities, most notably of our cultural heritage. This is what he calls “some

external matrix of conditions and presuppositions for [the photograph’s] readability” and he

also asserts that without it “the photograph is an ‘incomplete’ utterance”.31

29 Sekula, Allan. “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning”, in Thinking Photography, ed. Victor Burgin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1982, p. 84. 30 Ibid., p. 84. 31 Sekula, p. 85.






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The vision of an invisible city hovering over the apparent three-dimensional one has

always been challenging to the minds of novelists and critics alike. Novels by nature have the

capacity of exploring such psychological depths and can serve as catalysts for creating an

imaginary land readers would care to envisage. Today’s false Arcadia, the modern metropolis,

is not a land of happiness any more (perhaps it has never been that), it is rather an ambiguous

fictional creation, alarming, dim, and disillusioning. The exploration of this imaginary world

that we have ‘built’ on and around our cities is the sole purpose of Burger’s New York photo

album. It is this realm that is placed in the focus of attention: the invisible city.

As opposed to the Nietzschean dystopia, Burger chooses Saint Augustine’s vision of

utopia. He refuses to deal with a false, inhuman urban environment but rather places his

emphasis on the human viewpoint and approaches his subject with enthusiasm and humility.

Burger holds photography in high esteem knowing that, as Edgar Allan Poe wrote, “[t]he

instrument itself must undoubtedly be regarded as the most important, and perhaps the most

extraordinary triumph of modern science”.32 There is no denying it that in Burger’s case his

love of his subject matter (New York in particular) and his love of photography culminate in

his New York photo collection as a real triumph.

“The photograph seems to declare: ‘This really happened. The camera was there. See for

yourself.’”33

32 Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Daguerreotype”, in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg. New Haven, Connecticut: Leete’s Island Books, 1980, p. 37. 33 Tagg, John. “The Currency of the Photograph”, in Thinking Photography, ed. Victor Burgin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1982, p. 117.






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Appendix

Fig.1. Alfred Stieglitz: From Shelton, West, 1935 Source: http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/visualarts/Image-Library/Stieglitz/stieglitz_from_the_shelton-west-1935.jpg

http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/visualarts/Image






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Fig.2. Lewis Hine: Climbing into America, Ellis Island, New York, 1905 Source: bp3.blogger.com/.../s400/hine_climbing.jpg

Fig.3. Barna Burger: Flat Iron Building, 199634

34 All of Burger Barna’s photos are used here with a permission from the photographer.






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Fig.4. Alfred Stieglitz: Flatiron Building, 1903 Source: http://www.tfaoi.com/mn/mib/mib225.jpg

http://www.tfaoi.com/mn/mib/mib225.jpg






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Fig.5. Barna Burger: Stripes and Stars, 1991






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Fig.6. Robert Frank: Parade – Hoboken, New Yersey, 1958 Source: web.ncf.ca/ek867/frank.parade.hoboken.jpg

Fig.7. Henri Cartier-Bresson: A transatlantic arriving in the harbour, 1959






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Fig.8. Barna Burger: Lady With Book And Torch, 1993

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