Photographer and subject

I just finished watching an excellent TV show on PBS: American Masters: Artists create images of Marilyn Monroe. Seems like a good time to take a look at the relationship of the photographer and the subject. The objects on both side of the camera's lens, and the way they relate to each other.
In Bill Jay and David Hurn's book "On being a photographer", Bill is discussing what it takes to be a photographer:

Many people are interested in photography in some nebulous way; they might be interested in the seemingly glamorous jobs of top fashion or war photographers; or in the acquisition and appreciation of beautiful, functional machines, the cameras...

...but these interests, no matter how personally enjoyable they might be never lead to the person becoming a photographer. The reason is that photography is only a tool, a vehicle, for expressing or transmitting a passion in something else. (emphasis mine)

As someone who has spent 25 years teaching photography in one way or another, this is quite a statement. Yes, it is true that I have seen many students much more in love with the idea of being a photographer than in photographing. Yet, it is hard for me to accept such a hard line, that the photograph is only there to suggest something else.

This seems to bring to mind the phrase "Art for art's sake", or in this instance "the photograph for the photograph's sake". Does the image laid down in silver, or pigment etc. by necessity relate to another object, or can it be enjoyed purely as mark on surface?
The photograph has always had a strange relationship to reality. No drawing could ever be submitted as legal proof, yet the photograph has a long history of providing documentation of something that has happened or existed. Yet anyone who has worked in a darkroom knows the secrets of changing that supposed reality. Just look at the work of Jerry Uelsmann or Scott Mutter if you doubt me.

It is interesting that with the increased control over the image available in digital imaging, this percepting of "true photography as unmanipulated reality" persists. Why is it that when the audience discovers that the photographer has eliminated telephone wires in the sky of a beautiful landscape, we feel somehow slightly "cheated"? Does the audience similarily begrudge the graphite artist his eraser?
Oh wellllllllll........... enough about that. If anyone is interested in thinking about the nature of photography and artifice, here is a good link on photonet: http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00CvSh

What I really wanted to talk about was that word "passion." ... "a passion in something else"
How does the photographer transmit the feelings he/she has for the subject into images ?




I am about to embark on what will be, for me, a huge undertaking: travel to a continent I have never been to before, interject myself into people's lives whom I have never met, much less been a part of their culture.

How can I avoid being what Thatcher Cook so accurately called in a discussion I had with him, an "humanitarian tourist?" The idea of being a casual observer of human suffering, just to add strong pictures to my portfolio, is troubling.