Art & Creativity Quote by Janet Malcolm

Malcolm’s line is a needle slid under photography’s self-myth: that the camera is a clean machine for truth. “If you scratch” suggests a restoration trick, the way conservators test varnish to see what’s underneath. The gesture is skeptical and slightly mischievous, implying that a “great photograph” isn’t merely taken; it’s composed, coerced, and worked over - even when the labor is hidden behind the camera’s supposedly automatic eye.

The pairing “a painting and a photograph” lands as both compliment and accusation. Compliment, because it elevates the photograph into the long tradition of pictorial intelligence: balance, color, chiaroscuro, narrative. Accusation, because it calls out the fraudulence of photographic innocence. Great photos borrow painting’s authority (its permission to manipulate reality) while still cashing in on photography’s alibi of fact. Malcolm, a writer famous for anatomizing the power games of journalism, is circling the same ethical hinge: representation always involves control, yet some mediums pretend otherwise.

Context matters: Malcolm wrote in an era when documentary photography, magazine photojournalism, and later digital editing all complicated the public’s faith in images. Her phrasing makes that complication feel tactile. Scratch the surface and you discover the double life of the photograph: artifice dressed as evidence. The subtext is not anti-photography; it’s anti-naivete. The best images don’t escape interpretation - they weaponize it.