Quotes by
Alan Trachtenberg

But were they in fact representations...pictorial copies or replications of real things?...Or were they something else--magical emanations, not pictures at all, but pieces of the world transferred by light to a plate--like shadows or footprints? The daguerreotype seemed to possess its sitters.

In order for Liebling to document work in a slaughterhouse he had to actually go there, a trip few of us would relish taking. In photographs like these there is the power of an additional message: "I can show you this because I was there." The document becomes one of both the slaughterhouse and Liebling’s personal experience.

For Liebling, as for every major figure in photography, pictorial power arises from the desire to be with the world, not merely to record but to register the fact of one’s own presence, to project one’s self in the act of capturing a scene.

Liebling’s work shows us not the world of objective facts, but his own experience of the world. In the angle of vision, the man reveals himself.