From: Katharine Thayer (kthayer@pacifier.com)
Date: 04/11/02-02:58:11 AM Z
shannon stoney wrote:
>
>
> I guess it depends on where you live. In Tennessee, where I live
> most of the time, when I can escape from Houston, there are more
> trees than media. The tv doesn't come in too good, and I don't watch
> it anyway. I don't read newspapers because then i have to recycle
> them. I don't listen to NPR much because I would rather listen to
> the people that live with me. So, trees are a more relevant topic to
> me than media.
I try to stay out of these discussions any more and haven't read most of
this one, but the subject line on this post pulled me in.
I've always found it interesting that those who set themselves up as
arbiters of what subject matter is permissible for photography and what
isn't, say out of one side of their mouths that we should photograph
what's around us, while out of the other side of their mouths comes some
version of the idea that landscape is passe' and no one should be
photographing nature any more. In other words, only those who live in
cities or suburbs and who breathe popular culture have permission to
photograph what's around them (or in other other words, only what
surrounds ME should be a permissible subject matter for YOU). Those of
us who have long since tossed out our TVs, who live as far from housing
developments, malls and skyscrapers as we can get, who arrange our days
by the tides and the weather, who know trees and how the ocean moves and
where the osprey lives in the same way city dwellers might know the
sound of the el or the way the sun glints off a particular building at a
particular time of day, are told that what we see isn't worth
photographing and what we know isn't worth knowing. This is just
nonsense, and I hope Shannon or anyone else will pay it little mind.
Katharine Thayer
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