From: shannon stoney (sstoney@pdq.net)
Date: 08/28/02-02:41:27 PM Z
Jonathan wrote:
>Have you ever asked what photography (and the images) might want or need
>*from you*?
>
>Have you ever considered that an image may have its own reasons for being??
>
>Perhaps your role in image-making should be as a *facilitator,* rather than
>*originator*???
>
>The latter leaves the personality in complete control: you - the personality
>"you" - has to puzzle out intellectually, deductively, THE ANSWERS. The
>former allows the process and, more importantly the *image* - a voice in the
>outcome. You bear witness to the results - and are either interested in
>them or you're not. Perhaps the world speaks to us through ATTRACTION. It
>could be our connection with the world is essentially an erotic one!!!!
>Wouldn't that be grand!?!?
This is a very helpful idea. I think I am going to try it on for a while.
IT sort of appeals to a certain pagan sensibility too. Maybe this is
the way most people related to the world until the great desert
monotheisms came along to make us feel guilty or silly about being
attracted erotically to, say, peppers or seaweed or the opposite sex.
I saw some nudes in the most recent Aperture today that I liked a lot
but that almost seemed to defy you to call them exploitative. There
were some real crotch shots, as well as blatantly sexy, even slightly
s and m, pictures of nude women. But they were made by a woman! I'm
sorry that I can't remember the photographer's name right now. She
is Hispanic. IF a series of images like this appears in a magazine
like Aperture, maybe it means that the culture has turned some sort
of corner, and is no longer obsessively worried about whether nude
photographs are politically correct.
Also today I saw a show in a gallery, and some of the photographs in
this show did offend me. IT was interesting to have the experience of
"being offended" by a photograph. The photos that upset me were
photographs of children with craniosacral abnormalities or bad burns,
which made them look strange and even freakish. It seems in really
poor taste to me to photograph people mostly because they are funny
looking. I know Diane Arbus got away with it, sort of, but maybe she
shouldn't have. I wonder why this offends me, but nude pictures of
beautiful young women do not? IT seems really exploitative to me, as
does photographing people simply because they are poor. It seems
voyeuristic. Maybe there is an element of voyeurism in a great deal
of photography that involves people, but some of it seems healthy and
some seems a bit National Enquirer-ish.
But maybe Nancy Burson, who made the photographs, was "attracted" to
this subject in the way that Jonathan describes, and so maybe my
assumption that she was somehow exploiting the shock value of a
person's birth defect is incorrect.
--shannon
--
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : 09/19/02-11:02:50 AM Z CST