From: Judy Seigel (jseigel@panix.com)
Date: 09/19/02-01:00:31 AM Z
On Tue, 17 Sep 2002, Marco Milazzo wrote:
> But I think the question we ought to ask ourselves about street/candid
> photography is whether we're abusing people who are just going about their
> business and don't expect to end up in someone's photo project. It's a
> little like cheap sex: we don't want to get to know them -- we just want to
> use them and run.
What we "expect" and what we encounter on any trip any day are often as
not utterly unrelated. And do you really want to "know" every person you
photograph? There's not time enough for you or them -- and maybe they
don't want to "know" you. As for "just going about their business"--
maybe yes, maybe no, so what? Maybe they want to make faces and strut, see
and be seen, look for trouble, make a splash, greet the world -- or
whatever. If you don't want to "exploit" them, no one has a gun at your
head (though I repeat that IME most are tickled pink to be photographed),
but don't make your own inhibitions into universal law, especially a law
of "art". As for your analogy to "cheap sex" -- quite the contrary --
photography is very expensive sex.
> And not surprisingly, the pictures are usually as superficial as our
> two-second relationship with the subject. Whereas, I think most successful
> pictures of people are collaborations -- partnerships, even --between the
> photographer and subject. If I remember correctly, Dorthea Lange spent a
> couple of weeks with migrant farm families before even showing them a
> camera. By that time, they trusted her, and she was able to get pictures
> with depth.
This is not the version of Lange I heard, but hardly matters either way.
Many of those FSA photographs were hastily shot, and/or faked. Yes indeed,
many great historic photographs supposedly found or happened upon were
carefully posed & set up. (Weegee, Orkin, Doisneau, et al.) Shot &
reshot. So who's being cheated here? Us, the audience? Probably. So what?
Great photography can be a fake, or artifice, or trick, or stolen, or
whatever -- certainly "honesty" and "depth" are in eye of the beholder..
One person's "honesty" being the next one's pap.
Perhaps, for the type of photograph Lange was aiming for (propaganda,
incidentally -- as explicitly stated), some "relationship" may have been
her best route -- or not. We don't know really. . But to declare that
other approaches (including what Carl dismisses as merely "crowd"
photographs) are "superficial," and demand a proper "relation between the
photographer and subject," omits a wide swath of the most meaningful 20th
century (and I daresay 21st century) photography. Not to mention all those
hidden camera greats -- from Walker Evans to Erich Salomon, and Helen
Levitt (she used a right angle lens), oh there are a million of them.
I also have in hand the new Louis Faurer book. It is mostly grab shots,
often without eye contact, quite surreptitious, "caught," never posed.
Those photographs to my eye are among the most moving and profound of the
20th century. To dismiss them according to some glib prescription is
what's "superficial."
But the 20th century is replete with "crowd" or "impersonal" or not
arranged photographs -- right back to Paul Strand who showed the
impersonal figures on Wall Street, through Robert Frank and Burk Uzzle --
to name others who come crowding to mind.
> But that brings me back to my original point: photography is a "people"
> business as well as a technical and creative endeavor. Getting a
> subject to relax and pose well (or relax and not pose), arranging a
Right, like Richard Avedon whose "people business" with his models in the
American West made them look like deformed derelicts. You speak pious (a
word I use in lieu of "sanctimonious" so as not to be disrespectful)
nonsense. This "relationship" may be your own need and style, to which you
are certainly entitled, but to generalize, to declare it an absolute
is.... ignorant at best.
> group shot, or getting to shoot in a situation where cameras aren't
> normally allowed is about working with people -- understanding what they
> want as well as what you want.
What they want -- oh my, is to look like some fantasy of perfection in
their head, nothing AT ALL like what they really look like. I learned that
in grad school, incidentally, when I photographed a classmate at her
opening. She looked so beautiful I lovingly made a perfect print to give
her -- she took one look and said, "I can't believe I've got, not one, not
two, but three bags under my eyes." She was 25 and gorgeous... Only she
saw those "bags."
> Marco
> (I have opinions on the war too, but I'm saving them.)
It is possible, to be hoped anyway, that your opinions on the war will be
sounder.
Judy
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