From: Carl Weese (cweese@earthlink.net)
Date: 09/19/02-11:11:12 AM Z
> including what Carl dismisses as merely "crowd"
> photographs
Judy,
The only snaps I dismiss as crowd photographs are photographs of crowds.
I've spent hundreds of times as many hours "street shooting" as you have, so
as my grandmother used to say, don't try to teach your grandmother how to
suck eggs.
Strand indeed used tricks to photograph people unaware in his early work,
but he grew out of that phase and did far better people work using the
"total immersion" method that's mentioned earlier in this thread. I'm aware
that some important critic-critters prefer the earlier work: I think
they're wrong.
Burk Uzzle's entire body of work in this vein (he also used to shoot annual
reports to pay the rent, maybe still does, and now teaches at Bard) was
based on total immersion, never the drive-by shooting.
If you want crowd shots, there are plenty produced by all the surveillance
cameras in the world. A few frames will probably look like Art.
The Strand Wall Street picture is of course not street shooting at all: it's
shot from a second or third story window across the street, hardly rubbing
shoulders with the unwashed masses. The figures in the picture (it would be
silly to call them people in this context) are just graphic elements in an
abstraction of city light on granite bank buildings and pavement and wool
coats. "Blind" and the gravure Mexican Portfolio were indeed a sneaked
images. See Strand's work decades later in Ghana and Italy for some of the
most powerful people pictures ever made. No hiding behind a fake lens for
these.
>But the 20th century is replete with "crowd" or "impersonal" or not
>arranged photographs
False distinction. It isn't a choice of stolen vs. posed or arranged.
There's a huge area between the two extremes. The point here is that to be
"invisible" is not the ideal, actually not the least bit desireable. The
stolen picture made with a right angle prism or false lens to deceive the
subject is one extreme, the Avedonesque directed session (portfolio samples
presented as Art) is the other. Between the two lies a huge range of
undirected but 'un-snuck' photographic strategies. For arranged pictures
that work, consider August Sander, the model that Avedon fails to emulate.
(Avedon may be the best and most influential commercial photographer of the
20th Century, I just don't buy it as art.)
For pictures that are convincingly true to life but not "sneaked" by an
"invisible" or hidden photographer, Uzzle is one of many excellent examples.
The fact that many icons of "candid" photography weren't in fact candid
shouldn't be surprising. As Nick Nixon is so fond of saying, "all
photographs are fiction". Just how the fiction was arrived at can be quite
opaque when viewing the picture. Many people think that Nixon's own work, or
Sally Mann's or Jock Sturges' is candid when of course they all engage in
massive direction and arrangement. Everyone can tell that Joel-Peter
Witkin's pictures are directed and arranged. Does that make them more
honest? Gene Smith arranged some of his most famous 'documentary' images.
Like Mann, he did it very well.
The issue of publication and permission is a legal one dealing with need for
permission for certain ("commercial") publication uses and no permission
needed for other ("editorial") uses. Up to now "fine art" display and
publication has been deemed Editorial rather than Commercial in the US but
it would be naive to take it for granted that the courts will continue to
uphold this interpretation of the First Ammendment. Especially now. It
already doesn't apply in other countries, as someone pointed out about the
rules in France.
>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.
Not always. About a dozen years ago I made photograhs at a traveling
carnival. (Putting pictures where my mouth is, anyone interested can see a
few of them here: http://home.earthlink.net/~cweese/carnivalthumb.html).
Carnies are notoriously clannish and suspicious of customers with cameras. I
managed to shoot a little, went home and processed the film, made 5x7
prints, and handed them out. Not idealized pictures making people look good,
not especially flattering, just the best of the early pictures. They loved
them and wanted more. I was granted complete access and was able to work in
the total immersion manner. (It's worth pointing out that of course my
contact with the customers who appear in the pictures was much briefer and
more nearly 'drive-by'). One guy who operated one of the complex rides
wanted a picture of his wife, who hated having her picture taken, so he
started coaching me on the best way to sneak a shot of her working...
---Carl
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