From: Thom Mitchell (tjmitch@ix.netcom.com)
Date: 09/19/02-10:08:51 AM Z
Are the "crummy pictures" the photographer's fault or the curator's fault?
Haven't seen the show yet (hope to tomorrow when I'm in town on business)
but clearly Winogrand had some issues by the backlog of work upon his death
but some of his other images are really interesting and worth spending the
time to look at and hodl as examples of the genre of street photography. I
take far too many pictures which after contacting or printing test prints,
I simply file them in file 13. Maybe Winogrand would've done the same and
maybe he simply chose to but not processing or printing.
I have some serious questions about whether Images (and film) processed,
edited and printed after an artist has died have the same stature as ones
the artist took and had an active hand in. Not having had the opportunity to
meet or work with Mr. Winogrand, I am deprived of some of the context but
that may not be a bad thing. I have his "Stock Photographs" book, his
"Figments From the Real World" book from the posthumous show as well as the
recent "The Man in the Crowd: The Uneasy Streets of Gary Winogrand". His
rodeo photographs are of a more consistent quality than the books edited
after his death, I presume this is because he had some involvment in them
(but I don't know).
Since so much of what separates 35mm photographers is the ability to
edit and since he never edited his work, did he do any work? Or was his
compulsion to take pictures a mental illness since he apparently had no need
to go to the next step in the process. This would be similar in my mind to
some who is a painter and later in the painter's career, the painter
stretches his/her own canvasses and then simply never gets around to putting
anything the canvasses, but maybe has some rough sketches. We can conjecture
what might have been but we'll never know.
If the image only exists in our minds does it in fact exist?
Thom
----- Original Message -----
From: <ARTHURWG@aol.com>
To: <alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca>
Sent: Thursday, September 19, 2002 9:26 AM
Subject: Re: Winogrand/ was news article concerning photographing in public
spaces
> I recently saw the current Winogrand show at ICP. Lot's of "street
> photography." I've never seen so many crummy pictures in a major
exhibition.
> Yes, there were several of Winogrand's so-called masterpieces, including
many
> fine pictures in color. But the hit ratio was clearly very low-- and all
the
> pictures had been selected from thousands of others. It brings to mind the
> infinite number of monkeys and all those typewriters....
>
> Arthur
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