Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/05/03
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Bernard wrote:
. . .
Isn't your sociologist's socialistic political agenda blurring your vision?
. . .
--> Ouch !
It's VERY IMPORTANT that people realize the Internet
brings people together who live in extremely different
personal circumstances, cultures and media environments.
It's VERY IMPORTANT to realize American media
have become painfully sanitized since the Gulf War,
and the American public sanitized by "political correctness",
as a good example.
What earns a "Communist" sticker in the USA can very well
be very generally accepted values, attitudes and ideals
in cosmopolitan and / or sociology literate circles
that could even be considered "bourgeois" by many "ordinary
folk", elsewhere.
Culture clash is a reality.
Please be more careful.
Photography IS a major "foundation" medium (to convey messages,
usually socially relevant messages with implicit political
agenda, from square one, aware or not). Even more than in Science,
where the experimentor can often bias lab experiments' results,
the creative photographer, even conservative style "objective"
photo-journalism, ANY photographer is going to generate
images that are meaningful to him/her, politically even at some point.
Most of us are mediatized minds whose major media mindspace
is advertising and advertising related images and "entertainment",
"entertainment" designed as carriers for advertising.
Images and concocted messages used to an explicit end:
to heat up the consumer society and economy, useful or not
to the individual consumer, even for ideas and political ideas,
genuine or role-playing for acceptance and / or security
and / or economic or symbolic dominance ("status").
Denying the object of sociology as a worthy pursuit
and forum almost is caving in to those whose interest it may be
to maximize people as replaceable resources where
the conscious / aware / informed individual is seen as a "problem",
a potential competitor no less.
Sociology, my field too, is a universe that's poorly known
to most people. Equating sociology and socialism is not fair.
Wether sociology is a fine mind tool for the photographer
or photography quite a tool for the sociologist, that's
a FAR more interesting question here . . .
Andre Jean Quintal