[Leica] Exceptional Contemporary Documentary Imagery

[benedenia at gmail.com (Marty Deveney)]

On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 11:13 PM, George Lottermoser <imagist3 at mac.com> 
wrote:
> Personally I put those two shots in the category of environmental 
> portraiture.
> Others may consider them outside the realm of "documentary."

I've worked on farms, fishing boats and with professional hunters.
I've spent time in abattoirs and worked for over 12 months in a fish
processing factory while I was a marine biology undergraduate.  The
shot of the guy with the crossed knives is very typical of moving a
carcass on an unmechanised line with a rough or poorly lubricated
gantry.  It's a safety risk (great way to hurt your back) .  The
reason I think it might have been posed is because, at least in
anything approaching a large scale factory, there is no way that
someone would stay still long enough to catch that.

This, however, looks like a very primitive operation, by modern
standards, so maybe it is actually documentary.

Live animals never see carcasses, nor are they held confined, nor do
they ever "shriek in terror".  The gross anthropomorphisation
expressed here is absurd at best and devisive worst.  Particularly to
show these in the US, Europe or North America and to pretend that this
is what "most" abattoirs are like is outright misleading.  In a well
designed modern facility, terrestrial animals are killed a lot more
humanely than fish that die slowly by being crushed or of asphyxia in
a net, or which struggle on the end of a line for a long time.
Whatever the case, whoever runs this facility has a lot of work to do
to bring it up to modern standards.  I am a bit surprised that this
continues in the EU, but I've been surprised in Italy before.

Marty