Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/11/02
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Depending on who is doing the street photography I might agree. But anyone with a camera can 'go out' and 'do' photography. some of it may even be good. But 'the anyone with a camera' is not analogous to Jazz. I hope you don't infer that anyone can do good jazz. but in my relationship with jazz (as a player and a listener) it is a culmination of years of dedication and effort. The learning of the instrument is therefore necessary. Jazz doesn't neccesarily break every rule. some of it is avant garde (to coin an old phrase) and 'out there'. but much of Jazz to me is emotive of the moment and maintained within the music. It is a relationship with the other players and an outlet from all of your past experiences that brings Jazz together. Rob Mueller Studies in Black and White www.studiesinblackandwhite.com rob@studiesinblackandwhite.com - -----Original Message----- From: Johnny Deadman [mailto:deadman@jukebox.demon.co.uk] Sent: Monday, November 01, 1999 4:11 AM To: leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us Subject: [Leica] street > I said that as long as street photography (including candid and some forms > of documentary photography) captures the essence of life and the heartbeat > of the environment and does not appear grossly badly taken in terms of say > horizon, exposure, perspective, it is an artform in itself. I am just writing an essay (!) on this for my website. Street shooting is to photography as jazz is to music - when it's good it's 'out there', riffing on past glories, but breaking every rule, sometimes one by one and sometimes all together. Garry Winogrand used to say that when he saw something in his viewfinder that he'd seen before, he did something to change it. Good for him. That's how we progress as a species (human beings AND photographers). For this reason I sometimes think something even more radical, that counter-intuitively it is the form of photography which is most about photography, or at least about ways of seeing, or of organizing the real world visually, which amounts to the same thing. - -- Johnny Deadman "The obscure man's reflections may be aw wise as the rich cheese-maker's, on everything but cheese" - Haskins