Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/05/02
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]on 5/2/01 6:15 AM, Oddmund Garvik at garvik@ifrance.com wrote: > The main photographic concern today should be the restoring of the > image, breaking the impact of the image pollution. Barnak "invented" the > 35mm camera. Leica made the photo reportage possible. But one day it > (almost) stopped. Photography became too dangerous for the establishment. > The images were too exposing and "disappeared" from the medias. Some > medias even disappeared. The power needed another "image" and started > pouring out anything in a total disorder, but efficiently. The image > became banal, without any direction, any idea, any emotion. Just images. > Thousands of images. Commercial junk. I couldn't agree more with this... the diagnosis if not the analysis. I don't believe 'dangerous' images disappeared from the media because of any action by the establishment, but due to market pressures and corporate acquisitions which forced the various media, like the right and the left in politics, to become more the-same in order to complete. Any organ that wasn't the-same either disappeared or shrivelled to a tiny hard-core readership. Of course that may be exactly what Oddmund is saying in his own political dialect. Example: photo editors of the few magazines that still publish extended photostories now report that they get fewer and fewer self-financed projects coming over the threshold. Either it's no longer financially viable, or people have just given up because they can't get the pictures out. (I got in the mail yesterday a magazine called "Labor's Heritage" featuring a beautiful, long photo-essay by Slobodan Dimitrov of this list, shot on his 4x5... portraits of construction workers. Stunning. Slobodan, I can't believe you made any money from this project, but thanks for doing it! I'm passing the mag on...) The internet has been highly touted as a means of breaking this stranglehold. It remains to be seen whether this will happen. I am on the fence but not especially hopeful. > Here and there outstanding images, and outstanding photographers and > photojournalists. There are Magnum and some other agencies. But they are > also becoming commercial and directed. The dominant situation is decline. I guess it is. But we are also living in what A D Coleman calls the 'golden age of the photo book' (see his essay at http://www.contactphoto.com). Most of this stuff is banal nonsense, but there is riveting work out there too, like that Larry Towell book Oddmund mentioned. > > What about restoring a photographic movement like in the past? Like the > Photo League? This is an old idea i have, and I wote this here at the Lug > back in 1996 (I too, start citing myself, what a horror...!): > http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/v01/msg01314.html An interesting idea! But not if tied to a political agenda. If tied to some notion of the power and integrity of the image, and its relation to the real world as opposed to galleries, curators, editors, ad-men, and stockholders, yes! - -- Johnny Deadman http://www.pinkheadedbug.com