Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/05/25

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Subject: Re: [Leica] Re: Disagreeing is how we learn
From: Johnny Deadman <john@pinkheadedbug.com>
Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 23:16:10 -0400

on 5/25/01 10:36 PM, Donna-Lee Phillips at dlp@pacific.net wrote:

> Mark--
> 
>> Donna everyone including myself are takin by your breezy writing style but
>> I'm going to make an  "emperor with new clothes" point because in your long
>> post there is not one single point you made which i happen agree with.
>> 
> My opinions are clearly marked, always, as "opinions" not facts, so that you
> don't agree with a single point I made means only that we are very different
> people.

Understood by everyone on this list, DL. And for your truly inspired message
header, thanks. Every message to the LUG has the invisible words at the
beginning 'in my opinion...'.

>> And a causal look at the body of great photography will find half of it of
>> people unaware they are being photographed. Unposed. To find this an invasion
>> of their private space is just plain weird is my strong > opinion.
>> 
> ... until I realized that you meant "casual", not "causal". In order to see if
> half of the corpus is of unposed people, we'd first have to define what "great
> photography" is. That's a really long talk.

Interesting point. Seriously, I (personally) find it hard to imagine a
definition which didn't meet Mark's criterion. I mean, even discarding the
idea of a photographic canon, the verite/documentary side of photography has
been its most consistent inspiration. I just find it hard to imagine that
landscape, still life, portraiture and consensual documentary are going to
be more than 50% of anyone's greatest hits.

- -- 
John Brownlow

http://www.pinkheadedbug.com