Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/07/18

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Subject: [Leica] going mainstream
From: Kyle Cassidy <cassidy@netaxs.com>
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2001 13:13:31 -0400 (EDT)

>Why not peaceful, quiet portraits without B+G, or maybe even a landscape
>without what are intended to be clubbed to death animals?
>
>Yes, it may be your right, but isn't the world filled with enough
>sneaking around and B+G or general ugliness?
>
>Give it a break, try for something more..... mainstream. 

when i look out my window, there are no quiet portraits. we live in a
neighborhood with little pretense. the people around me are living at the
fringes of existence. they buy drugs, they get beaten up, they get
stabbed, robbed, they steal things, they throw their trash into the yards
of their neighbors, their houses burn. they lead lives of negligible
consequence and great desperation. these are the people i know, these are
their lives, this is what i photograph. 

i can already turn out a very mainstream portrait relatively consistantly.
my portfolio is crammed with them. so what's the point anymore? there are
about six million leica photographers who do portraits and landscapes and
nearly every one of them is better than i'm ever going to be at it. why
jocky for position in front of el capitan with forty other people when you
can be the only photographer crouched over the sidewalk watching three red
ants meticulously chew the head off of a black ant? i can't close my eyes
and pretend there aren't 8 year old girls working as prostitutes and
living in sewers. i feel compelled to show everybody else what i see
because i don't think that 8 year old girls should be living in sewers
working as prostitutes.

the thing about the photo of the girl with the bat and the dead opossum,
apart from it being technically vaccant because i didn't take the time
with it that i could have (and probably should have refrained from posting
it for that reason alone), is that if it was a photo of a nice white
haired old man and  his 13 year old grandson kneeling behind the gutted
corpse of an 8 point buck, grinning from ear to ear, it would have
recieved nothing but praise  here. except from mark rabiner, who would
have posted "hey! that deer  got shot twice!" and nobody would have known
what he meant one way or the other.

Replies: Reply from Mark Rabiner <mark@rabiner.cncoffice.com> (Re: [Leica] going mainstream)