[Leica] the difference between photography and art (and weegee!)

["kyle cassidy" <kcassidy@asc.upenn.edu>]

so i went to the weegee opening friday, expecting i'd see a few of my photo
buddies, maybe some of the PLUG, some shooters from the papers, but i
didn't.. in a show devoted to a news photographer, there were no
photographers (who i recognized). who did turn out in droves was the
highbrow philly art scene (the people in black suits with no neckties and
nametags announcing they were "$5,000 doners" or "$10,000 doners") i saw a
bunch of gallery owners and the sorts of people you see leaving their black
lincoln's for valet at the academy of music and it really stuck me,
especially in the wake of all this cindy sherman bashing ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
discussion -- that the art world and the photo world meet only tangentally,
the intersection of those sets is very small. even when you have someone
like Cindy Sherman who is, ostensibly a "photographer" because she uses a
camera, photography is not really her world. she doesn't really care a wit
about photography, it's the means to her end, which is artistic, rather than
technical, or even "photographic". same with anna gaskill or any of the
other current "in" crowd.  they have cameras, they use film, but their
mindset is so far removed from what we on the lug typically think of as
"photographer".

what was really sad about weegee is that he saw this other world, this art
world, and saw that it was embracing him and so he tried consciously to
please it and it's obvious that he knows nothing about art -- the work he
did in his last years with prisms and whatnot was not art (well, it was bad
art) and it wasn't weegee. he was clearly in a world out of his league -- he
tasted it and he wanted more, but he was incapable of understanding it. he
was a hard boiled crime photographer and it was for his excellent eye that
he got recognized. had he the distain to simply ignore the art crowd, or tip
his grubby hat and say "thanks folks, nice party, now i gotta get back to
work", he would have continuted doing what he did best until the end of his
days but i think he died a bewildered man producing false work.

just my two pea, take it for what it's worth.

kc


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