Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/08/01
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]It would be worth thinking about why this is so. My instinct is that very few people enjoy being educated, they mainly want to be entertained. Hence the triumph of the movies and TV over print. Very few of us remember anything about what actually went on during the Vietnam war, but many of us watch films (mostly complete bullshit) or even TV documentaries about it because it's fun to do so - it's got nothing to do with a need to be informed. Why is there virtually no market for photographic documentary? Because reading and assimilating information and images is work, whereas (say) watching a crap movie like City of Joy (which purports to also inform us) is entertaining, and the completely misleading picture it gives of Calcutta or South Asian slums in general is neither here nor there, really. As another example, it's far more fun to look at pictures of the latest Palm handheld and imagine owning it than it is to look at pictures of other people's unaspirational lives. I suspect that pictures in newspapers are more of an editorial habit than anything else - we're used to seeing them there and expect them, but virtually no-one really looks at them or attempts to understand them (and their content in 99% of cases is so minimal that who could be bothered anyway?). If they really added value to a publication, then there'd be a flourishing market for PJ - which there simply isn't. Even at the visual level most photography is so banal. Who can be bothered to look at that stuff when they can see Matrix or Resident Evil and see really cutting edge visuals? I was more moved by the bullet dodging, frozen time panning and martial arts in Matrix, or by the brilliantly edited heist scene in 2000 Miles from Memphis than by anything I've seen in print for the last ten years. Perhaps partly because I didn't feel an obligation to be moved by it. R. - ----- Original Message ----- From: "Allan Wafkowski" <allanwafkowski@mac.com> To: <leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us> Sent: Thursday, August 01, 2002 2:31 AM Subject: Re: [Leica] Millimeters and Milliseconds > One would be hard pressed to find empirical proof that photojournalism > has had any profound effect on the world. One can find ample proof that > art has profoundly changed the world. One need only look to the > 1960s-1970s. The music, art, and literature played a profound role in > changing American and European culture. It wasn't politics, and it > wasn't newspaper photography. Five years of Disco changed the world more > than 90 years of photojournalism. > > Allan > - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html