Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2004/07/14

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Subject: [Leica] The Barnack Award, or bubble gum photography!
From: s.dimitrov at charter.net (Slobodan Dimitrov)
Date: Wed Jul 14 17:12:22 2004

The oppressed work is now being done by the runner's up.
 S. Dimitrov

> From: Tim Atherton <timatherton@theedge.ca>
> Reply-To: Leica Users Group <lug@leica-users.org>
> Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2004 12:40:53 -0600
> To: Leica Users Group <lug@leica-users.org>
> Subject: RE: [Leica] The Barnack Award, or bubble gum photography!
> 
> 
> Actually I rather liked them. I'm glad the Barnack awards have moved away
> from much of the clich?d B&W documentary photography which it seemed stuck
> in a few years ago - same old dreary work showing "oppressed" or
> disadvantaged people etc etc
> 
> (and I'm not sure what an "Arbus photo-documentary approach to subject" is
> apart from an appeal to a constantly backwards looking approach to
> photogrpahic clich?s that seems to dog so much current photography?)
> 
> And it's colour, which is always a good thing.
> 
> As to the subject matter - sometimes it takes an outsider to see how our
> world actually looks. My experience travelling around N America is that -
> oh, I don't know - 85% of the inhabited/occupied space is pretty darned
> ugly/mundane/dreary/dirty etc - yet most people have become blind and 
> immune
> to it. So people just don't see it - yet within those spaces there are many
> visually interesting and intriguing things. It seems that about 95% of the
> photography seems to concentrate on that remaining 15% of the space - at
> it's worst it's the picture postcard snapshots - at it's best, it's mostly
> what 100 other photographers are also trying to photograph "meaningfully".
> 
> Mind you, what won the award here isn't really some of the best that I've
> seen - but it's rather better most
> 
> tim
> 
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In reply to: Message from timatherton at theedge.ca (Tim Atherton) ([Leica] The Barnack Award, or bubble gum photography!)