[Leica] Re: Photos and culture

[lrzeitlin at optonline.net (Lawrence Zeitlin)]

On May 19, 2006, at 2:35 PM, lug-request@leica-users.org wrote:

>
>>>>> Looking at still images is an inculturated activity. Without
>>>>> grooming  the next mass audience, still photography could be
>>>>> considered spent.
>
> Pontification coming:
>
> Correct in premise, but incorrect conclusion.  I think Gene Smith's 
> Minimata
> photo of the mother bathing her child would affect any feeling person 
> who
> saw it.  Would they all have the same reaction?  No. But that hardly
> detracts from its impact.  The appeal of photography is that images of
> people are instantly intelligible regardless of culture.  Or history.  
> Do
> you not recognize images of people in cave paintings as 
> representatively
> human?  Of course you do. As long as there are humans, they will react
> emotionally to images of other humans.  We can't help it.
>
>

More pontification:

Discussions of photographic appeal tend to obscure the fact that ALL 
photographs are abstract representations of an external world. When 
Margaret Mead showed Tahitian natives black and white photographs of 
themselves and their village, they rotated the photos this way and 
that, shook their heads, and handed them back. "Nice designs", they 
said, "but what are they?" Mead then realized that photographs were 
such abstractions that only long experience enables their 
interpretation.

Closer to home, your dog or cat does not jump into the TV screen to 
frolic in the fields shown in the Alpo commercials. Neither does it 
growl or flee from the TV intruders in your household. The image on TV 
is not the real world to the animal but a flickering pattern on an 
illuminated tube. We see the image as a depiction of reality because 
our intelligence and experience enables us infer the scene from its 
abstract representation. The animal does not.

Interpretation and appreciation of photographs is a learned skill. 
Western conventions of art and photography are not universally shared. 
We accept the concept of perspective, absent in old European and Asian 
art as being the only natural way to represent reality, size of an 
object decreasing as the apparent distance increases. In older Indian 
art, distance and size are unrelated. The size of an object depends on 
its social importance. Kings are always shown as larger than their 
retainers, regardless of their apparent distance. To the local eye, 
Western photographs are abnormal.

I confess that I have somewhat the same feelings when viewing photos 
made with extreme wide angle lenses. To me they seem bizarre. Rather 
than being attention grabbers, they evoke a sense of dismay. I want to 
turn the page as quick as possible.

But then I learned to take pictures more than half a century ago an I 
have not been properly acculturated to the modern photographic era.

Larry Z