Re: [Leica] Suzy Q, again

[Martin Howard <howard.390@osu.edu>]

Paul Chefurka jotted down the following:

> I hope you're snipping a lot of context, Arthur, because if these quotes
> accurately reflect Ms. Sontag's impressions of the art, I truly despair.  In
> fact I find the thoughts you have quoted to be facile, dismissive and
> contemptuous.  If they really reflect her outlook, I may in fact never read
> the whole book, because my blood pressure wouldn't take it.  Just these bits
> are more enraging than a week-long thread on watches.

What's so terrible about them?  I think she makes some good points,
especially if you look at photography at large (not just the eclectic small
group of 'names' in photography).  Pick up an issue of "B&W World" and it
seems that everyone and their brother is now a "fine arts, B&W photographer"
doing available-light stills of flowers in a pot by a window, or landscapes
à la Ansel Adams.  Just look at all the one-hour photo places, the number of
rolls of film that Kodak, Ilford, Fuji, and other manufacturers sell per
year.  I'm quite sure that, in consumer-oriented societies at least, many
people are getting 4x6"s more often than they're getting laid.  For many,
photography is a sort of compulsion: many of us are so out of touch with the
human experience, so sheltered by technology and civilization, that learning
to see the world anew with the aid of a camera becomes an avenue of
exploration to a lost experience.  I think the most telling and astute
observation is her last one: "Needing to have reality confirmed and
experienced enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which
everyone is now adicted".  Think of Salgado's work, or Natchwey's: Where we
as remote viewers can experience a carefully preserved, technically perfect,
aesthetical, slice of reality from a safe distance.  In some twisted manner,
it's as though it doens't matter any longer whether the subject matter is
the flower pot by the window, a malnourished child, a foggy dawn over a
battle field, or sunrise over the Pacific Ocean.

M.

- -- 
Martin Howard                 | "We can't make mistakes like that on our
Visiting Scholar, CSEL, OSU   |  own. We need computers to help us."
email: howard.390@osu.edu     |     -- A pharmacologist on computerization
www: http://mvhoward.i.am/    +-------------------------------------------