Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1996/11/24
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Are any of the members of the forum working in this direction? Is the Leica still an >adapted tool for this kind of work? > >Regards > >Oddmund > > Oddmund, I've been photographing a group of indigent alcoholics in Denver for going on eight months. Their stories are incredible and some of them have fallen from great heights only to land where the are today - skid row. In working downtown I stumbled across an organized dog fight and gained entrance with the promise not to photograph the people, just the animals (animals?). It's amazing what a Leica with a wide lens lets you get away with. My first exposure to "street" photography was not in a book, but rather working in a lab with a B&W printer named David Healey. D. Healey has been a photojournalist since the early sixties and has produced and published some of the most moving stories I've ever seen. He's almost unknown, yet continues to produce beautiful work - all with the Leica and almost exclusively in B&W. A few years ago in the magazine "Zoom" he had published a story on the Mexican gangs in Los Angeles. This was before anyone cared about the gang scene here in the US. Inspiring stuff. He suggested that I go to Haiti in 1984, so I bought an M and spent three months walking from Port au Prince to Cape Haitian. It was my first time in a third world country and the experience opened my eyes. I was 18. Jean Claude Duvalier was still in power and the signs of insurrection were growing. What an adventure. ben