[Leica] Musings on the role of photography and a question about what you shoot and why

["Khoffberg" <khoffberg@email.msn.com>]

I've been reading a biography of Ansel Adams written by Mary Street Alinder
who was his number one aide the last ten years or so of his life.  At
different points she takes great care to discuss Ansel's relationships with
folks like Stieglitz, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, Paul Strand, and all
the rest.  Being relatively unfamiliar with the history of American
photographers, the relationships between all these folks are fascinating to
me.

For example, I am now aware of two early debates in photography that I knew
nothing about.  The first was pictorialism (championed by a chap named
Mortensen) vs. so-called "straight photography" as practiced by Adams,
Weston, Stieglitz, Cunningham, Paul Strand, etc.  The other which raged
during the depression was art for art's sake (Adams and Weston) vs. art for
life's sake (Walker Evans and the other Farm Security Administration
photographers).  The first group believed that beauty was even more
important a subject during those terrible times, the later believed that you
needed to show the grit and horror of daily life.

As I'm writing this, I have on my coffee table (silly name for a low table)
a copy of a book of Ansel Adam's photos and another by Eugene Smith which
strikes this same juxtaposition.  Hard to know which is the greater force
but they're both moving in very different ways.

All of this leads me to a question.  When you grab your Leica (or whatever)
and go out to take pictures for yourself, do you go in search of beauty or
with the purpose of telling a story, righting a wrong, illuminating the
absurdity of the human condition, or something else entirely?  Does an M
camera lead you in one direction and medium or large format another?  It
seems like an RNGF camera lends itself especially to art for life's sake but
hardly exclusively.

For whatever it's worth, I find shooting pastoral landscapes increasingly
unsatisfying.  I'm much more interested in finding/telling a story.  For
example, I've come to enjoy prowling around on construction sites on
weekends when nobody is there.  Why was the gear left where it was?  What
were they doing with it?  What stories do the tractors have to tell?  How
does that bucket feel about being filled with tar all day every day?

Happy new year.

Kevin Hoffberg