[Leica] Homeless: flowers of the street

[Mike Johnston <michaeljohnston@ameritech.net>]

>At a local film school, it seems that everyone wants to be "street
>photographers", taking "real documentary photographs".   Man oh man, if

>the
>homeless people in my home town got a buck for every "real documentary
>photograph" taken of them, they wouldn't be homeless.



A number of the homeless people around the Corcoran School and Museum in
D.C. got wise and started charging the "afternoon photojournalists"
$1.00 a shot to take their picture. One woman who lived on a grate was
quite agressive about it--she'd chase the would-be P.J.'s down the
street after they photographed her, demanding to be paid! She was pretty
funny about it, too: "Yeh wouldn't know it from the way I'm lookin' now,
but I'm a famous model and I get paid! Every day I get paid! Get back
here, I want what's comin' to me!" It was quite alarming for most art
students.

The instructors considered that a part of a photographer's education
too....

- --Mike

P.S. Half of my involvement in photography has consisted of becoming
thoroughly  jaded about various clichéd subject matter. Street people
were first, because everybody I ever taught in D.C. at one point or
another decided that they needed to change the world with a socially
meaningful photograph of a homeless person asleep on a bench or
sidewalk. I used to mark students up half a grade point for the semester
if they'd never shown me a "bum shot." More recently, my pet peeve has
become slot canyons or slot canyons or whatever you want to call them.
Awful. A plague. Worst by far are god-d**ned flower shots, which I
virtually cannot discuss without profanity. If *EVERY* photograph of a
flower disappeared off the earth in the flash of some benevolent genie's
magic wand, it would not affect authentic human culture on earth one
whit. I hate flower photographs with a fine violence and great phlegm. I
wish I could innoculate myself against ever having to look at another.

Actually, Arnold Crane (whose book _The Other Side of the Lens_
,mentioned here recently, I edited), showed me one of the few good
flower shots I have ever seen. Flower photographs may not be precisely
the the most numerous kind of photograph, but GOOD flower photographs
are definitely the rarest kind of photographs on earth; not one in ten
million qualifies.