Re: [Leica] kyle's lost his @#$@#$! mind - week 35

[Mark Rabiner <mark@rabiner.cncoffice.com>]

Jesse Hellman wrote:
> 
> I am a psychiatrist and work with a number of women who have cut
> themselves. Photographing a young woman cutting herself is tacitly
> condoning what she is doing. The photographer is using her for his
> purposes, including his voyeurism and sadism. Is there a message to her
> that he cares more for his photography than for her? I would not know
> what went on in her mind, but do understand that standing by and
> watching, even more profiting from it, is a very destructive thing to
> have done.
> 
> Can anyone imagine Kyle standing by and photographing her hanging
> herself, after having photographed her putting up the rope?
> 
> The reason she seems so blank is that she is so unable to feel, and is
> not relating to the photographer. The women who have done this often
> told me later that they were trying to feel something, that they felt so
> blank.
> 
> There is a difference between being in a public situation, as a
> documentary photographer, where others are acting to help, using your
> skill to record the events, and that of trying to profit from an
> intimate situation such as this.
> 
> It is very difficult to photograph the emotions which a woman such as
> this feels. The camera does not record inner feelings, only outward
> manifestations. Since the person does not show her emotions, but acts
> them out via the cutting, indirect means must be used to try to convey
> what she feels. I have rarely seen photos that succeeded. The intense
> emotions felt by some schizophrenics have been more successfully
> recorded.
> 
> Kyle's photographs are not even good, in any event. I hope that this is
> because, in spite of his effort to be unencumbered by ethics, he was
> made sick by what he was doing.
> 
> Jesse

I'm just going to weigh in and say that i think this post is stupid and way off
the mark.
That a professional psychiatrist would post an off base post like this on a
forum such as ours is a disgrace to their profession.
Kyles photographs are not insensitive and this women is not incarcerated in a
mental institution. She is free to live a full life.
Mark William Rabiner