[Leica] 13 steps part 3

["TLEE" <javalee@msn.com>]

The following is the course title/ description:

Course title:    An anti-taxonomy of photography

Description:    Perhaps the last person to be able to look at reality in a
global way was the eighteenth-century man or woman.  Since then,
fragmentation has increasingly affected how we see, think and feel.  The
adman, the sage, the thief, the philanthropist, the prostitute and the
priest all have a distinct way of viewing reality, as valid asnd as
segregated as that of the fashion, news or pronography photographer.  In
this couse, we are out to re-appropriate reality -- to get at perception
before it has been shaped as expression, to identify the failure of art
criticism, to see images in the heartt and eye before they harden as
categories, styles, difinitions.   If it is possible to do so, to try to
reconcile the layers of meanings and to pull from all the contradictions
some intuitive truth, and begin there the documentary process.


Required materials and reading list:
A preliminary reading list for the coruse includes the following:
All of Roland Barthes; all of John Berger; Michel Foucault (essay on "Las
Meninas" in Les Mots et Les Choses);  Honore de Balzac;
Emile Zola; Herman Melville (Moby Dick, especially the description of
whales); Gustav Fleubert (Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education); Marcel
Proust (the descriptive passages); whatever is digestable of Marx, such as
his 'detective stories', like the 18th Brumaire and The Commune;
Frederick Engels (On the situation of the working class inEngland); James
Agee(Let us know Praise Famous Men); Ryzard Kapucinshi (Shah of Shahs);
Merleau-Ponty; Levi-Strauss (Tristes Tropiquis); Georges Bataille (Story of
the Eye); Loa Tse (The Way); Herrigel (Zen and the Art of Archery); Rilke
(Letters to a young poet)

Must buys: John Zacksowski (spelling?)    Looking at Pictures - John Berger


I expect the participants to be familiar with teh works of Atget; Charles
Malville; Timothy O'Sullivan, Lewis Hine, Jocob Riis (How the other half
lives), Edward S. Curtis (Visions of a Vanishing Race), August Ssander,
Erich Salomon, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn (his writings), Russell Lee,
Walker Evand (First and Last, ;American Photographs), Robert Frank (The
Americans, The Lines of my Hand), Bresson (The Europeans, The Decisive
Moment), Steichen (The family of Man), Rene Burri (The Germans), William
Klein (New York, Rome and Tokyo), Weegee (Naked City), Dioane Arbus, Mark
Riboud (the Faces of North Vietnam and the Threee Banners of China), Philip
Jones Griffiths (Vietnam Inc.), Susan Meisalas (Nicaragua and El Salvador),
Don McCullin (Is anyone Paying andy Notice?), Josef Koudelka (Gypsies),
Bruce Davidson (Photographs, and East 100th street), Leonard Freed (Balck
and White in Amnerica and Made in GErmany), Eugene Smith (Minimata and Let
Truth be the Prejucide), Garry Winogrand (Public Relation, Women are
Beatuiful, Lee Friedlander (Factory Valleys, American Monuments,
Photographs), Chaucey Hare (Interior America), robert Adams (From the
Missouri West), richard Avedon (In the american West)

All Particcipants should bring a visual documetation as complete as
possible, including (for example) the family album, their best pictures,
their worst pictures, their favorite clippings, junk food packaging, art
books and other elements of personal visual culture.In addition, arrive with
50 copy slides of images done by others of which you (the course
participants) would have liked to be the authors (looking at all this work
because it raises questions)


note (Ting's):
To some of u folks, Some of what Gilles P wrote is seems very basic and
common sense... Some of the stuff doesnt' make sense to me, but I 'm sure it
was discussed in his class in detail

I dont know what the students are like in the 80s,  but the class I was in
had working journists from Sweden, Italy, Mexico, Iseral, Canada, etc

hope u all find these postings interesting... Happy holidays to all
best,
Ting
btw, pls dont shoot the messenger :)