Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/01/25
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]on 1/25/01 5:00 PM, julianthomas.terra.es at julianthomas@terra.es wrote: > This has just been mentioned on the SP list. Considering my current project, > I'm thinking about whether I can exclude the actual human presence. If you > think about Atget, Evans, Friedlander, Brassai, Kertesz, Hass, they all, at > times, portrayed cities without the people being there. The sign 'is' the > human presence. It all depends what you are trying to accomplish. I've got > loads of negs of graffitti, streetsigns, door numbers, which together could > be used to tell a story about the places the signs are from. I've been trying to shoot my city (toronto) in this way with very little success. But at xmas I went back to Lincoln in England, and shot a few rolls that are among the best 'human landscape' that I've ever done. Will post them when I get a moment. So the answer is: you can shoot whatever you want, of course, but the human landscape without the human figure is a remarkable challenge. It sounds like it should be easy but it's stunningly hard. The only thing easy about it is that it's easy to make boring, sterile pictures. We've talked about this before, but the best human landscape stuff I've seen really is mark powers' THE SHIPPING FORECAST, which has a lot of human figures in it, I know. - -- John Brownlow http://www.pinkheadedbug.com