Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/07/18
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]>Why not peaceful, quiet portraits without B+G, or maybe even a landscape >without what are intended to be clubbed to death animals? > >Yes, it may be your right, but isn't the world filled with enough >sneaking around and B+G or general ugliness? > >Give it a break, try for something more..... mainstream. when i look out my window, there are no quiet portraits. we live in a neighborhood with little pretense. the people around me are living at the fringes of existence. they buy drugs, they get beaten up, they get stabbed, robbed, they steal things, they throw their trash into the yards of their neighbors, their houses burn. they lead lives of negligible consequence and great desperation. these are the people i know, these are their lives, this is what i photograph. i can already turn out a very mainstream portrait relatively consistantly. my portfolio is crammed with them. so what's the point anymore? there are about six million leica photographers who do portraits and landscapes and nearly every one of them is better than i'm ever going to be at it. why jocky for position in front of el capitan with forty other people when you can be the only photographer crouched over the sidewalk watching three red ants meticulously chew the head off of a black ant? i can't close my eyes and pretend there aren't 8 year old girls working as prostitutes and living in sewers. i feel compelled to show everybody else what i see because i don't think that 8 year old girls should be living in sewers working as prostitutes. the thing about the photo of the girl with the bat and the dead opossum, apart from it being technically vaccant because i didn't take the time with it that i could have (and probably should have refrained from posting it for that reason alone), is that if it was a photo of a nice white haired old man and his 13 year old grandson kneeling behind the gutted corpse of an 8 point buck, grinning from ear to ear, it would have recieved nothing but praise here. except from mark rabiner, who would have posted "hey! that deer got shot twice!" and nobody would have known what he meant one way or the other.