Re: [Leica] Salgado - Simply The Best?? Talk amongst yourselves

["B. D. Colen" <bdcolen@earthlink.net>]

Okay, Bob - You've shut me up. I lay NO claim to being able to carry on
anything but the most superficial conversation in re art theory, etc.

I would suggest, however, that the fact that the "art world" and
photography diverged as photography took over the representational
aspects of art, doesn't mean that as representational a form of
photography as docureportojournalism can't be "art." I think.

And while you are right about the power and perceived accuracy of photo
reportage - and its impact and believability - good written journalism
can and often does convey a far fuller, far far more accurate "picture"
of a situation or event than photography, with its nanoseconds out of
context, can ever hope to convey.

Cheers

B. D.

Bob Walkden wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> > Well, I see where this could deteriorate pretty quickly...but...
> 
> it seems to have started already...
> 
> > I wasn't suggesting comparing documentary and "art" photographers. What
> > I was suggesting is that documentary photography can definitely have
> > artistic, as well as social, value, and I for one think that Salgado's
> > work is an example of that.
> 
> I have a small bee in my bonnet about the relationship between photography,
> particularly reportage, and art. It's quite a long argument, which I
> haven't really got time to go into in detail at the moment unfortunately,
> but I'll try and sketch some of the salient points.
> 
> My first point is that photographers (or at least, people on photography
> discussion lists and in photography magazines) seem to feel a sense of
> inferiority towards Art-with-a-capital-A and hanker after art status. This
> is curious because the history of art (I mean specifically painting) since
> the birth of photography has been a headlong flight away from photography.
> Photography turned painting upside by usurping its representational role.
> By and large the philosophy of art until then had been about
> representationalism; photography caused a crisis and ever since then art
> has been in search of a coherent philosophy, which it hasn't yet found.
> 
> For photography to engage with the art world it must engage with the avant
> garde, but in my opinion the avant garde and reportage photography are
> mutually exclusive by virtue of what they are trying to do, so reportage
> photography considered as art could only be bad art. There are, of course,
> artists using photographs as a medium, such as Wolfgang Tillmans, but this
> doesn't mean that all photography can or should be considered in art terms
> any more than Chris Ophili's (sp?) use of elephant dung as a medium means
> that all of Dumbo's droppings can or should be treated as Art.
> 
> Without wishing to get involved in a long discussion about the philosophy
> of art, it seems likely that the only coherent definition of Art is that it
> is a long conversation with its own history. So an object has art status if
> and only if it is a connected part of that conversation. We can determine
> whether or not it is good or bad art by the quality of its contribution to
> the conversation. I don't believe that reportage photography as practiced
> by Nachtwey, Salgado et al. is (or even should be) part of that
> conversation, and if it is then it is almost certainly bad Art.
> 
> My own opinion is that reportage photography has no need of Art status. It
> seems to me that reportage is what photography does supremely well, that it
> does this better than it does anything else, and that nothing else does
> reportage as well as photography - although reportage writing comes close.
> This is because it exploits the unique quality of photography, which is
> believability. However sophisticated we are, and however much we know that
> the camera does lie, we still believe in the representational power of
> photography. Anybody who thinks this is false should try replacing their
> passport photo with a miniature oil painting and see how many countries
> they can get into. Most art photography goes against the properties of the
> medium and as a result becomes both bad art and bad photography, just as a
> watercolour which tried to be an oil would be highly unlikely to succeed.
> 
> So to claim that reportage photography has artistic value, but then not to
> talk about in the same terms that apply to the rest of the art world, is
> contradictory. If Salgado's work has artistic value then we should talk
> about that aspect of his work in the same terms as we talk about Tillman's
> work, which, at least in my opinion, would be a category error.
> 
> Another option, which is the one I choose to take, is to consider reportage
> as not part of the art world, and in no need of art status. I think it
> stands on its own 3 legs.
> 
> > As I'm sure you know, there are in fact
> > those who think that he work is "too beautiful" and because of that
> > loses its documentary value.
> 
> Indeed. I don't have any patience with that point of view.
> 
> One of the major causes of confusion in people's minds when it comes to
> considering photography and art, is that they share a vocabulary, namely
> the vocabulary of visual literacy - they both use colour, form, tone,
> texture, perspective and so on - but they use them to different purposes.
> 
> > I, too, seriously doubt that their purpose is to have an impact on
> > photography. That doesn't mean that they don't have one, and it doesn't
> > mean that that impact isn't meaningful and important.
> 
> Possibly, but as a general rule documentary photographers are very
> conservative in the way they show their subjects. Robert Frank of course
> was a glaring exception to this, but I think that Salgado isn't. His
> compositional techniques and his general style are very conservative indeed
> (albeit impressive) and strongly influenced by the tradition of Western
> religious art. The word that people come up with time and time again to
> describe his work is 'biblical' - to such an extent that it's a tired old
> cliche itself. What they mean by this is that a great deal of his work
> recalls paintings of Madonnas, depositions from the cross, pietas and so
> forth. They work very well and communicate very effectively on an emotional
> level because of these references, but they are deeply conservative and
> only a documentary photographer could get away with it. If an art
> photographer, or indeed any other artist, tried to make use of the same
> devices they would have to do it in an ironic, post-modern way to avoid
> accusations of (unintentional) kitsch.
> 
> And these are not the only expressive devices he uses, of course. Many of
> his pictures, particularly those of workers, use the same techniques as
> Socialist Realism to depict the heroic nature of manual work and are very
> successful because of this in provoking our responses. This is not a
> criticism of what he does - I admire his work as much as anybody else - but
> I don't think he's stretching the envelope or moving photography forward,
> whatever that means, in the way that people like Frank or Hank did.
> 
> > BTW - As you were talking about the impossibility of defining
> > documentary photography...I would suggest that HCB isn't really a
> > documentary photographer. He has done some documentary photography, but
> > somehow I don't see him in that camp.
> 
> Well, I agree with you about that, but as the Devil's Advocate it would
> probably be a straightforward matter to come up with a definition of
> documentary photography that includes him, or confuses the subject to such
> an extent that further discussion is rendered impossible. It's largely a
> matter of labels, and doesn't really affect what the photographer actually
> does. Capa understood this when he advised Hank to call himself a
> photojournalist rather than an artist.
> 
> Incidentally, I prefer the term reportage to describe what Salgado,
> Nachtwey and so on do. I think this term includes documentary photography
> as a specialised category, and also includes what HCB does. But this
> definition of terms is a rather dull discussion about which shoe-boxes to
> put things in, and doesn't affect the things themselves in any way.
> Unfortunately people often end up arguing about the shoe-boxes and losing
> sight of the photographs.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Bob