Re: [Leica] Images of Africa WAS salgado et al.

[S Dimitrov <sld@earthlink.net>]

Main reason why I refused to go outside the immediacy of my environment.
The Third World is always a short distance away, physically and
mentally. I always tell photographers who are starting out that you
don't need to go to Stonehenge to see Stonehenge.
Photojournalism has its very foundational antecedents rooted in the
Colonial experience. It was developed to show the great strength of
Empire by using the personal and intimate in ways that script authorship
had yet to catch up to. The schools which teach it, teach ONLY
mechanics, and are as devoid of critical thinking as another post
humanist entity.
One of my problems with HCB, is that he was a colonial who never
publicly addressed the issue. He directly comes out the colonial
experience, that borders on the pied-noire. His photography, I always
felt, was an extension of whatever Republic he was living under at the
moment. As the notion of the Republic faded so did his work output.
Ortega y Gasset wrote very critically on the issues in a tidy collection
of lectures posthumously published under the title--Una interpretacion
de la historia universal. Well worth a read if one is going to engage in
this kind of debate.


 Slobodan Dimitrov