Re: [Leica] ELEKTRONIX

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

Don Dory wrote:
> 
> B.D.
> 

> So, below is my ramblings on images that profoundly affected me.  Not in
> specific order but in stream of remembrance so probably significant.
> 
> W E. Smith's Minimata image of the little girl being bathed.  Far more
> impact to become green than Rachel Carson or the Sierra Club.  Just think,
> one little picture if publicized could change many people re the impact
> people have on the environment.

Amazing image. And now at the center of yet another storm of controversy
as Aileen Smith has given all rights to the image to the child's
parents, and they in turn have asked that it never again be
displayed...in any form...
> 
> W.E. Smith's image of the Marines holding up the deformed discarded baby.
> Powerful anti-war image from the "Good" war.  For me even more moving than
> the napalmed girl in Vietnam or the VC being executed also from Vietnam.

Don't know as I'd go as far as the last line, but it is a powerful
reminder of who the real victims of modern warfare are.
> 
> W.E Smith again with his image of the Haitian insane asylum resident
> particularly the last one where you could see only the eyes. One image
> bringing up all the dark feelings inside, telling you where you will end up
> if you don't resist.

Yes...But....This image raises all the usual questions about Smith and
his darkroom manipulations. The original image is pretty mundane. This
one was, in essence, created in the darkroom as he burned and burned and
burned to eliminate everything but that partial face.....Still a
powerful, scary image...

And speaking of that one....it is the cover illustration on the jacket
of a newly released novel...with NO photographer's credit...and if
someone can do that with one of W. Eugene Smith's iconic images, what
does that tell you about the chances the rest of us ultimately have to
protect our rights...
> 
> Earnest Haas in "The Creation" the airplane shot of the migrating birds, a
> diagonal band of white against the earth.  Beautiful as an abstract and
> beautiful as a metaphor for life.
> 

Beautiful


> Ralph Gibson's half image of a girls face. Simply a wonderful image at every
> level.  The one where the edge of the face acts as a divider between light
> and darkness with absolutely sharp eyelashes

Don't know this one or the next....:-(
> 
> Ralph Gibson's "The Somnambulist"  Every photographer should read this book.
> 
> Robert Frank "The Americans"  Risking a flaming, it's as if he was
> possessed, forced to produce some of the best photography of the 50's.
> Challenging America to rethink itself.  Possibly allowed the Civil Rights
> movement to proceed by forcing a smug intelligentsia to look at what was
> really out in America.

Terrific body of work...Don't think however that it had a damn thing to
do with the civil rights movement...The civil rights movement was about
American blacks - and later sympathetic whites working with them -
risking their lives by saying ENOUGH! and having the "audacity" to
demand to right to vote, go to decent schools, and when all is said and
done, be treated like Americans, rathern than like black South Africans.
Didn't have a damn thing to do with a Swiss photographer, who may have
had great impact on the photo and art world, but that's a pretty insular
world....
> 
> >From an unknown to me photographer an image of  an incinerated Iraqi soldier
> who in his last moments was trying to flee his burning truck.  A very
> powerful image almost impossible to find in American journalism but shown
> fairly widely in Europe and I suppose the rest of the world.

Amazing shot..
> 
> Avedon's "In the American West" for showing me how much can be revealed
> about the photographer in a portrait.

Very good point...I'm not big on the work at all, but you are absolutely
right about what it says about the photographer...
> 
> Michael Kenna's Notre Gardens book.  This book has absolutely wonderful
> images of the gardens surrounding the great French Chateau's.  The
> perspective that they were taken from both uplifts as spiritual beauty but
> also instructs as a photographer.

See Gibson comment.;-)
> 
> Last for this posting, the self portrait from that famous flower
> photographer where the top of a death's head cane is critically in focus
> with the upper torso of the photographer just out of focus.  The calm
> acceptance of certain fate is instructive.
> 
Could it be Maplethorp?


> Thanks for listening
> 
> Don
> "Good taste" is a virtue of the keepers of museums.  If you scorn bad taste,
> you will have neither palaces nor gardens."
> 
> dorysrus@mindspring.com