Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/08/01
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Matteo Persivale wrote: mr Colen, your distinction between work made on assignment and personal work, is dangerously close -- for me -- to the criticism (by many, even by other PJ's like Donna Ferrato for example) that Salgado makes a lot of money selling his work and that's bad because he shoots dirt-poor people. - ----- Sorry, Matteo, but me thinks you protesteth too much.;-) There is absolutely nothing in what I wrote to suggest that I begrudge the ability of pjs and documentary photographers to earn a good living. Nor did I say, nor would I for a minute buy into, anything as stupid as suggesting that a Salgado should sell his cameras and give his money to the poor. What I said was that documentary photography ultimately has little impact in terms of changing the world. Certainly there have been exceptions to this - as Steven Alexander pointed out the photography that came out of the American South during the Civil Rights movement had an enormous impact on national attitudes on race. Not enormous enough, unfortunately, but that has to do with our inherent national racism, not with the work of photo journalists and t.v. camera men, who often literally laid their lives on the line in order to show the rest of the nation what was going on in places like Selma, Birmingham and the like. But once again that raises the question of the distinction between daily journalism and long-term documentary work. The work of most serious documentary photographers is unknown to the vast majority of literate, well educated people, at least in the U.S. I would be willing to bet, for example, that most people in the U.S. who agree with the worldview of Sabastio Salgado are utterly unaware of who he is. It's damn hard to change the world when the world never sees your work. B. D. - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html