[Leica] The Barnack Award, or bubble gum photography!

[mlpowell at sbcglobal.net (Matthew Powell)]

On Jul 14, 2004, at 11:03 AM, Slobodan Dimitrov wrote:
> http://www.leica-camera.com/kultur/events/wettbewerbe/obp/index_e.html
>
> I kept mulling of what it reminded me of, when it dawned on me where 
> I've
> seen the like of it before. In this case, more like where I've heard it
> before, as the term bubble gum popped into my brain.
> I guess that this is their way of going after the youth market, by 
> selecting
> what is essentially 70's retro imagery. In other  words bubble gum
> photography.
> S. Dimitrov

I can't see enough from the images on their website to comment on the 
actual photos. It's only a little bit better than looking at a contact 
sheet. Very disappointing of Leica (Hasselblad has the same problem 
with their galleries, from what I remember).

The mention of trends and 'classical photography' reminds me of a John 
Szarkowski interview in the spring Modern Painters -

NK - Do you think photographs always become more interesting with time?

JS - Most become more interesting with time. Naive photographers always 
become more interesting with time. By naive I mean photographs that 
were not made with high artistic ambition. On the other hand, if you 
take the photographs that Stieglitz exhibited at the Albright Gallery 
in Buffalo in 1910, those pictures have become much less interesting - 
and they weren't very interesting to begin with because all they had 
was artistic ambition. Whereas naive photographers almost always have 
something of the world in them. Misdirected artistic ambition can turn 
into an effort to squeeze the world out so that there is nothing left 
but aesthetics, because then everybody can plainly see that it is art. 
It has to be art, because there's nothing else there. Even good, 
serious photographers like me can find themselves doing photographs 
that can be about very little but the highly attenuated, photographic 
or artistic problem - and then it doesn't have much to do with the 
world any more.

(typos surely mine)