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

[timatherton at theedge.ca (Tim Atherton)]

Actually I rather liked them. I'm glad the Barnack awards have moved away
from much of the clich?d B&W documentary photography which it seemed stuck
in a few years ago - same old dreary work showing "oppressed" or
disadvantaged people etc etc

(and I'm not sure what an "Arbus photo-documentary approach to subject" is
apart from an appeal to a constantly backwards looking approach to
photogrpahic clich?s that seems to dog so much current photography?)

And it's colour, which is always a good thing.

As to the subject matter - sometimes it takes an outsider to see how our
world actually looks. My experience travelling around N America is that -
oh, I don't know - 85% of the inhabited/occupied space is pretty darned
ugly/mundane/dreary/dirty etc - yet most people have become blind and immune
to it. So people just don't see it - yet within those spaces there are many
visually interesting and intriguing things. It seems that about 95% of the
photography seems to concentrate on that remaining 15% of the space - at
it's worst it's the picture postcard snapshots - at it's best, it's mostly
what 100 other photographers are also trying to photograph "meaningfully".

Mind you, what won the award here isn't really some of the best that I've
seen - but it's rather better most

tim