Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2010/03/25
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Looking at all the Jim Marshall pics on the Times site and on The Online Photographer (the two by the way are running reversed versions of the Miles Davis pic and something tells me it's the Times, not the OP, that's got it wrong) I started thinking about great portrait photography; of course I thought of it in terms of how I cannot do it; and it struck me that what I admire so much about it and what makes it so hard for me to do is that the space between the camera and the subject is clear; that great portraitists are interested in what's there whereas my training, as a writer, is to be interested in how I'm reacting to what's there, seeing it, constituting it (or re-constituting it) in language. I can meet people, exchange pleasantries, and be (essentially in secret) watching them, assessing them, memorizing them, so that I can go home and render them not as they ARE or even remarkably closely to how THEY APPEAR TO BE but rather as I have seen them and reshaped them. I do this by writing words down to evoke certain images and certain kinds of understandings. But it's an exceedingly low-res portrait: the writer leaves room for the reader to fill in with his or her own imaginative vision so that the reader is bonded to the text. When I go to take a picture of someone I am too aware of myself there with the camera; I feel clumsy or embarrassed or pushy or trivial or comical or SOMETHING that's important to me: and I feel as if I should be DOING something to make that person become that person, whereas of course what I need to do is be invisible. But how I feel about me in the scene still matters. So the space is never clear, the light is obscured, because in the end all the great portraitists from Paul Strand or Walker Evans or even that French Cote d'Azure guy who's always taking slightly out of focus pictures of flappers climbing on summer rocks -- what was his name? -- 1920s... or Man Ray for that matter, so stylized: they all have a style, certainly, but the space between the lens and the subject is left clear of opinion as it were. Guys like Irving Penn and Avedon --- LARTIGUE is the French dude's name, it just came back to me -- Penn and Avedon can be egomaniacs and probably were but not while the camera was at their eye. But since I cannot do it my speculations on what it requires could be entirely wrong. Only practice confirms truth, really. On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 9:15 PM, EPL <manolito at videotron.ca> wrote: > In 1999, Jim Marshall and I corresponded a little and then talked by phone > a > few times about Leica gear. Jim -- like me -- was a certified gearhead. > Yes, > he preferred the M4 (his were modified) above all other Ms. > > But more important: he took some of my favourite photos. Janis Joplin with > the Southern Comfort mickey is one. > > Lucky man, he was, at a time when his nation was in turmoil, he saw the > best > of it. > > Emanuel > > > _______________________________________________ > Leica Users Group. > See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information >