[Leica] Anne Leibovitz

[lew1716 at gmail.com (Lew Schwartz)]

On Sun, Jul 7, 2013 at 12:54 PM, Bill Pearce <billcpearce at cox.net> wrote:

> So she is doing what painters have been doing for hundreds of years, and
> that's bad? Since when did photography have to be realistic? I thought we
> had shed those shackles years ago.


It's not a question of her being good or bad or whether or not we were ever
shackled (Were we?). If you follow the widely acknowledged distinction
between photograph and illustration made everywhere else in the media,
she'd be an illustrator, not a photographer. I don't think photography is
even essential to the images used to illustrate the article Jayanand
posted. A commercial artist with an airbrush and Illustrator could have
produced those without touching a camera. Using a camera this way has the
appeal of a tour de force, whoever would have thought you could/would do
that with a camera?  ..... so the work becomes valued as a performance: We
admire it for the skill, effort and social engineering behind its
production as opposed to its end result. Side by side with an artist's
illustration, however, there's nothing special, imo.


-Lew Schwartz