[Leica] Rural America????

[Howard L Ritter Jr]

+1. These images look like location shoots for this season’s poverty-chic fashions.

More than laboriously staged (not in itself a bad thing, I would say, if the point is not straight reportage but activism or advocacy), and in some cases intrusively HDR’d, the photos are, and look, posed. This is also not necessarily a bad thing, etc., but here it’s the WAY that the models (I can’t see the people as anything but that) are posed. Their bodily attitudes and often their arrangements in the illustrations look forced and tendentious, completely unnatural, placed in a tableau like mannikins in a display window (I know, I’m mixing fashion metaphors). Crewdson might as well have posted a paragraph with each one lecturing the viewer in detail on what particular pathos is supposed to be engendered by the image, because none is.

Poverty porn.

I don’t know what writer on photography would see these as natural. Maybe one who’s never taken a picture.

—howard

> On May 30, 2018, at 15:11, Tina Manley via LUG <lug at leica-users.org> wrote:
> 
> PESO:
> 
> "While the photos look natural, they are in fact laboriously staged."
> 
> No, they do not look natural.  They look laboriously staged.
> 
> https://www.cnn.com/style/article/gregory-crewdson-photographers-gallery/index.html
> 
> Opinions?
> 
> Tina
> 
> -- 
> Tina Manley
> www.tinamanley.com
> tina-manley.artistwebsites.com
> http://www.alamy.com/stock-photography/3B49552F-90A0-4D0A-A11D-2175C937AA91/Tina+Manley.html
> 
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