Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/05/05
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 11:43 AM 5/5/99 -0700, you wrote: > The objectives of news and documentary film on the one hand and Orson > Welles's "Citizen Kane" and Robert Altman's "Nashville" on the other > differ in the same way as the objectives of photojournalism and art. The objectives are mixed. In some ways they are the same. Communicate. In others, they couldn't be farther apart. But then Orson Wells would never claim that Citizen Kane is a work of art. That is not fake. Faking is when you go around representing your pictures as candid when they were not. Remember the Dosineau controversy of the last 80s? >Surrealism is an artistic style, and whether Cartier-Bresson considers >himself that or something else is of far less importance than what he >created in whatever style. He made it SEEM that "Photojournalism and art >are not so far apart," perhaps, because he, extraordinarily, while >practicing photojournalism, produced some great works of art. Photojournalism, to my mind, is the greatest expression of photographic are there is. Why? Because the very nature of photography has been representational. In the sense that the point of it is to show what's in front of the lens. Other artistic expressions have come from photography. Abstract (Man Ray and his Rayographs being an extreme - and cool - example). But what is the very nature of photography is expressed in photojournalism at its best. Not the every day ho-hum. I'm talking Gene Smith (even though he set up some of his pictures and manipulated some images - he was in the teething stages of photojournalism as it's practiced today), Sebastiao Salgado, Jim Stanfield, Sam Abell, Eli Reed, Alex Webb, William Albert Allard, Sarah Leen, Carol Guzy, Maggie Steeber, David Allen Harvey. These people are at least the equals, and in my estimation head and shoulders above most "artists" out there for being true to the essential nature of photography. That is, a lens projecting an image on film, unmanipulated for the most part other than the basic principles of image manipulation for color and tone. Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Bullock, White, Sexton, Weston, Weston, and a host of others are also true to the nature of photography. Artists of the highest order. Some manipulate, some don't. That's not the point. Art is a subject that philosophers take on with massive tomes. I'm not about to try to define it precisely. Nobody here could either, I suspect. But we all know it when we see it. It is a matter of opinion. One slice of that art world is photojournalism - at the high end, that is. Eric Welch St. Joseph, MO http://www.ponyexpress.net/~ewelch Never forget: 2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2.