Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/11/24
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]c'mon Mike, tell us how you really feel about flowers. you must really miss Maplethorpe to be so animate. Rob (flower boy) Mueller Studies in Black and White www.studiesinblackandwhite.com rob@studiesinblackandwhite.com - -----Original Message----- From: Mike Johnston [mailto:michaeljohnston@ameritech.net] Sent: Tuesday, November 23, 1999 11:23 AM To: leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us Subject: [Leica] Homeless: flowers of the street >At a local film school, it seems that everyone wants to be "street >photographers", taking "real documentary photographs". Man oh man, if >the >homeless people in my home town got a buck for every "real documentary >photograph" taken of them, they wouldn't be homeless. A number of the homeless people around the Corcoran School and Museum in D.C. got wise and started charging the "afternoon photojournalists" $1.00 a shot to take their picture. One woman who lived on a grate was quite agressive about it--she'd chase the would-be P.J.'s down the street after they photographed her, demanding to be paid! She was pretty funny about it, too: "Yeh wouldn't know it from the way I'm lookin' now, but I'm a famous model and I get paid! Every day I get paid! Get back here, I want what's comin' to me!" It was quite alarming for most art students. The instructors considered that a part of a photographer's education too.... - --Mike P.S. Half of my involvement in photography has consisted of becoming thoroughly jaded about various clichéd subject matter. Street people were first, because everybody I ever taught in D.C. at one point or another decided that they needed to change the world with a socially meaningful photograph of a homeless person asleep on a bench or sidewalk. I used to mark students up half a grade point for the semester if they'd never shown me a "bum shot." More recently, my pet peeve has become slot canyons or slot canyons or whatever you want to call them. Awful. A plague. Worst by far are god-d**ned flower shots, which I virtually cannot discuss without profanity. If *EVERY* photograph of a flower disappeared off the earth in the flash of some benevolent genie's magic wand, it would not affect authentic human culture on earth one whit. I hate flower photographs with a fine violence and great phlegm. I wish I could innoculate myself against ever having to look at another. Actually, Arnold Crane (whose book _The Other Side of the Lens_ ,mentioned here recently, I edited), showed me one of the few good flower shots I have ever seen. Flower photographs may not be precisely the the most numerous kind of photograph, but GOOD flower photographs are definitely the rarest kind of photographs on earth; not one in ten million qualifies.