Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/11/24

[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]

Subject: RE: [Leica] Homeless: flowers of the street
From: "Mueller, Rob" <rob.mueller@eds.com>
Date: Wed, 24 Nov 1999 09:44:33 -0500

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.