Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/09/08

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Subject: RE: [Leica] Suddenly Susan?
From: Jem Kime <jem.kime@cwcom.net>
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2000 16:50:32 +0100

John,
I am all for photography being assessed by the art community, my point was 
more that I could not enjoy the language in which Susan Sontag wrote.

Interestingly your final para. referred to "place a particular tone where 
we want it". One of the earliest protagonists of photography as art was PH 
Emerson (who in turn inspired Steiglitz to take the concept to America 
where it flourished) and his basis for this belief was that he should be 
able, as an artist, to place any photographic tone where he wanted it - he 
merely had to find out how that could be achieved.
Alas, the findings of Hurter and Driffield dissuaded him from that delusion 
and so he renounced his claim (that photography could be art), by then of 
course the world had been persuaded (in part at lest) by practise rather 
than theory.

But still we acknowledge the distance between the multifarious uses for 
photography and the less diverse applications of fine art.

Jem

- -----Original Message-----
From:	John Collier [SMTP:jbcollier@home.com]
Sent:	08 September 2000 15:42
To:	leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
Subject:	[Leica] Suddenly Susan?

I, fortunately, have read the writings in question which originated in a
series of articles for the New York Review of Books. The collected essays,
published as "On Photography", won the National Book Critics' "Circle Award
for Criticism" in 1977. Susan Sontag, along with Janet Malcolm and others,
seem to be vilified by photographers for trying to critically place
photography within the other art movements of the 19th and 20th centuries.
They even had the "gall" to dismiss Ansel Adams' work as a continuation of
the very "pictorialism" that he and the "f64" people tried to rebel 
against.
A statement that I largely agree with.

Why do we photographers feel that only photographers can properly criticise
photography? We think of certain photographs as new or revolutionary which
are just mirroring somewhat dated trends in the current art world. We scorn
photographs that critics praise because the photograph's craftsmanship is
not up to our illustrious standards! We praise sentimental romantic fluff
because it is skilfully reproduced!

I could rant on and on but my point is that 99.99999% of photography on 
this
planet is not particularly significant to the various art movements and 
that
includes myself and most of this group. We enjoy recording the world around
us and have our appreciative, albeit captive, audience. Let's not get too
cocky because we can place a particular tone where we want it or because we
are adept at remembering to put the main subject off centre!

Disrespectfully yours :-)

John Collier

PS: I am presently reading, and enjoying, "Photograhy, A Middle-brow Art" 
by
Pierre Bourdieu :-)

> From: Walter S Delesandri <walt@jove.acs.unt.edu>
>
> Hi, Eric, and agreed....unfortunately, this wench was required
> reading in "art" school in the seventies and eighties.....now we
> have "new" gurus, equally inept, giving guest lectures and writing
> "scholarly" papers about everything BUT photographic issues....I can't
> attend most of our presentations because I couldn't keep my mouth shut
> or refrain from puking.
>
>> Sep 2000, Eric Welch wrote:
>>
>>
>> This woman should be banned from all discussion lists on photography! 
She
>> knows squat about what photography is about. Her book On Photography was 
an
>> excuse to spew her lame theories.
>>
>> Now if you want me to tell you what I REALLY think, email me privately. 
;-)
>>
>>> On 9/7/00 5:07 PM, Robert Rose at rjr@usip.com wrote:
>>>
>>> In America the photographer is not simply the
>>> person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
>>> Susan Sontag