Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/09/26
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]on 26/9/00 3:51 pm, Austin Burbridge at Austin.Burbridge@Alumni.Brown.edu wrote: > What I appreciate about On Photography is that it is a useful > compendium of received ideas, circa 1977. . . . I respect the > activity, although I do think of them as received ideas I've always felt it was an outsider's view of photography... a theoretical take on it that didn't have much to do with its actual practice. it's *easy* to theorize photography as an invasive, colonistic, masculine practice... easy and in the cases of most photographers whose work actually means a damn, quite wrong. I remember reading ON PHOTOGRAPHY the first time and feeling very emotionally bruised because it seemed to be accusing me as a photographer per se of all sorts of things which I had very consciously determined not to do. It wasn't until later that I realised it was SS who had the problem and not me. Her vision of photography is a straw man. Yes, it was a bunch of received ideas, and of-its-time, but presented as assertions, as fact, as analysis. It made me wonder if she had ever actually picked up a camera. Compare and contrast with, for example, the (to me) amazing writings of Robert Adams, or Edward Weston's daybooks. The difference is that the two latter are/were totally engaged with the practice of photography. In between the two I suppose falls Szarkowski, who was enough of a critic to remain distanced from the smell of developer, and enough of a photographer to get the film on the reel. - -- Johnny Deadman http://www.pinkheadedbug.com