Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/09/26

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Subject: Re: [Leica] Suzy Q, again
From: John Brownlow <john@pinkheadedbug.com>
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 16:34:41 -0400

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