Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/03/29

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Subject: [Leica] Re: Luc Delahaye's Camera
From: Peter Metelerkamp <peter.metelerkamp@bristol.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 14:32:32 +0100
References: <200103290801.AAA10880@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>

I read in the recent predictably vacuous review in 
(British) Amateur Photographer that he used an M6. Are 
those who have posted sure it was a G2 (not that it 
matters, really!)?

For those who have not seen it, Winterreise is a sad 
comment on the state of photographic publishing - by as 
august an imprint as Phaidon, no less. 

The series of pictures accumulates by steady growth towards 
a great work for our dislocated times, as strong and
operatic and deeply courageous and elegaic as anything 
being made in any art form. And this is not merely 
a matter of "topic" or subject-matter. Delahaye is, for 
example, (IMHO - of course!) a far more eloquent colourist 
(and composer/arranger) than Boris Michailov whose (also 
profound and admirable) work exploring the more Gorky-esque
dimesions of that zone "Beyond the Fall" (Anthony Suau) 
recently won the Citibank prize, while his work is braver 
and more difficult than the lyrical formalism of Sarfati's 
sad depleted factories. 

But this huge effort is utterly traduced by being rendered 
consistently split across the spine of a miserable little 
book in trendy full-bleed; the designer/accountant 
responsible should be chained together and sent to Siberia,
where they can offer the plea of "economic necessity" to 
the court of the indifferent winds, while vast and vulgar 
coffee-table tomes rain down upon them like anti-radar 
chaff from the gaping cloaca of our culture. 

- ----------------------
Peter Metelerkamp
Programme Director
MA in Film and Television Production
University of Bristol 
peter.metelerkamp@bris.ac.uk