Re: [Leica] ELEKTRONIX

[Daniel Bowdoin <danlb@mindspring.com>]

Dave Jenkins wrote

>I graduated from college in 1960, so I am very much a product of the
>50s. I do not find the America of good-hearted people I knew in "The
>Americans." Frank's book is the work of an European who did not
>understand America or Americans, who had the basic European's contempt
>for our uncultured ways, and who could not reconcile the sprawl and
>diversity of this country with his button-downed Swiss background. On
>some levels "The Americans" may be a great piece of work. Undeniably, it
>has been seminal in its effects and undoubtedly did cause some americans
>to think differently about their country. Which is unfortunate, because
>the book is essentially a lie about America.
>
>As is Avedon's book "In the American West." . . . . .

>Yes. What it reveals is that the photographer is dead as a doornail in
>his soul. No photographer can find deadness everywhere he looks, as
>Avedon does, unless he himself is dead inside.
>
>Dave Jenkins
>
>
>:  "The contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion,
>without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a
>whole harvest of invention."
>            . . .Francis Bacon

There seems to me to be considerable incongruity between your admiring
citation of Bacon (this was also a favorite of Dorothea Lange) and your
harsh assessments of Frank and, particularly, Avedon. They photographed
what they saw and what they see. That their vision does not validate your
own view of the world is hardly, or at least certainly not necesessarily,
an indication that it is filled with "error or confusion, substitution or
imposture". It simply means that their vision and yours are not the same.
To accuse Frank of creating a lie and Avedon of being spiritually dead,
on the basis of those two bodies of work, suggests to me nothing more
than pretention derived from an apparently somewhat circumscribed range
of life experience. 

On the question of the relationship between the photographer and the
subject of the photograph, as well as on the relationship between the
photograph and the Truth, Avedon's comments in the foreword to In the
American West are interesting and worth thinking about. Photographers are
rarely so reflective and articulate about what they are doing and why
they are doing it.

Daniel Bowdoin