Re: [Leica] ELEKTRONIX

[Bill Satterfield <cwsat@istate.net>]

Descartes expressed it very well when he said---" I think, therefore I am".
Another unnamed philosopher said----Words are leaky vessels for communicating
thoughts"

Daniel Bowdoin wrote:

> 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