Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/08/30

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Subject: Re: [Leica] Talk amongst yourselves...
From: "ML" <lenonm@milwaukee.tec.wi.us>
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2001 11:08:41 -0500
References: <5.1.0.14.2.20010821170924.0230d130@xsj02.sjs.agilent.com> <5.1.0.14.2.20010828212121.02fba4e0@127.0.0.1> <3B8D4191.CE66828@rabiner.cncoffice.com> <3B8D43E6.6C714462@earthlink.net>

Now, *that* was fine.

Whatever personal sense of inadequacy Anthony may feel about his war
photography, he need feel none about his writing.

My goodness... I do appreciate fine writing. If only I could write so well.
<sigh>

Thanks for taking the time to key that in. :-)

- -Bruce

P.S. Is his last name actually "Loyd," or might it be "Lloyd?"



- ----- Original Message -----
From: "B. D. Colen" <bdcolen@earthlink.net>
To: <leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>
Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2001 2:35 PM
Subject: [Leica] Talk amongst yourselves...


> about some fascinating observations by a young British vet of the Gulf
> War and Northern Ireland who went to the former Yugoslavia and Chechnya
> as a freelance photographer and writer for a London paper....
>
> Anthony Loyd, "My War Gone By, I Miss It So," Anchor, 2000, p 109, 110
>
>
> "The photographs I had taken that day were useless. Take away the sound,
> motion and atmosphere from a scene of fighting, transpose an image onto
> a two-dimensional surface, and you have to have something really special
> even to communicate a trace of the madness you have witnessed. My shots
> were clumsy and empty: blurred figures running with guns; even the
> firing looked cardboard, meaningless. I had been there, I knew the
> reality. Friends there knew it. They were all wise enough to know what
> might lie behind a fuzzy shot of a soldier running. But people who had
> never been to war? Their understanding of combat was the Hollywood
> version, in which you watch one man fire and the other man fall, a
> tandem you hardly ever seen in war, and if you do the chances are it
> happens too quickly to get on film.
>
> "When a photographer does capture 'the moment' in war, what ever it is,
> it leaves all the other mediums of reportage so far behind as to make
> them almost irrelevant: a single punch to the consciousness that will
> not go away until you close your eyes or look at something else. Yet I
> was not a good photographer, and was too often frustrated by my
> inability to capture on film the essence of what I was witnessing.
> Words, though open to different interpretations by different people, at
> least allowed me greater opportunity to explain was was happening, if
> only to myself."
>

In reply to: Message from Jim Brick <jim_brick@agilent.com> ([Leica] Re: [Lieca] LUG and AOL)
Message from Tina Manley <images@InfoAve.Net> (Re: [Leica] Noctilux for Rabs)
Message from Mark Rabiner <mark@rabiner.cncoffice.com> (Re: [Leica] Noctilux for Rabs)
Message from "B. D. Colen" <bdcolen@earthlink.net> ([Leica] Talk amongst yourselves...)