Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/08/01

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Subject: RE: [Leica] Documentary photography - pj
From: "B. D. Colen" <bdcolen@earthlink.net>
Date: Thu, 1 Aug 2002 17:11:55 -0400

Matteo Persivale wrote:
mr Colen,

your distinction between work made on assignment
and personal work, is dangerously close -- for me --
to the criticism (by many, even by other PJ's like
Donna Ferrato for example) that Salgado makes a lot
of money selling his work and that's bad because
he shoots dirt-poor people.
- -----
Sorry, Matteo, but me thinks you protesteth too much.;-) There is absolutely
nothing in what I wrote to suggest that I begrudge the ability of pjs and
documentary photographers to earn a good living. Nor did I say, nor would I
for a minute buy into, anything as stupid as suggesting that a Salgado
should sell his cameras and give his money to the poor.

What I said was that documentary photography ultimately has little impact in
terms of changing the world. Certainly there have been exceptions to this -
as Steven Alexander pointed out the photography that came out of the
American South during the Civil Rights movement had an enormous impact on
national attitudes on race. Not enormous enough, unfortunately, but that has
to do with our inherent national racism, not with the work of photo
journalists and t.v. camera men, who often literally laid their lives on the
line in order to show the rest of the nation what was going on in places
like Selma, Birmingham and the like.

But once again that raises the question of the distinction between daily
journalism and long-term documentary work. The work of most serious
documentary photographers is unknown to the vast majority of literate, well
educated people, at least in the U.S. I would be willing to bet, for
example, that most people in the U.S. who agree with the worldview of
Sabastio Salgado are utterly unaware of who he is.

It's damn hard to change the world when the world never sees your work.

B. D.

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