[Leica] New Yorker - Now literalism

[cmbrow at wm.edu (Chandos Michael Brown)]

What a treat to see this marvelous image, executed with a virtually
antique lens (that should cause those fetishists among us who grasp at
the latest and best--to make us better photographers) to blush with
shame; and what a refreshing break from the flood of utterly banal
images that clog this list and others, among which, alas, I must include
many of my own.

It's humbling, damn it.  In the now several years that I've participated
in the LUG, I haven't seen even a handful of images that I could imagine
on my wall (and to put this in some perspective, I haven't hung *any* of
my own in the house); thanks, BD, and I share your sense of the
relationship between "ambivalence" and aesthetic 'texture' (for want of
a better term), though I should say that an "ambiguous" image provokes
an "ambivalent" response, and that the uncertainty of this response
actuates precisely the 'pause' that you describe.  The late William
Empson wrote an interesting book many years ago, -Seven Types of
Ambiguity-, that speaks well to the aesthetic and theoretical issues
that your comments raise, though he is primarily concerned with
literature.


Cheers!

Chandos  

-----Original Message-----
From: lug-bounces+cmbrow=wm.edu@leica-users.org
[mailto:lug-bounces+cmbrow=wm.edu@leica-users.org] On Behalf Of B D
Colen
Sent: Wednesday, December 15, 2004 12:24 PM
To: lug@leica-users.org
Subject: [Leica] New Yorker - Now literalism

Richard Taylor observed that the Gladwell New Yorker article while
interesting,
had nothing to tell us about "Leica photography" because, after all,
unless a
photo is an abstract, we can look at it and instantly know what it's
about and
what's going on...Which leads me to observe....
-------


Ah, but let's here it for the literal minded! 
Richard, surely you aren't suggesting that photographs of people and
situations
- 1/2 to 1/8000th of a second slices of reality - can't be interpreted
many
different ways by many different observers? We all bring to our
observation of
every photograph our entire life experience - and all our life
experiences are
different. A group of us can look at the same photo and come up with
either
slightly, or widely varying interpretations of the scene before us. Last
spring
at the end of each week's class I'd show my students a photograph and
ask they
to write the first 250 words of a short story based on what they saw -
the
variation in what they came up with was astounding. Granted, they were
reaching, but go to Bill Clough's PAW - I believe for '03, but it might
be '02,
to see Madison.

The bottom line for me is that without ambivalence, it's the incredibly
rare
street photo or public scene - non-news photo - that's worth the time it
takes
to even look at it.

B. D.


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