[Leica] integrity?

[pswango at att.net (Phil Swango)]

There's a good book that looks at this issue from several perspectives:
straight photography, pictorialism, documentary, and fine art photography.
It's Joel Eisinger's "Trace and Transformation." UNM Press:1995.  The title
gives a hint to the ideas behind the discussion.  All photographs reveal a
trace of some original object or event, and all photographs transform the
original into something completely different.  Compare an actual person to
a monochrome 2-D snapshot of him.  You won't have any trouble telling which
is which. ;-)

Here's a sample from the chapter on documentary photography:

"Those directly involved in documentary photography understood not
only the degree to which they selected the truth but also the degree to
which they inflected it. Such inflection comes about, in part, through the
unavoidable choices of camera angle, length of lens, lighting, and so on,
choices every photographer makes all the time. But the documentary pho-
tographers also shaped the truth by directing human subjects and arrang-
ing inanimate subject matter. Documentarians, however, did not write
about these aspects of their work until years later, so it was not something

the public or the critics of documentary photography were aware of. In
general, contemporary writing on documentary photography hardly ques-
tioned the assumption that photographs show an unambiguous truth."
I found this on Questia, the online library.  I just might have to
subscribe.  What a great way to access books!

-- 
Phil Swango
307 Aliso Dr SE
Albuquerque, NM 87108
505-262-4085