[Leica] integrity?

[henningw at archiphoto.com (Henning Wulff)]

At 10:39 AM -0600 4/18/07, Phil Swango wrote:
>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

While there seems to be some consensus on what type of photography 
constitutes photojournalism, and what sort of adjustments might move 
this into other realms, 'truth' is a whole other issue, and has only 
peripherally to do with this.

-- 
    *            Henning J. Wulff
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