[Leica] Beware HCB Wannabes

[passaro.vince at gmail.com (Vince Passaro)]

I don't who "you" is here Jeffery but my point was that the least safe and
comforting the artist, the better the artist. The great artists who've been
in practice and at home obnoxious and worse are legion, and I do believe
there is a correlation between their vision and the barbed wire they seem to
be wearing as jock straps. Being nice doesn't get the job done, most of the
time. There are of course exceptions. Many. Still, if you want to use
"obnoxious" as the measuring term, you've lost most of us; it's a school
marm's word, an accountant's word, a ticket collector's word, and efforts
not to be obnoxious while likely good for the smooth operation of polite
society (and all its hidden crimes) are not interesting or important to us.
Sometimes the best technique is  'silence, exile and cunning' which I think
is what you really mean, outside the ninth grade geography teacher vocab of
'obnoxious'; and sometimes it's not and the artist has to become something
of a terrorist.  Sometimes we have to INTERRUPT.  There is no way really to
be discreet taking people's photos on the street and indeed one of the
complaints was not that he was up in people's faces but that he was trying
to be discreet: far away with telephoto lenses -- ie, "creepy."

As far as his work goes (I'm about to go look at it), we should all keep in
mind that art of the second order makes art of the first order possible. And
on down the line. So Rabs is quite right: he is us, period.

Vince

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 9:34 PM, Jeffery Smith <jsmith342 at gmail.com> 
wrote:

> You agree that the more obnoxious the photographer, the better the
> photographer, as long as he's doing whatever he wants? Cool.
>
> On Mar 18, 2010, at 8:04 PM, Vince Passaro wrote:
>
> > I agree with Rabs. Of course. And a further thought: I remember one day
> not
> > long ago -- within the last decade that means, to us oldies -- seeing a
> > photographer with a Leica 35mm camera on Fifth Ave near the corner of
> 57th
> > or 58th St I think (possibley a few blocks osouth of there) standing in
> the
> > flow of the crowd just whirling right and left and all the way around
> taking
> > pictures of people only .7 meters from their faces in many cases, or
> > sometimes a bit further. He was like a dervish: to watch him was to see a
> > man who was completely lost in what he was doing, the faces in the crowd,
> > images momentarily clarified within a blur, him catching them probably
> not
> > in full focus most of hte time, taking pictures (and manually advancing
> the
> > film) as fast as I've ever seen anyone with that kind of equipment work.
> I
> > deeply admired him. He looked insane. He was frightening people. Some
> > people, that is. It was New York after all and many just made their way
> > around him and kept on without a backward glance.
> >
> > Here's a very short, famous, Eastern-ish poem for street photographer's
> > everywhere. The title is "In a Station of the Metro" - it's only two
> lines
> > long:
> >
> > The apparition of these faces in a crowd;
> > Petals on a wet black bough.
> >
> > it's like a Capa picture double exposed onto an Ansel Adams....
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 8:37 PM, Mark Rabiner <mark at rabinergroup.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >>> I think the size of his cannon...er....Canon..is what is making him so
> >>> conspicuous and is what is unnerving his subjects. My reference to the
> >> Leica
> >>> RF is not so he can be like HCB, but so he might be less conspicuous.
> >> Robert
> >>> Capa's Contax would be fine too. Using a big SLR with a telephoto to
> get
> >>> pictures of young ladies is paparazzi-ish, not streetphotography-ish.
> >>>
> >>> Jeffery
> >>
> >>
> >> I think he can set up an 8x10 view camera if he feels like it if he's
> not
> >> blocking the sidewalk too much.
> >>
> >> [Rabs]
> >> Mark William Rabiner
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
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> >>
> >
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