Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Channelling Atget...


Julian Thomas posted this picture of his on his blog The Bartender Never Gets Killed and said of it:

"Every time I walk past this it makes my skin creep…"; Which immediately caught my attention (although the picture itself had already done that very directly)

Ed Nixon left a pertinent comment about it saying:


"This is it in a nutshell: the rest of the world (as typified in my experience by my friends, family and acquaintances) would never think of or credit the idea of making a photo because it makes their skin creep. Formal qualities aside — which they will probably not even see because of the spasmodic glaze that comes into the eye in reaction to the ‘ugly’ subject. And so the viewership (awful word) seems stuck back in the conceptual 20s, 30s to 50s with images of textured rocks, trees, mountains and sand dunes. (Nothing wrong with those images, by the way.) You look through the pages of a glossy periodical dedicated to fine art (and definitely analog) black and white photography for example, the ones where the advertisers are galleries and well heeled art photographers, and you see a collection of variations based on, say, three images or image stereotypes — rocks, trees and shores (with more rocks mutes by blurry water.)

What to do? It’s not like folks are dying to have their precious preconceptions and biases challenged. Or falling over themselves to become informed about what has been going on over the past 40 or so years. But maybe I’m misguided; maybe it really is all and only about the light; content is just glue."

BTW, Julian still seems to be working on his various "Exotics" and "Minimal Pairs"



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