Jim Chinn
Member
df cardwell said:Do you mean Gene Smith's Walk to Paradise Garden ?
Well, yeah. It was a single roll of film, the first he shot since being shot up on Okinawa, after a long and painful rehab. His first attempt to make a picture since his awful war years. Yeah, he staged it, but so what ? The story is well known, well documented, and damn good photograph. Not to mention, the contact sheet has been published many times, as well.
And, if I recall, they are even HIS kids.
Pray, examine it. What IS your point ?
There was an article on Smith sometime ago in Camera and Darkroom about how he would use bleach and dye to change the direction that people were looking in an image (Spanish Funeral), or add elemets from other negatives such as the case with some shots of Albert Schwietzer. Smith was a great phtographer and and I admire his work. But not everything we see in the print was actually there when the shot was made. Is it fraud? to some degree. Is it poetic license? Maybe a better term.
If I recall, Dosineau never said anything about using actors untill one of the people in the shot talked about it.
To clarify, there are two Iwo Jma shots. The most popular and the one that is depicted in a statue in DC is based on the "staged" version which was a recreation of the original.