N.E. Friends
Although I have been out of the area for a while now, it is nice to see that you are all sill active.
There was a Winogrand exhibition that I saw at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art just before it shut down for a major remodel. I don't think that this is the same exhibition, but it got me thinking:
Winogrand developed and printed very few of his images - mostly they were processed and printed by others for him - he would look at contact sheets, and circle the images that he wanted prints of, and the prints were generated for him. When he died, he left 10s of thousands of unprocessed, exposed rolls of film, and in the exhibition that I saw, many of these images were presented.
One of the things that bothered me was that there was some clear manipulation in the printing of some of the images, which would have been done after Winogrands death, so he would not have had any input into it - one example was a case of poorly done dodging to highlight one face in an image while leaving others darker. When I left the exhibition, one question that I had was just how much manipulation can be done by someone who is printing an image - without input from the 'photographer' - can be done and still claim that the result is the work of the photographer.
The museum presented all of the work as that of Garry Winogrand, and in a couple of prints, the name of the person who generated the print was mentioned, but for the most part the printers were anonymous.
Clearly in other artistic fields we do not expect the artist to have a hand in every step of the process. Dale Chihuly is a prolific glass artist who has not personally manipulated the glass in years. Christo presents art works of a scale that no one person could ever realize them, but in photography, we (or at least I) seem to hold on to the feeling that we should be in control of the entire process to be able to claim ownership of the image.
What do you think?
