Looking at Life Magazine

[doughowk]

A Review of exhibit at International Center of Photography. An interesting quote, from the review, about photojournalist's efforts to use photography to change the world

they're so beautiful that they subvert their own mission to expose the horrors of poverty under Franco. They romanticize the village, in the way Walter Benjamin famously fretted about when he described the paradox of photography in general. The camera, artfully used, he wrote, was "incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it." It turns even "abject poverty itself, by handling it in a modish, technically perfect way, into an object of enjoyment."

The review includes a slideshow of some of the pictures featured at the exhibit.