Photography hot takes!

[BrianShaw]

No one gets bothered when Weegee or Cartier or Adams gets critiqued.

Another classic hot take. You are on a roll, iteratively!!!

 

[Cholentpot]

Another classic hot take. You are on a roll, iteratively!!!

I can keep going.

Despite everything Steve McCurry is still the GOAT.

 

[Don_ih]

I've found a certain age set of men white knight them.

Whatever that certain age may be, you will eventually reach it, and your taste and ideas will be deemed "of a certain" type, also.

Anyway, I wasn't latching onto who you were identifying other than the fact they're all women.

 

[tcolgate]

No one gets bothered when Weegee or Cartier or Adams gets critiqued.

It is almost impressive that you typed that into a thread which contains multiple posts rushing to the defence of Ansel Adams. A thread on a forum that has a > 10 year running thread on HCB Appreciation that accepts no quarter on the matter of Bresson's apparently mystical skills!

 

[Don_ih]

True. There is a thread on here about a total pile of crap Cartier-Bresson photo that has many pages of people claiming the photo is great.

 

[chuckroast]

Dane Arbus, Vivian Mair, my mother, Gail Rubin, Dorothea Lange, Polly Smith, Margaret Bourke-White...

But Don does have a point, maybe the crop of photographers that I mentioned don't resonate with me. I've found a certain age set of men white knight them.



Yep. I know that folks get riled up when you critique those names I mentioned. No one gets bothered when Weegee or Cartier or Adams gets critiqued. Mention Cindy Sherman and out come the armor and lances.

For the record, Cindy Sherman's work is awful. Out of all the names I mentioned for criticism I genuinely find Sherman's work to have zero artistic worth. It's the equivalent of a girl on Tiktok upgrading her camera and lighting and taking selfies of herself and the goobers all eat it up.

I agree with Sherman and Lebowitz being vastly oversold as photographers.

But to be fair, there are any number of highly regarded men that are the darlings of the arts community whose work is mostly sophomoric snapshooting.

Among them I include Meyerowitz and Freedlander whose work I rarely find all that interesting. Vivien Maier was head and shoulders better than either of them. So it ain't a gender thing.

This seems to especially be a particular NYC disease where "The City" justifies all manner of artistic dreck. It is certainly true that art needs to be understood in its context and time, but it should have some timeless quality to it. None of the above hit that criteria in my estimation.

In fairness, almost no one can deliver a consistently great body of work over a lifetime of shooting so we need to give all the above a bunch of grace. But I rile at the arterati who constantly pimp mediocre work (cf "The Fountainhead" that deals exactly with this phenomenon).

 

[tcolgate]

Vivien Maier was head and shoulders better than either of them.

Here's a hot take (though not an original thought of my own).
We'll never know how good Vivien Maier was (or wasn't), because we've never really seen a Vivien Maier photo. She never got to print, never got to exhibit (though IIRC, she did start some discussions). All we have is a *heavily* curated collection of photos, from a source of 10s of thousands of negatives, selected by people that never knew her, and never spoke to her.

 

[Don_ih]

All we have is a *heavily* curated collection of photos,

Yet, of those photos, a large number are excellent.
But, yes, the Vivian Meier we know (the mythologized one) is the only one we can know. I'm not sure how much that actually matters, though.

 

[chuckroast]

Here's a hot take (though not an original thought of my own).
We'll never know how good Vivien Maier was (or wasn't), because we've never really seen a Vivien Maier photo. She never got to print, never got to exhibit (though IIRC, she did start some discussions). All we have is a *heavily* curated collection of photos, from a source of 10s of thousands of negatives, selected by people that never knew her, and never spoke to her.

We certainly don't know how good of a printer she was , but we do know what a good photographer she was

 

[tcolgate]

Yet, of those photos, a large number are excellent.
But, yes, the Vivian Meier we know (the mythologized one) is the only one we can know. I'm not sure how much that actually matters, though.

I guess I see it as more of a regret, in that we don't have her "voice". We have a few hundred photos selected from 150,000 photos, by a handful men that didn't know her.

 

[chuckroast]

I guess I see it as more of a regret, in that we don't have her "voice". We have a few hundred photos selected from 150,000 photos, by a handful men that didn't know her.

The same can be said for Bach... we only have his scores. And what survived was selected by men. Neither of those things impugns his genius.

 

[tcolgate]

The same can be said for Bach... we only have his scores. And what survived was selected by men. Neither of those things impugns his genius.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but Bach was a successful professional musician, quite a celebrated one, who got to curate his own work. From a family of professional musicians, whose children were professional musicians, and who had students that were themselves professional musicians. So far as I know, he very much got to refine and curate his work and his legacy.
Van Gogh might have been a better comparison, but we have quite a bit of first hand biographical info about him, and what he was trying to do.
What little of Maier's work we have seen was discovered essentially by accident, and arranged, and presented to us by strangers. We do know (I forget the source), that she enquired about exhibiting her work. It's a great shame that we'll never know what she wanted us to see.

 

[chuckroast]

Perhaps I'm missing something, but Bach was a successful professional musician, quite a celebrated one, who got to curate his own work. From a family of professional musicians, whose children were professional musicians, and who had students that were themselves professional musicians. So far as I know, he very much got to refine and curate his work and his legacy.
Van Gogh might have been a better comparison, but we have quite a bit of first hand biographical info about him, and what he was trying to do.
What little of Maier's work we have seen was discovered essentially by accident, and arranged, and presented to us by strangers. We do know (I forget the source), that she enquired about exhibiting her work. It's a great shame that we'll never know what she wanted us to see.

In the words of AA, the negative is the score, the print is the performance. We have only some idea of how Bach wanted his own scores performed, but you're right. we know more about that than we do how Maier wanted her pictures printed.

Given that she took her film in for processing at a local photoshop or drugstore , I suspect she would have been content with their printing as well. Again, there is no way to know this for certain.

Even so , knowing what little we do about her , she is still head and shoulders above the people I mentioned above I think are overrated.

 

[cirwin2010]

I'm going to open a different can of worms. I find that a lot of street photography to be uh... not great.

 

[tcolgate]

I'm going to open a different can of worms. I find that a lot of street photography to be uh... not great.

Everything claiming to be street photog
raphy that called also be described as "candid photo of angry/scared looking woman" can gladly go right in the bin. Which I think is most of Instagram. Also everything ripping off Bruce Golden, and most of Bruce Golden (I do like the Biker and Yakuza projects though)

I'm just not convinced the great archive of "angry looking person with camera in face" is the great social document people suggest it is

 

[chuckroast]

I'm going to open a different can of worms. I find that a lot of street photography to be uh... not great.

Well, a lot of the stuff we revere today is considered great because it has stood the test of time. HCB's work leaps to mind as perhaps technically deficient but capturing a moment in time - dare I say, a "decisive moment" - which we hold today with a romanticist's view.

Maier is terrific because she didn't just do "street" photography, she'd captured an era in Chicago that informs those of us who were not there at least what she was seeing on a fairly grand scale. People like Meyerowitz and Freedlander - to me anyway - have a much more pedestrian view of their streets. It is simpler, it is banal, it is mostly not that interesting.

She told stories, they took snapshots.

 

[chuckroast]

Everything claiming to be street photog
raphy that called also be described as "candid photo of angry/scared looking woman" can gladly go right in the bin. Which I think is most of Instagram. Also everything ripping off Bruce Golden, and most of Bruce Golden (I do like the Biker and Yakuza projects though)

I'm just not convinced the great archive of "angry looking person with camera in face" is the great social document people suggest it is

With one exception: Karsh's portrait of Churchill. While not a street photo, it's the ultimate angry person glaring at the lens picture ever taken

 

[mshchem]

Controversial. Beer can shortages in the USA due to aluminum supply disruption. Will beer cans end up like Kodak Endura color paper extinct??

 

[mshchem]

With one exception: Karsh's portrait of Churchill. While not a street photo, it's the ultimate angry person glaring at the lens picture ever taken

The BEST!!!

 

[Vaughn]

I'm going to open a different can of worms. I find that a lot of street photography to be uh... not great.

I find the same with portraits and pictures of buildings...almost as boring as trees and rocks.

 

[chuckroast]

Controversial. Beer can shortages in the USA due to aluminum supply disruption. Will beer cans end up like Kodak Endura color paper extinct??

I would hate to see Endura go, but I'd be delighted to see all aluminum cans for drinks disappear. They are lined with plastics (which then show up in your system as microplastics over time) and the aluminum is implicated in dementia. Long live the glass bottle for all drinks of this sort.

 

[chuckroast]

I find the same with portraits and pictures of buildings...almost as boring as trees and rocks.

Well, there's a place for all the above. But for myself, the building pictures I most resonate with are the ones that are abandoned, falling apart, or otherwise decaying. They are visual interesting. There is beauty in the chaos. Most of the rest of the building pictures I see tend to border on architectural documentary.

Like most of us, I've probably shot thousands trees, rocks, and landscapes. These were rarely remarkable to look at, but they were good learning tools. I think there is considerable benefit to trying to replicate the work and look of the masters like Weston, Adams, et al, even if you mostly fluff the outcomes. I'm sure they did too.

These attempts hone skills and vision that later can translate into making your work your own. Every now and then, I even manage to produce a work in my own voice that I like.

 

[MattKing]

I would hate to see Endura go

Too late - it is long gone.
And as for Cindy Sherman,
It helps to put her best work into its own time.
All the Tik-Tok wannabes came significantly later.
Original Cindy Sherman prints are actually quite compelling. On the internet though, meh.

 

[BrianShaw]

I'd be delighted to see all aluminum cans for drinks disappear. They are lined with plastics (which then show up in your system as microplastics over time) and the aluminum is implicated in dementia. Long live the glass bottle for all drinks of this sort.

I don't prefer cans either, but most of the fear regarding them has been debunked long ago by notable scientific studies/sources, including the Alzheimer Society and National Institutes of Health. Some microbreweries converted from bottling to canning as cost-savings measures to keep their businesses afloat. To convert back would decimate them. Sad as it is...

 

[chuckroast]

I don't prefer cans either, but most of the fear regarding them has been debunked long ago by notable scientific studies/sources, including the Alzheimer Society and National Institutes of Health. Some microbreweries converted from bottling to canning as cost-savings measures to keep their businesses afloat. To convert back would decimate them. Sad as it is...

The issue of aluminum is open and has only been shown to be slightly correlative, not causal, much like the recently touted study that shows a correlation between hearing loss and dementia. So I avoid it with an abundance of caution. But there is nearly no question that microplastics are nasty for the human carcass.