Bob W <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/3532483.stm
What a pathetic load of twaddle. (I'm being polite here.)
First quotation is an outright falsehood: "...it won't be made the way
Cartier-Bresson made his. We know he didn't crop them."
Then he goes on with the stupid truth/falsehood blather that's been
beaten to death already. As if truth had anything to do with the
validity of art. ("The telling of beautiful, untrue things is the proper
aim of art" - Oscar Wilde)
Dag Thrane's unmanipulated images point makes the point that photos can
be unmanipulated yet untruthful, but even ordinary photos have
manipulation inherent in them. Selection of lens and film have a huge
influence, of course, but even more fundamental than that is the framing
of the shot itself; the choice of what is included in the photograph and
what 99.99999% of the world is excluded. Somewhere in my archives I have
a great example of this. It's a shot of myself and my SO at the top of
Mt. Mitchell. We're in full hiking gear (backpacks, etc.), having hiked
about 7 miles of trail to get there. The photo, full-frame and unaltered
in any way, shows us at the marker indicating that we're at the summit
of the highest peak in North Carolina. What it doesn't show, just
*barely* out of frame, is the aluminum bench set into concrete and the
asphalt path leading 50 yards to the parking lot and a group of
enormously overweight tourists making their way toward the summit. This
photo is perfectly truthful about the place, the people it shows and
even what it *implies* about how they got there. But it's quite
misleading (and deliberately so) about the nature of the place it shows.
To quote a noted PDML'er: "Why is photography the only art form for
which some neurotics demand something called truth?" - Bob Blakely
(The answer: Because they're neurotic, elitist and more than a little
full of themselves.)
--
Mark Roberts
Photography and writing
www.robertstech.com
