----- Original Message ----- From: "Malcolm Smith" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Considering we are bombarded every day by images from television, computer > screens, papers and magazines and advertising hoardings, it's amazing we > have the capacity to be stopped in our tracks from time to time by a > particular image. Nah... what's more amazing is our capacity to forget all the others. Shel's images may mean something special in an american cultural context, but I find most of his attempts to do drop-out documentary uninteresting. Probably as it would fail to touch most Californians to see a drop-out from the winter streets of Oslo, should I be so inclined as to photograph them. Humans apply distance to observed tragedy to tone it down. The ones that we don't forget immediately are the ones that trigger something that has a reference to the observer's own social context. Shel was lucky this time to trigger someone's social references badly enough to start a discussion over the theme depicted. If some of the Europeans (like Bob W, Valentin, Alin or myself) had been first to respond, the whole dicussion would have taken a totally different direction. For good or for bad, I don't know. > Most of the people I chat to about photography, expect it > to be about the capture of happy family events or something pretty. So do > people not want a reflection of reality, should we not record war images, > poverty or other things that remind us of a part of the real world? Absolutely. And please also include pictures of endangered species and environmental issues that makes our planet a progressively worse place to stay. Ken Wallers beautiful glacier shots may soon be documents of a different past. The real question is: which part of the real world triggers your own references to reality, and which images linger long enough in *your* memory to make a difference to you? (a generalised "you", Malcolm...:-)) > Or do we live with the images as a reminder of the past and present and hope > they make a contribution to changing the future? If I got it right, Shel renounced the social agenda he was accused of having. His photos apparently has social resonance to US americans, though, otherwise he wouldn't have been accused in the first place...:-) Photography has the power to deal with such things, and I think *most* photographers should have a concious relationship to this. If a photographer choose to emphasise on a reflection of reality, as Malcolm put it, it cannot be dismissed afterwards as "just a snapshot, really". Jostein
