----- Original Message -----
From: "Bob W" <p...@web-options.com>
To: "'Pentax-Discuss Mail List'" <pdml@pdml.net>
Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2011 2:26 AM
Subject: RE: V. Maier exhibition in London
From: pdml-boun...@pdml.net [mailto:pdml-boun...@pdml.net] On Behalf Of
Christine Aguila
Interesting comments, Bob--especially the points about how she might
end up
fitting into photog history. Not sure I agree, but I appreciate the
validity of your points. As you say, it will be interesting to watch
the
story unfold. I watched the video on the web site and also thought the
exhibition space was wonderful. Cheers, Christine
I won't mind if history proves me wrong! In what ways do you disagree? I'd
be interested to hear your thoughts.
Well, probably more accurate to say, I don't know what my position is--it's
just to early to tell. There's a lot of friggin negs to go through. I
agree with you that in the exhibition I saw, not every photo was superb (I
don't know if we saw the same shots), but I certainly liked a lot of what I
saw, and the world is just learning about her body of work, so I'm not
really ready to commit either way, but as I said, you make valid points. You
may be interested in Colin Westerbeck's (Bystander: History of Street
Photography with Joel Meyerowitz) view:
From the Chicago Magazine article published earlier this year:
"Colin Westerbeck, the former curator of photography at the Art Institute of
Chicago and one of the country's leading experts on street photography,
thinks Maier is an interesting case. He inspected her work after Maloof
e-mailed him. "She worked the streets in a savvy way," he says. "But when
you consider the level of street photography happening in Chicago in the
fifties and sixties, she doesn't stand out." Westerbeck explains that
Maier's
work lacks the level of irony and wit of some of her Chicago contemporaries,
such as Harry Callahan or Yasuhiro Ishimoto, and unlike them, she herself is
often a participant in the shot. The greatest artists, Westerbeck says, know
how to create a distance from their subjects.
Yet Westerbeck admits that he understands the allure of Maier's work. "She
was a kind of mysterious figure," he says. "What's compelling about her
pictures is the way that they capture the local character of Chicago in the
past decades."
And some interesting selected comments about Westerbeck's quote; you have
to scroll down a bit to the comment section: http://tinyurl.com/434sddo
I don't know anything about Colin Westerbeck, so I don't know if he really
is a "hack curator" as one of the comments states. Cheers, Christine
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