[ Post New Message | Post Reply to this One | Send Private Email to Jeff Spirer | Help ]

Response to Just Another Street Shot

from Jeff Spirer (jeff@spirer.com)
A while back you were very critical of Phil Borges' formalistic style, and were very critical of his images, techniques, and motives. However, I'm guessing that he is also trying to take meaningful photographs, just as we are. So what makes your photograph of the young girl on the street more meaningful than Borges' photographs of native peoples?

I don't know if I can answer that. But my problem with Borges is that he wants to put indigenous people into a box, and that is where they have been put for years. It may be a more sympathetic box, but the only box that really works is the empathetic one. If you want to see some truly great portraits of indigenous people, see some photographs by Luis Gonzalez Palma. (II Silenzio dei Maya is the best book of his work, if somewhat expensive and hard to find.) It's immediately obvious that Palma and Borges are working on two different emotional planes.

I have done photographs of indigenous people, and I'm pretty careful about what I shoot. I do shoot on the street, for example, this one.

How is your image of the girl on the street a meaningful photograph to you? Can you tell me?

Like most of my urban shots in the US, to me it's about the alienation of the individual in the greater scheme of things, a contrast between the individual, the person, and the trappings of modern life, the metallic, the glass. The noise. I suppose that in some way I am an existentialist, although my style of shooting is much closer to the surrealists, as I have said before. With this shot, I had been looking at the security gate and thinking about the open markets we have once a week. She walked into the scene and I isolated her. By the way, it's an illusion, she was holding a man's hand.

so then, the quality of meaningfulness is totally relative: simply a matter of personal opinion and/or artistic taste, devoid of any specific criteria of what "meaningfulness" means in an absolute sense. Is that correct?

Maybe. It's certainly why what is art? is such a commonly unanswerable topic. It doesn't mean we can't be critical - many photos are trying to message but fail for some reason. Not for everyone necessarily, but for someone, maybe the someone that happens to be reviewing at the moment. And it is tied to the moment...for years, I have searched for a good video transfer of Orson Wells' movie of The Trial (a photographer's movie if there ever was one.) It was impossible to find because it was unanimously trashed by critics when it came out. It recently resurfaced, due to a revisionism among critics about the film. Well, a great film was always a great film, but there was a coterie of critics that didn't particularly care for it, forcing it into obscurity. Fortunately, it's now available, and I'd recommend it to any black and white photographer purely for visual reasons, although there's a lot more going for it than just the visual.

If I were to take a disposable camera and sit on a street bench and snap away for ten minutes, I could set up a display of photographs or post them here that are "meaningful" to me...simply because I say they are.

Are they meaningful to you> Or are you just saying they are?

My photos are meaningful to me, and I find, frequently to other people. (Not consistently, some people hate them.) I find meaning in their thematic and stylistic relationships, something not particularly planned, it just happens because it's where my mind goes, how I see the world, what matters to me. Isolated, they may be meaningless to most people. As a group, I think they come together in several ways.

(posted 8618 days ago)

[ Previous | Next ]