According to the great artist Jörg Colberg, street photography is rubbish "For me, looking at street photography is like watching a "sitcom" like "Friends": the jokes are all just a bunch of fairly lame one liners". Quoted from his Blog
According to him, pictures like this, are meant to truly ask question's and stimulate the viewer, personally I've seen better work in an Ikea catalogue.
I see this master has a new book and exhibit out. If it's meant to be a documentation of bonfire builders where are the people that construct them, what do they look like what are there story's. It's like photographing a church cermon, without a priest or participants.
In fifty years time people will look at those pictures and say this tells me nothing about that time in the past. As without the written text there is no context to the images. The images themselves don't even illustrate what the text talks about.
It's Ironic that a visual medium, has to rely on written words to justify itself.
Although Friends is a pretty trite sitcom, I recently read an interview where the writers of Peep Show were discussing how good comedy is the hardest genre to write, yet yeilds the least respect as a writer or performer. Those of you who have not yet seen peep show the sitcom, I recomend you do so post haste.
Here is my latest disasterpiece, what a waste of an x-pan I know. I had some prints returned to me from a gallery with the in debt critque in a letter of a single line "Subject matter not appropriate".
Just merely being an image "taker" who just gets lucky, I need to become a real artist and image "maker" like here. That last person I linked also has some really interesting opinions on vernacular photography. I walked off mid conversation, so I didn't really get the full light of wisdom.
Now back to the darkroom. (no pun intended).
