On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 11:10 AM, Graydon <[email protected]> wrote:
> My problem with this particular photo is that the degree of, hrm, moderate > murkiness gives it a sense of being old; these people are grandparents now. > > That takes away from the slice-of-life immediacy of the whole thing; the > event depicted is a very immediate, right-this-second transitory event. > There's a point to be made about yeah, that kind of right-this-second > transitory event happened fifty years ago and five hundred years ago, > too, but the specific camera-beyond-its-capabilities aesthetic starts to > push the moment into a murkiness of potential meanings because the > possible intended implications of the depiction are so much broader than > the one little narrow moment being depicted. > > (Is this *ironic* reference to "it's been going on as long as people > were people" or *non-ironic* reference to "it's been going as long as > people were people"? Should the camera-beyond-its-limits aesthetic be > understood as nostalgia, early aesthetic fixation, or a comment on the > scope of the utility of technology? And so on.) > > I don't find your photos that lack the murkiness to do this, even when > they're quite dark. I think this is because I take the murkiness as an > assertion of the irrelevance of the chronological location of the moment > depicted; "it doesn't matter when this happened". "It doesn't matter > when this happened" is a lot of weight to put on the bar scene > equivalent of "O HAI" and I don't think the moment in question is quite > up to that. It's a fine and excellent moment; it's not plausibly a > *robust* moment unless we know for sure that they are now grandparents > with one another, and we don't know that, so the dislocation in time (to > me) diminishes the effectiveness of the scene. But did you like it? cheers, frank ;-) -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
