> > > > 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.
that's what Chiang Kai Shek said about the French Revolution. [...] > 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. > I have that book. I hadn't seen those comments before - they are very interesting and close to my own opinion, although he expresses it better than I did. > 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." > I agree with that. One of the things running through my mind as I looked at the exhibition was how interesting it was to see the world and how it has changed. It's a curiosity of this type of photography that mere rarity gives it value, regardless of any aesthetic considerations. So run-of-the-mill pictures of Victorian life have great value as records of a disappeared time, and it is just so of these pictures of Chicago. > 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 That's just an ad hominem attack by some internet know-it-all with a chip on his shoulder. We should invite him onto the PDML. Westerbeck's opinion is perfectly valid and he is able to back it up. Everybody is free to disagree with it and give their own reasoned opinion. This is not science, it's the arts. I agree that the jury is still out while we await more of her work, and some different editing, but I don't really see her as a Great Photographer on the evidence so far. I think she is good, but probably no better than many of us. If our photos are discovered in 60 years time the best of them will look fantastic and very interesting, but to be great they'd have to stand up well alongside people like HCB, Kertesz, Brassai, Doisneau, Stieglitz, Erwitt, Munkcasi and so on. They are the greats, and I don't think Maier or any of us are in that company. B -- 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.
