On 7/20/2011 04:22, Bob W wrote:
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
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