Joel Meyerowitz: phones killed the sexiness of the street

Now the question is, can the great apes feel nostalgia.

Hmm... I feel nostalgia for

Sumatra, my home country,

or maybe I'm from Borneo...

I just don't know...

http://bayouline.com/o2.gif

"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future."

--Nils Bohr, Nobel laureate in Physics

Fred, that's a great line. I hope you don;t mind if I steal it.

I hope you don;t mind if I steal it.

I would have no right to mind your stealing it, since it's Nils Bohr's line, not mine! :)

Photography of great photographers of the past is appealing in a large part because, well, it shows the past! It shows things like they were, and no longer are. People won't use cell phones forever. Or they will definitely not look like today's cell phones. Some new technology is going to come along sooner or later. If everybody tries to keep people on cell phones out of their photos, it seems time to take more of them now! People will reminisce about them in 50 years!

Case in point, I used to take quite a few photos in the 1980s, and I always tried to focus on people and buildings, keeping cars out of the way. Now when people look at these images, many times what interests them most are the old cars I did not manage to avoid having in the frame.

If you took pics of people on the street and viewers are more interested in the background cars, the more important lesson to be learned may not have to do with the style of the cars. :D

The past is obviously part of the texture of a photo from the past, but what makes a street photo great is usually the power of life on the street expressed in the photo, (which can be done with or without people). If Meyerowitz was a great street photographer, it has to do with the action, expressiveness, and gesture he captured and conveyed more than the stylings of the cars that adorned the streets he walked. His photos are alive today, not simply relics of the past. I see Meyerowitz’s photos not so much as mementos but as timeless expressions of life unfolding.

I agree with you that, at some point, today’s cell phones may have significant nostalgic effect, but that won’t be enough to make the photos they’re in great photos of the past. Pics with cell phones in them and pics with stylish cars are likely to have nostalgic appeal. What becomes great, though, usually goes beyond those sorts of trappings.

"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future."

--Nils Bohr, Nobel laureate in Physics

Fred, I understand you put the quote in there in an amusing way. Its funny how the last part after the comma appears superfluous without context. What else could there be to predict other than future? He must be referring to mankind's future, which seems to be the case from the applied 'the'.

BTW, it could be a Danish proverb attributed to Bohr, since it was first mentioned in a text in the 1970s without referring to the source.

Here is another one, supposedly uttered by Bohr: "The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."

What else could there be to predict other than future? He must be referring to mankind's future, which seems to be the case from the applied 'the'.

I take this quote to be like a Yogi Berra-ism. Because you can't predict anything but the future, the quote is an intentional absurdity, meant to emphasize the futility and folly of prediction in certain circumstances.

Speaking of which . . .

"The future ain't what it used to be." —Berra

Thats what I thought ...

Some favorite Yogi quotes:

"Always go to other people's funerals; otherwise they won't go to yours."

“Its getting late early”

and this one seems appropriate for some people on PN:

"I really didn't say everything I said."

NTIM but I somehow feel compelled to note that earlier this year I finished reading the entirety of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu in the now-classic English translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff et al.

There are sublime and deeply moving discussions there of memory, time, and the like, unfortunately interspersed with very long non-sublime moments. Still, I'm pleased to have read it, not least because it means I don't have to do it again.....

Proust could have used an editor like Edward Aswell who "extracted" You Can't Go Home Again for Thomas Wolfe.