'One of Those Days'

Sometimes links in comments embed and sometimes not.

The link in the comment above did not embed, so you will have to cut and paste it into your browser to see it, unless somehow your browser 'recognizes' it as a link and marks it as such.  Mine does not.

john

John (Crosley)

The commentator above is me, Fred.

I didn't suggest the Maier photo I was posting was representative of her body of work. I brought it up simply as a counterexample to illustrate what I was talking about.

As I said, whether Maier or Bresson or any other photographer shot photos like this has nothing to do with developing one's own photographic vision and sense of ethics. We each decide that for ourselves both when we photograph and when we view photographs. And, as I also said, what photographers did 50 years ago on the street, just like what artists did 50 years ago, what writers did 50 years ago, and what musicians were doing 50 years ago, isn't necessarily what a photographer, artist, writer, or musician is going to want to do today. Visions and particularly approaches to city streets and the people who inhabit them change.

Take Arbus, for example, who I think shared a significant vision with us. Were someone to do pretty much what she did today, it could easily seem to me relatively exploitive and mostly unnecessary. Been there. Done that.

Fred G.

Perhaps you should inform Mary Ellen Mark, who has made a personal quest wherever she goes in the world to seek out circuses and in particular to seek our both performers and the FREAKS thereof who are very similar to the people that ARBUS herself documented.

Mark, in a video I recently videoed and which appeared not dated, explained it was her quest to find and document such people. If she is doing such work now or recently is it 'dated' or somehow 'exploitative' or 'unnecessary?'

Perhaps you could explain why; you chose the example.

I think some work, some approaches, and some subjects are timeless.

I take my photos, and think I add my own particular flavor.

I won't be shamed by the suggestions of lack of ethics of use of loaded words such as 'exploitative' or 'unnecessary' as they are veiled words of invective which is useful in argument but of no help when it comes to a real life shooting situations on the street.

When push comes to shove, I opt for pressing the shutter; if someone wants to complain, I can generally predict who it will be - someone with a finely honed sense of 'ethics' and an equally finely sharpened pen.

But while a critic worries ethics, I'll be getting the captures, and if I worried too much about whether or not to trip the shutter in split second situations, I might end up like the cop who hesitates to fire while wondering 'does that perp really have a pistol aimed at me in his hand or is that just a cell phone as the 'cell phone' he thinks he sees explodes and sends a bullet straight toward his heart.

I opt for pressing the shutter almost always; each time I press it is a chance at photographic immortality.

Those too bound up in questions of 'do I shoot or not' end up with figurative bullets through their photographic heart and their 'street work' is liable to be DOA.

© John S. Crosley 2014

This is an extraordinarily crisp shot.

I blew up detail to the equivalent of 40 x 60 or so on a computer screen and viewed the recumbent man.

Across the bridge of his nose is a cut, typical of the sort of cuts one finds on fallen drunks, though it is small and not serious (and thus not prominent and also thus hard to see).

Similarly he has marks around his mouth, also very small and hard to see.  These are characteristic marks of a person who has been 'falling down drunk'.

Now a narcoleptic can have such marks too, but those who are narcoleptic often wear protective headgear if they are prone to falls, and those who are surely know they are prone to such falls.

You may have seen the people on the street; often with a bicycle and a helmet and wondered 'What the heck is that guy wearing that steel helmet for?' instead of a minimal bicycle helmet.  Likely the wearer is narcoleptic.

It is clear to me (reasonably clear now) that calling this guy possibly narcoleptic was being far too charitable, but I was being ethical, since I had not had the giant blowup review I just had today and seen the characteristic facial marks of the drunk.

Remember I also viewed him on the street and saw enough to now cement my opinion.

john

John (Crosley)

You're a guy makin' pics and posting them on the Internet (just like the rest of us). And you do it very well. You're not a cop out saving lives.

To all the cops out on the beat, thank you.

John, I'm not out to shame you. Don't think of this as being about you. Think of it as being about me and about the man you photographed. Not everything is about you. I assume the words written with my own pen reflect more of me than of you.