Some Sunday New York Times Reading…
Written on April 28, 2008
The work of Jill Freedman, reminiscent of the work of Weegee…capturing the grit of 70’s New York.
An audiovisual tour through Yosemite National Park, Ansel Adams’ biggest muse.
Behind George Lois’ Esquire covers.
Cultural observations by Virginia Heffernan on the Flickr phenomenon…how photography made purely for the web has taken on its own life and aesthetic, and the rise of one Rebekka Guoleifsdottir, who has grown her photography skills with Flickr to land a major advertising campaign for Toyota.
I have never been one to overly look at Flickr for new talent (ok, I have never looked at Flickr for new talent) and I wish Rebekka all the best, but this last observation by Virginia Heffernan is terribly, terribly depressing.
“On Flickr, Cartier-Bresson is no Guoleifsdottir. Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that when a prankster posted a Cartier-Bresson photo of a cyclist passing a spiral staircase, passing the photo off as his own, a mob of commenters shouted it down, crying for it to be deleted. “When everything is blurred you cannot convey the motion of the bicyclist,” one commenter carped. “Why is the staircase so ‘soft’? Camera shake?” wrote another. “Gray, blurry, small, odd crop,” someone concluded. That seemed to be the final word.”
Filed in: Art, Exhibitions & Events, Advertising, Talent, Editorial, Word on the Street.
Mob rules baby… how does it go again, oh yeah, ten thousand lemmings can’t be wrong…. and neither can you, you and you… “fermer la porte, ya des courants d’aire….”
aargh, I went to that site and checked her out. What are you trying to do to me, I had to reach for the glycerine pills. My fucking ticker fluttered in panic….hello, some of us are sensitive corneas here…
aaahh, come on….!
Is it really such a bad thing for HCB to held to a anonymous critique? His pictures are certainly good, but they aren’t the yardstick for every other image to be graded either.
It is really lame that someone took his image as their own though. That is not a web specific phenomena though.
Why depressing? While I think HCB was incredible and his work was hugely important to my photographic education, let’s keep in mind he had little competition. Rebekka is certainly not the norm on flickr and the fact that she stands out so much amongst the huge number of community members is a credit to her.
Just because people know how to make sharp pictures on modern equipment doesn’t make them photographers like HCB or Rebekka (or valid critics). Not to worry.