Banned from r/Leica for a Photo of John Abernathy being Arrested/Assaulted and tossing his M10 to a Fellow Photographer

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chuckroast said:
Sorry, but they do not. That's exactly why photojournalism is a debate. The POV of the journalist - any journalist - is biased. What they show you is one thing. What they do not show is just as important. Moreover, capturing just a moment completely erases the context of how and why that moment was reached.

Journalistic output of any kind has to be scrutinized with the same vigor one examines politicians talking ... and for the exact same reason. Both are editing reality for effect.

Unfortunately, like I said, that kind of analysis pretty much always involves some discussion of the politics of the photographer, the subjects, the culture at large and thus is a third rail that cannot be discussed with civility these days.

In the famous words of Richard Avendon, "All photographs are accurate. None of them is truth."
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I could agree with you, but not this time; in this case I think there isn't much to discuss about what the photograph is showing and what's happening in Minnesota. There's no space for interpretation.
 
Retro-Grouch said:
M y fear is always "mission creep", and the road to hell paved with the good intentions of those who would "protect" us.
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I was the originator of the pure-silver mailing list some 20ish years ago. That list came out of a frustration that USENET rec.photo groups had become battle zones full of bad manners. At its peak, pure-silver had hundreds of participants from around the world.

The rules were minimal but clear: Don't be a jerk, don't cuss, be polite, assume there are children reading (which there were). I made it clear it was "one strike and your out" zero tolerance, and I enforced it on a few occasions. No one ever got tossed out solely because of their ideas.

Since it was my list on my nickel hosted on my servers, it was my rules and they knew it. I wasn't promoting free speech, I was promoting civil speech. There was no penalty for the content of the speech beyond that, and even things I personally disagreed with got left alone.

I tell this story to make a larger point: Moderating a public discussion is hard. As a moderator/list owner, you have to try and balance the desire for civility, integrity, without viewpoint discrimination .... that sometimes requires you to grind your teeth and let things go. So my hat's off to the mods here and elsewhere who go through this thankless process even though they may sometimes overstep.

Oddly enough, when I had enough of being the list mommy - a list I created and loved - I announced my intention to pass it off to be hosted elsewhere and moderated by others willing to volunteer. I immediately incurred the wrath of the entitled few who thought it was my responsibility to keep making this incredible resource available for free at my own cost, time and energy. So much for appreciation.

BTW, the archives of that list up to the time I ended it can be found at the link below. The archives of the pure-silver list that replaced it can be found at freelists.org. I am still subscribed to the new list, but it is a shadow of its former self.


Small minds discuss people
Average minds discuss events
Great minds discuss ideas
 
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Well I'm glad Chuckroast has chimed in to suggest that maybe the hammers need protection from the eggs.

Unless this Abernathy fellow was throwing punches, it's hard to think of a sensible defense for brutalizing a photographer. Does anybody want to enlighten us about what this photographer was doing that justified such treatment?
 
Mos6502 said:
Well I'm glad Chuckroast has chimed in to suggest that maybe the hammers need protection from the eggs.

Unless this Abernathy fellow was throwing punches, it's hard to think of a sensible defense for brutalizing a photographer.
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Or a legal defense for attacking a journalist, assuming he was wearing "PRESS" identification. I wasn't there and don't know the details, of course, but the incident is worrisome to say the least. Are there professional photojournalists on RFF who have any input on this?
 
Mos6502 said:
Well I'm glad Chuckroast has chimed in to suggest that maybe the hammers need protection from the eggs.

Unless this Abernathy fellow was throwing punches, it's hard to think of a sensible defense for brutalizing a photographer.
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You're assuming that this was the intent. That's what I mean about journalism requiring context. We do not know exactly what happened before this. My guess - and that's all it is - is the photographer got caught up in something larger not of his own doing at was not a likely target.

This is not unknown territory. One of the the difficulties of being a journo is that you are supposed to be present to provide a wide and contextualized view of the proceedings, but often, when they get close enough to said proceedings, they themselves become part of the story.

Sometimes, this can happen decades after the events. Witness the recent kerfuffle about the famous Vietnam napalm girl.

Neutrality does not exist. What you see is rarely all you get. Context is everything.
 
Retro-Grouch said:
Or a legal defense for attacking a journalist, assuming he was wearing "PRESS" identification. I wasn't there and don't know the details, of course, but the incident is worrisome to say the least. Are there professional photojournalists on RFF who have any input on this?
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I have seen the photos of him being attacked, and quite a stunning photo by Pierre Lavie of him throwing his camera out of harm's way (while he was being shoved on the ground). Even if he weren't a member of the press (he is a Getty photographer), what was happening was in public view, and he was on public property. Is this acceptable to us as photographers? I find it wholly indefensible.
 
Mos6502 said:
I have seen the photos of him being attacked, and quite a stunning photo by Pierre Lavie of him throwing his camera out of harm's way (while he was being shoved on the ground). Even if he weren't a member of the press (he is a Getty photographer), what was happening was in public view, and he was on public property. Is this acceptable to us as photographers? I find it wholly indefensible.
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Although I share your anger at this incident, it might be argued (and almost certainly will be) by "law enforcement" that he was interfering with the performance of their duties. In such a case, his status as a member of the press, and being on public property, would not be an adequate defense. Understand that I'm playing devil's advocate here, and trying to tease apart the legal aspects involved in a journalist's job. I think we all know what's actually going on in Minneapolis.
 
Mos6502 said:
I have seen the photos of him being attacked, and quite a stunning photo by Pierre Lavie of him throwing his camera out of harm's way (while he was being shoved on the ground). Even if he weren't a member of the press (he is a Getty photographer), what was happening was in public view, and he was on public property. Is this acceptable to us as photographers? I find it wholly indefensible.
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The single image cannot tell us what is- or is not acceptable. I can think of a half dozen reasons why it is not acceptable at all and I can similarly come up with a half dozen reasons or so why it is understandable.

The one thing I know for sure is that no serious journo goes into a war zone with the reasonable expectation of being untouched by it. From Robert Capra forward, photographers have been in the thick it. You'll recall that he was a war photographer of great note who said "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough." Think about that. He's effectively saying, "Get closer to the action, the danger, the death, and the risk to make better pictures." It is one of the many reasons to admire serious photojournalists.

You'll notice that I have taken no position on this, because I simply don't know what led up to this. What I do know is that is human instinct to read a moment like this and assign the meaning to it that most closely aligns with our own general worldview.
 
With all due respect, you have taken a position and indicated your personal bias clearly. Apathy, pretended or genuine, is still a bias. There's a marked difference between one saying he does not know, because he hasn't looked into it, and saying nobody can know because nobody can look into it. The information to make a determination is out there, if you care. If you don't care, that's fine, but it's silly to suggest that because you don't care, and won't look, nobody else can. You wouldn't suggest that nobody knows if the Titanic actually struck an iceberg, and actually sank, simply because you personally haven't looked into it yet. So far as what you know about human nature, it is more in human nature to be curious about things than it is for humans to throw up their hands and say it can't be figured out because the answer might scare them.

Anyway, gonna add somebody to the ignore list, they're obviously not interested in having a reasonable discussion.
 
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chuckroast said:
The single image cannot tell us what is- or is not acceptable. I can think of a half dozen reasons why it is not acceptable at all and I can similarly come up with a half dozen reasons or so why it is understandable.
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I wonder if someone could make the same argument for the children in the "The Terror of War"...
 
css9450 said:
You make an important point. Yahoo Groups (and Clubs) gave way to forums, but forums are dying fast and in their place is social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, "X" and Reddit. And NONE of the latter have the search and archiving capabilities of the former. A generation of information is likely to be lost.
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My sense is that internet forum discussion was at its rational peak in the 2000s and early 2010s. In the late 90s we had eGroups, email-based discussion forums which were also accessible online. People could email the list and receive dozens of replies. eGroups was acquired by YahooGroups, and they continued for many fruitful years until the Verizon takeover and subsequent deletion. By that time, forum traffic was almost nothing, and many that remained moved to Groups.io. I imagine that a lot of old Yahoo Groups were deleted because no one was around to migrate to Groups.io.

Network54 was a forum site used by many watch forums in the 2000s, EZBoards was used by a few fitness discussion forums; EZBoards was acquired by Yuku, which was then acquired by Tapatalk. Those boards are mostly gone or quiet now. Many boards were lost during an EZBoards hack which saw a lot of boards overrun by spam and reams of posts deleted. Network54 was taken by Tapatalk, too, but many things were lost. The Wayback Machine did not capture many Network54 boards so who knows what has gone.

Before all of that, and running concurrently, were the old Usenet groups started in the late 70s which were acquired by Google to become Google Groups. Many Usenet groups were unmoderated, so anyone could spam the group, troll and flame, and all that annoying stuff. Amusingly, Google's vast resources means that almost all of Usenet activity until 2024 remains online to this day.

Now it's all happening on reddit, twitter/x, Facebook and other digital wastelands. RFF and some select standalone forums like Cameraderie, LUF and others are the last bastions of civilized and detailed discussions about photography and gear. Sad. But I'm proud to be one of the keepers of the flame, as all who post here continue to be.
 
Archiver said:
My sense is that internet forum discussion was at its rational peak in the 2000s and early 2010s. In the late 90s we had eGroups, email-based discussion forums which were also accessible online. People could email the list and receive dozens of replies. eGroups was acquired by YahooGroups, and they continued for many fruitful years until the Verizon takeover and subsequent deletion. By that time, forum traffic was almost nothing, and many that remained moved to Groups.io. I imagine that a lot of old Yahoo Groups were deleted because no one was around to migrate to Groups.io.

Network54 was a forum site used by many watch forums in the 2000s, EZBoards was used by a few fitness discussion forums; EZBoards was acquired by Yuku, which was then acquired by Tapatalk. Those boards are mostly gone or quiet now. Many boards were lost during an EZBoards hack which saw a lot of boards overrun by spam and reams of posts deleted. Network54 was taken by Tapatalk, too, but many things were lost. The Wayback Machine did not capture many Network54 boards so who knows what has gone.

Before all of that, and running concurrently, were the old Usenet groups started in the late 70s which were acquired by Google to become Google Groups. Many Usenet groups were unmoderated, so anyone could spam the group, troll and flame, and all that annoying stuff. Amusingly, Google's vast resources means that almost all of Usenet activity until 2024 remains online to this day.

Now it's all happening on reddit, twitter/x, Facebook and other digital wastelands. RFF and some select standalone forums like Cameraderie, LUF and others are the last bastions of civilized and detailed discussions about photography and gear. Sad. But I'm proud to be one of the keepers of the flame, as all who post here continue to be.
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"Now it's all happening on reddit, twitter/x, Facebook and other digital wastelands. RFF and some select standalone forums like Cameraderie, LUF and others are the last bastions of civilized and detailed discussions about photography and gear. Sad. But I'm proud to be one of the keepers of the flame, as all who post here continue to be."


I wish I had some clever catch-all phrase for this phenomenon. But i don't. I saw it happen with TV's They used to be expensive B&W with high class content. There were three or four live drama presentations a week, like you were in the theater.. We had 30 minutes of Kukla, Fran and Ollie every night from 7:00 to 7:30. The news took only 15 minutes. Imagine. Then TV's got cheaper which meant folks who were less affluent could buy them. And generally the less affluent are less sophisticated and the live drama was relaced by quiz shows, soap operas and serial TV shows.

Then computers hit bigtime in the early 80's with the IBM PC-XT, it's cheap clones, and Apple computers. They were complex and not the usual consumer item. Then they got cheaper and easier to use. And internet content began to sink to what we now have. It has become as intellectual and sophisticated as a dive bar at closing. There were, early on, sophisticated topics. When Yahoo was two computers in a classroom at Stanford it was fun, complex and super geeky. I spent over an hour trying to track down an obscure computer language that took me around the country, to Switzerland and finally back to Berkley, the about a little more than an hour drive. But it was access to thought.

Now it is Denisovan dialog.
 
boojum said:
"Now it's all happening on reddit, twitter/x, Facebook and other digital wastelands. RFF and some select standalone forums like Cameraderie, LUF and others are the last bastions of civilized and detailed discussions about photography and gear. Sad. But I'm proud to be one of the keepers of the flame, as all who post here continue to be."


I wish I had some clever catch-all phrase for this phenomenon. But i don't. I saw it happen with TV's They used to be expensive B&W with high class content. There were three or four live drama presentations a week, like you were in the theater.. We had 30 minutes of Kukla, Fran and Ollie every night from 7:00 to 7:30. The news took only 15 minutes. Imagine. Then TV's got cheaper which meant folks who were less affluent could buy them. And generally the less affluent are less sophisticated and the live drama was relaced by quiz shows, soap operas and serial TV shows.

Then computers hit bigtime in the early 80's with the IBM PC-XT, it's cheap clones, and Apple computers. They were complex and not the usual consumer item. Then they got cheaper and easier to use. And internet content began to sink to what we now have. It has become as intellectual and sophisticated as a dive bar at closing. There were, early on, sophisticated topics. When Yahoo was two computers in a classroom at Stanford it was fun, complex and super geeky. I spent over an hour trying to track down an obscure computer language that took me around the country, to Switzerland and finally back to Berkley, the about a little more than an hour drive. But it was access to thought.

Now it is Denisovan dialog.
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Careful now, someone will look at what you've written and infer that you're elitist. 😄 But the wider the spread of technology, the lower and lower the common denominator of users becomes. Now that every man and his dog has the internet, every man and his dog can post whatever they like. This is both boon and bane, because it opens the doors to the less privileged to express themselves and learn, as well as the frankly stupid and stunted to express whatever dreck that passes between their ears.

Fortunately, as with social groups in person, those with similar interests will congregate. We see it in the echo chambers of twitter and reddit as well as more open and reasonable spaces. If we at RFF have faults, it's that we're a bunch of (largely old) curmudgeons with varying degrees of obsessiveness. We're mostly older Anglo/Euro/Asian(?) males with the perspective of age and experience, open to new things because of an interest in photographic technology and getting the most for our money. Just being on a forum like RFF means we are literate in the older ways of the internet, and we carry the ethos and practices of those times. I'm rambling now. Where were we? Where's my camera?
 
chuckroast said:
I tell this story to make a larger point: Moderating a public discussion is hard. As a moderator/list owner, you have to try and balance the desire for civility, integrity, without viewpoint discrimination .... that sometimes requires you to grind your teeth and let things go. So my hat's off to the mods here and elsewhere who go through this thankless process even though they may sometimes overstep.
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I personally know at least two former moderators of high-traffic forums/lists who burned out from the volume of posts and the work of filtering and policing discussion. Both of those forums were eventually lost to digital erosion.

chuckroast said:
Oddly enough, when I had enough of being the list mommy - a list I created and loved - I announced my intention to pass it off to be hosted elsewhere and moderated by others willing to volunteer. I immediately incurred the wrath of the entitled few who thought it was my responsibility to keep making this incredible resource available for free at my own cost, time and energy. So much for appreciation.

BTW, the archives of that list up to the time I ended it can be found at the link below. The archives of the pure-silver list that replaced it can be found at freelists.org. I am still subscribed to the new list, but it is a shadow of its former self.
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And there's the rub - when a dedicated moderator helms a knowledgeable and well mannered group, great things can happen. When the moderator goes, especially if said moderator is a strong personality, the whole group can drift and become something else. Old members aligned with the moderator leave. New members arrive. Things change and sometimes not for the better.
 
chuckroast said:
I was the originator of the pure-silver mailing list some 20ish years ago. That list came out of a frustration that USENET rec.photo groups had become battle zones full of bad manners. At its peak, pure-silver had hundreds of participants from around the world.

The rules were minimal but clear: Don't be a jerk, don't cuss, be polite, assume there are children reading (which there were). I made it clear it was "one strike and your out" zero tolerance, and I enforced it on a few occasions. No one ever got tossed out solely because of their ideas.

Since it was my list on my nickel hosted on my servers, it was my rules and they knew it. I wasn't promoting free speech, I was promoting civil speech. There was no penalty for the content of the speech beyond that, and even things I personally disagreed with got left alone.

I tell this story to make a larger point: Moderating a public discussion is hard. As a moderator/list owner, you have to try and balance the desire for civility, integrity, without viewpoint discrimination .... that sometimes requires you to grind your teeth and let things go. So my hat's off to the mods here and elsewhere who go through this thankless process even though they may sometimes overstep.

Oddly enough, when I had enough of being the list mommy - a list I created and loved - I announced my intention to pass it off to be hosted elsewhere and moderated by others willing to volunteer. I immediately incurred the wrath of the entitled few who thought it was my responsibility to keep making this incredible resource available for free at my own cost, time and energy. So much for appreciation.

BTW, the archives of that list up to the time I ended it can be found at the link below. The archives of the pure-silver list that replaced it can be found at freelists.org. I am still subscribed to the new list, but it is a shadow of its former self.


Small minds discuss people
Average minds discuss events
Great minds discuss ideas
Click to expand...

It’s a universal experience. Re: [Leica] RE:Ebay
 
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