A picture that has always bothered me

[Dektol Dan]

A painting would have been better

A painting would have been better

It's just another Norman Rockwell painting, but with less class because it's only a photograph. It has no poetry at all when compared with the Master of the Post, and it would have little value at all if it didn't have a Rockwell theme.

 

[amateriat]

Erwitt gets his Goya on...one more time.

(From Between the Sexes, a book that holds up a bit better than I expected it to.)


- Barrett

 

[kdemas]

To me this is really the fun thing about art. The original poster is truly bothered by this photo and the "misrepresentations" he feels it brings forward. I, on the other hand, find it to ba a fantastic "moment in time" without the broad implications the poster sees.

We all see through different eyes, what a great medium photography is that allows each person to "take something different" from a photo.

Fun stuff. Thanks for posting, I had actually never seen this shot and love it!

Kent

 

[antiquark]

Erwitt gets his Goya on...one more time.

Wow, that picture looks totally posed.

Maybe it's just me, but posed pictures aren't as appealing as natural or spontaneous pictures.

 

[Chris101]

I'm just wondering what the woman looking at the clothed Goya would look like naked.

 

[amateriat]

I'm just wondering what the woman looking at the clothed Goya would look like naked.

Actually, she looks really young...I wouldn't go there m'self...


- Barrett

 

[Leigh Youdale]

THAT Photo

THAT Photo

I'm dizzy trying to assimilate to B***S that's being thrown around over this!
So much navel gazing and so little factual information - opinions, assumptions, beliefs, "philosophy" - on it goes!
So Mabel doesn't like it? Tough! Get over it.
"Manipulated" - I don't care if he staged the whole thing. Better if he didn't but it's an amusing photograph anyway, and that's about all. Doesn't require a thesis or an existential debate.
As someone else said - "Sometimes a photograph is just a photograph".

 

[Chris101]

Actually, she looks really young...I wouldn't go there m'self...

In my (admittedly sick, but not like that) mind, she's at least 18! :angel:

 

[willie_901]

The initial post complained about Erwitt's hypocrisy because he posed, i.e. manipulated, a photograph pre-acquisition, and at the same time, Erwitt is vocally critical of post-acquisition digital manipulation.

Because we have no prior knowledge whatsoever of how the photograph in question was taken, there are only two possibilities: Erwitt staged the photograph and is, in some sense, a hypocrite. Or, Erwitt was at the right place at the right time and recorded a natural scene with no artificial intervention on his part.

If Erwitt silently waited (maybe for hours) for an imbalance of viewers to occur - this is not manipulation. It is simply editing what the photographer (in this case artist) wants to portray by choosing when to press the shutter. This is no different than taking a photograph everytime a group of people congregated in front of these two paintings and selecting the one the photographer feels is most interesting.

There is only a 50:50 chance Erwitt is a hypocrite. Whatever one concludes, that conclusion has nothing to do with the facts and everything to do with the concluder's prior experiences.

So, without more information, only the observers' prior knowledge (experience) can determine whether or not Erwitt is a hypocrite. And that decision is completely subjective because none of us know the facts.

 

[Paul T.]

The picture above is absolutely a manipulation, every bit as much as it would be if he'd photoshopped in a few extra dudes. I think it's odd that Erwitt could be so aggressively against digital manipulation when every photo is in fact manipulated in the framing--and here, I feel as though he has manipulated a scene in order to advance a false thesis.

My $.02. Pile on.

It's good that we're discussing photos and not cameras here, and that you're promoting a debate.

But I think your point is pretty banal. The photo is neither faked, nor manipulated. You might say it's clichéd - in fact, he has captured people behaving in a clichéd way. But the agenda is not completely simplistic; for instance, we know which painting is the original, supposedly better one. Maybe the men are going for the superior artwork . Or maybe they're ogling the flesh. And by judging them, aren't we opting for a clichéd viewpoint, too?

A comparatively minor point, but if you work in the creative arts, I would have thought you'd had avoided copying someone else's copyright material.

 

[cmogi10]

so I skipped over this thread before, and now I open it and read the first post.

and I skip everything in the middle so I can ask are you serious???
(sorry if that's been asked before hah)

 

[Rick Waldroup]

so I skipped over this thread before, and now I open it and read the first post.

and I skip everything in the middle so I can ask are you serious???
(sorry if that's been asked before hah)

Yes, he is serious...... how freakin' wild is that?




After reading this thread, another member PM'd me this quote by Erwitt

"To me, photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place... I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”

 

[Encinalense]

A comparatively minor point, but if you work in the creative arts, I would have thought you'd had avoided copying someone else's copyright material.

In the first place, I'd suggest that was fair use of the Erwitt piece. The discussion might have been a bit less lowbrow (though I admit laughing aloud a few times). But still.

Also: maybe don't assume that all creators share that restrictive perspective of copyright.

 

[Lawrence A.]

I like Erwitt, too, but producing an image is about manipulation one way or another, chemical or digital. Ansel Adams, considered a "straight" photographer, sometimes burned in areas of a print several hundred percent of the exposure time to get the photograph he wanted and "saw". And it's long since been decided that "seeing" contains large scale psychological elements; it is not the mere mechanical absorption of "impressions". Prints don't jump automatically from the camera, whether it's a film camera or a digital camera. The information has to be "manipulated", one way or another. Even the choice of paper grade in traditional black and white photography changes the look of the presented image, and is thus a form of visual manipulation. The film, the sensor, contain information; there is no way around manipulating that information when you choose to make a print.