Where in the Wilde is Wodehouse?
Where in the Wilde is Wodehouse?
wintoid said:
I tried to read the PDF but it was peppered with expletives. Expletives used as adjectives just leave me bemused. It's as if something powerful is trying to be expressed but the writer just can't get it out. It was too frustrating to read and he doesn't sound like my kind of guy, so I just looked at the pictures. Some were OK.
As for the attack on RFF members, well I'd say there's no reason to feel we need to defend ourselves. RFF has its merits, and many of the members he rubbished give a lot to our community (albeit not huge PDF files).
I've started reading
"Street Photography For The Purist" too, and keep being bugged by the stream of consciousness sections and the overuse of "foul language". Writing about styles of photography isn't so easy as writing about technique, but the parts Chris Weeks wrote himself lack the clarity of some of the other authors' forwards.
His written work reminds me of Dr. Timson's advice in my junior year high school English class about writing. She said "throw out half of what you wrote in the first draft". I think "Street Photography" could use a good trimming. It seems too full of "what the fecks" and "whatevers" and rambling prose poetry. These problems get in the way of Mr. Week's expression of his opinions on how street photography. I know he says he was trying to make it raw, like how he feels about street photography, but it does not all work well for me stylistically. When people overuse expletives in writing, the words get robbed of their power, and the expressive quality of the writing decreases rather than increases. Vulgarity is a poor substitute for more intelligent forms of humor. So I'd love to read something on photography that had half the wit of Oscar Wilde or P. G. Wodehouse.
The content of the writing, however, is fairly interesting, though I don't agree with all of it (and it was not meant to be all agreed with). Mr. Weeks actually makes me want to load some B&W film for a change, instead of the color negatives I usually shoot. But I disagree with him about why B&W film may be more useful for street work. I don't think B&W is more realistic, more universal or more authentic for street photos, but it can provide a graphic power that is trickier to achieve with color film. My old photo Prof. Geoff Winningham had a memorable quote, "Black and white is the real absraction," that I always thought was spot-on. But Mr. Weeks' piece is making me think about where in and about Boston that I can go to practice stealthy street shooting. That's good.
I do find it incredible that Mr. Weeks would abuse his blog by linking the "s" synonym for crap to photographer
Todd Hanz's home page. I think that action by Mr. Weeks is just puerile and pointlessly mean. I've seen so much work over the years that was really, truly, badly executed or badly conceived that I expected Mr. Hanz's photos would be really boring and poor quality (like I regard Allen Ginsberg's Leica-abused dreck or the "art" of Kate P. Freedberg in Boston who attaches a digicam to her pug's collar for a "dog's eye view of the street"). Some of Todd's work is quite good in my opinion, especially considering what's out and about.
