NYT: Mark vs MacCurry?

Mark? MacCurry?

Interesting article. Not interested in photographer wars, but I am content with two different people's perspectives... not who did it better.
 
Mc Curry has worked all his life for National Geographic, not for a night club for frustrated photographers.
 
jsrockit said:
Well, outsider vs. insider viewpoint.
Click to expand...

I agree with this.

I don't understand the point in these articles, one can dissect the view of a photographer, his work etc why assert that the photographer is boring ? It adds nothing to the discussion, the author seems to conflate opinion with critique
 
Lauffray said:
the author seems to conflate opinion with critique
Click to expand...

That's what I got out of it too. McCurry's work may be a Norman Rockwellian view of India, for better or worse, but it is inarguably done very very well.
Singh's work is very different and unplanned. It is what you would see if you walked around and took photos w/o a specific agenda. It is very natural for that.

I don't see the point of criticizing one and praising the other, unless the success and popularity of one is seen as gauche to the intellectual opining about it in an article in the NYT..
 
I don't care what the NYT or Teju Cole have to say about photography. They should spend less time pontificating and more time shooting - not that it would help them, but at least it might represent an honest effort. :)
 
The diatribe seems to be an assertion that all photography can/should be done only one way.
You can choose only one approach: either Avedon, or Penn, or Newton did it 'right.' Choose one of Doisneau, Capa, or Cartier-Bresson. All other attitudes or perspectives are invalid.

Frankly, i'd spend hours in McCurry's books, and not more than a few minutes in those of 'the other guy,' insider or not. Not looking for a sociology or history lesson. And, i don't much care, when looking at this kind of work, what most represents reality. McCurry is not a strict 'photojournalist.' His is a more 'pictorial' journalism, and criticizing that type of vision is just stupid.
 
Having read the article a fortnight ago when the thread was started, I've re-visited it quickly, and am still left with my first thought about this thread:
Why is it called "NYT: Mark vs MacCurry?" Mary Ellen's work is barely mentioned. "Singh vs McCurry", maybe. I appreciated the reminder about Singh's work (I have a book on Paris, shot by him in the 1970s) but got little else out of the article. Assessing different photographic styles isn't necessarily a right/wrong equation.
 
Huss said:
Here is the author's instagram page:

https://www.instagram.com/_tejucole/

Judge yourself whether his photography is of a caliber to lay judgment on McCurry.
Click to expand...

If you click on the 'Photography' tab of his website you get one single image.

It just seems that NYT needed an opinion piece and he duly gave them one. Personally I agree that Singh's pictures, from what I've found, show a 'wider view' of India but it did seem a little daft as Mr Cole started to deride a photograph taken in 1983 for not making ample social comment on contemporary India some thirty three years later. Opinion pieces can end up coming out the same way that most opinions do, a little screeching, a little preachy and just plain wrong in the eyes of some others. Also, as Lauffray mentions - why call McCurry's work boring. It's such a weak and unhelpful adjective that it only seems to weaken the authors point.
 
NY_Dan said:
I don't care what the NYT or Teju Cole have to say about photography. They should spend less time pontificating and more time shooting - not that it would help them...
Click to expand...
Huss said:
...Judge yourself whether his photography is of a caliber to lay judgment on McCurry.
Click to expand...
My eyes glaze over when people start discussing whether or not a photography critic must be a good photographer. Consequently, I confess that I've only skimmed through this thread but have read the Teju Cole article on Steve McCurry. Some of reactions to the Coles article make me think about the Ingrid Sischy 1991 New Yorker article on Sabastião Salgado: that is, that certain photographers elicit a level of adoration that places then beyond criticism in the minds of some of their fans. But I'm grateful that this thread has introduced me to Teju Cole and his engaging and thought provoking article about the nature of travel photography, Far Away From Here. This article, also written for the New York Times, has the subtitle "In travel photography, as in writing, there's no shortcut to finding your own voice." Here is a long quote, although the whole article makes for rewarding reading:
Baedeker was already able to state, in that early guide to Switzerland, that places like the Rigi, the Brünig and the Scheideck were on ‘‘beaten tracks.’’ By the 1880s, Switzerland was estimated to be receiving a million visitors a year. Travelers tend to go where other travelers have gone, and perhaps this is part of the reason travel photography remains in thrall to the typical. When you do visit Zurich or Cape Town or Bangkok, they are very much alike: The amusement parks have striking similarities, the cafes all play the same Brazilian music, the malls are interchangeable, kids on the school buses resemble one another and the interiors of middle-class homes conform to the same parameters.

This doesn’t mean the world is uninteresting. It only means that the world is more uniform than most photo essays acknowledge, and that a lot of travel photography relies on an easy essentialism. I like Italo Calvino’s idea of ‘‘continuous cities,’’ as described in the novel ‘‘Invisible Cities.’’ He suggests that there is actually just one big, continuous city that does not begin or end: ‘‘Only the name of the airport changes.’’ What is then interesting is to find, in that continuity, the less-obvious differences of texture: the signs, the markings, the assemblages, the things hiding in plain sight in each cityscape or landscape. This is what outstanding photographers are able to do, and it is the target the rest of us chase.

The question I confronted in Switzerland is similar to that confronted by any camera-toting visitor in a great landscape: Can my photograph convey an experience that others have already captured so well? The answer is almost always no, but you try anyway. I might feel myself to be a singular traveler, but I am in fact part of a great endless horde. In the 1870s, Mark Twain was already complaining: ‘‘Now everybody goes everywhere; and Switzerland, and many other regions which were unvisited and unknown remotenesses a hundred years ago, are in our days a buzzing hive of restless strangers.’’

But ambition always comes to darken your serenity. Technically proficient mountain pictures were good, but I also had to develop my own voice. In photography, as in writing, there’s no shortcut to finding that voice. I could not decide ahead of time that I would take only ugly pictures or only beautiful ones, or that everything would be in focus or blurred, or that I would use only color or only black and white. I had been thinking about landscape, I had been exploring color film for a few years, I was drawn to abstraction, and a certain gentle surrealism to be found in the attitude of objects. But there then followed a situational focus, a sensitivity to what the environment gave me.
Click to expand...
And a few paragraphs later he writes:
Along the way, I felt the constant company of doubt: my lack of talent, my impostor’s syndrome, my fear of boring others. Every once in a great while, there was finally a superb picture, but when I looked at it the following week, I would see that it actually wasn’t very good: too obvious, too derivative. Three thousand photographs and three thousand doubts.
Click to expand...
There's also a short slideshow to his Switzerland photographs that, to me, show him to be an interesting photographer. Above, someone wrote a putdown of Cole in linking his Instagram feed: actually, a leisurely walk through his Instagram photos, with a reading of the text that companies the pictures, is instructive and confirms that he is a photographer whose pictures are worth looking at, and a writer worth reading.
 
Nowhereman said:
There's also a short slideshow to his Switzerland photographs that, to me, show him to be an interesting photographer. Above, someone wrote a putdown of Cole in linking his Instagram feed: actually, a leisurely walk through his Instagram photos, with a reading of the text that companies the pictures, is instructive and confirms that he is a photographer whose pictures are worth looking at, and a writer worth reading.
Click to expand...

I linked his instagram site. and let others judge his work.

I think his writing is great but the photography extremely sub par.
After seeing it it puts his critique of Mccurry's work into sharp perspective.

An opinion.
 
What perspective is that? The work of a critic stands for itself, whether in photography or painting, and bears absolutely no relation to the critic's ability or skill in the art being critiqued: for example, A.D. Coleman is an outstanding photography critic, who has published countless essays and many books of photography critique — he is not a photographer at all.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom