The part of Mr. Puts' article that struck me was this:
The Leica camera is most often used for taking pictures in the domestic or vernacular domain. Most of these pictures are made for personal memories of important or emotionally relevant events or persons.
The official Leica view is that these pictures are irrelevant for the Leica image. They seem to forget that the first Leica images were very domestic snapshots. It is a fallacy to equate Leica photography with art photography. Most early Leica photographs were reportages by scientists and by explorers who documented the reality of expeditions and were made with reality in focus.
Which I'm reading as a bit of push back against the "Leicas are Serious Cameras for Art" kind of thinking.
More interesting to me, however is the differences expressed by each of us in this thread. And that has me re-considering one of my own long held ideas.
I have had conversations with some of my friends over the years about this and may have briefly talked about it here, but after reading this thread...
Anyway, I used to think that a poem or piece of prose--pretty much any written piece--was eminently easier to reproduce so that every reader at least started from the same place, as it were. That any visual medium was never going to be exactly the same for any viewer, that even for something mechanically reproduced each copy would be subtly (or not) different from any other copy. And that because a written piece is not the actual typography or alphabet but those things are the representation of the idea of the words they contain, the differences between, say, a handwritten version of a poem and that same poem printed in a book were irrelevant. While those differences of reproduction of, say, a photograph can become very important in how the viewer sees the photograph.
I started thinking about this a long time ago; I had seen some of Gertrude Kasebier's photos in print in a pretty good collection of her work--mostly around the beginning of the last century--and then made a trip to see some of her original prints. The difference in seeing those originals and what the book showed was, well, eye opening for me. I had seen this before with paintings but niavely thought something like well newsprint reproductions are obviously not going to be as good as an original print but a well printed book ought to be pretty close to the original...
After that I'd been thinking that a reproduction of an image must be considered to be a symbol or maybe a metaphor for the "actual" image so my understanding of that image clearly depended on how well the symbol identified the image.
And, for something written, because the letters are the symbol for the idea, as long as those symbols are legible and I understand the language, I am seeing what the author intended to show.
So, this afternoon as I was reading this thread, there was a bit of a eureka moment for me.
Which, as best as I can write it, is that they are not that much more a precise symbol of what the author intends than a visual work, that the mechanical reproduction does not affect my perception, nor differentiate it from any other viewer/reader nearly as much as what we each bring to the viewing/reading.
Thanks!
Annd, the above is a pretty good example of why I mostly don't blab about this stuff and just try to take photos of what I find interesting or beautiful around me.
🙂
Rob
