"The Non-art Leica Snapshot"

[nightfly]

Seems like this applies much more to your phone than your Leica but sure.

It's not exactly a new or particularly original sentiment. It's kinda what people like Eggleston built their careers on. Then it became art.

 

[Contarama]

HCB shot his first 10000 (likely with a Leica) and they were his worst. 🙂

Nothing new under the sun boys...

 

[Ranchu]

It's not exactly a new or particularly original sentiment. It's kinda what people like Eggleston built their careers on. Then it became art.

I'm sad for you that you think that. I'm trying to imagine who these 'people like Eggleston' are, also. What's his face, with the hot dog built a career off Eggleston, but that's all I can think of.

 

[Contarama]

I'm glad for him. Lets all go canoeing shall we??? LMAO

 

[PKR]

It occurred to me the similarity between this angle from Puts and the Lomo marketing angle. Leica might be copying Lomo's marketing.

Funny!



http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7007160.stm

I'm sure a plastic Leica with selectable light leaks is on the drawing board. The big question is... is $3,800 too much money for a plastic camera? And, will it have a plastic lens? A Plasticon perhaps. Further, the accessory "metal" lens hood in 5 color choices may be too much, or, not enough.

The biggger question remains: will Leica buy Lomo or will Lomo buy Leica? A digital Lomo ..the mind swims in plastic pixels.

 

[Richard G]

I'm sure a plastic Leica with selectable light leaks is on the drawing board. The big question is... is $3,800 too much money for a plastic camera? And, will it have a plastic lens? A Plasticon perhaps. Further, the accessory "metal" lens hood in 5 color choices may be too much, or, not enough.

The biggger question remains: will Leica buy Lomo or will Lomo buy Leica? A digital Lomo ..the mind swims in plastic pixels.

"Selectable light leaks": I like that.

 

[Ranchu]

All I know is that only when this 'Don't think, just shoot' style of snapshot photography is accepted will we start to understand the Leica camera, its lenses and its uses.

 

[PKR]

"Selectable light leaks": I like that.

I think there's an old, kind of junkie, black m2 kicken around. I've got some really small drills, like #80. I could drill some holes in the film holding area of the body and cover them with gaffer tape on the exterior. Pulling the tape in various patterns to create some cool light leaks? I'll have a look in my junk box of questionable gear and report back.

 

[nightfly]

I'm not sure why this is sad. I'd much rather look at this type of photography than very studied, formal shots by earlier photographers. I love and practice this.

Eggleston, Saul Leiter, Stephen Shore (pre large format), Martin Paar, Harry Guyaert and probably 10 other great photographers of ordinary things that they elevate by keen observation.

I just feel like if you really want to see ordinary snapshot style photography, you have millions of photographs at your fingertips with things like instagram and you don't need a Leica.

I guess I'm a little cyncial about true meaning of this sentiment. I think the idea is that we need to be a little looser and less precious about our photography which I agree with but it seems to employed in the service of selling expensive cameras to amateurs who would just as well served by whatever is in their pocket.

 

[infrequent]

The biggger question remains: will Leica buy Lomo or will Lomo buy Leica? A digital Lomo ..the mind swims in plastic pixels.

Leica already has a "cheap" lifestyle camera - SOFORT - that is effectively a revised Fuji Instax Neo camera. One can imagine similar arrangements with others perhaps?

 

[Richard G]

Without wanting to seem like I only drink Kool Aid, that huge Leica volume "Eyes Wide Open" has some compelling images from earlier decades which are 100% the subject matter, people in action, events, nothing clever or contrived, miraculously captured on the fly, on film, forever. I think that is what Puts was referring to.

 

[tunalegs]

I'm pretty sure when Steichen made the Moon Light Pond photo, he thought he was making something that might be nice to look at - not just a record of an event. But, it is that too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_photographs

Sure, but that photo is far removed from the origins of photography, and Steichen was among those working to bring photography into the art world.

So this:

Considering photography's origins it makes sense ... it's just record keeping that the art world ultimately embraced for its own purposes.

still stands.

 

[PKR]

Sure, but that photo is far removed from the origins of photography, and Steichen was among those working to bring photography into the art world.

Maybe not a good word here (art), but lots of early photo work copied paintings in composition and lighting.
http://www.photo-museum.org/daguerre-invention-photo/

 

[Ranchu]

I'm not sure why this is sad. I'd much rather look at this type of photography than very studied, formal shots by earlier photographers. I love and practice this.

Eggleston, Saul Leiter, Stephen Shore (pre large format), Martin Paar, Harry Guyaert and probably 10 other great photographers of ordinary things that they elevate by keen observation.

I just feel like if you really want to see ordinary snapshot style photography, you have millions of photographs at your fingertips with things like instagram and you don't need a Leica.

I guess I'm a little cyncial about true meaning of this sentiment. I think the idea is that we need to be a little looser and less precious about our photography which I agree with but it seems to employed in the service of selling expensive cameras to amateurs who would just as well served by whatever is in their pocket.

I agree with a lot of what you say here, but you and I are seeing different things in Eggleston's work, or reading different things into the Puts quote.

s an advice to start taking pictures without artistic pretensions but with a great admiration for the objects that reality offers us.... So forget about art and composition and just record whatever interests you and look afterwards in the picture to see what inspired you

Is miles away from what I see in Eggleston's pictures. His pictures don't seem to me to be about objects at all, as much as kinetic aesthetic/perceptual forces and presences. So to speak. They are very consciously sought. It's hard for me to put it into words, I don't really like to actually..

 

[tunalegs]

Maybe not a good word here (art), but lots of early photo work copied paintings in composition and lighting.
http://www.photo-museum.org/daguerre-invention-photo/

Sure, but mimicking art does not necessarily mean it was art.

For the first few decades of photography's existence, photography was generally understood to be a purely scientific process. a photographer was simply somebody who worked cameras and mixed chemicals, and if they were good they got a fixed image on a metal plate. It was not understood that there was any room for a photographer to exercise their personal creativity over the image, it either came out right or it didn't. It wasn't really until the pictorialist movement, where photographers went out of their way to show how much control they had over the final image that people began to accept photography as art, as they saw the photographer could exercise control over the final image.

 

[aizan]

So forget about art and composition and just record whatever interests you and look afterwards in the picture to see what inspired you.​

it's hard to tell what he's talking about. is he talking about the looser shooting style of winogrand, frank, klein, moriyama, et al.?

 

[571514m3]

Without wanting to seem like I only drink Kool Aid, that huge Leica volume "Eyes Wide Open" has some compelling images from earlier decades which are 100% the subject matter, people in action, events, nothing clever or contrived, miraculously captured on the fly, on film, forever. I think that is what Puts was referring to.

+1

🙂

 

[tunalegs]

I had to look up the original blog post to find context for the quote: http://www.imx.nl/photo/blog/files/63568242eabf01174a5354419d00b14e-72.html

It seems Puts is more saying that just having a Leica doesn't make one an artist, and further one needn't think they must try to be an artist if they have a Leica - even if this is part of Leica's marketing shtick.

 

[johannielscom]

Interesting.

I remember a photographer in a Magnum documentary telling about the struggle that the Magnum photographers went through at some point, where many of them had to make an effort to let go of the 'old' style of photography where composition and the rule of thirds were omnipresent and subjects were 'worthy' of HCB and Capa. Instead they needed to change over to the Martin Parr approach to framing, compositon, subjects etc.

He said it was tough for those who looked for the nice and rustic sheep herd sceneries to realise that it was the fastfood restaurant that depicted modern times but that the switch had to be made, for Magnum's relevance as an agency. The alternative was to turn into a pleasant bunch of old folk using arcane camera gear. That last sentence is my own phrasing of the situation 😀.

I haven't read anything other than the quote from Puts and haven't read the book mentioned at all but I think it is this that he means. If Leica photographers do not change the content of their shots, the relevance of photographers, images and the camera brand might decline and eventually fade. From a marketing perspective it's about rejuvenating the consumer base I suppose.

To me this marketing aspect is all humdrum, I only shoot a pre-war Leica II anyway. But I do try to turn my lens away from 'rustic cattle-like' scenes and keep a bit of a spring in my shots.

 

[cz23]

tunalegs, thank you for citing Erwin's post; I should have done so at the start.

Keith, good point about the art world co-opting the snapshot. That's actually a large part of the context of the quote I selected. As Puts mentions, Szarkowski's New Documents exhibit is the milestone that started it all. I'm not sure if Erwin is disappointed with that fact. But to me it seems that without it, we may not even be aware today of the work of Winogrand, Friedlander, and Arbus.

But the quote had a more personal resonance with me that I'll try to explain.

I know that I (and I suspect others here do the same) often go out with my camera looking for good photographs. It can become as if we are collecting baseball cards. And I think whether we are conscious of it or not, our understanding of "good" has been handed down to us by the art world.

I believe what Puts is suggesting is this: Replace that pursuit of good photographs with a genuine interest in the world around you, with a keen alertness and sensitivity to what truly engages you. Then make that appreciation the subject of your photographs. It's a distinction of mindset. A subtle but important one, I feel, and one I would like to develop more.

The Leica thing is incidental. We all know this type of photography can be practiced with pretty much any equipment. Erwin is a Leica historian, so that's to be expected. But it is certainly true that it was the invention of the small, light, hand-held Leica that first allowed us to document all those fleeting sparks of perception. That's the legacy of Leica that I think he would like to see preserved.

John