I Can See it For You Wholesale

Mrs. Deane has a nice write-up on a documentary project by Andreas Reeg. I really like this passage in particular:

Somehow the photographs correspond to my own hands-on experience of meeting people in the world, in their environment, and not isolated and disconnected. Reeg presents me with slices of situations that seem likely and natural to me, whereas a lot of portraits fail to come across to me as "likely", even if they try mimicking real life by getting their subjects to do things like sit on a bed or stare out of a window. To me, such 'unlikely' portraits smell too much of camera and set-up and the ego of the photographer, triggering all the wrong images and associations in my mind.

This does a pretty good job of encapsulating a distinction which is sometimes very tricky to articulate. Of course, it doesn’t really resolve the issue, because of course how do you explain to someone what makes a photo “smell” a certain way? It is tricky…and it points back to the more or less perennial problem of the relationship between photographic representation and “reality” however defined, or the even more difficult and slippery “authenticity.”

portrait therapy: andreas reeg | Mrs. Deane.

I’m pretty sure the combination is illegal in Utah.

I recently received a press-release in the mail where the photographer claimed affinity to both Wittgenstein and Foucault. Is that combination possible!?

Couldn’t have said it any better (Conscientious)

I subscribe to quite a few photography blogs, and there are quite a lot of posts floating around promoting this or that photographer and/or exhibition and/or photo-set.

A lot of what I see coming through these channels is either rather familiar or tediously arty. But I also see, fairly often, images that belong to a group that I think of as "interesting pictures of boring things." Here’s an example, via Conscientious.

Images of this kind are sort of risky to inflict on average viewers, because the intrinsic banality of the content may mask (or, indeed, totally annul) the quality of the photography — not to mention, of course, that if there isn’t also some purpose or meaning at work, it’s just a technical exercise. So, when they fail, they fail hard. But when they work, they can be very, very impressive.

Anyone have any examples of this (either of their own, or links to other photographers) they’d like to share?

BTW: I’m not talking about effects-heavy, bokeh-heavy, or macro-tastic shots of mundane objects, so please don’t post those.