The other thing: Shane, I noticed you subtitled your post “the night of the hunter.” I don’t think you were referring to the great James Agee film with Robert Mitchum, but maybe you were. Anyway, I was thinking about that word hunter & the whole idea of going out alone into the crazy & largely uncooperative world & trying to bring back something poetic & marvelous. Some people are suited to that — the solitude, the uncertainty, the trying to capture a mini-second of control or maybe just luck in an uncontrollable world. They are not — or don’t feel they are — suited to collaboration, planning, making a big deal. Then too they might not have the time or money. Again, it’s not necessary to attack Crewsdon or any of the others to say that the more improvisational found-moment form calls for great discipline & skill & can embody the very highest aspirations. I think the photography establishment tends to ignore it because it’s so seemingly easy to do & now everybody has a point & shoot. It’s like haiku. Everybody writes it. But go & take a look at the haiku of Basho.

Just as you have to work very hard to impress certain people with creating works of fictional photography, you have to take very careful steps when making documentary photography. If you are caught “faking reality” it will always devaluate the photograph – no matter the aesthetical qualities.

I think by no means it is insignificant to separate photography into two camps. The one that is documenting reality (to the degree that such a thing is possible) and the other that is creating works of fiction (depicting a mental reality), rather than a physical one. Staged photography is fiction, or a performance if you will.

Photography is a technology that can be applied both to art and science. While on a conceptual level everything might be claimed to be real or unreal, any meaningful way of communication has to go beyond playing with words.

Photography is what photography does. Of course we change our view and understanding of images once we know how they were made. That is the whole thing isn’t it? Knowledge of photography is the key to crating and understanding photography.

Amen.

That said‚Äîtoo briefly‚Äîmy argument against the set-up picture is that it leaves the matter of content to the IMAGINATION of the photographer, a faculty that, in my experience, is generally deficient compared to the mad swirling possibilities that our dear common world kicks up at us on a regular basis. That‚Äôs all. Remember, T. S. Eliot made the clear, brutal distinction between the art that floods us with the ‚Äúaura‚Äù of experience, and the art that ‚Äòpresents‚Äô the experience itself. ANY artist, I feel, must contend seriously with the question of which side of that distinction he or she is going to bet on in their work. Obviously, I‚Äôm with Eliot‚Äîand Homer‚Äîin this, believing that the mind-constructed photograph almost necessarily leads to a form of illustration, the very epitome of aura-art.”

– Papageorge, via Alec Soth’s recent interview.