Moritz Neumüller’s active suppression, in his article, of the public complaints levied at Halliday … obscures the fact that a deep-seated and long-standing professional jealousy, and a concomitant battle over the psycho-geography of London, lay at the heart of Halliday’s entire campaign against Butturini. […]
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The Mercedes Baptiste Halliday narrative legitimised Gian Butturini’s detractors, and kept them respectable. On paper, it superficially resembled a clear, ideological position, fuelled by a defiance of racial injustice. In actuality, it was a subterfuge, a mere foil – albeit one cut from noble principles – to hide the pettiest and basest of motives: the green-eyed monster of professional jealousy. […] For all of Moritz Neumüller’s profuse appeals to impartiality and critical objectivity, the very notion that Gian Butturini’s book LONDON had not only offended, but offended widely — indeed, globally — remains an untested one, founded not upon documentary evidence, but on faith, or magical thinking, alone. […] Exuding an exhaustive scholarliness and an air of academic authority, Neumüller’s textual apparatus thus becomes unstable on close inspection, at its worst incomplete, misleading, and factually inaccurate. … Parr and Butturini’s social media detractors, very limited in number and audience, never put forward a case to support their claims that Butturini’s London was a racist text. […] Herman Emmet’s models, I know, are Agee-Evans and W. Eugene Smith, among others. This work emerges from that lineage, extends the thrust of those seminal efforts, and deserves to stand in their company. But it certainly is not of interest exclusively to those concerned with serious photography, who may well prove to be only a small segment of its audience. […] |
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