I got stuck indoors in the air-conditioning during the heat wave that began shortly after I returned from China (but is definitely not caused by global warming, as the Angel Moroni recently told Mitt Romney in a dream, according to the latest rumor out of Salt Lake City). Adrift in the doldrums until […]
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When I speak of the well-made photograph, I use that phrase to describe a recurrent type of photograph produced according to strict if unstated guidelines — and, beyond that, a recurrent type of photography project built around such pictures. I use trope similarly, in its meaning as “a common or overused theme or device: cliché.” These pictures and projects resemble each other to such an extent that, with minor adjustments, the images, their accompanying texts, often even the project statements, are hot-swappable and interchangeable. In short, they all look basically the same. […] Conceptually (I use the word advisedly, and charitably), the vast majority of photography projects I encounter nowadays seem to represent some welling-up of archetypes from the collective unconscious of the academically indoctrinated. Something’s in the academy-filtered air they’ve breathed, or the academy-blend Kool-Aid they’ve imbibed. […] Now, even rigorous and thorough research is surely not as conventionally manly and ostentatiously testosterone-validating as wrangling your view camera plus related equipment up some mountain and making your mule your bitch after dinner by the campfire at the summit. So I can see how someone like Jeff Schneider can analogize a mere desk-bound scrivener like myself to “a spoiled, pubescent young girl,” “virgins in their tighty whities who like to throw stones from the safety of their firewalls,” and “a closeted homosexual evangelist.” . . . […] |
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NY Times Photo Ethics Policy Meets Edgar Martins
Martins’s contract stipulated digitally unaltered images (beyond the minimal tweaking described in the above memo), and he repeatedly asserted to Times staffers — including the writer of the accompanying Times Magazine article, several editors, and the fact checker at the magazine — that his images conformed to those guidelines. Where I come from, we call that lying, when its source is a photographer commissioned to document the real estate bust. Reading Martins’s own “annotations” of his now-controversial images, it seems clear that he felt free to exercise extreme license in montaging and altering his illustrations, rationalizing this activity with a logic and vocabulary far more commonplace in the discourse around creative photography than in that related to photojournalism and documentary work. […]