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1 of 2 today - 2010-03-17 19:35:31
| posting two today - this diptych and the Rockies shot taken in the same spot as yesterday's post. actually i prepared this diptych to post yesterday and even put it up for a few minutes but then i lost confidence and took it down. these 2 black and white photos here are film and were taken in january. i thought of putting them together yesterday and they have a specific meaning for me but i don't expect it to make much sense to anyone else. different topic: tomorrow is photo class and we will make short presentations. mine is on the Japanese postwar photographers Shomei Tomatsu and Daido Moriyama. to tell you a bit about them both began photographing at a time when photo-realism was very popular in Japan. Ken Domon, who was a key figure in the photo-realism movement, felt strongly that the photographer must present the subject matter in an objective way. it was the photographer's responsibility to find and convey the 'essence' of the subject. Domon felt the worst thing a photographer could do was to pose a subject or stage an event. within this school of thought and much of photojournalism and narrative photography is the idea that the subject is more important than the photographer's will. both Tomatsu and Moriyama have been criticized for creating photos where the sense of time and place are not always evident. Moriyama in particular resisted the idea of narrative. he often shot his photographs in series - sometimes spending years photographing a particular subject or place - but then he tore apart the "narrative fabric" of this work by arranging the images in discordant ways in photographic books. for Moriyama creating photographs that conveyed his sense of the "visible present" or his "authentic experience" of a time or place was more important than representing reality in the conventional sense. other Japanese photographers working at this time also expressed the idea of using photography to create a "personal document" or work that expressed a "private vision" instead of representing reality. Moriyama did this partly through photographing again and again his favorite things and the things he most disliked. he was very conscious though of pushing himself to create work that was not as he called it 'navel gazing'. i think Moriyama was striving to find a way of working that went beyond both objective reporting and subjective expressing. i find Tomatsu's work calmer and more accessible than Moriyama's however i've enjoyed looking at and thinking about the work of both. |
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