The camera never lied - at least
until now.
Written By: Charles Darwent,
UK | Published: The
Independent, UK
In case you
hadn't heard, photography is going through a crisis at the moment, a spell
of spiritual self-doubt. For 150 years, cameras never lied;
now, it seems, they do nothing but lie.
Born in a time of media & spin, young
photographers have been struck down by anomie: a feeling
that cameras are dishonest recorders, that the only decent thing to do with them is lie.
A recent show at
the Mus�e de l'Elys�e in Switzerland asked fledgling snappers from
around the world to send in their portfolios. Of the thousands that
did, from Afghanistan
to Zimbabwe, not one submitted a piece of street photography. An
entire field of practice -
the mainstay of Olympians like Weegee, Walker Evans & Robert Doisneau
- had simply
disappeared. With it went a belief in Cartier-Bresson's decisive moment: that
a camera, unposed & surreptitious, could catch a kind of truth.
Look at the
Elys�e's catalogue (reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow)
& you'll see the work of a young American, Ted Partin. At first
glance, Partin looks like
Nan Goldin: actually, his MTV-generation shots are about as far from
Goldin's as it is possible
to be. Posed, complicitous, made with a large-format camera, they
say to the viewer:
everything
I'm showing you is a lie; the image, the medium, the world. [ full
story ]
