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 Musée de l'Elysée 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
Elysée'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 ]
