At 13:17 -0800 16/1/03, AG Schnozz wrote:
>I just can't leave this subject alone. I've got to pipe in
>here.
>
>Regarding Galen Rowell: What he lacked in specific photographic
>technical skills, he made up for in other areas which will allow
>his reputation to transend generations. He will remain one of
>the all-time greatest "Adventure Photographers". I think that
>most of his stuff had little to do with specific artistic or
>technical talent (he learned through the years what worked and
>didn't work) than with "being there" with the right mental
>working attitude.
>
>Will he go down in the anals of time and be referenced in the
>same breath as Ansel Adams or Monet? Hardly. In no one single
>category did he excell, but as a package, he truely was great.
Now I think we are getting to the heart of the matter, thank you very much.
Galen Rowell was by all accounts a wonderful person, a courageous and
caring adventurer, knowledgeable and erudite, and a fine professional
photographer. His photographs were charming, interesting, beautiful,
educative, and crafted with excellence. Many of them embodied values about
wild things.
But I maintain that they were not great photographs, and he was not a great
photographer.
As a package, as you put it, he may have been a truly fine human being (the
term great when applied to a total person being fraught with even more
emotional baggage than when applied to photographs and photographers, I'll
not venture into Rowell's "greatness as a package") but his pictures are
not memorable (no one has met my challenge to recall any and discuss their
greatness without reference to books, etc.).
I don't share this view completely, but photography critics of my
acquaintance view Rowell as a super-chocolate-box image maker.
>
>Regarding Photography being about Light: Hogwash!
>
[snip well-said defence of this claim, with which I agree]
>
>It's all about balance. Put too much emphasis on "light" and
>the photo will fail. Too much emphasis on the subject will
>cause the composition to fail. Compositions without interesting
>subjects fail. Too much emphasis on equipment/film/working
>methods will cause everything to fail.
Yes, all true. But you demean the idea of great photographs by bringing
them down from their lofty perch of meaning to "packages of greatness" in a
similar way to your characterization of Rowell as a "great package".
And, you introduce a primary substitution of the term "subject", which is a
camera-club, photo-magazine, competition-category word, for my view that
"content" is the most important thing in great photographs. Content being
far more than simple "subject matter"; content being the result of depth of
experience by the people in front of the lens and behind it, and the depth
of intellect, feeling, response and expression by the photographer.
This is exemplified by, for instance, Ron Jackson's quest to rise above the
pack of competent hack pros. This is a laudable goal, but it can be nothing
more than achieving the kind of "photography package" skills and abilities
to make commercially and visually slick and even interesting, exciting
pictures.
What I've been on about since beginning this discussion with Ron and others
is the matter of going beyond those professional considerations, to the
matter of actually using the camera to delve deeply not only into the
meaning of the world around us, but our reaction to it and our expression
of ourselves.
None of what I'm on about has anything to do with craft, professionalism or
artifice -- or packages, human or otherwise.
--
Cheers from Godzone,
Michael Kopp
Wellington, New Zealand
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