|
|
[Shortly after the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, then a relatively new museum specializing in photography, announced an ambitious plan to bring together the works of dozens of eastern European photographers in a massive group show the next summer. I’d met Charles-Henri Favrod, founding director of […] Instead of securing licenses for all these replications of other photographers’ works, Sandro Miller relied instead on a legal opinion interpreting the “fair use” exception to the copyright law as covering these restagings. I don’t see how simply replicating a scenario with John Malkovich substituting for the original subject comments in any significant way on the image from which its iconography derives. With all other elements of each image duplicated as faithfully as possible, is Malkovich’s presence in and of itself “transformative”? […] Looking at John Szarkowski’s photographs and Cornell Capa’s, asking myself — based on that early evidence of personal tendency and taste — which of the two had surprised me most as advocates for photography by transcending the narrow-mindedness to which performers in any medium are prone in order to create an institutional environment with an atmosphere of tolerance and encouragement for all, the unequivocal answer that came was Cornell Capa. […] How seriously are we to take the droppings of a gluttonous voyeur who spent the last seven years of his life producing a third of a million negatives without bothering to look at any of them, much less analyze them critically? This was not a photographer; this was a shooter, afflicted with a textbook case of terminal distraction, the quintessence if not the prototype of the dreaded “Hand With Five Fingers” you have surely seen in camera ads on TV. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Time Capsule 1974: Collier’s Encyclopedia Yearbook
I took the assignment of writing this annual round-up of events in the photo world as an opportunity to create a time capsule of sorts for users of Collier’s Encyclopedia. I just came across the one that appeared 40 years ago in the 1975 edition of the Yearbook, synopsizing the year 1974 (and the last months of of 1973). Here it is. […]