all photos ~ (embiggenable)
WRITING ABOUT WILLIAM CHRISTENBERRY’S KODAK BROWNIE snapshots, Walker Evans wrote:
I need not proclaim the distinction in these unpretentious pictures. They will be spotted by the many experts who now follow photography in all its turns-and they will probably be mishandled in one way or another, as usual. I want, though, to indulge myself in the truly sensual pleasure of these things in their quiet honesty, subtlety, and restrained strength and their refreshing purity. There is something enlightening about them, they seem to write a new little social and architectural history about one regional America (the Deep South). In addition to that, each one is a poem.
ASIDE Christenberry-who later became close friends with Walker Evans-made his Kodak Brownie camera pictures in the 1970s, getting his prints done at drugstore photo counters as he toured and pictured Hale County, Ala., where his family is from. Hale County is the local where Evans made many of his acclaimed photographs.END ASIDE
I stumbled upon Christenberry’s little color snapshots-and the above quote-earlier today while I was (re)reading the DOCUMENTATION chapter in the new color photography book. That reading was instigated by a desire to find some insight into the art world thinking, re: documentation, that I might pass along with the posting of the pictures presented in this entry. Pictures that some might think to be mere documents, or, some might think to be fine art, or, yet again, some might think to be casual snapshots.
In any event, it would seem that at least one influential author / critic-Sally Eauclaire-along with Walker Evans believes that a photograph made in a documentary style that exhibits honesty, subtlety, and restrained strength and their refreshing purity also can possess artistic merit. And, as more investigation, as written in 2010 in the Washington Post revealed:
“The drugstore prints barely even seem to count as art. That's what makes them so wonderful and so important. They feel like they provide the most direct, intense, unmediated encounter with the reality that matters to Christenberry, without any artifying filter getting in the way.”
So, all of that written, what I come away with is that I can at least feel good about the M.O. with which I approach my picture making; striving to make pictures that are quiet, direct, unmediated, honest, and art sauce free. Whether that M.O. translates into pictures that viewers perceive to possess those same qualities is out of my control.