PROCRASTINATION IS THE WORD OF THE WEEK. Since returning from Portugal, my mind, photography projects-wise, has been overloaded; processing, organizing and printing Portugal pictures, acquiring and messin’ around with the Instax printer and thinking about what I want to do with it, and what should be at the top o’ the heap - finalizing the work (and getting it out the door) on my Adirondack Survey Project.
The net result of all that mental muddle has been a bit of slacking off, blog entry-wise. However, over the past week there has been a bit of a preoccupation on a few sites, re: street photography. It seems like a bit of a contagion spreading from on site to another. So…
…the prime irritant which got me infected with the bug was a bit of a snit-ty entry from my annoyingly favorite Texas-based gearhead obsessive who is prone to getting a bit testy when his non-commercial, aka “personal”, photography bonafides are called into question. In this case, it seems that another blogger (unnamed) opined that the Texan’s pictures, those self-described as “street'“ photography, are not street photography at all. This poke at the hornet’s nest send the Texan into a snit that resulted in a throw spit-balls at the wall and see what sticks exercise. The spit-balls were a very large number of pictures, some of which had the “look” of street photography, others not so much.
That written, it is not my intention to get into the are-they-or-ain’t-they street photography fracas. My intent is to get off my chest, once and for all, my opinion that the work in question and, or for that matter, and / all of the non-commercial pictures posted by the Texan exhibit not single shred of a coherent picture making vision. And, when confronted with a similar assessment-which he has been-his defense is that his site is a gear review site, not an “art” site.
Well, iMo, he just blew that defense to smithereens. If his posting of his cluster-fuck / poorly edited street photography is not an attempt to bolster his non-commercial picture making creds, then-as his entry states-”we’re all delusional” and so is he.
All of the above written, what this street photography contagion has caused me to do is spend some time processing some of my Portugal street photography pictures to monochrome and present them in a new WORK page gallery. Have a look and let me know what you think of it.
PS more on street photography-specifically, Mike Johnston’s Tips For Photographing in Public-in my next entry. And, the bathroom picture in this entry is the bathroom in a our Porto, Portugal hotel room. I want to replicate it in our house.
