Mission Peak Trail. January 21, 2006. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.
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Photography: Who Owns Seydou Ke
The fate of his images has provoked feuds and threats, and above all, a philosophical disagreement over the nature of photography and the concept of authenticity. By MICHAEL RIPS. [NYT > Arts]
The story of this discrepancy – how a pocket-size print, sold for a few dollars in a neighborhood shop in West Africa, became a wall-size photograph that sold for $16,000 in an upscale SoHo gallery – begins in colonial Mali in the 1930’s and continues into the future: a new show of Mr. Keïta’s work opens at the Sean Kelly Gallery in Chelsea on Friday.
It is a story that includes screaming fights, a lawsuit and charges of theft, forgery and perjury. It survives the photographer himself, who died in 2001. And it touches on the broadest channels of human history, from colonialism to capitalism to revolution to race. But it also involves a conflict of the most rarefied sort – a philosophical disagreement over the nature of photography and the concept of authenticity.
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The Confluence Rule
At The Online Photographer Mike Johnston comments about an article by Charles Cramer that compares medium format digital to scanned 4×5 film. I think one of Johnston’s comments is especially intriguing:
I have a principle I call “the confluence rule.” What I’ve noticed is that the closer two of anything are to each other, the more people tend to work to discriminate between them, and the more passionate their arguments become about which is “best.” This is backwards, in my opinion. To me, the closer two of anything are to each other–the more confluent they are–the less it matters which one you choose.
By the way, The Online Photographer has become one of my favorite photography blogs recently.
Photos of 1906 earthquake and fire deliver new perspectives and fresh aftershocks
From SFGate:
People who lived through the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake will recall the jumpy, weak-kneed feeling that haunted them until denial set in again. They should prepare to experience that sensation once more, though faintly, when they see “1906 Earthquake: A Disaster in Pictures” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and “After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006: Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire” at the Legion of Honor.
I’m currently reading Simon Winchester’s book on the 1906 quake, A Crack in the Edge of the World, I live 50 miles south of San Francisco, I have learned to recognize the many (many!) signs of California’s earthquake-affected geography, and I do remember the jumpy, weak-kneed feeling that I experienced during the 1989 quake.
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