Luminous Landscape Forum

The Art of Photography => User Critiques => Topic started by: seamus finn on January 07, 2014, 02:48:08 pm

Title: Headless Holiday
Post by: seamus finn on January 07, 2014, 02:48:08 pm
Somewhere in Lanzarote. Or should it be Facebook?

Title: Re: Headless Holiday
Post by: RSL on January 07, 2014, 03:35:41 pm
Great shot, Seamus. Another Martin Parr.
Title: Re: Headless Holiday
Post by: WalterEG on January 07, 2014, 03:47:46 pm
What makes this for me, Seamus, is that we could be looking at a mirror image of the snapper, but for the scarf and apparel.  It is all driven home to me with the T-shirt slogan facing her from above which is possibly a mirror image also of her own self-image.  Feisty tatt. too. 

W
Title: Re: Headless Holiday
Post by: seamus finn on January 07, 2014, 05:14:50 pm
Quote
[Great shot, Seamus. Another Martin Parr./quote]

I'm wondering if this is a compliment, Russ. An awful lot of people don't like Parr and how they think he exploits people.
I think he's admirable for his scathing commentary on modern society. Having being a journalist and newspaper editor for over forty years, I sometimes look at his pictures and ponder how I might put into a thousand how he does it in a click.
Title: Re: Headless Holiday
Post by: Eric Myrvaagnes on January 07, 2014, 06:43:56 pm
You don't exploit people, Seamus. You just show us life as it really is, at its most interesting moments.
Title: Re: Headless Holiday
Post by: seamus finn on January 07, 2014, 06:54:16 pm
You don't exploit people, Seamus. You just show us life as it really is, at its most interesting moments.

Or its most photographically mundane?
Title: Re: Headless Holiday
Post by: AFairley on January 07, 2014, 07:30:27 pm
Quote from: seamus finn on January 07, 2014, 06:54:16 pm
You don't exploit people, Seamus. You just show us life as it really is, at its most interesting moments.

Or its most photographically mundane?

Well, that's part of its charm. You show life at its most mundane and banal, but at the same time you capture and celebrate the ridiculously vibrant is-ness of it all.  I find it hard to express, but I mean to be complementry.
Title: Re: Headless Holiday
Post by: Christoph C. Feldhaim on January 08, 2014, 02:57:10 am
Quote from: seamus finn on January 07, 2014, 06:54:16 pm
You don't exploit people, Seamus. You just show us life as it really is, at its most interesting moments.

Or its most photographically mundane?

Seeing the mundane through your own eyes and elevating it above the ordinary by your subjective view on it is the matter of street photography.
So the question always is what did you do that differentiates the image from sole documentation of the mundane.
And thats not always easily to answer.

Cheers
~Chris
Title: Re: Headless Holiday
Post by: Rob C on January 08, 2014, 04:36:32 am
Nope, Seamus, I don't think you are an expoitative street shooter - at least, not from anything I've seen from you on LuLa.

Thankfully, neither do I make any comparison with Parr, whose work I do feel is exploitation in the extreme and, for me at least, will always be tinged with the mockery that I saw in his Technicolor foray into the lives of the British poor. Unlike the stuff from Winogrand or Klein and any number of others who made a b¡g rep from the street, and whose work expressed the dynamic of the experience, Parr seems to me always to have worked from a sense of belonging to a higher social class - he seems as if he's slumming, in other words, not observing. Just my opinion, of course, but my constant reaction to him. I suppose that it will colour anything else he ever does that I get to see.

You didn't have to go to the Canaries to find that stuff, though; half that flight away and you'd find it all, unfortunately, in the Balearics. Cesar Manrique must be weeping in his box.

Rob C
Title: Re: Headless Holiday
Post by: petermfiore on January 08, 2014, 07:46:58 am
Quote from: RSL on January 07, 2014, 03:35:41 pm
Great shot, Seamus. Another Martin Parr.



Much more a Seamus Finn...


Peter
Title: Re: Headless Holiday
Post by: RSL on January 08, 2014, 09:03:42 am
Quote from: petermfiore on January 08, 2014, 07:46:58 am
Much more a Seamus Finn...

That was a compliment Peter. I love Parr's work because he gets right to the point without dorking around. Seamus did the same thing here.
Title: Re: Headless Holiday
Post by: AFairley on January 08, 2014, 10:05:31 am
Quote from: RSL on January 08, 2014, 09:03:42 am
That was a compliment Peter. I love Parr's work because he gets right to the point without dorking around. Seamus did the same thing here.

Except Seamus does not have the judgmental quality that puts me off of Parr (from what little I have seen of Parrs work).
Title: Re: Headless Holiday
Post by: seamus finn on January 08, 2014, 04:37:31 pm
Quote
Except Seamus does not have the judgmental quality that puts me off of Parr (from what little I have seen of Parrs work).
Title: Re: Headless Holiday
Post by: RSL on January 08, 2014, 07:16:39 pm
I don't see Parr as "judgmental." I see him doing the same thing HCB did: telling it like it is. The difference is that since HCB's day, the way it is is a lot sillier.
Title: Re: Headless Holiday
Post by: AFairley on January 08, 2014, 08:55:19 pm
Quote from: RSL on January 08, 2014, 07:16:39 pm
I don't see Parr as "judgmental." I see him doing the same thing HCB did: telling it like it is. The difference is that since HCB's day, the way it is is a lot sillier.

I don't know, Russ, it's all in the editing, isn't it?  It seems to me that Parr is editing with an agenda (as we all do).  I'l readily give you that HCB captured some odd stuff...