At long last, we agree on something!
;-)
I link to Steidl's photo books:
https://steidl.de/Books/Photography-0104064348.html?chunk=1Looking through this list last night I ended up pulling out my copy of the eponymous
Louis Faurer that they printed some time ago. I reread it cover to cover, looked at all the photographs and tried to come to terms with what was going on. Faurer himself had precious little to say, and the editorial writers handling the project waxed eloquent as ever they do. The take away? That as with many photographers, Faurer was confused. In his case, he appears to me to have had a terrible inferiority complex about himself because he earned his living working for fashion magazines such as
Harper's Bazaar, and felt that his "real" work - kinda mediocre street stuff - was the real jewel in his life whereas, at least in my opinion, his fashion works was really damned good. Which presumably was also the view of the people who hired him over those decades. He and Frank shared the same low opinion about professional work. Frank got published in book form, Faurer, in his lifetime, did not.
Not only does this seem to me to reflect artistic confusion, but some kind of defensive mechanism perhaps meant to defend published commercial work that may have been felt was lacking in some respects, suggesting that "personal" work - could you but see it - was so much superior. I don't buy that. You are as good as what you can pull off.
Back to the list of books: I saw nothing that I would put my money down to buy. I saw several that I would flip through in a library. Mostly, I just wondered who on Earth took the financial risk of getting the majority through print.
So returning to Slobodan's point about the lack of non-political debate, it's probably due to the fact that photography is about doing it, rather than endlessly disecting the results.
I guess that in the end, GAS and fanboyism is the driving force of public photography interfacings (if I may invent a bastard use of that word).
