Jim Hubbard: “Photojournalism has Ended”
It (photojournalism) is nothing but superficial. You don’t get to know anybody. Not their struggles or their pain. Someone has been shot or killed and you come in and photograph those who are mourning the loss. You don’t get to know them or anything. You are just looking for a pictures of them crying. I wanted to understand people.”, he says.
How I Became a Big Loafer
In essence every photographer worth his name is in the business of loafing or should be.
Henri Cartier Bresson one of the greatest in the profession was into it too. He was of course French and as is their wont the French elevate everything into high art. So in French a loafer is called flaneur; a far more sophisticated, respectable terminology. Balzac, another Frenchman, described the flaneur as the sort of person who is a connoisseur of the smells, the sounds, the drama of the streets he walks in and he described the activity of loafing as being a sort of ‘’gastronomy of the eye’’.
Ten ‘Photography’ Books All Photographers Should Read.
I believe in their pursuit to specialize, all professions only become more and more parochial. In our world we respect the specialists but the specialists are often only navel-gazers. Knowledgeable in their field yes but one-dimensional and therefore shallow as a whole. If becoming an ‘expert’ requires narrowing our vision, its worth asking if its worth it after all. I believe we must have a healthy contempt for all specialists.
How Photographers get their Shots and Miss the Picture.
Does photography make you see more – as is popularly believed – or does it sometimes make you wear blinkers to the world around you? Photography of course should make you see and absorb more and this is what we all believe but I think it can do just the opposite. I feel photographers are so busy with the visual assimilation of what is at hand that they don’t (and perhaps can’t) care much about what it is they are photographing. They are not so much interested in understanding the subject as they are in `capturing’ it.