I am struggling with my natural inclination toward photographs of “structural” elements of the built environment as frames and context for the minimized human presences in many of my pics. I am also struggling with deciding which Fuji prime to buy first because focal length is framing is context. I am drawn to the 35mm ffe because it is wide enough for context and allows for multiple frames in a shot. On the other hand, I find myself cropping more than I like, so maybe I’m actually looking for something more like a nifty fifty, which in the Fuji system would be either the 35 F2 or the legendary but flawed 35 F1.4.
The question of the ethics/aesthetics of portraits of apparently poor people is an altogether other and totally perplexing one. Even more perplexing for a first worlder snapping in the former third world. Add to that the fact that many Bangkokians who walk past people on the sidewalks (far fewer here than in a city like Vancouver or New York) without a second thought or a glance are far “richer” than both the man on the sidewalk outside Starbucks and the white guy taking his picture and cropping it down to try to show both the humanity of the man and the indifference of the passing legs. I was also thinking to catch his perspective with this crop.
None of the Dorothea Lange/Walker Evans school of dignity in poverty for this lad. At least not without complexity and doubt.
As something of a thoroughly post-modern Millie, I see fragments and fragmented bodies (through reflections and brutal crops) as simply where we are and when. Wait till you see the anxious crop-and-chops I am contemplating in nervous bnw as part of the “Leaving the Station” Station Series.
And not to get too pretentious but didn’t Lacan propose something along the lines of “our infantile experience of our bodies “in bits and pieces” is resolved in the mirror images provided by Others”?
Smoke and Mirrors 
The gaze is embodied and has Humanitas.
But who disembodied the other legs?
A very pertinent question.
I am struggling with my natural inclination toward photographs of “structural” elements of the built environment as frames and context for the minimized human presences in many of my pics. I am also struggling with deciding which Fuji prime to buy first because focal length is framing is context. I am drawn to the 35mm ffe because it is wide enough for context and allows for multiple frames in a shot. On the other hand, I find myself cropping more than I like, so maybe I’m actually looking for something more like a nifty fifty, which in the Fuji system would be either the 35 F2 or the legendary but flawed 35 F1.4.
The question of the ethics/aesthetics of portraits of apparently poor people is an altogether other and totally perplexing one. Even more perplexing for a first worlder snapping in the former third world. Add to that the fact that many Bangkokians who walk past people on the sidewalks (far fewer here than in a city like Vancouver or New York) without a second thought or a glance are far “richer” than both the man on the sidewalk outside Starbucks and the white guy taking his picture and cropping it down to try to show both the humanity of the man and the indifference of the passing legs. I was also thinking to catch his perspective with this crop.
None of the Dorothea Lange/Walker Evans school of dignity in poverty for this lad. At least not without complexity and doubt.
As something of a thoroughly post-modern Millie, I see fragments and fragmented bodies (through reflections and brutal crops) as simply where we are and when. Wait till you see the anxious crop-and-chops I am contemplating in nervous bnw as part of the “Leaving the Station” Station Series.
And not to get too pretentious but didn’t Lacan propose something along the lines of “our infantile experience of our bodies “in bits and pieces” is resolved in the mirror images provided by Others”?
Jeepers. I could write a mini essay!