>SNIP>
The same is true of the 'landscape' and 'nature' photographers working in the American west. Some of these people conduct classes, thus perpetuating their approach and creating more followers who do the same sort of work, think the same, and dress the same. Don't you think it's
frightening that Shaw and Sexton are so similar, down to their
pose?
The point I am making is that your
style is in part derived from
cultural associations: your generation and location.
One European photographer whose work I admire is Willy Ronis. You don't see much of this
style of work nowadays, at least not from
Americans.
willy ronis - Google Search
Willy Ronis was born in 1910, an his work looks like yet another clone in the street shooter/candid style of photography that was popular in the 1940's and 1950's. His work reminds me a lot of HCB's work, or Robert Frank's similar genre work (street photography), as exemplified in Frank's book "The Americans", which was first published in 1958...you ask where are the next Willy Ronis-like shooters, and lament that his style is not seen much any longer. No, his style is not seen much any more because it was thoroughly and totally played out by a doxen or more Leica street shooters who worked from 1930 to 1965...his work was done in a very monotonous style, with a semi-wide angle or normal lens, and is largely French street scenes and daily life scenes, shot on crappy 100-ISO or slower B&W films of the 40's and 50's...Willy Ronis' style is now passe...the world is sick of it. Today's shooters in that genre use vastly superior modern digital SLR cameras, and shoot in full color, and can actually SHOW shadow details...Ronis is the product of a byegone era of 28/35/50/90mm Leica and 75 and 80mm-only Rolleiflex. The style Ronis worked in can be seen in the work of dozens of others of his era, which was an era terribly limited by technology; the flash bulb was invented in 1928, and did not gain popularity for an entire decade or more. Ronis' style is very rooted in pre-WWII technology and a pre-war ethos.
The same goes for sports and news shots done at nighttime during the Ronis and HCB eras...lots of direct, on-camera stuff shot on 4x5 or with 120 rollfilm and one,single on-camera flashbulb...that style of working is played out now and passe. Today, top-level sports shooters have multi-light Speedotron 2400 or DynaLite Arena packs ceiling or balcony-mounted, and remote controlled backboard mounted cameras, and they are shooting with very fast advance cameras and with optics that simply were IMPOSSIBLE to design for 4x5 or 120 rollfilm or Leicas in the 30's,40's,and 50's. Look at famous sports photyos of the Ronis/HCB eras, and then compare them to what we see today in Sports Illustrated.
I think your attribution of a typical "American" style to Liebovitz in particular is a load of crap. Photography is a world-wide medium and it is influenced much more by the equipment and film and mass media reproduction needs than it is by the country of origin of the photographers. 1930's,1940's,1950's,1960's,1970's,1980's,and 1990's photographs look similar from all over the world when viewed by decade. The street and sports work of the 1940's looks like it was done in the 1940's. The work of Ronis done in the mid-1950's in The Family of Man exhibit and book is virtually indistinguishable from the work of the many others...look through the book and you'll see that all those Leica-shooting, and Rollei-shooting, and Graphic-shooting guys looked almost the same, and their photos looked almost the same as well.
As to the Sexton and whatzisname portraits--I think you might not quite be in on the secret of that...it's just like my avatar....the old photographer in mirror shooting his own self portrait...it's an "in joke"...it's a gag!!! It's a commentary on the photography field. It's sort of a generic "this is me-I am a photographer-look at my face and see what I look like" shot. Considering that normal daily attire for men since about 1860 has been a button-front shirt, and big cameras have been riding on tripods since about 1840, I'm frankly not surprised that two landscape photographers avail themselves of common things like long sleeved button-front shirts and tripods...wow... I bet if the photos were full-length, we'd see that BOTH those guys were wearing boots too!!!
Anyway...landscape photography...it's a sub-section of photography. It's just like portraiture, nudes, sports, social documentary,industrial,aerial,and reportage...just another type of photography. Some people like it. Some are bored by it. I could live my life without seeing another slot canyon from Antelope Canyon, or never seeing another Half Dome photo, and die happy. Just as I could go my entire life without seeing some tedious European photographer's "interpretation" of the Eiffel Tower or those fu(&ing canals and boatmen in Venice...and I could give two $H!+s about seeing more Ronis-like grainy B&W, dimly-lit scenes of French life in the 1950's where people live in cold-water flats that are already 200 years old and decrepit, or sitting around cafe's drunk off their asses from 3 hours of drinking wine after lunch, or little kids carrying baguettes of bread home to Mama...that ****'s totally played out and done with...
I was waiting to see how long this one would go and how fun it might get. From a spectators point of view.
