THEY TELL A LIE: A Tribute to Steve Schapiro and Susan Sontag

[RonPrice]

Part 1:

In recent years, especially since my retirement from FT, PT, and most volunteer work, except for some on-line work for several causes like: mental health, the arts and sciences, and the Baha’i Faith, I have taken an interest in the art and philosophy, the science and the history of photography. The modus operandi, and the experiences of some of the more significant photographers in the last two centuries, is of more than a little interest to me as a literary artist.

I leave the taking of photos to others, as I always have since my childhood: my parents, my friends, my wife and children and now, in the evening of my life, some of my grandchildren. They have, one and all, taken volumes, indeed, dozens of albums, of photos to document my life and theirs in a variety of ways.

Part 2:

This particular prose-poem is the result of my viewing a doco on the life of photographer Steve Schapiro.[SUP]1 [/SUP]Schapiro(1934- ) is an American photojournalist who captured some of the most important social events, people and activites, of the 1960s and 1970s in the USA, and the West generally. He is also famous for his film-set photos; for example, for the legendary movies The Godfather and Taxi-Driver.-Ron Price with thanks to: [SUP]1[/SUP]“Steve Shapiro: An Eye on an American Icon,” SBSONE TV, 15 March 2014, 3:00-4:00 p.m.

I rather liked that idea, Steve:
to capture a person’s unique
self, and identifying as much
as possible with the culture,
the politics & the history of
those people in your photos.

I’ve been trying to do that with
words for years! I’m not the fly-
on-the-wall, more of a literary--
gad-about surveying the great
photographic scene as far back
as those precursor technologies
in the middle of that first 1000,
that millennium, with Chinese
philosophers and those Greek
mathematicians,[SUP]1[/SUP] ever onward
to the first and second 1000
years of our CE, our own AD.

We have come a long way since
those Greeks and the Hebrews
put down our roots, Western
roots, for the globalizing, the
planetizing, civilization of our
time, our age, our 21[SUP]st[/SUP] century.

You documented that golden
age of movie-making in the
‘60s when I was starting-out
on my golden-adult-journey
with its lead & base-metals.

As you say, though, Steve:
photography is so often a
lie--does not tell the truth.[SUP]2
[/SUP]
[SUP]1 [/SUP]Wikipedia has an excellent overview of the history of photography and its ‘precursor technologies’ going back to 500 BC(circa).
[SUP]2[/SUP] “Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern.” –Words from the Sontag Foundation website. "On Photography(1977) is to my mind the most original and illuminating study of the subject."—Calvin Trillin, The New Yorker. Not many photographs are worth a thousand of Susan Sontag's words."—Robert Hughes, Time Magazine

Ron Price
17 March 2014