Another case of seeing a lot just by looking - this was shot from my window just before dinner a while ago. There are a lot of times where I'll suddenly yelp "hang on a minute, I'll catch up with you" and I stop and shoot. Which brings to mind a discussion I once had with a friend about getting great images. The particular subject was a book of war photography. My friend pointed out, that, among other issues with the book, you had to be an idiot to not get great shots during a war. This got me to thinking and posing a challenge to myself - that since I wasn't in a place of staggering and constant beauty like Monument Valley, I would try to make powerful and beautiful images in the environment I was in (New York City) without relying on cliches and trickery. After all, the difference between an amateur and a professional photographer is not money earned - but rather the pro's ability to make good images consistently, not relying on luck or location.
There was bunch of controversy surrounding the above mentioned book, it was selling for about $100 and did a real good job documenting the horrors of war. The cry arose that the photographer was profiteering and making money using other people's pain and suffering. Another way not to pay the artist. Most, if not all, socially concerned documentary photographers have been slammed by this criticism. I even went to a lecture/workshop on photographing the homeless with all sorts of famous and near famous on the panel, and Dorothea Lange was held up as yet another example of the above, since the women who posed for the famous Migrant Mother shot, had said that she didn't want to be known as the person in the photo, didn't like the photo, and was generally all out of sorts because of the photo. OK. The photos in question have helped to raise awareness of immediate, pressing and heartbreaking human problems, photographers also need to eat, and I have never met a documentary photographer who thought they would get rich.
I've done my own work documenting poverty and social injustice, and when there still was a market for stock for textbooks I sold steadily. Never made a lot, sort of squeaked through. I doubt there's much of a market for images of the sick and suffering online, and certainly not through any venues I know.
The few photographers I have met who have tried to ride the coat tails of the Gene Smiths of the world, in order to get known and then make money, have all gotten jobs in other fields.
The real horror story in photography today is hyper-idealization and objectification. No one looks like a magazine cover or hair ad. Skin without pores? Maybe on a mannequin or a doll, but on person? Every hair in place? Perfect everything?
Body parts lifted and held in place with surgical tape, thirty-seven pounds of makeup is added, and retouching done that is just plain peculiar. I once spent an evening working at a place that retouched and prepped work for a major tabloid. Almost invisible amounts of colors had to be removed, skin made perfect, flaws that would disappear in the inking process corrected, details in black dresses and clothes brought out (again, lost in the inking processes) and all to please some publicist, since the readership didn't have anything resembling the ability to discern these "problems".
The artist who have the courage to go under fire, to live in horrible areas, to document the worst of our world, do not need to be brought down the the level of the K Mart shopping, painting on velvet, yahoos whose greatest angst is brought on by a lost TV remote
Artists do what artists do because that's what artists do and we'll keep doing it.
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