Originally Posted by
Peter Lewin
I've been having fun watching the critiques of Ash's work, but at this point I need to join in. Could anyone take a quick look at Adrian Tyler's posting back on page 3 with three attached Gary Winnograd pictures of demonstrations, and tell me how they are better or different from Ash's pictures (at least the first two thumbnails)? I too understand the desire to get closer (I remember Fred Picker's workshop, "get as close as you can, then take one step more...") and watching composition, but I don't see that in Winnograd's pictures of demonstrations either. Maybe Cartier Bresson did it better, but I can't think of any pictures he took of street demonstrations, and none of us are in his class. I can't help but feel that if Ash took the pictures with a 35mm Leica, none of us would have criticized his street shooting - but since he used the extremely unusual tool of a hand-held 4x5, we are applying a different, and possibly inappropriate, standard. I wish I could remember names, but over the years I've been lucky enough to attend lectures with a bunch of published "street shooters" and half of them, on occasion, "shoot from the hip" without even getting the viewfinder to their eye - what would we say about them? And was it Friedlander who could never keep his horizons level?
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