The facts regarding Magnum and the suspension of the photographer David Alan Harvey, that you can read about in a PetaPixel article, started a debate online about photojournalism. As usual, most of the debate was pro or against D.A. Harvey by people not knowing the facts and pretending to judge, forgetting as usual the principle of innocence. Personally I started to think about photojournalism and why I never worked in that field. This week picture is a symbol of my choice and a good starting point to explain it. . . . My opinion about the Magnum case is very simple: I do not understand what is going on and what was behind the series of events, included the elimination of some pictures by Harvey from the agency archive, that ended with the suspension. I only know that for me a man is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, and I’m sure there are better reasons to suspend people from a photo agency, like for example staging images, retouching them and being an a%%^#le with a poor Afgan girl. But if you create a propaganda that fit the agency nobody will suspend you, no matter how much […]
The case of the evident modification in the prints by McCurry exposed at an exhibit in Italy had created a big debate online between photographers. I don’t know McCurry and I’m not evaluating his work or his “right” to do what he wants with his pictures. I want to be more general and answer to the questions posed by the recent debate about his modifications. The article that made me write is the recent article by Alex Cooke I read on Fstoppers. Alex Cooke arrives at the point to tell there is not the truth and using a physicist like Richard Feynman as “master at deconstructing the idea of the absolute” to confirm his relativism, an interpretation of Feynman absolutely absurd and wrong since in the posted video Feynman does exactly the opposite: he simply state that to explain a truth you must keep at the level the audience can understand, not that there are no absolutes. The electric force is an absolute! To get back to photography we must first of all understand that the relativism is a wrong concept, in communication and in life. The truth exists and the only problem, eventually, is the limited view of the […]
