Me, talking about what all sorts of visual artists can do: >>wonderful nudes, portraits, landscapes, still >>lifes (lives?), street scenes, charming vistas, cats, >>babies Howard questioning: >to my mind exceptionally well and I believe we do need >photography to do them! Oh, I don't deny that photography can do these things well. But photography has no monopoly on them, and other visual arts do them just as well. Photography does have a near monopoly on visual journalism and visual documentation. I'm thinking about these things in part because I've started a new research project having to do with South Africa in the 1950s and '60s. As you can imagine, the visual record is immense and staggeringly rich--created by astonishingly good photographers such as Bob Gosani, Peter Magubane, and Juergen Schadeberg, among others. My first book had to do with South Africa in the early 19th century. As you can imagine, the visual record is small. Sketches, a few paintings. Some of it interesting and some of it useful, but there isn't much of it. This record (these documents) is not nearly as large or interesting or as useful as the record produced by photographers. --John ===== J. Mason Charlottesville, Virginia Cool snaps: http://wtju.radio.virginia.edu/mason/ __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Photos: High-quality 4x6 digital prints for 25¢ http://photos.yahoo.com/ph/print_splash
