Just of the shoe? Sounds like a lost powerful image. I suppose anybody could throw a shoe onto the sidewalk and say, "this was his."
If memory serves, the image consisted of the wrecked taxi, with the sidewalk shoe in the immediate foreground. In any event, I think the point Ed Hart was trying to make was that a photojournalist is obliged to tell the truth as completely as possible, and a corollary of that is to avoid even the remote appearance of untruth. He was quite a character, who made a deep impression on all who encountered him. Another of Ed's favorites was: "Photography is show business. If you don't show, you're not in business."
But you raise an interesting point, is the shot so obvious that it must be set up? A camouflaged still life? But, also, wouldn't that depend on the reputation of the photographer or the purpose/story of the image itsellf.
Your mentioning the possibility of a setup in your caption just reminded me of the Hart story, and I wanted to share it. But you're right, it's interesting to think about. I wonder how others on Photoforum would have reacted to the flower on the rocks if you hadn't mentioned it.
... Yet, it used to be a common (though, I'm certain, not for public display) practice to have a final family portrait done with the deceased. Nowadays, behavior like that could make a funeral a double event. Really, I question whether my family would be more offended if I whipped out a digital or a SLR at the next funeral and started clickin'.
My former landlord here in Italy asked me to make a nice print of a snapshot of his grandmother, who had just died. It's customary for small portraits of the deceased to be encased in some sort of weatherproof shield and attached to the tombstone. So, he said, the picture must look as good as possible. I recall putting the old woman's portrait into Photoshop to tweak the saturation and contrast. I hesitated, wondering if I ought to clone out a dark, ragged, red-rimmed blemish on her chin. It looked to me like a melanoma, perhaps the beginnings of the cancer that eventually killed her. I decided to get rid of it. I don't know if my landlord or anyone else noticed or not. In any event, nobody complained.
Trevor Cunningham, Life of a Daffodil. Ed Hart, my former editor at UPI/New York, told the story of an accident right in front of the Daily News building. A nine-year-old boy got hit by an out-of-control taxi, and the impact threw his shoe onto the sidewalk. Ed took a shot of the shoe, but then decided not to run it because it looked so much like a setup, even though it wasn't.
"The optimist believes this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it's true" - J Robert Oppenheimer
http://www.geocities.com/tr_cunningham
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