I wanted to check out a documentary photographer and found Robert Leon. He is from Vancouver, Canada. He is a traveling and documentary photographer, but started out as mainly a fashion photographer for about nine years in Italy. While there he started doing travel photography throughout Greece, Italy, and Turkey by finding assignments through the people he knew in Italy. He eventually went to Guatemala, India, Israel, Mexico, and other countries. He really immerses himself into the culture and with the people to get to know them and have them become comfortable with him taking their photograph. From a medicine man in India to the Lacandons of Chiapas, Mexico ( Mayans), he really achieves capturing their unique culture and identities.
In an article for Shutterbug, he states that he mainly shoots digital unless he goes to a remote place where there is no internet or electricity available. The article can be found here : http://www.shutterbug.net/techniques/pro_techniques/1007robertleon/index.html
His website : http://www.robertleon.com/index.php
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I enjoy artists who photograph various cultures. Photography, in my opinion, is a true way to capture the identity of a culture, making us see the essence of the culture in other ways that we normally don't realize. I like how he photographs people with objects that really help us see the true identity of the culture.
ReplyDeleteInteresting comment which brings up some good points. There has been a long standing debate through the history of photography whether it is possible for photograph to convey objective "truth" about anything. Still running, that debate!
ReplyDeletePhotographs certainly *look* like they could be true. Especially if you compare to drawing or painting, which certain carry the biases of the artists. Yet, it is entirely possible for photographs to be less true than they appear. Often the images made of foreign cultures will carry the biases of the photographer and their home cultures. For example, what might be considered worthy of a picture in one culture might elicit indifferent shrugs or even outright offense in another.
We should probably look at some examples in class, starting with Edward Curtis. He is well known for photographing Native Americans. He created a remarkable collection of images. The problem is that he photographed them the way *he* thought they should appear. So, if they didn't look "Indian enough", he'd pull out the war bonnets and props to dress them up a little. So you can see -- the way he photographed them did not quite document them truthfully, but rather reinforced his biases and perhaps colonial stereotypes. This example is more extreme, but it can simply come down to angle, point of view, or the selection of one photographic moment versus another. Whenever you click the shutter, the camera has a tendency to authenticate, or rather, to say: "... this is important!" Whether it is or not...
kind of like how candid shots or snapshots with a regular point and shoot of your friends or of an object is often viewed as not art or not important but something to record that is just important only to you and maybe your friends...?
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