Saturday 28 January 2012

Loads of crap (or how Martin Parr pressed my Flash button)




Up until a year ago I haven't heard much of Martin Parr. Sure, his name popped out here-there, but so have other names: too many for me to follow at the time. I took some photography courses, and then I found out more about him: that his photos are basically crap, that the new Magnum is crap (Cartier-Bresson never liked his pictures), and that generally the use of direct flash is crap. So much crap slaying suddenly got my juices flowing and -- since I'm a Libran -- decided to get on the crap's side, just to counter-balance what was going on.

Supporting memories came in to cement my snap decision: the wonderful use of flash by photographers I've met on the internet (flickr, back then also jpg), the "Martin Parr WE ♥ U" flickr group that I've seen some of Simon Kossoff's pictures posted to. I mean, if Simon Kossoff ♥ Martin Parr, then the crap lies somewhere else. Etc.
So, for my next homework, decided to make use of the 'flash' button on my camera, and serve the teacher with the end results. Here are two pictures made back then.
Two very different pictures, in the end. One passed as 'good', the other was 'crap'. You figure which, what. In any case, that proved that crap lies not in every flash. (And equally -- that Martin Parr lies not in every flash, either.)

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