Comments on: Sui Generis

By: Danny Yee

Danny Yee — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 05:50:30 +0000

Sound's like another case study for Ian Howe's Genius Explained...

Danny.

By: seth edenbaum

seth edenbaum — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 03:46:29 +0000

I don’t know anyone who pays much attention to anything Lartigue produced after his youth. His early photographs are wonderful. He was a prodigy ~~as the author admits~~ and one with all the advantages of money and time. Still, he faded. I don’t know about the book, but the article is silly. And Bourdieu was the son of postman.

By: bza

bza — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 23:43:08 +0000

Bourdieu’s style is enough to give anyone a migraine after a while, I’ve always thought that you could get all you needed to get out of Distinction just by looking at the charts and the tables.

By: Maureen

Maureen — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 19:35:45 +0000

Wait, does this mean that Bourdieu wasn’t the son of French peasants?

By: Matt McGrattan

Matt McGrattan — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 18:08:49 +0000

Sorry about the double post.

By: Matt McGrattan

Matt McGrattan — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 18:02:22 +0000

Re: Alan’s comments on photographers who are incomprehensibly regarded as great… The late Henri Cartier-Bresson sort of falls into that category for me as does Lartigue. Don McCullin’s work, on the other hand, is amazing. Aesthetically. Not just as a record of conflict. If you get a chance to look through the large size collection of McCullin prints they are quite astoundingly beautiful. They are also technically massively more accomplished than Bresson whose work just often looks amateurish in comparison—I know that’s the intent according to Bresson—to capture the decisive moment in some quasi-intuitive way but it still doesn’t cut it for me. And HCB was mostly not being shot at. I suppose McCullin was a) a war photographer and b) a working class Londoner who took photographs as his job—and therefore less of an ‘artist’ according to the sui generis ‘gentleman amateur’ criteria under discussion.

By: Matt McGrattan

Matt McGrattan — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 17:59:41 +0000

Re: photographers who are incomprehensibly regarded as great… The late Henri Cartier-Bresson sort of falls into that category for me as does Lartigue. Don McCullin’s work, on the other hand, is amazing. Aesthetically. Not just as a record of conflict. If you get a chance to look through the large size collection of McCullin prints they are quite astoundingly beautiful. They are also technically massively more accomplished than Bresson whose work just often looks amateurish in comparison—I know that’s the intent according to Bresson—to capture the decisive moment in some quasi-intuitive way but it still doesn’t cut it for me. And HCB was mostly not being shot at. I suppose McCullin was a) a war photographer and b) a working class Londoner who took photographs as his job—and therefore less of an ‘artist’ according to the sui generis ‘gentleman amateur’ criteria under discussion.

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 16:08:13 +0000

The best way to win a race is to insist you’re not in one, while still managing to convey the impression that if there were such a race you would happen to be comfortably in the lead. Have you read Stephen Potter’s Gamesmanship series?

By: yabonn

yabonn — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 12:06:07 +0000

A man’s status in English society has always depended primarily on his own consciousness Bourdieu would have talked – i suppose – about plural “statuses”, different habituses defining different success scales. Of course, as this has no real influence on the rest of he article, you can file that under “useless nitpick”.

By: Alan

Alan — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 12:03:10 +0000

I went to an exhibition of Lartigue’s work at the George Pomidou Centre in Paris last year. I had never previously heard of him. After walking through the exhibition twice, I was still wondering why they bothered. I saw only two or three shots of any merit, though there were some that were mildly interesting as a record of the past. Of the millions of wonderstruck boy amateur photographers in the world, why make a fuss about this one?

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 07:00:48 +0000

Thanks for that MK.

By: Motoko Kusanagi

Motoko Kusanagi — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 06:58:33 +0000

The link to Luke doesn’t seem to function. Maybe this works.

By: jr

jr — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 06:39:23 +0000

This is similar to Szarkowski’s treatment of Earnest Bellocq, a studio photogragher who had a secret sideline in photographing prostitutes. MOMA presented him (on no evidence at all) as a hydrocephalic dwarf, a sort of idiot savant of the camera.