paltry photography: "Nigel Shafran"

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3 May 2011

Compost Picture 1 by Nigel Shafran

(Copyright - Nigel Shafran)

"Nigel Shafran's series Compost Pictures quietly documents an ever changing bowl of kitchen scraps ready for the compost pile and carries a more abstract sense of the passage of time and light."

Exhibited as part of the HOUSE exhibition, Hove.

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There are a lot of photographers that don’t care whether what they take is good or not - they photograph for fun.

But there are a lot of acclaimed photographers who take their photos very seriously, despite some of their photos being seriously awful.

These may be technically perfect but the content - washed out photos of waves; staged shots of somnolent streets; posed pix of facially paralysed people; red and green and nothing else or just grey - means these shots should have been deleted, not distributed.

You look at this photography and you think - that’s paltry photography.

And the dictatorship of themes. 'The development of the Civil War in the Congo' - yes. But 'the role of the paperclip as a metaphor for relationships - no.

Just what section is it in the 'Law of Photography' that bans selections of just good, although unrelated, images or even a single excellent shot for display in venues that take photography 'seriously'?

I post photos here that have been exhibited or published as well as some of the text that was distributed with the shots.

Unless otherwise indicated, these images and quoted text are sourced from the relevant gallery publicity and photography-now.com

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