maandag, april 21, 2008
Digital Journalist herdenkt Philip Jones Griffiths
Het online tijdschrift over fotojournalistiek The Digital Journalist besteedt deze maand aandacht aan Magnum-fotograaf Philip Jones Griffiths.
Bekijk een reeks foto's en lees de necrologie van Peter Howe.
For more than 40 years Philip was a member of Magnum, serving five years as its president. It was always a stormy relationship, and he claimed that he had to live in London towards the end of his life because the agency invalidated his health insurance, forcing him to rely on the free medical treatment available in the United Kingdom. Whether or not this was true it was certainly typical of the ambivalent attitude that he had towards the cooperative. His initial expectations of what Magnum could do for him were, however, unreasonably high. "I was 16 when I first read about Magnum. In those days it was a rather more practical problem that I had. My mother had always done my laundry, and what was I going to do when I left home? I read in a magazine that Magnum did Robert Capa's laundry for him. I said, 'That's for me. That's the place I'm going to end up.' Anyway, not only did they not do my laundry, they've done very little else for me over the years, but still it was a great concept, this idea of a band of brothers who would wander around the world righting wrongs, doing humanistic photography, finger on the pulse of humanity, and the very idea that you could just keep traveling – all you needed was a small suitcase and a camera bag. Somehow you need never come home, you could just keep on going from A to B to C to D and you could sort of circumnavigate the world indefinitely; I found all that very exciting. Of course the reality is somewhat different."
Bekijk een reeks foto's en lees de necrologie van Peter Howe.
For more than 40 years Philip was a member of Magnum, serving five years as its president. It was always a stormy relationship, and he claimed that he had to live in London towards the end of his life because the agency invalidated his health insurance, forcing him to rely on the free medical treatment available in the United Kingdom. Whether or not this was true it was certainly typical of the ambivalent attitude that he had towards the cooperative. His initial expectations of what Magnum could do for him were, however, unreasonably high. "I was 16 when I first read about Magnum. In those days it was a rather more practical problem that I had. My mother had always done my laundry, and what was I going to do when I left home? I read in a magazine that Magnum did Robert Capa's laundry for him. I said, 'That's for me. That's the place I'm going to end up.' Anyway, not only did they not do my laundry, they've done very little else for me over the years, but still it was a great concept, this idea of a band of brothers who would wander around the world righting wrongs, doing humanistic photography, finger on the pulse of humanity, and the very idea that you could just keep traveling – all you needed was a small suitcase and a camera bag. Somehow you need never come home, you could just keep on going from A to B to C to D and you could sort of circumnavigate the world indefinitely; I found all that very exciting. Of course the reality is somewhat different."
# posted by Jan-Edward : 01:05
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