User talk:Bchalifour

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Louis Stettner
Thank you for adding material to Louis Stettner. But where is it from? Please note this in the article, via footnotes. (And see WP:RS.) For an example, see Willy Ronis: with some exceptions (which I hope will soon be fixed), the reader can see what comes from where. Thank you. -- Hoary (talk) 02:36, 2 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Uh, sorry, no. It's not at all good to source assertions about somebody to that person's own website -- whether made by himself or (however scrupulously) by an admirer. I'd expect to find Stettner in the Oxford Companion to the Photograph but disappointingly, he's not there. Surely he's written up in some other fairly accessible book about or encyclopedia of photography. This of course doesn't have to be in English; it could be in French or another language, as long as you can understand what it says and specify just what it is. -- Hoary (talk) 03:01, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Hi Hoary, That's why the Oxford companion is not such a reliable source, too Anglo-Saxon for a member of the Photo League who lives in Paris. ;O) Wouldn't the following achievements qualify him for an entry in the Oxford Companion, if not at least Wikipedia? - appreciation written by Henry Miller and Luc Sante at the back of the 1996 Rizzoli book "Louis Stettner's New York", -one-man shows at ICP (New York), Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), Bonni Benrubi Gallery (New York), Agathe Gaillard, Howard Greenberg (NYC), The Photographer's Gallery (London), Centre de la Photographie (Genève) George Eastman House (Rochester, NY).... So, whose work ethics are we questioning here? Best, --Bruno Chalifour (talk) 03:26, 2 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I think the Companion is a reliable source; it's just an inadequate source.


 * Miller was a fabulist when young and I hate to think what his mental state would have been like in 1996. Oh no, wait, he was dead at the time. Well, presumably he wrote it some time earlier. Sante is always a very enjoyable writer and I'd hope that he gets his facts straight.


 * Nobody's saying that Stettner doesn't deserve an article. He deserves one. You enjoy his work; don't you have books that discuss it and him?


 * Here's the article I'm intermittently working on now. It's still a mess, it's unambitious, and it's uninteresting. (For that matter, a lot of the photographer's work isn't interesting.) I hope that it will improve. But everything in it will be found in one or other of two clearly specified sources, both independent of the photographer. That's the right approach for any photographer, of any nationality, domicile, or style. -- Hoary (talk) 05:55, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

By the way, I am not the originator of the article; I just straightened up a few facts, added a few dates that are all but ambiguous. The only reason being that I am helping a French friend in his writing on Stettner. Having worked at Visual Studies Workshop (Rochester, NY) and regularly doing research at the George Eastman House for my own courses and articles on photography, most of the information I have is from primary sources (archives), or books (my own, VSW's, U of R, RIT's, SUNY Buffalo's and the GEH's... when I do not fly to New York City). Now, if Miller was just a fabulist and Sante had all his facts wrong we would probably not have mentioned their names or been discussing them.;o) Best, BC


 * I don't think that Miller was just a fabulist, but when I skimread his descriptions of how various women were in awe of him and more particularly his virile member, I have to laugh.


 * I love Sante's writing, but his own blog hints heavily that one should be wary of taking it too seriously all the time.


 * Yes, I did jump to the mistaken conclusion that you were just the latest reincarnation of an earlier editor, who had seemed well informed but grumpy and ... uncollegial. Sorry about that. Do stick around. If, as I guess, you have time to do a little clearing here and there but lack the time to look things up in books, do please keep on with the little clearing.


 * Really, what do you think of the Companion? I've found it odd and irritating in places; but that's to be expected of the first edition of any ambitious reference book, and I've noticed very few mistakes and all in all have been happy with my purchase. As for general histories of photography, or even of 20th century photography, I rarely buy any because their inadequacies tend to irritate me much more than does the Companion, and because shelf space is lacking. The Companion aside, most of my photobooks are about (or by) this or that individual photographer. (Right now I'm in an "early Chris Steele-Perkins" phase.) -- Hoary (talk) 09:20, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

As we are back on the Miller subject, I frankly do not care for his virility or what women had to do with it, having little to do with it myself. I tend to take Proust's path [in the "Contre Sainte Beuve" by the way and I tend to prefer the Pleiade edition]and look at the work first, what we really know someone for as a society and a culture. Although the E channel and Fox are part of the culture I have adopted I do not have to make their values mine! Biographical information can be informative but I could not care less about Sudek's, Le Querrec's, Ruwedel's, Bach's, Cézanne's, or Atget's lives and still enjoy their works. ;o)

I like reincarnations; I try to do that every morning but as you have astutely noticed pitifully fail at changing skins (although it evolves) including grumpiness and "uncollegiality". I have found them good tools to keep at bay self-centered and often humourless people. I am glad you are not one of them!

As for the Oxford Companion I have had the same issues as the ones you point out and I find myself not using it very much if at all. I found that a lot of the photographers or information I am looking for is missing. After a few tries I have almost given up and had rather drive 8 min to the GEH–the price to pay for this resource is inhumane weather though. One has to be born with a snow-shovel grafted here [I bet you Miller was not!]! To give you an example, I cannot remember the last time I used the Companion except for double-checking after your email that Stettner was absent. It feels like using the "Cruel and Tender" catalogue to have an idea of contemporary photography: "Bonjour l'erreur!" In both cases you get some information but the documents produced do not live up to their intentions. Nice try though.


 * First off, thank you for mentioning Ruwedel, a name I had never heard of. This article in the Guardian makes him sound worthwhile.


 * Miller in the snow, hmmm. What would, say, Norman Mailer have done? "At Columbia University when asked how he’d remove the snow that had buried Queens County for more than a month in 1968 (and had turned the city against Lindsay): 'I’d piss on it.'" I fear that Miller might have come up with some vaguely related fantasy.


 * I read at the time that Cruel and Tender was a good exhibition, but I was halfway around the planet at the time. I've never seen the catalogue. Certainly British galleries can mount good survey exhibitions: though I haven't seen No Such Thing as Society, the book of the show makes me want to do so. (Alas the book says very little about any one photographer, which is one reason why I could write next to nothing about Markéta Luskačová.) -- Hoary (talk) 01:26, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

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