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Comment by noselfrighteous | Hacker News Reader

I think your tl;dr is unjust. I read the author as criticizing the imposition of a simple story onto the nuanced experiences of people. I think he criticizes it for the lack of artistic subtlety (pictures are not allowed to speak to the reader by themselves) and also for the effect that ignoring social structure has on the way the art is consumed.

He decries the "read, get emotional cookies, and forget" effect of the simple "uplifting" narratives of every day people. The consumer of the art must think no further than one person's experience.

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I disagree, I think that tl;dr was spot on. Frankly, the article's authors position is classic and arrogant imho. They define what art is and hold it to that standard, ignoring that Stanton himself was simply building a project (a photography blog turned storytelling blog as he and the article puts it).

I'd ask the author - How is this any different from an exhibit at a museum? Because I see essentially the same thing when I go: people standing in front of something, taking it in, taking a photo of it (yuck), moving to the next piece and repeating.

The New Yorker tends to have this classicist view of the world, that's their angle and I understand it and the place for it, I just don't like it when it is used for to paint this cynical view of a disposable consumptive world.

Hope that wasn't a rant (and it was not directed at you, I know you're trying to frame the authors position as well which I'm rallying against).

Isn't the answer to your museum question is in the article? The author values the ambiguity of an image, rather than having it pre-packaged to a and consumable concept that the "story" gives it.

I don't really get his beef, to be quite honest. To me the true crime (albeit a minor infraction) of HONY is that it's not much more than a Gotham-based localization of the much more interesting and long-standing Colors publication, publishing since the 90s

Photography never "speaks for itself"; photography is usually a pretty heavy-handed imposition of meaning through the use of composition, tone, framing, editing.

To call photography subtle is incorrect; it's a violent imposition of meaning onto the subject, by the photographer.

Interesting point of view. And when it comes to photography of humans, it's pretty difficult to take a photo without having the act of taking a photo affect the subject, both in how they are depicted, how they feel, and the impact of publicity.

I saw three different photos from three different sources of the same scene from the Palestine-Israel conflict. They told wildly different stories.

You are right, but this is Hacker News, where technical intelligence is high and cultural intelligence scarily scarce.

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