Okay, I am sorry for not having done some post which has been controversial but now it's time for me to stir up the pot again with the fire. For a few months, I am deciding to figure out a nice philosophy of using the Leica. Here are my results:

I watched "Italian for Beginners" directed by Lone Scherfig a few weeks ago at the local Ritz at the Bourse theater in Philly. I loved the movie and how natural it was and found out later on that it is a movie from the Dogme 95 movement which was founded in 1995 by the Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. The website is at: http://www.tvropa.com/tvropa1.2/film/dogme95/index.htm where one can read all about the movement.

Basically the directors have pledged to obey a "vow of chastity" in filmmaking which involves the following rules:

1) Shooting must be done on location. No fake props or sets. 2) All camera shots must be done handheld. 3) You must shoot in color. 4) No optical tricks or filters are permitted. 5) You must use 35mm film.

And so on... you can find the rest of the rules at: http://www.tvropa.com/tvropa1.2/film/dogme95/the_vow/index.htm

Well, of course, the rules of a Dogme 95 film sound somewhat like some of the Leica rules of photojournalism and honest shooting. After all, shooting pretty women under "fake" lighting tells us fairly little about the natural attributes of life.

In fact, I modify the manifesto to read: 'Furthermore I swear as a photographer to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a "work", as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.'

So here is a possible manifesto for the Dogme 95 Leica photographers or shooting Leica pictures under Dogme 95 rules (if you're not a strict adherent):

1) No tripod permitted for the shot. Only handheld Leicas allowed. 2) You must shoot on location only. No setup shots are permitted. 3) You must shoot only on color slide or print film. 4) No optical devices or most filters (only allowing UV filters) are allowed in shooting. 5) No shots of superficial action are permitted. 6) The shot must be taken in the present time (not hard to do). 7) The photographer must not be credited.

Well, I have thrown down the gauntlet to see what flak or response one gets. You know, no fire without fire itself. To quote and modify Vinterberg's quote, "Strangely the strict set of rules we have set ourselves have turned out to be a release, a relief and emancipation almost. The strictness of the rule have not hindered but on the contrary encouraged my imagination.... It has come alive. The advantage of the Dogme95 rules is also that they ensure a great freedom of movements during the shooting [of photos]. While nearly all other film-making instruments [except for the Leica camera] have been stripped away what remain are the two most essential of instruments to a director, the STORY and the [PICTORAL COMPOSITION]. Dogme95 allows my to focus on these instruments in the extreme."

If only now we can get a Dogme 95 Leica gallery to complement the Family of Man 2 project...

-- Alfie Wang (leica_phile@hotmail.com), February 13, 2002

Answers

I apologize beforehand, but YAWN. . . . (and sorry, I couldn't get pass the first sentence)

-- Glenn Travis (leicaddict@hotmail.com), February 13, 2002.

Dear Alie,

Great rules. Let me add an eighth rule. To pharaphrase George Orwell in "Politics and the English Language"-- Break all these rules before commiting a barbarism.

-- Alex Shishin (shishin@suma.kobe-wu.ac.jp), February 13, 2002.

Glenn is right. This is a big yawn. It was discussed to death a while ago on photo.net.

True art movements that produced something of value, like surrealism, never bothered with things like equipment and how to use it. That has value for about ten seconds.

Read the Surrealist Manifesto to understand how to make meaningful art happen. The Dogme thing is stupid.

-- Jeff Spirer (jeff@spirer.com), February 13, 2002.

Glenn is correct. YAWN.

I get tired of these b.s. rules that keep popping up on this board about how to use your Leica. If I want to use my camera in the studio with a tripod with strobes with BW film shooting models pretending to do something, then I will. The images are what counts, not a dogma made up around some so-called philosophy of using the Leica. Then again, I don't label myself a Leica photographer, but rather a photographer. There's a big difference.

-- Richard (rvle@yahoo.com), February 13, 2002.

Alfie: You haven't 'thrown down the gauntlet', you have instilled terminal ennui!!

There is, tragically, a reality that you just don't understand. It is not a case of you thinking outside the 'box'. You don't even have a box. Charitably, I would like to believe that one day you will wake up with a revelation and the light will have dawned, but I'm not holding my breath.

-- Ian MacEachern (iwmac@sympatico.ca), February 14, 2002.

Alfie, please take a long sabbatical again.

If you think that you're being profound and deep, you're sorely mistaken. This is as wrong-headed as it can get.

Think about what you have just written really hard. Does it make sense at all? It shows a muddled and confused intellect.

You are a young man too in love with your own ideas. You have to show some restraint before posting.

-- Erik X (xx@xx.com), February 14, 2002.

The dogme films are wonderful. The manifesto is very thought provoking, but it comes out of a context of special effects and plot twists overwhelming storytelling. I don't know how far it applies to photography, although documentary photography already has a sort of implicit manifesto anyway.

But I'll admit as soon as I saw the dogme manifesto, I saw lots of parallels with still photography.

-- rob (rob@robertappleby.com), February 14, 2002.

Let's give Alfie a break. The enthusiasm is charming, to say the least. Unfortunately, Dogme is now ancient news. It hit the cinematic guys hard some years ago & had some influence for about 4 or 5 months. Then the usual backlash occurred. There are actually anti-Dogme sites out there, etc etc, ad naseum. But Dogme's as cold as ice, as all manifesto-driven "movements" become in the blink of an eye.

-- Patrick (pg@patrickgarner.com), February 14, 2002.

Yes Alfie, and lets take it a step further. Leica photographers must smelt their own metal and cast their cameras and grind their optics from original 1920's drawings. By the way they should make their own film. You still don't get it - the image is what counts. I have a little test - seperates the imagemakers from the equipment collectors. Your house is on fire! Other than you loved ones you have time to save one thing only - you box of negs or your camera bag!! Which is it?

-- Bob Todrick (bobtodrick@yahoo.com), February 14, 2002.

I agree with Bob: it's the image that counts. Why limit yourself and the pictorial possibilities with such rules? Sometimes B&W is more appropriate than color. Sometimes a flash will make possible an image that wouldn't otherwise happen. Same thing with a tripod.

In the end, it's the image on paper or projected on a screen that matters. No one is going to say, "Wow! What a great set of guiding principles that yielded this blurry, underexposed, and boring photograph. Bravo!"

I remember reading Dogma 95 when it was new and thinking how absurd it was at the time. I wasn't surprised when critics and auteurs publicly rejected it. The nineties are over, and this is not one of the great intellectual achievements that was meant to endure into the next decade.

-- Luke Dunlap (luked@mail.utexas.edu), February 14, 2002.

Some of my negatives I would actually throw into the fire.

-- Steven Hupp (shupp@chicagobotanic.org), February 14, 2002.

ALFIE,

JUST SHOOT DAMMIT!! IS IT REALLY THAT DIFFICULT??

if all this proves just too difficult for you, maybe you should get yourself a P/S with a built in flash or something simpler.

-- Joel (joel_low@pacific.net.sg), February 14, 2002.

Alfie:

You are mostly describing what photo journalism is, in my view.

However, I agree with you for not using too many filters and not using flashes or artificial lightings.

But I disagree about "refraining from personnal taste". The main reason is that I take pictures for fun and to help my failing memory (in the far future!). As soon I trip the shutter, it's too late, my taste is in.

It reminds me of the "automatic writing" some authors claimed during the "Dadaism Movement" (er, may be).

Once, I saw the work of a photographer who attached an Autofocus all weather camera on his dog neck with a random picture taking. The Family as seen by Fido, Wah! This gentleman photographer was indeed in your movement....

As for me, I decline your offer, I prefer to watch the light rather than photographing it. And for one second of real happiness, there are 18 hours of gloominess. To record those hours would be an apology to the Vogon Poetry.....

Keep up Alfie! Xavier.

-- Xavier d'Alfort (hot_billexf@hotmail.com), February 14, 2002.

Bob: Actually I'd grab the camera bag - all the REALLY important negs are in the bank safe-deposit box. And since I'm only as good as my NEXT picture...I need the tools available. 8^)

Maybe your question should be phrased "Which do you keep in a bank vault - your negatives or your cameras?"

Alfie et al: setting limitations and a semi-rigid structure can be a useful way to focus attention on the important parts of creative work - look what the haiku and sonnet forms did for poetry.

If you use rangefinders you're already setting some pretty strong limits on your photographic technique (no close-ups, no long lenses, no exact framing) in at least one dimension.

But dogma95 and other such groups.movements are setting rules for THEMSELVES - it doesn't go over at all as well to try and propose limits to/for OTHER people.

Ultimately, and this may be a paraphrase of what others have already said, manifestos don't make art - people do.

-- Andy Piper (apidens@denver.infi.net), February 14, 2002.

Okay I’ll bite, and I’m going to take the long view on this one . . .

Alfie, didn’t I read somewhere that you have a degree in creative writing? I have one, too, an MFA from the University of Florida (let that qualify me to respond to your aesthetics gauntlet).

Unlike writers, photographers have rigorously avoided issuing manifestoes and making aesthetic pronouncements, largely because (I assume) it doesn’t interest them. Few of the Old Masters of photography (our Leica heroes) bothered with such modernist pamphleteering because they saw themselves as engaged in a different enterprise. It was never about art; it was about finding the world-- and selling those images to a client.

HCB, as we all know, was and is an artist in many media, and he no doubt could wile away many an hour at the café, issuing forth on surrealist aesthetics (and who in Paris could not?). But he committed very few of his thoughts to paper (about photography or anything else), and most of his oracular utterances have been gleaned from interviews and conversation (same is true, by the way, of Jesus Christ).

For scores of debatable reasons, Leica cameras have been most famously engaged in humanist documentary photography, which by its nature can’t be bent into an aesthetic manifesto. The Family of Man project, despite the fact that it hung on museum walls, wouldn’t be characterized as having been created by adhering to aesthetic guidelines or rules. The beauty of photography (and why I chucked publishing dumb poems) is that it is refreshingly free of these encumbrances. Camera in hand, we can all step out and find the world we want, whether it be beautiful or terrible or both.

It might be interesting to note that “movements” in (Leica/documentary) photography have mostly been anti-art and pro- humanism. Think of the “concerned photographers” and the fact that socialist politics have driven much of the photojournalism we all appreciate.

Alfie, if you are looking for a forum to discuss high-minded aesthetic concerns in photography, I don’t think this is the place. The folks here aren’t really interested. They aren’t necessarily fans of Man Ray or even William Eggleston or Andreas Gursky. This forum seems to have attracted photographers interested in the pictures themselves and not the motivation behind them.

Of course, you can shoot whatever you want with your Leica or any other camera--which is precisely why the brand name won’t lend itself to a series of rules about photography.

If thinking up those rules helps you take better pictures, more power to you. It just seems that you won’t find many sympathetic ears on these pages.

-- Preston Merchant (merchant@speakeasy.org), February 15, 2002.