Dennis Stock press conference.

Wednesday 5 September 2007

When he finished his press conference and descended from the stage at Visa pour l’Image yesterday legendary Magnum photographer Dennis Stock was immediatedly surrounded by a crowd of photographers who wanted to photograph him. It was a scene eerily similar to the paparazzi swarms he had earlier decried. In a frequently passionate interchange with the questioners and the audience, Stock lamented the current state of editorial photography as being dominated by magazines whose publishers prefer sensational celebrity coverage to the sensitive reportage on important issues that was prevalent at the height of his career in the Fifies and Sixties.

Ironically Dennis Stock's best-known image is a “celebrity” photograph, his iconic black and white photo of a young James Dean walking through New York's Times Square on a rainy winter day. But Stock made it clear that his brand of reportage on actors like Dean, Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn, as well as jazz musicians like Miles Davis, was a far cry from what passes for the genre today. In those days photographers had much freer and more relaxed access to do in-depth reportage. According to Stock, “The paparazzi have screwed it up for everybody. We’re so bored with our … lives that we want to see the most intimate details of other people’s lives, mostly the sensational stuff, and it angers me a great deal.” Stock proposes a solution: “This is what is driving the vulgarity which is taking place in America today and it behooves all of us to change that, to have compassion and to not just look for sensationalism.”

Stock, who got his start as an apprentice to Gjon Mili at Life after winning the magazine’s photo contest for university students, asked how many in the audience were familiar with the work of W. Eugene Smith. “Gene Smith,” he emphatically stated “was America’s greatest photographer. He taught us all how to to the photo essay. If you don't know his work then run to find out about it.” Another American photographer and Smith contemporary, David Douglas Duncan, was in the audience and Dennis Stock affectionately saluted him from the stage. At one point the two old friends got into a brief debate about the effect of the capitalist system on photography which Stock sees as being largely negative. The old friends agreed to disagree, with Stock reminding Duncan that “I still love you.”

In discussing the current crisis in editorial photography Stock pointed to the internet as a possible solution and the greatest opportunity photographers have ever had. In a somewhat ironic appeal, given his views on capitalism, he exhorted the crowd to “go out and find those millionaires who will support what we do. Photography is a democratic art form and we need to get it back out there to the people where it belongs!”