Capa / Falling Soldier

To be honest, I thought that the Robert Capa exhibition was overrated.

The photos just didn't seem to be artistic. They didn't have interesting compositions, they weren't aesthetic, they weren't even different.

Mostly they were unfocussed, unambiguous and unexciting.

Apparently Capa claimed that if you said your art was photojournalism, it would suddenly generate excitement. But the problem is that these photos didn't appear to be anything more than that. They are groundbreaking because they were from the front line, from a practically undocumented war zone. They were used for journalistic purposes only.

It's also bound to be related to the fact that photojournalism today is worlds apart from those grainy, black-and-white shots that Capa risked his life for. It's hard to interpret early, poor quality photography objectively, because the high-tech digital cameras everyone has today are so powerful with their mega-pixels, their complex processing, their auto-everything. It has made us consider photography a means of replicating reality rather that an art form used to interpret it.

I think Richter understands that photos can add an extra dimension to what you see. I saw his retrospective at Edinburgh recently.

His "photo-paintings" shouldn't be as profound as they are: you could think of them as a reproduction of a reproduction, nothing more.

But somewhere, subtlely, things have been added, changed, faces become more obscure, the sky becomes darker, people become edgier, more fragile.

Richter / Man Shot Down

I think that if Richter used some of Capa's blurry photos of Spanish Republicans poised and alone against desolate Spanish rocks, and painted in the tension, the melancholy that is missing... he would make them beautiful.