Lee Jeffries, accountant, amateur photographer and awareness-raiser (and fund-raiser) from Bolton, Lancs. Interview here.
Surprisingly even on photography websites he is slaughtered by other photographers for these pictures. Their reflex criticism seems a direct throwback to the sort of ethical grandstanding that became prominant in the1970s. Originally posited by academics from traditional fine art and upper middle class social backgrounds whose sensibilities made them innately mistrustful of what they considered a shabby and inconsequential medium. One that was in fact just too much of the people, for the people and by the people. It didn't have the cultural stature of painting. It was practiced by tradespeople, or faceless technicians and artisans, amateurs, photojournalists, pornographers and, perhaps worst of all, the great seething mass of the public itself recording key moments in their own lives. But there is a long history of photography working for social change, and like Jeffries often integrating powerful portraiture - with Lewis Hine being perhaps the greatest caimpaigner-artist in this field.
Photography was regarded as common(place) and yet as incomprehensible as the trashy pop songs those high arbiters of taste and morality on occasion would attempt to dance to in off-piste social gatherings. Inculcated from an early age their affinities and expectations centred around classical music (from both listening to, playing, reading and talking about) - and were similarly constrained when it came to the visual arts. It is possible that as they felt the old certainties and deferences slipping away, they were the ones who had begun to feel excluded, irrelevant, invisible.
And despite the recent pre-eminance of photography as an art form that legacy of suspicion and moral condescension still lives on. There will always be a crop of self-appointed guardians who, when faced with pictures that unsettle them, react to their discomfiture with the same old sanctimonious hand-wringing. But these days what was once lagubrious literary admonishment has been reduced to simplistic one line haranguing. That's progress, I guess.
The accusatory derision aroused by the recent pictures by Ian Jeffries (who is both an amateur and someone holding down a job) still presents as being for the best possible reasons - out of faux concern for those people that in all likelihood they would cross the road to avoid. The original critics in revealing the disdain they felt seemed to reveal their own alienation from much of humanity - and perhaps even from themselves. Bearing witness to the degraded lives of the hierarchically lowest in society (by the hierarchically lowest art form) may have even uncomfortably invoked a certain measure of guilt and even culpability in the face of such evident failure of their society to protect all its members. This sense of shame would presumably be exacerbated when a photographer not only bore witness but even made efforts themselves to improve things.
The carping these days is from a morally lazy position, easily adopted and one which requires negligible intellectual or emotional coherence. In declaring images an affront to common decency, civilisation, etc., it is nothing more than another example of someone telling others what they can and can't do - but in this case it's not those on the political right doing the telling.
Surprisingly even on photography websites he is slaughtered by other photographers for these pictures. Their reflex criticism seems a direct throwback to the sort of ethical grandstanding that became prominant in the1970s. Originally posited by academics from traditional fine art and upper middle class social backgrounds whose sensibilities made them innately mistrustful of what they considered a shabby and inconsequential medium. One that was in fact just too much of the people, for the people and by the people. It didn't have the cultural stature of painting. It was practiced by tradespeople, or faceless technicians and artisans, amateurs, photojournalists, pornographers and, perhaps worst of all, the great seething mass of the public itself recording key moments in their own lives. But there is a long history of photography working for social change, and like Jeffries often integrating powerful portraiture - with Lewis Hine being perhaps the greatest caimpaigner-artist in this field.
Photography was regarded as common(place) and yet as incomprehensible as the trashy pop songs those high arbiters of taste and morality on occasion would attempt to dance to in off-piste social gatherings. Inculcated from an early age their affinities and expectations centred around classical music (from both listening to, playing, reading and talking about) - and were similarly constrained when it came to the visual arts. It is possible that as they felt the old certainties and deferences slipping away, they were the ones who had begun to feel excluded, irrelevant, invisible.
And despite the recent pre-eminance of photography as an art form that legacy of suspicion and moral condescension still lives on. There will always be a crop of self-appointed guardians who, when faced with pictures that unsettle them, react to their discomfiture with the same old sanctimonious hand-wringing. But these days what was once lagubrious literary admonishment has been reduced to simplistic one line haranguing. That's progress, I guess.
The accusatory derision aroused by the recent pictures by Ian Jeffries (who is both an amateur and someone holding down a job) still presents as being for the best possible reasons - out of faux concern for those people that in all likelihood they would cross the road to avoid. The original critics in revealing the disdain they felt seemed to reveal their own alienation from much of humanity - and perhaps even from themselves. Bearing witness to the degraded lives of the hierarchically lowest in society (by the hierarchically lowest art form) may have even uncomfortably invoked a certain measure of guilt and even culpability in the face of such evident failure of their society to protect all its members. This sense of shame would presumably be exacerbated when a photographer not only bore witness but even made efforts themselves to improve things.
The carping these days is from a morally lazy position, easily adopted and one which requires negligible intellectual or emotional coherence. In declaring images an affront to common decency, civilisation, etc., it is nothing more than another example of someone telling others what they can and can't do - but in this case it's not those on the political right doing the telling.