“No Smiling”

 

“No Smiling”

 

Rewatching the great documentary on street photographer Martha Cooper. Good ideas & interesting questions arose.

It was joyous & lacking the pomposity (a pompous word if ever there was one! Ha) of many current day docos.

 

When, after decades of pioneering work (most famously the first documentarian of the emerging underground Street Art/Graffiti/Hip Hop culture of the 70s up to the present), Martha was finally accepted into the Fine Art Galleries of New York, the curator in the film said “No photos of people smiling. It’s just not done.”

 

Martha has spent her life photographing disadvantaged communities, locating the innovative ways people create culture out of detritus & extremely limited resources. How they reclaim their neighbourhoods, create new movements & locate joy.

 

The fact that the Fine Art world is so hostile to such themes seems part & parcel of its failings, no doubt anchored as it is to the rich investors in Art. To look at art as object sublime rather than a document of a bigger life & culture is what I have fallen out of love with.

Its tone & attitude is too downcast. Preferring negative statements as to what is wrong, rather than what is right.

 

In a Western world currently in short supply of hope, it seems profoundly misguided, perhaps contrived that way?

 

One should not avoid facing the trials of humanity, but one must remember those things which enable us to love the social-joy-hilarity-sacredness of life.

 

 

Published & Copyright Malachi Doyle 2023.