Magnum Photos and Crappy Photography

With fine art over a certain age, it's fairly easy to decide what's crap and what's good art. A hundred years, or a few hundred years allows for perspective and distance that are impossible to achieve at the time.

Photography is a funny thing. It's a new art form. Historically speaking, that doesn't happen too often. Being new means that it's harder to say with any authority as to what is good and what is crap.

Coming from a fine art background and years of studying art history, it's pretty easy to distinguish why Michelangelo was a far better sculptor than many of his contemporaries who created very respectable sculpture in their own right.

If you met Michelangelo today, not knowing who he was, only able to judge him by the quality of his work, what would you write about him? "There's this Michelangelo guy who makes some pretty impressive sculpture, but will he be anything but a footnote in history?" Until history happens, so to speak, you really can't say. Time bears out the quality of our judgments.

I look at the various photographers represented by the Magnum Photos collective, and I read their website and wonder "Are they really all that and a bag of chips? Or is the collective opinion about those photographers a bit over-rated?" Truthfully speaking, quite a bit of the work shown *is* impressive.

Whether they've set the highest bar in the field of photography or not is a much harder thing to say. Two hundred years from now, how will their photos be viewed? Will Henri Cartier-Bresson be viewed as the equivalent of the Monet of his time, or as the equivalent of Sisley? In other words, you ask the common person on the street if they've heard of a painter called "Monet" before and most people will say "Yeah!". You ask the common person on the street if they've heard of a painter called "Sisley" and most people will say "Who?"

Perhaps it stems from my skeptical nature, but when I see many of my contemporaries in the photography world saying that the Magnum Photographers are the end-all be all of people photography, I hesitate to jump on the idealogical bandwagon. They're good, and some shots can easily be declared as excellent, but... It's hard to say whether collectively, they're "really all that and a bag of chips". I hesitate to make any judgment from anything less than a highly informed position.

Of course a lot of people at the time Impressionism became popular thought that the movement was complete crap and the lesson that denotes is quickly obvious. People at the time were wrong and Impressionism is most certainly not complete crap. In fact, as art movements go, it was pretty damn good.

But for every equivalent of the Impressionist movement, there's ten Rococo's or worse.

Where do the Magnum photographers fall between those two lines? To one side, or somewhere in-between?

Someone with a time machine get back to me on this.