[AGL] photography's dirty little secret

[Michael Eisenstadt]

as soon as the portable camera was invented in the 1850s, gentlemen amateur 
photographers were taking pictures of picturesque slums. i doubt they were 
aware of their own questionable motives: distancing themselves from the 
worthy/unworthy poor, reinforcing their class status, various other dark 
impulses. Susan Sontag's brilliant book On Photography explores this issue.

then there is the fact that American vernacular architecture basically 
consists of: sticks and tar paper. So art photographers flock to disasters 
and Bombay slums to aesthetize horrid reality for middle class customers as 
in the photo by Robert Polidori reproduced below.

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