The Hare and the tortoise

Not a lot happening today so I thought I'd do some homework. Looking back over the Magnum website's portfolios for Alex Webb and David Alan Harvey I found I was playing a game of pairs noticing their differences by seeing the way each had shot a similar subject. The pictures at the top are by Alex Webb and those at the bottom David Alan Harvey. In class, I liked the immediacy of  Webb's images and his sense of humour and the design part of me liked his use of  themed colour and strong shapes, but after looking at a longer series of them they began to seem less believable as real situations and some took on the feel of advertising images (of course that may be because he influenced that approach rather than the other way around). When we were shown the David Alan Harvey pictures immediately after these it felt like I was looking at someone's holiday photographs. It was hard for me at first to rationalize why this was so. It was only after looking at them in isolation that the idea of a sense of place that Paul mentioned some say is lacking in the Webb images, I understood why I might have thought this. There seems to be a sensitivity in Harvey's pictures, that is lacking in Webb's. For me it's as if Webb is clever and he shows it in a "ta da" way and Harvey is slower, thinking about what he sees, making the purpose of the image belong more to his subject.