.  I thought one of the most striking things was the implied victory of technique over content. What the guy was saying is that they had lots of perfectly exposed and processed pretty pictures, but none that meant anything, especially in the context of literally hundreds of other pretty pictures. If there's nothing to distinguish them (like a story) then what's the point? It's the thing we've sort of argued here several times, especially after Mark writes one of his essays about high-end cameras. I mean, is photography really nothing more than the best possible technique? There's a school of painting called "The Boston School" which has led to a proliferation of "atliers" in the US, in which people spend a fairly rigid four or five years drawing and then learning to paint, and I find their end-product product to be banal and generally unviewable. The problem is the same as in this kind of photography: a victory of technique over content. There are no ideas in the work, other than technique: in fact, technique IS their idea, and for me, that's simply not enough. I'm not against good technique, understand, but it's no where near sufficient on its own.  I thought one of the most striking things was the implied victory of technique over content. What the guy was saying is that they had lots of perfectly exposed and processed pretty pictures, but none that meant anything, especially in the context of literally hundreds of other pretty pictures. If there's nothing to distinguish them (like a story) then what's the point? It's the thing we've sort of argued here several times, especially after Mark writes one of his essays about high-end cameras. I mean, is photography really nothing more than the best possible technique? There's a school of painting called "The Boston School" which has led to a proliferation of "atliers" in the US, in which people spend a fairly rigid four or five years drawing and then learning to paint, and I find their end-product product to be banal and generally unviewable. The problem is the same as in this kind of photography: a victory of technique over content. There are no ideas in the work, other than technique: in fact, technique IS their idea, and for me, that's simply not enough. I'm not against good technique, understand, but it's no where near sufficient on its own.  