This is a belated rant – good for a beautiful spring Monday morning. As many of us may recall, Earth Day was recently celebrated. Sitting in my email inbox was a mailing from photographer Michael Fatali. I just had a chance to read his email. It was a drippy, hippee-speak laden poem praising our Earth Mother. It read in part with statements along the line of Let us give thanks to our goddess Earth Mother as we renew our spiritual energies in your pools of eternal yada yada yada.
To be clear; I don’t have a problem with Mr. Fatali’s images, and I don’t have a problem with hippees. In fact I live just over the hill from Berkeley. I don’t even have a problem with drippy cheesy poems praising the Earth Mother on Earth Day. What gets my gall in a knot is that this cheesy Earth Mom poem was delivered to me by a photographer convicted of scarring our National Parklands with duraflame presto logs for the sake of getting a picture.
So next time, Mr Fatali – if you want to send me a drippy poem praising your Earth Mommy, just remember that it would come across much more sincere if you included an apology for giving your Mother a fire scar.
Sheessh!   < end Rant>
Read More opinions about the incident from several years ago HERE and also about the outcome posted at the NY TIMES.
As you already know, Mr. Fatali is seemingly full of contradictions. Look at his website, it states that he uses no color filters or computers but only natural light. Probably true regarding the color filter part, but computers? The guy has his images on his own personal website. Last time I checked, you had to have your images processed through the computer in order to have them on a website. I’d like to know how to avoid the computer if there’s another way around getting my images on my website. Photographers who are pretentious enough to put disclaimers on websites claiming to either not use computers for their images or hating photoshop aren’t fooling anyone except for themselves. I’m not saying these people love Photoshop, but obviously they care enough about their images to want to make the best prints or files. I have to admit though, the guy is good at getting his name out there.