Stunning

[poliphilo]

"Stunned" is what you feel when someone just hit you on the back of the head with a frying pan- and you're halfway to unconsciousness, mouth agape, eyes glazed, unable to speak or move. How often has any work of art- or set of celebrity pix- actually affected you that way? Ever? Once or twice in your life?

But the people who write the headlines over at the Mail would be bereft if you took "stunning" away from them. And here's the Guardian at it too- trying to engage our interest in "Lee Miller's "stunning photographs of women at war."  Stunning? Really? Actually, no,  not at all. They're interesting pictures- if that's the sort of thing you find interesting- quite nice- but they don't stop you in your tracks. You register them, then flick on past. If it weren't that that's a woman's face framed in the flying helmet you wouldn't give the image a second's thought.

Comments

[glitzfrau.livejournal.com]

I have to disagree, here: Lee Miller's photos have genuinely stunned me. Though perhaps seeing them in the atmospheric setting of Leipzig town hall, where some were taken, helped.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Ah well.

I think Lee Miller was an amazing person, but I'm not convinced her photos are anything special- by which I mean any more remarkable than the work of other war photographers.