Template:Did you know nominations/John Harding (photographer)

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Cwmhiraeth (talk) 07:27, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

John Harding (photographer)[edit]

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~~... that 34 years after John Harding published his photobook Siblings, he published a supplement under the exact same title?~~ Source for the 2016 book Siblings and its relationship to the 1982 book: OCLC 957298471. More info on the 1982 book Siblings: your choice among ISBN 3-88184-052-4. The newer book is rather obscure; if you'd like to see more evidence for it, there's this illustrated introduction (text in Japanese) from a Japanese retailer.

Created by Hoary (talk). Self-nominated at 00:23, 14 February 2019 (UTC). (Nomination supplemented 00:40, 14 February 2019 (UTC)) ¶ PS There's no formal "QPQ" for this nomination, because DYK is IIRC new to me, and it's rather a mystery. However, seeing that Template:Did you know nominations/1994 Gambian coup d'état was four months old, I did non-trivial editing of the article that nomination is about. (If this nomination reaches half that age before being accepted or rejected, please just reject it.) -- Hoary (talk) 23:58, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

This article is new enough and long enough. The hook facts are cited inline, the article is neutral and I detected no copyright issues. No QPQ needed here. One paragraph, the Sandra S. Phillips comment, needs a citation before this can be approved. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 10:24, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

The comment about the Phillips comment surprises me. I quote the article: "A larger collection did not appear in print until the 2011 publication (in Japan) of Harding's photobook Analog Days [...]" / "In a foreword to Analog Days, Sandra S. Phillips writes [...]". There's even a link from the first instance of the string "Analog Days" that takes you elsewhere in the article, where the interested/sceptical reader gets the full publication details. Is something about this still inadequate? -- Hoary (talk) 10:57, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

@Hoary and Cwmhiraeth: Honestly I'm not sure about the hook, it doesn't sound that interesting does it? Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 10:27, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Well, I think it's interesting; if I didn't, I wouldn't have bothered with the rigmarole of DYK (for the first time, if my memory is correct). Aside from that, your comment doesn't surprise me at all. Different people are interested in very different things. When I look at successful DYKs, I often think "No, I didn't know that; and now that I do, meh." But I'm not knocking them. And it's very likely that vastly more people are interested in the DYKs that happen not to interest me than are interested in this little candidate of mine. ¶ As I look very quickly through the list of DYK candidates above, I infer that vast amounts of time are spent (or wasted) on them. I'm thick-skinned; if people think this is uninteresting, let's not waste more time on it. (Cwmhiraeth, do please respond candidly to Narutolovehinata5's question.) -- Hoary (talk) 10:57, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

I thought the proposed hook was interesting enough, but I might have expressed it differently. You do need that extra reference though. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 11:13, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

I'm sorry, Cwmhiraeth, but I can't see what's missing in the citation. As I've pointed out above, the comment of Phillips is sourced to "a foreword to Analog Days", the context tells the reader that this is a book by Harding, and a link takes the reader to full bibliographic details. Everyone knows that a foreword appears in the front of a book, and this foreword occupies a single page; specifying the page number would therefore be otiose. -- Hoary (talk) 12:39, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

A week or two ago I thought it was mildly interesting that the second book wasn't titled Siblings 2 or Siblings Revisited or was otherwise "disambiguated", as we might say hereabouts. But I've just seen Template:Did you know nominations/Yarmouth suspension bridge. Now that is interesting. (Tip of the hat to Dumelow.) In comparison this is b-o-r-i-n-g. Sorry, I can't think of any way of getting clowns or geese into it. -- Hoary (talk) 12:49, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Incidentally, I could take and provide a photo of the two books next to each other. (Even their cover designs are similar.) Or rather, I'm capable of doing this. However, if done straightforwardly this would necessarily reproduce two photos by JH (one on each cover): a no-no, copyrightwise. If there's interest, I could put more effort into dreaming up a legit way of doing this, where one gets a general idea of the covers but only part of each photo. -- Hoary (talk) 10:57, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

What you say above about the citation seems reasonable enough. I think the hook is interesting and everything else is OK so I will give the nomination a tick. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 19:01, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Hi, I came by to promote this, but I fail to see what's hooky (or surprising, or noteworthy, or interesting) about the hook. Sorry. Yoninah (talk) 22:44, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Yoninah, you wrote on my talk page that "[my] submission of John Harding (photographer) at the Did You Know nominations page has been reviewed, and some issues with it may need to be clarified." How might I go about clarifying?

I suppose that your "hooky" above means "DYK-worthy", and that this in turn means surprising, noteworthy, or interesting. Surprise and interest are subjective. I was surprised to see that one person had titled a book identically with a decades-earlier book with which it had no overlap, and this interested me. I am entirely unsurprised that this fails to surprise or interest somebody else -- after all, most didjaknows don't interest me. (As I look at the eight didjaknows currently on the top page: One I know very well (I'd thought it was a well known fact); two I didn't know and do pique my interest, five I didn't know but don't interest me in the slightest.)

As this candidate fails to interest either Narutolovehinata5 or you -- two out of the three editors (aside from me) who've commented so far -- shall we just scrap it? This "DYK" business seems disproportionately troublesome for all concerned, myself included. -- Hoary (talk) 23:24, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

As you wish. You quote a number of reviews which might be used to fashion a hook. I agree with you that many hooks don't seem so hooky, but most are netting at least 1,000 hits in a 12-hour run cycle. Yoninah (talk) 23:30, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

@Yoninah, Hoary, and Cwmhiraeth: Reading through the article right now, while I can't think of possible wordings at the moment, some of the reviews mentioned in the article seem promising. One possible option for a new hook includes the quote Writing in 2011, Stacen Berg described him as having photographed on the street "[n]early every day for over 30 years", another could be based on the quote From 1975 to 1976, he made black and white portraits of adult brothers and sisters in the US. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 00:05, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

ALT1: ~~... that after switching from black-and-white to color film, photographer John Harding was outdoors taking pictures almost every day for more than three decades?~~ Yoninah (talk) 00:22, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank you both for your continuing efforts. I liked Narutolovehinata5's first suggestion, but Yoninah's is more streamlined and therefore more attractive. Just one tweak to it: "outdoors" rather suggest to me, well, "the great outdoors": windswept mountains and all that. Rather than "outdoors", how about "out in the street", or "in the street"; or if there's something wrong with these, then the prosaic "outside"? ¶ I'm sorry, but Real Life is making demands on me; I shan't be able to pay much attention to Wikipedia for the next eight hours or so. -- Hoary (talk) 00:43, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

I originally had it that way:
ALT1a: ~~... that after switching from black-and-white to color film, John Harding was out on the street taking pictures almost every day for more than three decades?~~ Yoninah (talk) 01:01, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Yes, I like this "ALT1a". -- Hoary (talk) 02:20, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
ALT1b: ... that after switching from black and white to color film in 1977, John Harding was out on the street taking pictures almost every day for more than three decades? -Lopifalko (talk) 09:22, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Yes, Lopifalko's "ALT1b" is an improvement over "ALT1a": a little extra precision, of course; but of some additional interest to those who are knowledgable about these matters is that 1977 was rather early for a switch to color for purposes such as this. (No, it wasn't anything one might call "groundbreaking": Tony Ray-Jones, for example, had done street photography in color well over a decade earlier. But it was early all the same.) -- Hoary (talk) 11:03, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

@Narutolovehinata5: could you review ALT1b? Thanks, Yoninah (talk) 11:09, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

I think ALT1b works (I actually preferred ALT1a since I don't really understand the significance of 1977 and I doubt that most of our readers do, but eh); I don't have access to the sources so AGF for the content. Rest of the review per above, this is good to go. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 14:02, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, Narutolovehinata5. I think the year also helps set the date for the beginning of the "three decades" of taking pictures in the street. Yoninah (talk) 14:47, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
[Tying up a loose end here, not least because what's provided in "Color_photography#Artists'_perspectives" is terrible:] @Narutolovehinata5:, if we go back half a century, color was for holiday snaps and other "vernacular" photography, and of course for higher-budget advertising and the slickest of editorial work. "Serious" photography (and much else) was in black and white. Use of B/W now may seem an affectation, but back then there were several very practical reasons for using B/W; however, I shan't go into them here. As these practical reasons dwindled, more "serious" photographers experimented with or switched to color. This move was still underway in 1977, and indeed even ten years later color was rather new, when (in one of a series of three widely cited books) Sally Eauclaire anthologized Harding and eleven other "independents" for their still rather novel use of color. HTH. -- Hoary (talk) 22:54, 13 March 2019 (UTC)