Originally posted by Flanoman No 6 is truly a wonderful photograph, but I have serious reservations about it . if you look closely at the riders stirrup and just slightly below too the left , I think that's an open wound and probably one of many the horse suffered in the past judging by the many scars on its belly.
I admire that photograph, too, Flanoman.
I think your reservations aren't about the photograph, though, but rather how the horses are treated or neglected. I suspect you're probably right about that in many ways, and it bothers me, too, much as the effects of horse-racing do.
But the photograph itself is another matter. A photographer is a messenger of sorts: war photographers--Robert Capa and James Nachtwey, for instance--document the effects of war on soldiers, civilians, cities, and nature, but they aren't promoting or condoning war. It's because of war photographers' work that we have a visual record to remind us why war shouldn't happen. Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Magaret Bourke-White's work during the depression in the US is another example of fine, sometimes exquisite images documenting misfortune, despair, injustice and suffering--and serving as a reminder why societies need to do what they can to prevent such things in the future.
So it's not wrong to ponder the mistreatment of horses in the events documented by photograph #6 and have reservations about that mistreatment.
But that doesn't and shouldn't detract from photograph #6's standing as a wonderful, well-made photograph.
Nath