On Portraits

This is a theme I revisit occasionally, because I am very, very interested in how pictures of people function. Very long time readers may find large swathes of this familiar, but I believe I have something new to add this time around.

This much is so sufficiently established by wiser heads than mine that we might as well take it, in broad strokes, as fact:

We, humans, are mind-readers. When we are interacting with another human, we maintain a surprisingly accurate and detailed model of the other human's mental state. It goes beyond simple mood, and includes rough approximations of what the other human is thinking, and where, in some detail "their head is at." We guess at how a joke would be taken, whether she would like us to kiss her, and so on. We're wrong some of the time, but right surprisingly often. Our social systems are grounded in these mechanisms.

Two things: First, our mental model is built by continuous observation of body language and facial expression, in concert with how the conversation is going. We use a myriad of thoroughly subtle cues, I don't know the extent to which they're catalogued, but the catalog is deep. Second: we are over-confident in the correctness of our mental model.

How often do we encounter the "hey, but you wanted me to..." which is some combination of wishful thinking and misread cues? At least in those cases in which you did not actually want them to, but are now denying it.

Thus endeth the science lesson. Onwards now to speculation from your host.

Even somewhat less long-term readers will have seen my theory about presence, the idea that a photograph conjures a kind of presence. The idea is that when we look at a photo, any photo, we react, we behave, we feel, in some ways as if we were actually present in the photograph. We reconstruct the world that surrounds the photograph, in space and time, and interpret the photograph in the light of our construct.

So, consider a portrait.

We are, in a sense, there. We react as if we were in the presence of that person. We read their face, their body language, and attempt to construct a mental model of the subject's mind.

At the same time we construct a larger world to contain the portrait. I don't think we literally create a mental filmstrip with 10 seconds of "footage" of the face, our construct is more vague, more generalized than that. We do, though, build the equivalent.

There are, to my way of thinking, two mental models here. One is of the world of the photo, the world we're imagining the photo to be drawn from. The second is our model of the subject's mental state, of their mind. There may be no distinct line between these two things, but I will try to keep them separate in this next few lines, for clarity. We construct a mental model of the subject's mind based on our model of the world the photo comes from.

They appear, say, happy. We extrapolate that to a larger timeframe, add in everything else we can glean from the photo, from ourselves, from what we know of the subject, from accidental resemblances, and so on. We construct our mental model of the subject's mind as-if we were present, as-if we had been present for the last few minutes, or hours, or seconds. We mind conclude that they're happy-tinged-with-sad or whatever. We might conclude that he wants to be kissed, or that she wants to be elsewhere, or that they are distracted by love, or tragedy.

Return now to the two things. First: we're building this model of the subject's mental state on a ground of fine detail. The set of the eyebrows, the shape of the mouth, the crow's feet, the tilt of the head, minor details of the tension of tiny muscles, etc etc. Second: we're quite certain that we've got it right.

This suggests a couple of things.

First, it explains why we imagine we know something intimate, something profound, about the subject when we see a really good portrait. We understand the subject's mind, and we've definitely got it right. We see, we know.

Second, it suggests what makes a "good" portrait of that type. The maze of fine detail must be both visible, and also legible. This doesn't mean that the face need be lit like an operating theater, you can plunge one half into complete darkness since faces are pretty symmetrical. Rendering these details visible in whatever way makes sense, is the job of the photographer, with lighting and direction. Visibility, though, is not enough, the details must be legible, and therein lies the magic of a great portraitist. The sitter need be arranging their face and body into a form which, when seen statically, presents a coherent set of cues.

Coherent need not be consistent, the sitter might well present a mixed emotion, but the mixture must be legible to us as we see the static image and extrapolate it into a larger construct.

Third, this suggests why excessive modern software tends to render portraits terrible. AI driven skin smoothing software is magical, the skin comes out like a baby's ass. The appearance of the sitter is enhanced, the result remains essentially them in appearance. To the photographer who is aiming to get an attractive and flattering representation of a model's appearance, this is marvelous.

At the same time, though, these tools are erasing or muddling the minuscule cues we're reading. Legibility is destroyed. Tools which reshape the face to more pleasing proportions, especially, do this, but I think "skin work" tools are likely mucking up the fine structure of facial expression in ways we can't even quantify. Our mind-reading relies in part on cues too small to consciously note.

All that remains, when these tools are applied with anything but the lightest hand, is a kind of empty representation of someone's face. Of course, if that's all your started with (which is pretty common) nothing is lost. If all you're looking for is a flattering picture of someone's face, you probably didn't have a particularly visible-and-legible gestalt of detail in the first place.

Fourth, this suggests why so many commercially made, or amateur-made, portraits lack what we might call soul. The gestalt of legible detail on your face is inevitably the result of your internal mental state — that's why mind-reading works. If your mental state is nothing more than "ok, smile, don't blink" or "I wonder what's for lunch" or "is this asshole going to hit on me?" then there's not going to be much to read on the face in the resulting photo.

Most portraits are like that. This is the skill of the portraitist, to bring out that legible gestalt of detail, by conjuring a mental state which produces that. This is what all the chit-chat in the studio is for (or if you're Jane Bown, it's what the 10 seconds of observation and a magical invisibility is for.)

And there you have it. That's how portraits work.

Days of Snow

We had, to everyone's astonishment, a genuinely white Christmas here in Bellingham. It usually snows here during the winter, but almost never as early as December. This year it snowed on Christmas Day, and it snowed quite hard, and it has been very cold (as low as 9 degrees according to the Old Ways of accounting these things, -13 or so according to the moderns, accursed by God.)

There has been sledding. The dog cannot go on long walks because her feet get very cold and then she tries to get around with all her feet in the air which is awkward and doesn't work very well.

Photographing snow is notoriously difficult but I have, of course, mastered the form with a casual ease which must be seen to be believed.

I am in the throes of order fulfillment re: my book presale, and boy it's a lot of work. A full report will be forthcoming in, I think, the next week or two.

Happy Holidays, you reprobates!

Getting it Right

Sally Mann won the Prix Pictet for some photos she made in a swamp, the "Blackwater" series of tintypes. Yay! Tom Seymour, of The Art Newspaper, wrote it up in what he un-ironically referred to as a "long-form read" (1900 words) in a piece you may read here: "Ghostly photographs of the Virginia swamp ..."

This piece, despite (as usual) getting passed around by everyone as a great and important piece, is dogshit.

On the one hand, sure, it's got some good material in it, and it reports the facts of a notable event in the world of photography. Sure, Tom Seymour is (it is painfully clear) a generalist with no specialized domain knowlege, banging out some basic reportage on a deadline. Nevertheless, it contains multiple factual errors, and traces a well-worn and shoddy path through the story.

We begin with a discussion of the Blackwater photos, which Seymour covers mainly by quoting Mann, which saved him a couple hundred words of writing. Still, ok. Not a bad choice, Mann is lucid and on-point, and some degree of quotation is absolutely appropriate. This section is OK.

Seymour is obviously completely ignorant of wet-plate processes, making a complete hash to the tintype process: "She captured the charred landscapes using a large-format camera, a signature of her career, before conjuring the images in monochrome tintypes using wet collodion-coated glass plates" which is no particular sin, but just making up some bullshit to replace the knowledge you don't have is a bad habit. The first paragraph of the wikipedia page on "tintype" clears this up, but that clearly requires more effort than Seymour was willing to spend.

He then proceeds through a precis of Mann's early career, landing, of course, on "Immediate Family" and then pretty much stopping there, almost completely ignoring the decades of work that comes between the naked kids and the Prix Pictet. He takes a little detour through "At Twelve" focusing, of course, on the most prurient single anecdote from that work.

Along the way he describes Mann's early film work as wet-plate collodion, which it is not, and again a few seconds of research would have shown him this. But he's certainly not afraid of some purple prose. Seymour again:

In a sensual and dramatic monochrome, again exquisitely printed in large format via the wet-plate collodion process, the series depicts Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia, aged six, four and one when she started the project, and 12, ten and seven at the time of the series’ publication.

At this point we know that he is ignorant of Mann's career arc, obviously, but is he ignorant of what wet-plate looks like, of what Mann's wet-plate looks like, or what the photos in "Immediate Family" look like? Nobody with the smallest clue would think these photos are wet-plate, and most assuredly not Mann's distinctive take on wet-plate, and indeed they are not. These are mostly taken a decade or more before she learned the collodion process as, again, even a quick skim of even wikipedia would reveal.

He also claims that "At Twelve" is wet-plate, which raises exactly the same questions for exactly the same reasons.

Finally, somewhere in there, he tells us that Mann took up photography (she says) to spend time in the darkroom with her boyfriend (true) who was Larry Mann (no he wasn't.)

The pattern is clear, Seymour doesn't know anything about any of the details of anything here, which (again) is no sin. He's a generalist. He gets himself into trouble by (very) hastily skimming a couple of sources, and then extrapolating a bunch of wrong shit that he definitely didn't read anywhere. If he'd even kept to cribbing, he'd have been fine. Evidently he was unsatisfied with that, and felt the need to splice facts together to create falsehoods, and printed those instead.

Eventually some dumbshit MFA student is going to cite this garbage in their thesis, and then it's going to stick, and eventually wend its way back into wikipedia, and then the official story will simply be irretreivably false.

Of course, all journalism is like this. Generalists make up details to fill in the gaps, and move on.

Yes, I have pointed out these errors to Seymour and to the editorial staff of The Art Newspaper.

They simply don't care.

Something (Really Very NSFW) To Look At

Here's a magazine cover from someplace in Germany I guess. Below the fold because it's super-explicit closeup of childbirth with all, or rather almost all, that implies.

Good and Appealing

In my youth I attended a moderate number of rock concerts, some quite large, so I have some notion of the kinds of energy present at these things. At least, the kinds of energy present at them circa 1983, which I admit is quite some little while ago.

It happens that I've watched some Taylor Swift concert footage over the years, and it seems to me that the energy is a little different. Maybe a lot different.

The notable feature is that many clips seem to contains 10s of 1000s of screaming fans who know every single word of every single song singing along as if their very lives depended on it. I mean, I knew a lot of the words, but my life did not depend on singing them.

What do I think is going on? Well, something that is true about Ms. Swift is that she is a savant of the verse/chorus/bridge song structure. She can grind out well-crafted pop songs basically all day, they just fall out of her food hole. She's a competent singer, guitarist, pianist, but nothing remarkable. Her strength is songwriting. While she lacks Hack Williams's crystalline lucidity, she can really hammer together some words. She does interesting and clever things with the techniques of poetry, but in the end none of this is really her special trick.

Her special trick is this: every song is about you.

That's it. All the songs are about you, or you wish they were about you. Ok, maybe not you as such, but her fans all feel it, and it reaches out pretty broadly. You might be too cool, or too old, or too male, or whatever, but in the privacy of your own home you might remember what it was like to be young, to be like that.

There is no great technical virtuosity here. These songs are well-made, well-produced, pop songs, nothing more. Any number of pop groups and pop songwriters have slammed these things out by the yard. What they have not done is made songs that are about you by the yard. Swift has some sort of weird empathetic sense, she's explicit about just imagining how it might feel to be in some circumstance, and then she writes a song about it, and approximately 1.3 million people react with yes! yes! That song is about ME!

How does this apply to photography? After all, I write about photography, so surely I'm not just writing hagiography about some leggy blonde half my age?

The thing about photographs is they're already kind of about you. If you pay any attention at all to the frame, you're already "there" in a sense.

A photograph that people like isn't a technical tour de force it's a photograph that takes you to a place that you find interesting, or pleasant, or otherwise rewarding. A photograph of, say, a grey-ish jumble of sticks in a forest might not really appeal. You're "there" but so what? It's boring and probably cold. It's about you, but it's a boring song about picking your nose.

A photograph of a red ceiling, though, might catch your interest. You might imagine a pleasant, or thrilling, story for yourself. It's about you, in New Orleans, on that one night, when ...

A photo of a mom is about you, it's about your mom, or the mom you wish you had, or the mom you had in a different life, a mom deep with emotion, love, and strength. Your real mom was probably great too, but this is also a pretty good mom, a mom you'd be proud to have been the child of. It's about you, a you with a rich and interesting life. Of poverty, sure, but as long as you're not actually living it, poverty is interesting. This is a pop song, not real life, remember?

It's probably not fair to say that every "popular" or "well-known" photo is essentially a pop song about you, but there's something here, I am pretty sure.

Humanist photography, certainly, tends to bring us into a kind of virtualized contact with people we wish we'd met, people we'd like to meet, people who inspire us to imagine stories about ourselves. Just like Taylor Swift and that shitty boyfriend who never let her drive his great big stupid old pickup truck, and what we'd have done about that.

So there you have it, the photograph as pop song.

A Trick of the Light

I've noticed this particular frame for a couple of years now, off and on, and finally got around to photographing it a week or two ago. I might have shot it before, but I can't recall.

This is a purely random welter of twigs, wet from the rain, and yet the appearance of circles, of orbits, is quite definite. I had to think about it a little to work it out.

From the perspective we're looking at these twigs, the only surfaces which reliably reflect toward our eye are those oriented to the streetlight in a particular way. The only surfaces we "see" then, are the ones that follow the orbit. The rest are lost in darkness.

There is another tree I observe while walking the dog, with another welter of random twigs. This welter is lit by a security light on a building, which casts shadows on the tree's fairly white trunk. I don't have a photo of this one, it's not very photogenic despite being technically interesting.

The shadows cast on the tree trunk are entirely horizontal. Perfect straight horizontal lines.

This took me somewhat longer to work out. The security light is in fact a horizontal row of LED lights. It is "big" in the horizontal direction and therefore, as it were, wraps around vertical twigs and eliminates their shadows. The light is "small" vertically, and so does not do the same to horizontal twigs. It is, in effect, filtering out verticality. Mathematically, there's probably a convolution somewhere in here.

This led me to think a bit about strip lights. We often see them talked about as a way to create interesting catchlights in portraits (a "cat's-eye" effect, with a vertical strip light on each side) or to rimlight things, or whatever. I don't think I've ever noticed a talk about how a strip light acts like a big light in one dimension, and a small light in the other.

In theory, you should get hard shadow edges parallel to the strip, and soft shadow edges perpendicular to the strip.

This is a preliminary and not very successful attempt to illustrate the effect. I think my faked strip light isn't very good. Don't even ask. I rather like the picture, though.

Work in our labs proceeds.

Update

Further lab work produces these two photos, which make the point.

How To Make A Paper-Mache Skull

You can look up how to do paper mache in general in a million places. I use a little salt in some water and add flour to make a thin paste. Then I soak strips of newspaper in that, and apply them. But this isn't about that. It's about this:

Blow a balloon up about the size of your head, and cut out a piece of cardboard roughly like shown. A cereal box or whatever. Get some duct tape. Or other tape. Probably doesn't matter. You're going to make a kind of tent out of the cardboard, where one side of the tent is tangent to the balloon.

Duct tape this to the balloon. It's convenient to tape it over the knot. It should look a bit like this but honestly the details don't matter.

A conveniently sized bowl to put the thing in/on will help keep it from sticking to everything. Layer on strips of newspaper over the tented cardboard (this is the "jaw") and the main part of the skull. You'll leave a good sized area on the back/bottom open, through, so don't cover everything. You'll want to get your hands into the interior of the skull later, so leave yourself a nice opening.

Let dry, repeat. Four or five layers is probably enough structure to move on to the next step.

Which is to draw on a face. Just rough it out. You're going to form ridges and whatnot.

To make a ridge, take a long strip of newspaper and soak it in paste. Then twist it into a sort of rope. Dampen the skull along whatever line you want the ridge to follow, then press the rope onto that line. The ropes get mushy and can be shaped, and laid end-to-end or overlapped or whatever. You can be pretty slapdash.

I've done rough brow ridges, some ridges looping over the temples, the nose, and some lumps on the cheeks, here.

While it's still wet, cover with a layer of strips to meld it thoroughly to the skull's surface.

Next up, eye sockets. This is easily the most fun part. It's gross, sticky, and fun. After your skull has dried, using a very sharp knife cut an X into each of the eye holes, all the way through. If you have not popped and removed the balloon yet, this will definitely pop it. Probably a good idea to try to free the skull from the balloon a little before popping it. Cut away any balloon remains.

Cutting the X in each eye creates 4 triangular flaps. While gross and fun, the process has yet to get sticky. More fun awaits.

Form up two balls of aluminum foil, it doesn't matter if they're densely packed or not. Pretty tight, not not rock hard, is fine. They should be of a size to fit through the eye holes, but just barely. Flatten one side so they'll sit up nicely.

Now lay strips of paste-soaked newspaper across one of the balls, in all directions. Several layers. 4? 5?

Now pick this sticky object up, holding it at the bottom, sticky strips of newspaper upwards. Mold the paper to the ball a bit as you hold it. Now JAM IT INTO THE SKULL'S EYE. Push that molded sticky half-ball of newspaper strips into the middle of the X you cut earlier, and shove it through. The bottom surface of your aluminum ball should be slightly below the level of the skull's surface.

The ends of the newspaper strips are all over the place. Smooth them down over the skull's facial surface, the brow ridges, nose, etc. Then do the other eye. The result looks like this:

Inside the skull, it looks like this. The four triangular flaps are kind of hanging out.

Smooth the flaps down over the aluminum foil balls, adding some paste as necessary. Cover the whole thing in a layer of two more of newspaper strips, to meld the whole to the interior surface of the skull.

Let it dry for a bit, at least a few hours, before you pry the aluminium balls out of the eye sockets. My wife loves this part. It feels very very nasty, especially if things are still a bit damp.

At this point the edge of your skull probably looks like this, since it's just edges of newspaper. Probably a good idea to finish that edge with pasted newspaper strips wrapping from one side to the other. Also, adding more layers of newspaper overall as you work is generally a good idea. You'll find that the initial five layers or so is a bit flimsy, although it makes it easier to work and shape the thing.

While the skull is still pretty thin, I cave in the temples a bit, which breaks up the laminated layers and creates a soft spot, but improves the shape of the skull to be more skull-ish.

Adding more layers of paste-soaked paper inside and out re-wets the broken laminate, and allows it to re-set into the new shape, as well as adding strength to the skull overall.

I usually add a couple structural ridges to the interior about this time, using the same method as I did for the facial ridges above.

At this point there's still teeth to sculpt, and the various facial ridges can probably be detailed a little better as well.

Soak up some newspaper in hot water for a while, then drain and shred the paper as fine as possible. A little newspaper goes a long way. A tablespoon or two of shredded paper is probably all you need for a single skull. Add a little salt, and sufficient flour (and add water back in if necessary) to make a fairly smooth mud. Wet down your skull a little anywhere you want to add mud, and have at it.

The mud dries fairly slowly, and will appreciate attention you give it to re-assert any sculpting you've done as it dries. So just rough shaping when it's really wet, and then finer detail as it dries and sets over the next several hours. Just go touch up the teeth whenever you remember to.

When the mud is dried, I cover with another layer of strips.

At this point the nose hole still needs to be cut out, while will expose raw cut edges, and probably break up the laminate a little. Wrapping those edges in more paste-soaked paper will re-set things and clean up the edges, of course.

Let it dry out really thoroughly, and then paint with acrylic paints! Waterproof with a suitable product if desired.

Why We Need Photobook Criticism

There's a piece on Aperture, inside their "PhotoBook Review" label, which argues for more and better photobook criticism. This is, I have to say, a crashingly unsurprising point of view to appear within the pages of whatever "PhotoBook Review" is, other than $18 an issue. You can go read it here.

On the one hand, obviously I am a big fan of photobook criticism. I do it, I read it, I pay attention to the people who do it. I make fun of many of the people who do it, from time to time, on account of their occasional risibility.

On the other hand, this thing rubbed me rather the wrong way.

It begins with a quote from Sontag which is always a dicey operation. It's 50:50 that Sontag reversed course on whatever the quotation means, possibly on the next page. She's a tricky bugger, and will go on for pages on a theme before dismissing the whole thing as a bad job in a line or two. Also, she is a blatherer, and while she talked around a number of good ideas, her writing is mostly just blathering. But whatever, perhaps from this inauspicious beginning David Solo gets somewhere interesting. Or not.

Next up there's a pretty on-point complaint about most photobook writing, being the same as all other reviews of everything in that it's repackaged press-releases. Honestly, I'm not sure about this. Obviously there are press releases, and from time to time they get repackaged as a review, but mostly I think nobody writes anything at all about photobooks. It may be that that as a percentage, we're getting a lot of Serious Criticism, simply because the enture oeuvre is miniscule and there are, after all, 10 or 20 people who try to write seriously.

Solo proceeds through a lot of words which touch on "more cultural viewpoints" and "historical positioning" but which keep returning to the theme of photobook-as-artist-book. It seems to me that what Solo is really interested in is the book-ness of the photobook, the rare Japanese paper, the typography, the design, the gatefolds, the stupid clumsy bindings, and so on, so beloved of the Serious Photobook Community. He explicitly denigrates reviews that he thinks focus too much on the photographs, which is hilarious. These things are photobooks, dude. It's literally in the name.

His conceit appears to be that if only we doubled-down on talking about all that book-nerd shit we could totally expand the audience and legitimize the photobook as a thing. He stops, just barely, short of proposing that a great deal of grant money should be liberated to support "platforms" where he and his friends could place writing about gatefolds and varnish and the fascinating interplay of text and image. This is, apparently, supposed to be a solution to something or other.

It is, obviously, an absurd conceit. Getting deeper into nerd-land is not how you attract civilians to your cult.

A photobook conceived primarily not as a container for a bunch of photos is definitely a thing. It's just a very niche thing. Only a few people in the world really like it. It's like model railroading. It's a thing, it's very cool, and the people who are into it are really into it. Some of them think maybe they ought to be able to make a living at it. In the end, though, they probably should not.

A photo book (note the space) conceived primarily as a container for a bunch of photos can and should use the same assemblage of parts and tools, the Japanese paper, the spot color, the weird bindings (ok, probably avoid the weird bindings, those are almost always a huge mistake. I mean, seriously, Swiss binding? Give me a break. Someone literally forgot an endpaper once and said "we could probably market this dogshit to artists.") The difference is that rather than treating the photos as a way to showcase your awesome idea for a book, you start from the content and try to work out a good way to present the content in a book-like form.

I have seen and even written criticism which attempts to work out exactly how it is that the weird book-nerd shit supports and enhances the content, which is the idea every photobook practitioner trots out. The answer is usually "it does not, in fact, it distracts and is dumb."

This put me in mind of Lewis Bush's book Metropole which I quite liked. My reaction to the twee swiss binding and thread choices, though, is telling. I wrote this review three years ago and I found the book-nerd shit to be trivial and distracting from what is otherwise a pretty good book. This is the norm. It is as if a sculptor decided that what their statue really needs is a plate of cookies next to it or something. The oft-repeated mantra that you must hire a designer or your book will be shit might be accurate, but I would add to that advice "and keep that fucker on a short leash so they don't sell you a bunch of dumb ideas."

In advertising, your agency will come back with three proposals: the one that will win them an award, a throwaway, and the one you actually want. Book designers, at least the stratum of them that work in photobooks, seem to reliably offer up the one that will win them an award. As with the ad agency, your job is to say "no" to that one, and to the throwaway, and to pick out the proposal that you actually want.

I am pretty generous about what constitutes a book, and I am as guilty as anyone when it comes to having a great book idea, and then casting about for some content to stick in it.

I'm working on that.

Christmas Gift Ideas

You're probably scrambling to find the perfect gift for a loved one, about now, but don't worry, Uncle Andrew has you covered. This is what you get:

What is this object, you say? It is only the finest and most convenient-to-use camera system yet devised. It is a D3100 DSLR from Nikon, paired with an AIS 50mm lens that's probably older than you are. It might be an AI lens, actually, I'm not sure. This is what I use the most, all these wonderful pictures I share with you are made with this thing. Mostly. Sometimes other lenses, but this one is my favorite.

But Andrew, you say, the D3100 is discontinued, and it was always entry level, can I get one and how does it work with that ancient lens anyway? The answers are: I don't know try eBay, and yes, very handily!

The main thing that makes this great is that all those confusing modes and things go away, because none of them work. There is exactly one way to take pictures with this, and it works like so:

Set the mode dial to anything except Manual. Sunsets, Food, A, Sports, anything other than M. You will need this to focus. There's a little LED rangefinder system in the finder that will help you focus, because sure as shit the finder is no help here optically. The rangefinder system is a little rough itself, so you kinda learn to hunt around a bit inside the "in-focus" range 'a hair left of dead-center is usually about right' sorta thing. So, focus, set your aperture on the lens, and set your shutter speed to whatever.

Technically you can skip this part if you don't care about focus. I won't judge.

Now flick the mode dial back to Manual, because the camera can't see the lens and won't go off in anything but Manual mode. Since you can spin the mode dial either way, only one of which is right, you'll end up in some Pet Portraits mode about 50% of the time and the camera will still refuse to fire. I end up in Pet Portraits mode 90% of the time, because my very existence offends and defies the laws of mathematics.

When you do eventually get it in Manual, it'll go off finally at whatever exposure you've selected with aperture (on the lens, no you can't see the aperture in the finder you big sissy, you have to look at the lens, or count clicks, remember that cute little mirror system that literally showed you in the finder the tiny aperture numbers etched on the lens, though? That was cool. I have one of those cameras too.), shutter speed, and ISO. Metering does not work, so you're on your own, chimp or look at histograms or just guess. Put your goddamned big-boy pants on, ok? We're not here to hold your hand, we're here to make photographs.

No, you can't just leave it in Manual, because the rangefinder only works in every mode that's not Manual, because the camera desperately wants to show you a metering thing in Manual, which is ironic in this case because the meter doesn't work with AIS lenses. So in Manual there's just a blank area at the bottom of the finder, with an AIS lens.

You can leave it in manual and use Live View plus a zoom in to focus, but this is useful only when you're doing studio work on a tripod. I actually do this a lot too. The meter still doesn't work, though.

Anyways. If you'd like to give your spouse a reason to divorce you for Christmas, get them one of these. Please be sure to write me a note with the details on how it went.

And no, I am not kidding. I literally take most of my pictures this way. It's fine.

IT'S FINE.

Truthiness in Photos

Over on C4Journal, we see an article from our friend Lewis Bush, on post-truth photography. I take exception to a couple of points, but essentially he's offering a fair summary of certain philosophical ideas, pointing out that the Truth of photographs is a bit dicey, and then plunging into a short survey of some artists nobody has ever heard of who are "playing with the dialectics" or whatever around Truth and Photographs.

As usual, it is more my intention to examine some adjacent issues, rather than to truly take issue with Lewis's piece.

There are at least two significant contributors to what we might as well call the variability in perceived meaning of a photograph. This variability in meaning is a slight generalization of the idea that a photo is or is not True, of course, but allows us to ignore the issue of whether there is a Ground Truth to be varied from. A photo's meaning might indeed vary from a Ground Truth, but also it varies from your opinion of it, and from mine.

The first source of variability lies in the methods and technologies of the photograph itself. Let's say, the way photographing can shape the story. You can frame or crop things carefully to leave out details which contradict a version of the story. You can select these subjects, and reject those. The whole gamut, right? This is the kind of thing the self-styled experts of Photoland (which includes the editorial team at C4Journal) like to talk about, because it centers the photograph.

The second, and I submit much more important source, is what we as viewers bring to the table.

Consider a riot. We see some photos of it, and we find some opinion. The rioters are good or bad, the cause is just or unjust, and so on.

As a rule, in our western society, the photographs have almost no power to shape these opinions. The photographs will invariably be by-the-numbers generic photographs which serve the purpose of reifying the riot as a riot. These photographs say nothing more than "there was a riot, see?" Essentially the same photos say essentially the same thing about every riot; this is the method of western photojournalism. The very generic-ness of the pictures inures us to any attempts they might make to shape the meaning of the riot.

Our opinion of the riot has, as a practical matter, nothing to do with the photographic shaping of the story, and everything to do with us. A bunch of MAGA-hat wearing yahoos rioting is bad, a bunch of BLM supporters rioting is good, and that is the end of it. It doesn't matter if we saw the riot out the window, heard about it on the radio, or saw some photographs of it. It may surprise you to learn that other people might see these riots in a different way.

Note that this does not imply that every possible photograph works this lightly. I say only that the photos we will likely see will fail to move us. One certainly could photograph the MAGA-hat guys to look more evil, and the BLM guys to look more saintly, but generally the press photographer is looking for the standard set pieces no matter what the riot.

Another way to look at my distinction between the two sources of variable meaning is this: in the first case, the photography matters, and in the second case it does not — we would arrive at the same answer if we saw it with our own eyes.

This, arguably, is the point of the photograph. It is not that the photograph reveals some singular truth, that it changes minds as necessary to align all minds alike. Photographs don't, and never have. The ideal ought to be that they offer an equivalence to seeing it in person, with all the messy variability that brings with it.

There is, I think, a tendency among some theorists to conflate the two. People seeing news coverage of something arrive at different conclusions about it. The media theorist, being a media theorist, assumes that it is the media at fault.

There is little distinction made here between a photographer shaping a story in ways that don't suit the theorist, and a photographer failing to shape a story in ways that do suit the theorist. The generic photograph that treats the BLM-protester and the MAGA-hatter the same way is just as bad as the photograph that makes the wrong distinction between them.

"If only, " they reason, "the photographer had photographed those MAGA-hats to look shittier and dumber, the world at large would see that my point of view is the correct one."

This is... not quite right.