Robert Frank, Walker Evans

I have next to me Walker Evans American Photographs and Robert Frank's The Americans. These are two of the more important monographs in American photography, and for good reason. They've got some good pictures in them.

Robert Frank is often cited as one of the seminal "street photographers", and was a student of Walker Evans. I own the Evans book and am generally pretty familiar with his work. Robert Frank, of course I know some of his pictures because they're pretty universally known (even if you don't know who shot them) but mostly I wasn't familiar with the work. Anyways. Onwards.

My first impression of The Americans was "hey, he's a beat Walker Evans!" which was probably influenced by the fact that Jack Kerouac wrote the intro, and my knowledge of both the era Frank was working in and the fact that he was a student of Evans. A beat Walker Evans is exactly what one might expect. After due consideration, I think this summary is still pretty spot on.

Both photographers have that foursquare, head-on style that so exemplifies Evans. Here is a thing. Here is a person. This is what it looked like. And yet, these are not trivial pictures. For reasons that are not always clear, most of them are pretty good. Most of them not only show us the immediate thing, but get at in some way something more fundamental, something underlying the thing. Evans liked his diagonals, either a diagonal thrust to lines, or simply interesting objects placed in opposing corners. Frank doesn't seem to like them as much. Frank has a few other quirks, preferring fragments perhaps more than Evans. Franks pictures are a lot rougher around the edges, more out of focus material, more motion blur.

In general, though, the pictures are a whole lot more alike than they are different.

Every time I though "aha! Here's something Evans never did!" I'd flip the American Photographs and find an Evans shot where did did exactly that. And vice versa, for the most part.

The substantive difference, and the one that makes Frank "street" where Evans wasn't, is that Evans prefers to show us the scene, the thing, the person, where Frank -- sometimes -- shows us the moment in time. Not always, much of The Americans is very much Evans, very much the scene, the person, the object. But here and there, we see an instant, a moment in time that was there, click, and then gone. The moment captures, or makes us believe that it captured, the event.

Evans shows us a row of politicians in fancy hats. Frank shows us a row of policiticans in fancy hats, at the instant one of them stifles a yawn.

It's an interesting evolution, one well worth looking at. Frank strikes me as someone straddling the genres, between whatever you call what Evans did (straight photography?) and "street".

Success

A commenter asked what I knew about how to "succeed" in some sense. At any rate, that's what I took away from the exchange. I am not successful in any recognizable way. This is, at least in part, because I have not made any effort to succeed. I am pretty sure that success -- however one chooses to define it -- is pretty hard work. Still, I can perhaps offer some insights. More precisely, I can offer some insight into how not to do it.

Don't bother "working" the social media. Yes, there have been some successes there. Eric Kim, despite his completely derivative and not very interesting pictures, is a success. If you asked him, he would probably say that it was because he worked social media, gained followers and built an audience. Then he launched a web site and leveraged his audience into a career giving workshops and so on. This is what it looks like to him. That is what he did, certainly, and to that he would naturally attribute his success. If so, he's wrong. There are probably a million people out there with 10,000 or 100,000 followers on some social photography thing (flickr, instagram, 500px, etc) and not all of them are going to succeed.

I watched a great video on Survivorship Bias recently which brought this into sharp focus in my mind (hence this piece).

Don't bother copying other people. Yes, there are guys running around out there selling over-saturated landscape photographs and making quite a lot of money at it. Just because those 10 or 20 guys are doing well does not mean that the millions (yes, millions) of people copying them are going to do as well. If you want to make money selling expensive prints, you would do well to copy their business models, their sales processes, and so on. You would not do well to copy their pictures. The pictures might not matter that much, ultimately, but why start out with a the problem of differentiating yourself from the established guys? Start somewhere new. Find something appealing, crowd-pleasing, and not a saturated landscape. Flowers. Dogs. Kitchen implements. Vegetables. Whatever.

Obviously if you're trying to Art, rather than Sell, don't bother copying people. That's silly. If you're trying to Art, you probably want to start hanging around with gallerists and curators, but that's just a guess.

There isn't any royal road to success, but all the roads start with finding your own voice, surely. Figure out what you want to shoot, and shoot that. A lot.

Success, no matter how to define it, seems to demand that you be able to produce work consistently. A commercial photographer has to be able to go on site, on schedule, within a budget, and make more pictures of more or less the same sort as appear in her portfolio. A wedding photographer, ditto. An artist has to be able to grind out a new portfolio of new work every few years, a new portfolio which is related to but not the same as the previous one. A landscape artist needs to be able to go to a new location, and grind out more of the same, with equal or better quality.

So figure out what you want to shoot, and shoot it. A lot.

Ray Wylie Hubbard once said that the important thing about writing songs is how you're gonna feel playing it at every gig for twenty years, because every song might just be a success. Don't start shooting something you're going to hate if it does become the signature of your success. Shoot something you like.

I suspect that's part of why we see guys like Peter Lik doing landscapes. The work may be horrendously boring by now, but at least he gets to travel all over. If he was doing endless studio shots of flowers, he'd probably have killed himself by now.

Camera Face II

A random thought.

Many people hate pictures of themselves, saying "I look terrible in photographs". In some cases, what these people must hate is their Camera Face.

Camera Face

Here's an exercise for you. Google the exact phrase "senior session" and spend a little time on the web sites of the photographers that pop up. Pick a couple at random, it doesn't matter. Look at portfolios and also the descriptions of what you, as the client, can expect when you book your senior session. Take your time, I'll wait.

...

...

Ok, among the several things you may have observed might have been:

• Every one of these photographers goes on at some length about how they'll personalize the session so your unique style and personality is captured.
• All the pictures look the same. From one session to another. From one photographer to another. The "processing" will vary in small, irrelevant, ways.

Naturally, the last thing an 18 year old wants is for their actual personality to shine through. That's a pretty uncomfortable thought for a nearly-50 dude who doesn't give a shit, it would be a horrifying nightmare for a high school senior. By "your personality will shine through" the photographer means "we will photograph you holding a book, or a musical instrument, your choice, and if you like you may wear cowboy boots" which is as it should be.

The kids want to look 25 years old and hot, they have no interest in authenticity. In fact, they have no interest in non-conformity. They want their senior session to look just like those other ones except they should look a little hotter.

So we get endless girls incongruously squatting on railroad tracks in new frocks, all looking identical.

These things are a commodity. Whatever, there's no shame in that. I buy a lot of rice, and hold rice farmers in high esteem. It's perhaps a bit unfortunate that the photographers market the stuff about uniqueness, but whatever works, right?

Why are these things all so very much the same though? I was astonished at How. Incredibly. Narrow. the results are. There is:

• Serious Face
• Serious Face with teeth showing
• Smiling Face
• Laughing Face

and that appears to be almost literally it.

I have dubbed this phenomenon "Camera Face". These are the faces we put on when we're acutely conscious of the camera. These are masks, constructed to conceal, to represent us as normal and average (but hot! and 25!). I don't know if it's built into the human animal, or if we learn it through 13 years of school photos, or what, but it appears to be damn near universal.

The basic Senior Session photographer appears to pose the victim, and then to wait until the victim assumes Camera Face. The photographer waits until the victim is "ready" before releasing the shutter, and this mess is the result.

It's not a tragedy like genocide or a massive oil spill, but good lord, it ain't good.

I'm not a portrait guy, but I've shot some pretty good pictures of people. Plus which, I read a lot.

Actually good, interesting, actually pictures of people are taken not by waiting for Camera Face to appear, but waiting for Camera Face to disappear. You wait for the unguarded moment, the instant when the victim forgets the camera and is, for a moment, genuine, authentic. Alternatively, let the victim act, let them mug for the camera, put on a show. It's not authentic, but it's not Camera Face either. You get something into the picture.

Just Say No to Camera Face.

Arrrg

I take part in a couple of forums, variously acrimonious, variously filled with dunderheads. Since I have ceased posting my own pictures online, for a variety of reasons, I periodically take a bunch of grief from people who want to see my pictures before they'll listen to what I am saying. Which, as an aside, is completely idiotic.

Anyways, I don't post pictures in forums any more, because it will lead apparently inevitably to trying to please blockheads on internet forums.

As proof of this, I relate this sad little tale.

I recently shot a little portfolio for the blockheads on a forum, with a barely submerged subtext of "Fuck You" (you get one (1) guess as to whether anyone perceived this). I got some nice comments from a few nice people, and the bitchy bitches ignored it. Possibly they correctly read the subtext after all.

Now when I have a few spare moments and am shooting for a long term project, I find myself drawn to happy little exercises. Little happy crowd pleasing shots that mean nothing, that say nothing, but which would do quite well on some god damned internet forum.

Arrrrg

Complexification

Back in the day, books about photography could run to 100 pages or more. They covered how to mix chemicals up, and coat plates of glass or metal, all the way through composition and seating a person for a portrait.

Nowadays, thank goodness, most of that fiddly difficult stuff has been cleared away. A contemporary book, workshop, or similar, on photography is both short and tends to jump ahead pretty immediately to artistic and creative elements. No, wait. That's not right at all. If anything, instruction has become even more lengthy and tedious! What the hell is going on here?

The first thing that's going on is that you can always make a buck selling a book about so big. So the books are about so big, pretty much no matter what. You can always fill it up with trivia, as needed.

The second thing that's going on is that, as photography has gotten easier, the old guard has always insisted that it is hard. It was hard in the days of glass plates. There was an incredible amount of finicky, dangerous, difficult stuff. As things got simpler, the glass plate guys complained that it was too easy now with these new-fangled dry plates, so the books written in the wet to dry plate transition no-doubt started to put in filler, to replace the no longer relevant stuff about collodion. And so the dry plate guys learned that photography was hard, and so when roll film showed up, they stuck in more filler. So the roll film guys learned that photography was hard.

And so it goes. Now we have books and tutorials that are mostly filler. Sure, they tell you a few things. Now we spend a tremendous amount of time "teaching" things that can be learned by the student in five minutes, by using a process best described as Open Your God Damned Eyes. 75% of the crap about where to put the lights can be learned in a few minutes by looking at pictures, and looking at a model, and moving the lights around a bit. But no, it has to be turned into 150 pages of canned formulas complete with diagrams about where to put the lights, and (if you're lucky) sample pictures of the loop under the model's nose, which are the only part that matters a fig.

And let's be clear here, by "filler" I don't necessarily mean that Chapters 5 through 8 should simply be deleted. I mean that, perhaps Chapters 5 through 7 should be condensed to one short chapter, and 8 should be rolled in to chapter 3 as a single paragraph.

As of this writing, searching the web for the exact phrase "photography workshop" garners nearly eight hundred thousand hits. Everyone wants to sell you a goddamned workshop. It's crazy. There's every stripe out there selling this crap. There are internet-famous amateurs and pros looking to squeeze few more bucks out of their hobby. There's art and design schools or varying degrees of credibility. There's National Geographic. There's honest-to-god credible artists.

I'm sure that in some small subset of these real value can be obtained by the student. Indeed, I dare say it would be rare to go to one and learn nothing at all.

Still, the most useful piece and sage course ever taught in photography boils down to this:

Open Your God Damned Eyes.

Look at what you're shooting. Look at other pictures. Look, for crying out loud, at the settings the camera has chosen for you. If the shutter speed says 8 that's probably why your pictures are all fuzzy.

Ansel Adams

Here is a film clip. Hat tip to The Online Photographer. It's a short educational film from the 1950s about this photographer, you might have heard of him, guy named Ansel Adams. Narrated by Beaumont Newhall, written by his wife, Nancy.

It is straight-up hagiography. The Newhalls loved Adams, and it shows. It's still fun to watch.

Notes of particular interest:

• West Clay St in San Francisco (Seacliff neighborhood) is much the same now as then, according to google street view.
• Adams photographs do not stand up well at all to the terrible treatment the film gives them, with ridiculously weak blacks. Many of the pictures disintegrate into pointless jumbles.
• While Beaumont Newhall drones on endlessly about technique, much of what Adams says is about artistic expression.

I had occasion over the last weekend to spend some time with the standard library of Adams' books. Examples, and The Print in particular, but I dipped in to some of the others.

A constant theme, which surprised me, is that on virtually every page Adams talks about artistic expression. All his technique is explicitly about conveying feeling, emotion, an impression of whatever it is he's shooting. He suggests that you can't shoot it if you can't feel it. He says explicitly that all the technique he teaches is subsidiary to the artistic expression, that these technical details are mere guidelines intended to serve the final expression.

This was a surprise to me. Despite having read all this stuff, probably several times, a decade or more ago.

It strikes me, after noodling on it for a day or so, that the problem with Adams is that he was completely inarticulate on the issue of artistic expression. It shows in his books, and it shows in the film linked to above. He believed in it deeply, but he had almost literally no explicit guidance on how to do it. He reminds me of Harold Hill in "The Music Man" teaching children to play music (or rather, not teaching them) by urging them to simply "feel the music" more or less. While Adams clearly wants us to, he hasn't the foggiest notion how to help us to do it.

In part, I somewhat snottily suspect that it's because Adams himself couldn't do it very well. He made many beautiful pictures, many of which seem to be getting at the sublime, the majesty of nature, but that seems to be about it. When there is anything expressive in one of his pictures, it seems to be essentially "Oh. Wow. Wow." and frequently there isn't anything expressive it all. They're brilliant exercises in technique.

The only really good thing I've come across that isn't more or less "Oh. Wow. Wow." is his portrait of Georgia O'Keefe and Orville Cox, which looks a lot like an accident. But what an accident!

And so we are left with 100s of pages of explicit guidance on how to retain shadow detail, how to burn and dodge, how to compress or expand dynamic range to give a full range of tone in the final print, and on and on. All this crap has become gospel to many.

But it's not what Adams had in mind at all, as near as I can tell. He explicitly tells us that none of it is gospel, and that all of it is subsidiary to artistic expression.

And yet, here we are, in a world where plenty of self-styled experts will snootily complain about blocked up shadows for no damn reason at all except that they think blocked up shadows are wicked and sinful.