Ephemera

In response to Kirk Tuck's piece.

The critical change which has occurred in photography, photography as an aspect of our society, is the duration of our relationship with a photo. In 1970 a photo was a permanent artifact. We might file it away, but it remained. Our relationship was essentially open ended.

With the advent of digital photography and - far more important - the sharing and social networking ethos, our relationship with most photos is very short. I see an amusing object, snap, edit, send. My relationship with the photo is measured in seconds, maybe a minute. That's a thing I actually do, albeit always as a single recipient transaction. If I shared on a social media platform there might be  a secondary life as multiple recipients interact with the photo for a few seconds each. Maybe I would get some likes and the photo would pop up in my consciousness for a few seconds in a day or two. But that's it. The photo lives on as digital detritus, but it is, in the collective consciousness of humanity, gone.

This is new. Photos become far more like the spoken word, the gesture, a live performance. A photo is like a joke or an anecdote told at a party. Photos are ephemera.

A printed photo acquires more weight, more solidity in our consciousness, even today.

This is a reason for books. By placing a photo in a book you render it literally solid. You demand more of your viewer: to see the photo you must touch the book, turn the page. It requires, relative to Facebook or Flickr, infinitely more commitment from the viewer.

This is, really, why I don't share online. Your zero-commitment evaluation of my picture is of literally no value to me. Multiply by the millions more viewers I could reach, and I get a million times zero, still zero, value. I don't care.

I value the judgment of someone willing to lift a book and turn a page. If there's nobody willing to do that, so be it. That won't make me value a worthless +1 a jot more.

Kirk Tuck

Kirk has written a good think piece on the state of photography and culture.

Read it here.

I've been beating this little drum for a couple years. Kirk's got a good take on it, though.

I'll probably write some response thing in a few days but for now you can just read my comment on Kirk's blog!

History of Photography

I now own both the 4th and 5th editions of Beaumont Newhall's book on the history of photography. The differences between them are not so dramatic as I thought at first but they are, I think, telling. More on that later, perhaps. In any case, I do think his book is deeply flawed. He wants very much to lump photographers in to specific movements, and to connect them up in a lineage of influence.

As the art historian Janson had observed, this basically doesn't work for art in the modern era. It's every man for himself in an ever changing stew of ideas and influences - and that's how it has been for the entire history of photography. Attempting to organize by movements is a doomed effort.

I propose a different system of organization, which also might provide a framework for thinking about your own work, if you're in to that sort of thing. It's basic reportage: who, where, what, how, and why.

The who and where are basic facts. For thinking about your own work, it's just You and Here.

The Why I think of as a philosophy. Why are you taking these pictures? What's your purpose? To record your children's lives? To communicate your reaction to this scene? To represent Nature? To emulate the Old Masters of painting?

The What is, in my system, What does it look like? It's an the aesthetic or a visual style, perhaps. Great depth of field, sharp everywhere? Soft, painterly?

How. This is simply the methods. Do you use a big film camera or a cell phone? Do you retouch? Dodge? Photoshop extensively? Manipulate negatives? Collage?

These three facets interact and overlap, of course. They inform and modify one another.

Interestingly, breaking down and organizing the history of photography along the boundaries suggested by these three aspects, you get three completely different histories.

If Pictorialism is a set of methods, then these guys are the Pictorialists. If it's a philosophy or an aesthetic, you get two different groups. The same goes for straight photography, and so on.

Personally, I think straight photography is a philosophy, and pictorial photography is an aesthetic, so setting them up against each other as a sequence of competing movements is idiotic and wrong headed.

Unserious

Some time ago I stumbled over a forum posting in which a chap was asking for help using Farmer's Reducer. If you're not a black and white darkroom person this means nothing to you and that is OK. Anyways. It became clear that this chap does not own a copy of Ansel Adams' The Print.

This is the text. If you're going to do black and white darkroom work, you need to own a copy of it. It's not optional. You don't really need anything else. It's easy to obtain these days, and it's cheap.

So what?

This chap is unserious about darkroom printing. This is not a crime, dabblers are welcome in my world. I dabble.

The deal is, though, you should know when you're dabbling. Most self-styled photographers appear to me to be dabblers who don't know it.

Equipment is another angle of view on the same topic. People who rattle on about camera ergonomics, haptics, and how it's so terribly important to get a camera that just feels right are simply not serious about pictures. They are, almost without exception, inveterate gear hounds, always buying the latest and then selling it a few months later because they cannot adjust X in Y mode (where X and Y are two features the mere suggestion of which 20 years ago would have had you burned, justly, as a witch).

Some of these people are actually wonderful photographers (not many, but some) and are clearly serious about it. But at the moment they're going on about ergonomics, they are being unserious. They're wallowing in a bit of gearhead joy. They are, at that moment, dabblers in the land of photography.

It is not important to have a camera that just feels right. That is rubbish. For certain kinds of photography it is indeed necessary to have a camera that does not require a tripod. Beyond that it's all details. As proof, I submit.. the first 150 years of photography. There are, it turns out, some pretty good pictures in there.

Of course there are a few people on the edge, who will shoot with a comfortable camera but who won't with an uncomfortable one. If you are serious about pictures, you'll shoot with whatever you have. You'll figure it out, you'll find some pictures you can make with it, and you'll do that.

No crime being a dabbler. In our relatively affluent western society, we have that luxury, and we should feel free to exercise it. But please, be self-aware enough to recognize it.

So why not dabble? Because dabbling gets in the way. Dabbling gives you an excuse. I couldn't make anything of this negative because the instructions for Farmer's Reducer I found on the internet ruined the negative. I can't make the pictures I want because I need a different camera, or a different lens, or I can't afford to go to Africa, or whatever.

If you're serious you'll find some pictures you can shoot, and you'll shoot them. That's pretty much the definition.

REVIEW: Leica M Monochrom

I hear that equipment reviews are a great way to increase traffic, so, here goes.

The Leica M Monochrom is a new object from Leica. The price is something over $7400, which works out to about $10.80 a gram. The object is mainly black. It's about 139mm x 42mm x 80mm in size, with some rounded corners. This makes is somewhat denser than water. It will not float.

The price is about $335 a troy ounce, making it quite a bit cheaper than gold.

On one of the 139mm x 42mm sides there are: a dial with numbers on it and the letter A in red; a push-button; a multi-position switch; another button.

One one of the 139mm x 80mm sides there is a large round hole, and some sort of mounting system. On the other one there is a rectangular shiny area, some more buttons, and a dial of some sort.

There is an opening in one corner that admits light through the object, for reasons I cannot discern.

There is a hole, threaded on the interior surface.

The finish is crinkly in some places, smooth in others.

I rate this a definite buy and feel that it will definitely improve your life.

Intellectual Property Blindness

People are oddly blind to intellectual property rights even when they ought not to be. Software developers downloading music and movies, and so on.

Today I ran across a bit by a photographer who is one of those Z-list senior session types who would be appalled at the idea of shooting for free. She's an obnoxious bitch.

And today she's ever so pleased to have her words and pictures on petapixel (a terrible click bait web site aimed at photographers).

WTF?

It is vitally important to protect IP rights in my domain, but IP in your domain, eh, who cares.

If you're one of those photographers who's big on My Copyright (I am not), then at least try to be consistent. Intellectual property rights aren't just for you. They're either for everyone, or no-one.

Truth

One can, of course, talk about whether a photo depicts a true thing or not, as in journalism. I'm not terribly interested in that.

What I am interested in, at the moment, is whether a photograph or a body of them "reads" as "true". Is there some ineffable quality of truth-to-the-subject inherent in this body of work, or not?

This is, essentially, what P.H. Emerson disliked about H.P. Robinson's work. It's a subtle thing, and possibly a deeply personal thing. I find, though, that when I look over a collection of Robinson, it reads as stagey, not quite real. This is probably related to the fact that it is stagey and not quite real. Emerson, on the other hand, feels quite truthful.

Comparing any one Emerson to a a similarly themed Robinson, I don't see much difference. They're really quite similar. It's only in looking at the work en masse that this squishy feeling of truth/untruth steals over me.

I similarly feel this notion of truth in Paul Strand, and much of the Magnum corpus.

It is this sense of truth that separates, in my mind, a good portrait from a bad one. Most portraits are stagey awkward self-conscious crap. Good ones reflect a certain sense of honesty, of truth.

In this sense, I think I can firmly connect H.P. Robinson to the Pictorialists. In this sense, we have parallel tracks, with Robinson leading directly into the Pictorialists, and Emerson leading to Paul Strand, with the two big threads eventually colliding in Camera Work. The Pictorialists fade away, albeit temporarily.

(more on this later, by the way, I now have two editions of Newhall's History of Photography, the 4th and the 5th, and the differences between them on this subject are startling)

In contemporary photography I find almost nothing that reads true. The availability of cheap and flexible studio lighting, the ease of digital manipulation, and the basic disinterest most self-styled photographers have in these questions, mean that everything is stagey and unreal. We, the viewer, know it and can feel it in the results.

Landscape colors are a little too bright. Portraits are a little too forced and lit with too many lights. Urban photography is mostly forced exercises in abstraction, or equally forced exercises in finding the right craggy homeless face, and then processing it to a sort of corrugated bronze finish.

Contemporary standards dictate, arguably, that no photograph is finished until it's been ruined.

I don't seem to be able to shoot anything particularly truthful, for the record.

I think it's extremely hard. Adam Marelli can do it.