Let's suppose I went to Butte Montana to photograph the place, and let's suppose I brought an elephant along and shot the elephant all over Butte. You might deduce, reasonably, that I have no ideas about Butte, and that I am actually shooting an elephant, not a town. Now, let's suppose that I only put the elephant in a few of the shots.
At this point you might reasonably be puzzled as to what on earth I am doing. Is this an elephant shoot or a town shoot? Does Andrew just happen to have an elephant in his pocket that he pulls out from time to time?
Hold on to that though, and now ponder Dan Zvereff's skateboarder journeys in the East, say this one, or this one, and also consider Michele Sons "Feminine Landscape" series. All these bodies of work operate by going to exotic locales, and shoving something into the frame that is out of place. They're all elephants in Butte, only prettier.
I am on the record as not liking Zvereff, but liking Sons. Let's try to step away from the political implications of Zvereff's trips, and the general appeal of attractive young women. Even so, I still like Sons and I don't like Zvereff. It's possible this is based entirely on trivialities, or personal tastes, but I feel like there's another thing in here.
Zvereff drags his elephant out every now and then, but often he's just shooting the location. Close-up portraits of the locals, architecture, landscape. Every now and then he throws in a photo of a skateboarder. The result, I think, is that one can't really tell what the hell he's shooting. Is he shooting skateboarders? Or is he shooting Kazakhstan? Michele Sons, on the other hand, is very consistent. She's shooting women in flowing dresses in exotic places, every time. There's an "elephant" in every frame.
When the visual motif, the raw "what am I taking a picture of" is clear, then there is room for meaning. You can project anything you like onto Michele Sons' portfolio. Is it a metaphor for women isolated in a man's world? Does she just love Emily Bronte? Is it a fantasy of.. something? It doesn't matter, really. We can believe there is some sort of meaning and we can imagine whatever we like for it.
With Zvereff it is not clear, at least not to me, what he's taking pictures of. I'm sure you could say well, it's just docu, innit? but that's a bit of a cop-out. What's he documenting? He's choosing frames to show us, after all, but there does not appear (to me) to be any rhyme or reason to them.
Now, one needn't hit a single visual note over and over, either. With something like, say, American Photographs, we can discern patterns, contrasts between patterns, differences. Evans shows us the same thing several times, and then another thing that's similar in some ways and different in others. Again, there is room for meaning. We can imagine what Evans might have had in mind, selecting these pictures in this sequence. We can feel that he had some opinions about America, and some specific things he wanted to show us, maybe even pound through our thick skulls.
Possibly if Zvereff gave us three times as many pictures, whatever he had in mind would shine through, but as it stands it looks a lot like he shot a bunch of pictures of whatever caught his eye, and then just gave us a sort of highlights reel that covers "the best shots" and maybe a little narrative "gotta have a train pic" but without any specific ideas that he wanted to convey.
See also this post from Allen Murabayashi at photoshelter, He points to two different photo essays from the Rio Olympics, and makes some remarks, judging one to be better than the other (and by the way, Allen, good on ya -- we don't see enough actual criticism out there, and criticism includes judging, damn it). While Allen does make some excellent points, it is worth noting that both photo essays are terrible. Neither one is an essay at all, both are simply jumbles of Greatest Hits photos. The NYT collection is more subtle and balanced, and uses better pictures, but it's not an essay at all. It says nothing, it shows us nothing new. It's the same fucking pictures from the same fucking Olympics with a slightly different color scheme and a few new athletes. Ho hum.
There's no opinion expressed, in the first place, and perhaps more important it does not have any room for meaning. You can't imagine any meaning for a jumble of highlights. There's no place for you to imagine what the underlying idea might have been, there's no place for you to hang your own ideas about the Rio Olympics. There's no room for "dialog" or for you to expand you mind, your thinking, there's nothing for the viewer to even react to. I guess you can say wow, Michael Phelps. wow. but beyond that it's gettin' pretty thin. It's just some pictures to look at.
You might reasonably say that, well, if Zvereff is by your own admission, Mr. Molitor in the same company as the NYT photo editing staff, then he's doing OK. I am going to put my critic hat on extra firmly and make the bold assertion that, no, they both suck.
This is, basically, why I think having a clear concept as you shoot, edit, and sequence is so important. Whether your idea particularly reads or not. Simply by making the final result contain your idea, you have proven to an extent that it can contain an idea. You have at least built a vessel that has some room for meaning inside it. And maybe, just maybe, some traces of your idea will remain when the viewers fills it back up. That would be nice, eh?
Leave room for meaning.
Saturday, August 13, 2016
Friday, August 12, 2016
The Nikon
The Nikon. Why do I use The Nikon? The only real answer is that if you don't already know, I can't explain it, you just have to do it yourself. But I'll try.
There's something about the way it feels in the hand. The polycarbonate. The balance.
The way the controls fall under the fingers. As if the machine's designer had hands. And fingers. And a thumb. That were hooked up pretty much like mine are. Everything just feels ... right.
And there's the sound. That little clop-snap as the instrument makes the image. Bang. I push the button, and it takes a picture. It's not like other cameras. When you look through the little hole in the back, and looking, really seeing it, you wait until.. clop-snapthere, that's the instant. That's The Nikon. The Nikon is there in that instant. The image.
And the lens. Then the lens. The 18-55 lens. Soft when you first get it, but after you drop it a couple of times it gets ... this glow. This amazing look that's not like other lenses. People recognize it instantly, it looks like nothing else. The Dropped Nikkor Glow. It's why I shoot The Nikon. I can't get that glow in Photoshop, because I haven't bought the right pack of actions.
But it's really the feel of The Nikon. You can't explain it, you just have to pick it up and work with it for a thousand frames, or ten-thousand. Did you know that Henry Carter-Brassaï said that your first 10,000 pictures are your worst? He used The Nikon. And I do too. It's the way it feels. It's the Images you can Make with it
The Nikon.
There's something about the way it feels in the hand. The polycarbonate. The balance.
The way the controls fall under the fingers. As if the machine's designer had hands. And fingers. And a thumb. That were hooked up pretty much like mine are. Everything just feels ... right.
And there's the sound. That little clop-snap as the instrument makes the image. Bang. I push the button, and it takes a picture. It's not like other cameras. When you look through the little hole in the back, and looking, really seeing it, you wait until.. clop-snapthere, that's the instant. That's The Nikon. The Nikon is there in that instant. The image.
And the lens. Then the lens. The 18-55 lens. Soft when you first get it, but after you drop it a couple of times it gets ... this glow. This amazing look that's not like other lenses. People recognize it instantly, it looks like nothing else. The Dropped Nikkor Glow. It's why I shoot The Nikon. I can't get that glow in Photoshop, because I haven't bought the right pack of actions.
But it's really the feel of The Nikon. You can't explain it, you just have to pick it up and work with it for a thousand frames, or ten-thousand. Did you know that Henry Carter-Brassaï said that your first 10,000 pictures are your worst? He used The Nikon. And I do too. It's the way it feels. It's the Images you can Make with it
The Nikon.
Wednesday, August 10, 2016
Luminous Endowment Grants
The Luminous Endowment has announced the latest batch of winners. Lest anyone get any silly ideas about sour grapes, let me state up front that I have never applied, and therefore never been rejected. I have considered applying, and have been stymied by the fact that I can literally not think of a way to spend the grant money within the context of my life. So, any sour grapes are at a pretty far remove, at best.
Onwards. The winners are, in the main, perfectly competent photographers, producing perfectly competent copies of pictures we've seen before many times. This is as expected, it was Michael Reichmann's business for 20 years to teach photographers precisely how to do that, and it is what most photographers want to learn. It's not my thing, but it's perfectly reasonable.
Anyways, it doesn't matter. What defines the value or not of these things is whether the idea is any good. So, with my critic hat on, I offer a few lines of comment on each project. I am working from the assumption that the pictures we're shown are the ones that were submitted with the application, and as such only give a rough idea of what the final result might be. One winner states explicitly that the final work will be different, in fact.
"An American Family" from Zachary Roberts. This project makes me uncomfortable. Roberts' brother carried out a murder-suicide of a bunch of little Amish girls 10 years ago, and this seems to be Zachary coping with his understandable personal reaction. It feels exploitative. But then, that's photography for you, isn't it? So, I feel uncomfortable, but maybe I shouldn't.
This is the most fraught and difficult of the projects, clearly. Roberts has, I think, tried to make a movie about this and failed. Now he's falling back on the tropes of mid-20th-century photographers to try to make some sense of this material. The pictures are the most derivative of the lot, knock-off Walker Evans and Frank, with a touch of Cartier-Bresson thrown in. I assume that the title of the project is a deliberate nod to the seminal books by Evans and Frank. Juxtaposing the Amish with the Roberts family is a strong play, and has the potential to be effective. It's not clear what Roberts wants to do here, and I think it likely that Roberts also has no idea, but he is struggling.
I'm still deeply uncomfortable with this project, and I think the pictures themselves are knock-offs, but I'm starting to come around to the idea that this might be a very worthwhile project. It could also dribble out to nothing, or end in more dramatic failure.
"The Retail Landscape" from Drew Harty seems to be "Twentysix Gas Stations" all over again. This artist is right - the project needs more depth. Also, I think the assertion that in 1964 the USA had only 7600 retail spaces is absurd. This might be a typo, the correct number might have been 76,000, but that renders the cited current number of 107,773 less shocking. Not sure what's going on here. The work itself is perfectly serviceable, the project's agenda is more or less worthwhile, but I don't see anything new or interesting here, ultimately.
"Florida Stewards" from Dustin Angell is a worthy idea. I adore the idea of honoring these subjects, and I think this project does a terrible job of it. These are miserable portraits, casting each of these people in a heroic stance, shot from low down with excessive fill and too much whaling on various sliders. I think the idea might be to make them look vaguely like marble statues, as this is certainly the result. This is a terrible visual concept and should get dumped. These are people. Rendering them all identical and ugly does nobody any service.
"Publication Design Grant" from Eric Myrvaagnes leaves me utterly cold. These are all exercises in form and technique, with no content. I actively hate this kind of photography, however well executed (and these are very well executed indeed). There are millions and millions of these pictures out there, all more or less indistinguishable. Eric is, I think, a fine fellow, but that is neither here nor there.
"The Things We Leave Behind" from Ana V Ramirez is one of the three projects I found really interesting. Ms. Ramirez is, really, just making and photographing Cornell boxes made with a few of her deceased mother's things. But she's very very good at it, and the use of photography allows her to use ephemeral things in the work. Cornell could not have used blueberries with the same effect. It's not a photography project at all, except as an incidental bit of technique, but it's still pretty good. I personally love it.
"Made in China" from Kai Loeffelbein is another political statement of the sort we have possibly too many of. Yes, yes, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, it's mostly China's fault, and they are terrible to their workers. It's not as if some minor monograph is going to make much difference, these issues are discussed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Like "The Retail Landscape" this project is a lazy nod to chic contemporary artsy politics. (Politics with which, for the record, I happen to agree with.) The pictures are stylistically all over the place, and almost completely mundane. This is one of the weaker of the winners.
"Homeless at the End" from Daniel Lombardi is another politically charged, potentially exploitative piece. But it's excellent, rather than lazy. Lombardi shows us how to do it right. He's not lazy, he's working hard. He's made personal connections, and is sharing those with us. Rather than some lazy lawsy, homeless people certainly are dirty and downtrodden he's showing us specific homeless guys, with names, with lives and stories. He's granting them dignity, without concealing the reality. The pictures are not incredible, just workmanlike. You can see nods to various influences. What makes it work is the project as a whole, rather than the pictures taken one by one. This project is, easily, the best of the lot.
Interestingly, Lombardi has a web site version of the project with more words, and it's quite a bit weaker than the grant submission that we're looking at. I hope he's not going off the rails toward something crappy.
“Armenia: Off the beaten paths” from Hayk Melkonyan is a bunch of landscapes. Look. Armenia. It looks a lot like other parts of planet Earth, but different in some ways. Ho hum. Technically excellent, and utterly uninteresting. Not entirely clear to me why a professional photographer who shoots these things as his actual job got a grant to shoot more of it, to be honest.
"Road to Nyapyidaw" from Vivek Prabhu is clearly the weakest of the offerings. Possibly Prabhu will produce something interesting in the end, but the samples he provides are a smattering of amateurish "street" photographs from Hong Kong and hopes for the best. He has a concept, of sorts, but it boils down to travel to Myanmar and take some pictures which isn't much of a project. It sounds a lot more like a vacation. You know my opinion about flying in to someplace for a few days and shooting.
It does not help that, to the extent that he has an idea, for example My approach would be to tell the story of Nyapyidaw from the eyes of its people, and not to simply dismiss it off as a bizarre city that is a result of the junta's largesse or paranoia, his submitted pictures illustrate exactly no ability to pull it off. Strong use of Leading Lines in Hong Kong does not in any obvious way translate to an ability to portray cities in Myanmar through the eyes of the people living there.
Anyways, there they all are. The stronger projects all have some sort of personal connection, and an effort to share that personal connection, and are built around substantial amounts of labor. This is my life. This is my family. I know this guy. I am involved, and now I share that with you as best I can.
Interestingly, most of the winners have an expressed intent to "do a book", whatever that means. Myrvaagnes has a specific plan for how the money will assist him with this, the rest seem to be pretty vague. I find the whole thing kind of weird. Making a book doesn't cost anything, it's just work, and you just do it. It's way easier that travelling all over tarnation taking the pictures, and you don't need any money to do it.
Money isn't going to magically generate an audience for the book, either, which for most of these people seems to be what they actually want. Possibly the little dash of publicity associated with winning will produce an audience, or at any rate the germ of an audience? I don't know.
Onwards. The winners are, in the main, perfectly competent photographers, producing perfectly competent copies of pictures we've seen before many times. This is as expected, it was Michael Reichmann's business for 20 years to teach photographers precisely how to do that, and it is what most photographers want to learn. It's not my thing, but it's perfectly reasonable.
Anyways, it doesn't matter. What defines the value or not of these things is whether the idea is any good. So, with my critic hat on, I offer a few lines of comment on each project. I am working from the assumption that the pictures we're shown are the ones that were submitted with the application, and as such only give a rough idea of what the final result might be. One winner states explicitly that the final work will be different, in fact.
"An American Family" from Zachary Roberts. This project makes me uncomfortable. Roberts' brother carried out a murder-suicide of a bunch of little Amish girls 10 years ago, and this seems to be Zachary coping with his understandable personal reaction. It feels exploitative. But then, that's photography for you, isn't it? So, I feel uncomfortable, but maybe I shouldn't.
This is the most fraught and difficult of the projects, clearly. Roberts has, I think, tried to make a movie about this and failed. Now he's falling back on the tropes of mid-20th-century photographers to try to make some sense of this material. The pictures are the most derivative of the lot, knock-off Walker Evans and Frank, with a touch of Cartier-Bresson thrown in. I assume that the title of the project is a deliberate nod to the seminal books by Evans and Frank. Juxtaposing the Amish with the Roberts family is a strong play, and has the potential to be effective. It's not clear what Roberts wants to do here, and I think it likely that Roberts also has no idea, but he is struggling.
I'm still deeply uncomfortable with this project, and I think the pictures themselves are knock-offs, but I'm starting to come around to the idea that this might be a very worthwhile project. It could also dribble out to nothing, or end in more dramatic failure.
"The Retail Landscape" from Drew Harty seems to be "Twentysix Gas Stations" all over again. This artist is right - the project needs more depth. Also, I think the assertion that in 1964 the USA had only 7600 retail spaces is absurd. This might be a typo, the correct number might have been 76,000, but that renders the cited current number of 107,773 less shocking. Not sure what's going on here. The work itself is perfectly serviceable, the project's agenda is more or less worthwhile, but I don't see anything new or interesting here, ultimately.
"Florida Stewards" from Dustin Angell is a worthy idea. I adore the idea of honoring these subjects, and I think this project does a terrible job of it. These are miserable portraits, casting each of these people in a heroic stance, shot from low down with excessive fill and too much whaling on various sliders. I think the idea might be to make them look vaguely like marble statues, as this is certainly the result. This is a terrible visual concept and should get dumped. These are people. Rendering them all identical and ugly does nobody any service.
"Publication Design Grant" from Eric Myrvaagnes leaves me utterly cold. These are all exercises in form and technique, with no content. I actively hate this kind of photography, however well executed (and these are very well executed indeed). There are millions and millions of these pictures out there, all more or less indistinguishable. Eric is, I think, a fine fellow, but that is neither here nor there.
"The Things We Leave Behind" from Ana V Ramirez is one of the three projects I found really interesting. Ms. Ramirez is, really, just making and photographing Cornell boxes made with a few of her deceased mother's things. But she's very very good at it, and the use of photography allows her to use ephemeral things in the work. Cornell could not have used blueberries with the same effect. It's not a photography project at all, except as an incidental bit of technique, but it's still pretty good. I personally love it.
"Made in China" from Kai Loeffelbein is another political statement of the sort we have possibly too many of. Yes, yes, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, it's mostly China's fault, and they are terrible to their workers. It's not as if some minor monograph is going to make much difference, these issues are discussed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Like "The Retail Landscape" this project is a lazy nod to chic contemporary artsy politics. (Politics with which, for the record, I happen to agree with.) The pictures are stylistically all over the place, and almost completely mundane. This is one of the weaker of the winners.
"Homeless at the End" from Daniel Lombardi is another politically charged, potentially exploitative piece. But it's excellent, rather than lazy. Lombardi shows us how to do it right. He's not lazy, he's working hard. He's made personal connections, and is sharing those with us. Rather than some lazy lawsy, homeless people certainly are dirty and downtrodden he's showing us specific homeless guys, with names, with lives and stories. He's granting them dignity, without concealing the reality. The pictures are not incredible, just workmanlike. You can see nods to various influences. What makes it work is the project as a whole, rather than the pictures taken one by one. This project is, easily, the best of the lot.
Interestingly, Lombardi has a web site version of the project with more words, and it's quite a bit weaker than the grant submission that we're looking at. I hope he's not going off the rails toward something crappy.
“Armenia: Off the beaten paths” from Hayk Melkonyan is a bunch of landscapes. Look. Armenia. It looks a lot like other parts of planet Earth, but different in some ways. Ho hum. Technically excellent, and utterly uninteresting. Not entirely clear to me why a professional photographer who shoots these things as his actual job got a grant to shoot more of it, to be honest.
"Road to Nyapyidaw" from Vivek Prabhu is clearly the weakest of the offerings. Possibly Prabhu will produce something interesting in the end, but the samples he provides are a smattering of amateurish "street" photographs from Hong Kong and hopes for the best. He has a concept, of sorts, but it boils down to travel to Myanmar and take some pictures which isn't much of a project. It sounds a lot more like a vacation. You know my opinion about flying in to someplace for a few days and shooting.
It does not help that, to the extent that he has an idea, for example My approach would be to tell the story of Nyapyidaw from the eyes of its people, and not to simply dismiss it off as a bizarre city that is a result of the junta's largesse or paranoia, his submitted pictures illustrate exactly no ability to pull it off. Strong use of Leading Lines in Hong Kong does not in any obvious way translate to an ability to portray cities in Myanmar through the eyes of the people living there.
Anyways, there they all are. The stronger projects all have some sort of personal connection, and an effort to share that personal connection, and are built around substantial amounts of labor. This is my life. This is my family. I know this guy. I am involved, and now I share that with you as best I can.
Interestingly, most of the winners have an expressed intent to "do a book", whatever that means. Myrvaagnes has a specific plan for how the money will assist him with this, the rest seem to be pretty vague. I find the whole thing kind of weird. Making a book doesn't cost anything, it's just work, and you just do it. It's way easier that travelling all over tarnation taking the pictures, and you don't need any money to do it.
Money isn't going to magically generate an audience for the book, either, which for most of these people seems to be what they actually want. Possibly the little dash of publicity associated with winning will produce an audience, or at any rate the germ of an audience? I don't know.
Tuesday, August 9, 2016
The Thing Itself
A comment on the previous post got me thinking. The Bechers (a husband and wife team) did a thing in which they shot buildings more or less dead-on, presenting them more or less artlessly. The point was, as I understand it, that they felt these buildings were interesting in and of themselves. They presented grids of pictures, inviting viewers to compare various buildings, to I suppose note similarities and differences. It sounds kind of awesome.
Historically, their work is considered a precursor of New Topographics, and I do see the connection. Both approaches are interested in so-called typologies, but the New Topographics people are more opinionated. So, some shared ideas, some not so shared, as it should be.
Nothing I shot for the previous little essay really resembles anything the Bechers did, because everything I shot was imbued with some sort of opinion or idea. The first one, the one I dismiss, is crammed full of formalism, and the rest are crammed with opinion. At least, to the best of my ability. I was actively trying to put things in to the pictures which the Bechers explicitly tried to leave out.
This does point out, though, the distinction between the thing you're taking a picture of, and the picture itself. Current thinking among amateurs is very much that the job of the photographer is to make the thing itself look interesting. Possibly the most common critique offered on the internet is some variation of the sneering "you need to study composition" (usually offered by someone who has not), and this is really saying that the thing being photographed is insufficiently interesting. The photographer must make it interesting by using techniques. Composition, post processing, whatever.
At some roughly opposite point on the compass rose from the Bechers, we find Ansel Adams, who was the master of making things look interesting by applying technique. Flatten the contrast on many of his pictures and watch in astonishment as the whole thing collapses. It is perhaps not an accident that in these degenerate times we find that technique is considered the proper path to making pictures interesting. But it is not.
Just to pluck another genre from the air, we have the Birds In Flight people, who do amazing stuff. (and, notably, nobody ever seems to sneer at them for stupidly centering the bird in the frame like some sort of snapshot. It's not a snapshot if you used a huge lens, I guess.) The conceit though is that birds are not themselves that interesting, unless you catch them in the midst of some hard-to-capture behavior. A bird sitting on a branch sucks, evidently. But consider that idea. A living creature of any sort of some kind of freakish miracle. Bone and sinew, blood pumping, feathers a-fluff, it is the wildest sort of improbability just sitting there.
The thing itself is some sort of modernist (?) theory about the essence of stuff, I think, but I'm not talking about that here. I'm leaning more on Szarkowski's idea from the opening section of The Photographer's Eye, the idea of a photograph that is a simple, direct, artless representation of the thing in front of the lens. The Bechers are a notable example of this approach, but see also Walker Evans and so on.
In reality, I think that a balance is usefully struck between the thing itself and the photographer's ideas.
If you're going to have "soul" in your photographers, if there is going to be some kind of emotional connection, ultimately the emotional viewer is going to be reacting to the thing photographed in almost every case. Photographers do not, in general, have the painter's luxury of hoping that the viewer will feel based purely on the use of color, the geometry, that sort of thing. The photograph is altogether too rooted in reality. Confront the viewer with a Mondrian, and one might be rewarded with an emotional response. Confront the viewer with the photographic equivalent, and you're more likely to get puzzlement.
Not to say that the photographic abstract is all bullshit, it's not. Still, people read photographic abstracts as photographs. One reads these things speculatively, with a strong undercurrent of "what is it, really?" and "I think it might be.." One reacts as much to ones fancy of what the picture might be of as to anything else.
And so the photographer's job is to help the viewer along to some sort of reaction to the thing in front of the lens. Sometimes no help at all is required, really. A photo of one guy shooting another guy in the head requires no artifice whatsoever to produce a reaction. A photo of a mother bathing her crippled daughter might not require photographic gimmickry, but to make it really compelling you can make it look like a Pietà painted by, perhaps, Goya. Hit those tropes hard enough, you might change the goddamned world.
If you're just me hacking around with pictures of buildings in Bellingham, well, you do your best. My belief is that you need to begin with a genuine feeling toward the thing in the frame, and then you can try to say something around that, and maybe, just maybe, it'll read more or less the way you want. Faking your emotional response is a bad first step.
And anyways, why would you fake it? Surely there are more things that you feel something about than you will ever photograph. So try to make something of those.
Historically, their work is considered a precursor of New Topographics, and I do see the connection. Both approaches are interested in so-called typologies, but the New Topographics people are more opinionated. So, some shared ideas, some not so shared, as it should be.
Nothing I shot for the previous little essay really resembles anything the Bechers did, because everything I shot was imbued with some sort of opinion or idea. The first one, the one I dismiss, is crammed full of formalism, and the rest are crammed with opinion. At least, to the best of my ability. I was actively trying to put things in to the pictures which the Bechers explicitly tried to leave out.
This does point out, though, the distinction between the thing you're taking a picture of, and the picture itself. Current thinking among amateurs is very much that the job of the photographer is to make the thing itself look interesting. Possibly the most common critique offered on the internet is some variation of the sneering "you need to study composition" (usually offered by someone who has not), and this is really saying that the thing being photographed is insufficiently interesting. The photographer must make it interesting by using techniques. Composition, post processing, whatever.
At some roughly opposite point on the compass rose from the Bechers, we find Ansel Adams, who was the master of making things look interesting by applying technique. Flatten the contrast on many of his pictures and watch in astonishment as the whole thing collapses. It is perhaps not an accident that in these degenerate times we find that technique is considered the proper path to making pictures interesting. But it is not.
Just to pluck another genre from the air, we have the Birds In Flight people, who do amazing stuff. (and, notably, nobody ever seems to sneer at them for stupidly centering the bird in the frame like some sort of snapshot. It's not a snapshot if you used a huge lens, I guess.) The conceit though is that birds are not themselves that interesting, unless you catch them in the midst of some hard-to-capture behavior. A bird sitting on a branch sucks, evidently. But consider that idea. A living creature of any sort of some kind of freakish miracle. Bone and sinew, blood pumping, feathers a-fluff, it is the wildest sort of improbability just sitting there.
The thing itself is some sort of modernist (?) theory about the essence of stuff, I think, but I'm not talking about that here. I'm leaning more on Szarkowski's idea from the opening section of The Photographer's Eye, the idea of a photograph that is a simple, direct, artless representation of the thing in front of the lens. The Bechers are a notable example of this approach, but see also Walker Evans and so on.
In reality, I think that a balance is usefully struck between the thing itself and the photographer's ideas.
If you're going to have "soul" in your photographers, if there is going to be some kind of emotional connection, ultimately the emotional viewer is going to be reacting to the thing photographed in almost every case. Photographers do not, in general, have the painter's luxury of hoping that the viewer will feel based purely on the use of color, the geometry, that sort of thing. The photograph is altogether too rooted in reality. Confront the viewer with a Mondrian, and one might be rewarded with an emotional response. Confront the viewer with the photographic equivalent, and you're more likely to get puzzlement.
Not to say that the photographic abstract is all bullshit, it's not. Still, people read photographic abstracts as photographs. One reads these things speculatively, with a strong undercurrent of "what is it, really?" and "I think it might be.." One reacts as much to ones fancy of what the picture might be of as to anything else.
And so the photographer's job is to help the viewer along to some sort of reaction to the thing in front of the lens. Sometimes no help at all is required, really. A photo of one guy shooting another guy in the head requires no artifice whatsoever to produce a reaction. A photo of a mother bathing her crippled daughter might not require photographic gimmickry, but to make it really compelling you can make it look like a Pietà painted by, perhaps, Goya. Hit those tropes hard enough, you might change the goddamned world.
If you're just me hacking around with pictures of buildings in Bellingham, well, you do your best. My belief is that you need to begin with a genuine feeling toward the thing in the frame, and then you can try to say something around that, and maybe, just maybe, it'll read more or less the way you want. Faking your emotional response is a bad first step.
And anyways, why would you fake it? Surely there are more things that you feel something about than you will ever photograph. So try to make something of those.
Saturday, August 6, 2016
An Example
Let me preface this by saying that in truth I have no opinion about the building I am illustrating here. Let me also apologize for the lens, I had no idea this zoom lens was so completely broken. I rarely use it, and apparently it's been dropped one too many times. I used it because it is the lens I own with the longest zoom range. The horrible effects are irrelevant, however.
Here is a random building somewhere downtown in Bellingham. This is, more or less, the picture I would expect the average Internet Famous Photographer to produce. It says I can see visually interesting objects, perform perspective corrections, and execute a set of vaguely idiosyncratic post-processing steps to produce a sort of signature look.
(in this case, large radius unsharp mask, desaturate blues, push up the reds, then pull all colors down to taste, then sharpen some)
It also says, probably, I have no particular ideas about this building, it just caught my eye.
Here are some possible opinions and ideas.
The building looms:
In fact, it looms alarmingly:
No, actually it does not loom. It is merely decrepit:
It is a lonely object of pity:
You might disagree with these readings, that is OK. The point is that these are radically different readings of the same structure, shot minutes apart (while I was holding a latte in one hand, mind you). These are the sorts of things I might imagine, or even shoot, as I struggled to devise an idea of how to photograph this thing. If I gave a single goddamned wit about this building, I would go back, over and over, and refine my ideas, and try to devise a way to build an essay or a part of an essay.
These various readings would provide a starting point. I might say no, no, no or I might say kinda like that one but from the other side and then a bunch of details like those or whatever.
Here is a random building somewhere downtown in Bellingham. This is, more or less, the picture I would expect the average Internet Famous Photographer to produce. It says I can see visually interesting objects, perform perspective corrections, and execute a set of vaguely idiosyncratic post-processing steps to produce a sort of signature look.
(in this case, large radius unsharp mask, desaturate blues, push up the reds, then pull all colors down to taste, then sharpen some)
It also says, probably, I have no particular ideas about this building, it just caught my eye.
Here are some possible opinions and ideas.
The building looms:
In fact, it looms alarmingly:
No, actually it does not loom. It is merely decrepit:
It is a lonely object of pity:
You might disagree with these readings, that is OK. The point is that these are radically different readings of the same structure, shot minutes apart (while I was holding a latte in one hand, mind you). These are the sorts of things I might imagine, or even shoot, as I struggled to devise an idea of how to photograph this thing. If I gave a single goddamned wit about this building, I would go back, over and over, and refine my ideas, and try to devise a way to build an essay or a part of an essay.
These various readings would provide a starting point. I might say no, no, no or I might say kinda like that one but from the other side and then a bunch of details like those or whatever.
Soul/Creativity
I think I've written this essay a handful of times, but I like writing it, so there's that. How does it all work, after all?
That's Ansel Adams, technique guy. Less technique-heavy photographers have said much the same. You gotta feel something.
I do not think, as Adams sometimes suggests, that the only thing one can strive to photograph is ones actual, authentic, feeling on-site. I believe that one can re-imagine what one sees as something entirely different, but still, there's something in the chest, something indefinable, something you cannot fully put in to words. Sometimes you can wrap a lot of words around it, sometimes you can only mumble a little and then fall silent.
The steps I'm about to outline take place in no particular order, although the tyranny of text demands that I write them out one after the other. They intermingle and bounce off one another, altering one another endlessly until the work is complete. Also, consider this a blueprint, not to be mistaken for the machine itself. An anatomical drawing, sort of pathetic, certainly simplified, and in no way the organism. But perhaps it gives a little insight, and in any case it's the best I can do.
There is the idea, sometimes we call it the concept, which is that thing in your chest that you cannot put entirely in to words. The feeling you have, that notion.
You turn this into an idea of how to shoot. This is Adams pre-visualization, which is how I got on to this whole stupid thing in the first place. This is the creative act. You might be able to simply apply some basic tropes, it might be obvious how to shoot it. Gothic Nightmare? Try high contrast black&white, tilt the frames, and throw on a heavy vignette. It pretty much writes itself. Something about the Pacific Northwest is not writing itself at all, I have been locked in a low-key struggle with that for at least a year. I've written about that process by which Eureka! moments can be generated, here for instance.
It is here that the artist looks most intensely inwards, struggling to imagine what those final pictures might actually look like. It is here that the internalized outer world comes most in to play. Without having consumed broadly, consumed the world, the artist isn't going to get any Eurekas no inspirations, no Of course that is how it should look, how could I not have seen it?. There are, apparently, actual neurological reasons, partly understood, for this.
The third and final step is simply to and bang the things out. Once you know what they look like, it's a technical problem to make them. You move the lights and the camera and the subject around in the way that you do, and there you are.
Of course, let us be honest, if there was any real struggle, you've been attempting to "bang them out" all along, the original idea, that feeling in your chest, has been evolving as you learn what things look like in a photograph. The struggle to get to that final visualization involves staring at these pictures as well as everything else.
But the end result of that struggle to see in the mind's eye what these damned things are supposed to look like is ultimately the struggle to convert your feeling, your words and indefinable notion, into something that the world might, just possibly, get a hold of. You're trying to generate the visualization that's going to communicate your feeling, and transmute that sensation in your chest into an analogous sensation in someone else's. Your Eureka! moment is pretty specific, it is Aha! If I do that then they will feel what I feel.
This is a second reason that you must consume broadly. You should look at photographs and art, but also you should talk, and listen, and read, and drink, and play with children, and live, so that your inspirations have some chance of accurately pointing the way toward communicating with all the other East African Plains Apes that make up our society.
There are tools and tropes you can deploy. The Gothic Nightmare toolset is uncomplicated and I feel like it can be used entirely consciously, it's no more opaque than using a screwdriver to put in a screw. There is a vast visual literature here, which you can simply refer to and be done with it, and that is precisely what I did. The "message" is blunt and obvious. Not everything is. The referents available for rendering a car as an erotic hallucination are fewer, although Madison Avenue does provide some material here (they have, after all, been trying to eroticize cars forever). Making Vancouver look like Vancouver sounds really simple but I didn't have any particular tropes to lean on, other than "rainy", so it was real work to sort out what I wanted to make of it.
When your concept is best expressed as Umm... then the bag of pre-made tools might be pretty light, and you'll be making your own tools.
Don't worry too much about "soul", if you're working hard and struggling with things you cannot put in to words, it'll probably just happen by itself.
Good luck!
The final image you achieve will, to quote Alfred Stieglitz, reveal what you saw and felt. If it were not for this element of felt, the term creative photography would have no meaning.
That's Ansel Adams, technique guy. Less technique-heavy photographers have said much the same. You gotta feel something.
I do not think, as Adams sometimes suggests, that the only thing one can strive to photograph is ones actual, authentic, feeling on-site. I believe that one can re-imagine what one sees as something entirely different, but still, there's something in the chest, something indefinable, something you cannot fully put in to words. Sometimes you can wrap a lot of words around it, sometimes you can only mumble a little and then fall silent.
The steps I'm about to outline take place in no particular order, although the tyranny of text demands that I write them out one after the other. They intermingle and bounce off one another, altering one another endlessly until the work is complete. Also, consider this a blueprint, not to be mistaken for the machine itself. An anatomical drawing, sort of pathetic, certainly simplified, and in no way the organism. But perhaps it gives a little insight, and in any case it's the best I can do.
There is the idea, sometimes we call it the concept, which is that thing in your chest that you cannot put entirely in to words. The feeling you have, that notion.
I want to photograph my little neighborhood in southern Virginia as a gothic nightmare.
I see this Edsel as an erotic hallucination of chrome.
I just want it to look like Vancouver.
Uh. Something about the Pacific Northwest. I dunno. Workin' on it.
Um...
I see this Edsel as an erotic hallucination of chrome.
I just want it to look like Vancouver.
Uh. Something about the Pacific Northwest. I dunno. Workin' on it.
Um...
You turn this into an idea of how to shoot. This is Adams pre-visualization, which is how I got on to this whole stupid thing in the first place. This is the creative act. You might be able to simply apply some basic tropes, it might be obvious how to shoot it. Gothic Nightmare? Try high contrast black&white, tilt the frames, and throw on a heavy vignette. It pretty much writes itself. Something about the Pacific Northwest is not writing itself at all, I have been locked in a low-key struggle with that for at least a year. I've written about that process by which Eureka! moments can be generated, here for instance.
It is here that the artist looks most intensely inwards, struggling to imagine what those final pictures might actually look like. It is here that the internalized outer world comes most in to play. Without having consumed broadly, consumed the world, the artist isn't going to get any Eurekas no inspirations, no Of course that is how it should look, how could I not have seen it?. There are, apparently, actual neurological reasons, partly understood, for this.
The third and final step is simply to and bang the things out. Once you know what they look like, it's a technical problem to make them. You move the lights and the camera and the subject around in the way that you do, and there you are.
Of course, let us be honest, if there was any real struggle, you've been attempting to "bang them out" all along, the original idea, that feeling in your chest, has been evolving as you learn what things look like in a photograph. The struggle to get to that final visualization involves staring at these pictures as well as everything else.
But the end result of that struggle to see in the mind's eye what these damned things are supposed to look like is ultimately the struggle to convert your feeling, your words and indefinable notion, into something that the world might, just possibly, get a hold of. You're trying to generate the visualization that's going to communicate your feeling, and transmute that sensation in your chest into an analogous sensation in someone else's. Your Eureka! moment is pretty specific, it is Aha! If I do that then they will feel what I feel.
This is a second reason that you must consume broadly. You should look at photographs and art, but also you should talk, and listen, and read, and drink, and play with children, and live, so that your inspirations have some chance of accurately pointing the way toward communicating with all the other East African Plains Apes that make up our society.
There are tools and tropes you can deploy. The Gothic Nightmare toolset is uncomplicated and I feel like it can be used entirely consciously, it's no more opaque than using a screwdriver to put in a screw. There is a vast visual literature here, which you can simply refer to and be done with it, and that is precisely what I did. The "message" is blunt and obvious. Not everything is. The referents available for rendering a car as an erotic hallucination are fewer, although Madison Avenue does provide some material here (they have, after all, been trying to eroticize cars forever). Making Vancouver look like Vancouver sounds really simple but I didn't have any particular tropes to lean on, other than "rainy", so it was real work to sort out what I wanted to make of it.
When your concept is best expressed as Umm... then the bag of pre-made tools might be pretty light, and you'll be making your own tools.
Don't worry too much about "soul", if you're working hard and struggling with things you cannot put in to words, it'll probably just happen by itself.
Good luck!
Friday, August 5, 2016
"Soul, redux" - my reply
Ming has a new post up, continuing his investigation. This one is just wrong.
He is falling in to the "well it's all just subjective" trap, and is either saying outright or implying broadly that one cannot after all have universal reach. His little graphic strongly suggests that you can only have so much reach, which you can spread thinly to lightly connect with a broad audience, or concentrate to strongly reach a small one.
This is a cop-out, an excuse. It is manifestly clear that one can intensely reach a large audience, there is lots and lots of Art of various media that does just that. Not, perhaps, universal, there still remain cultural differences that matter. But broad and intense.
It is possibly to connect broadly and intensely. It is very difficult, but that is the star you should steer by, not some half-assed "it's all subjective" streetlight.
Paradoxically, this is accomplished by looking inward. I believe, I think, that the most powerful work is executed when the Artist brings the world within, and then in that tiny inward, but somehow complete, universe, works selfishly and alone.
This is why the Artist so often consumes art voraciously and lives widely, it is to bring that world inwards, so that the selfish, narcissistic process of Art-Making can then connect with the wide world.
He is falling in to the "well it's all just subjective" trap, and is either saying outright or implying broadly that one cannot after all have universal reach. His little graphic strongly suggests that you can only have so much reach, which you can spread thinly to lightly connect with a broad audience, or concentrate to strongly reach a small one.
This is a cop-out, an excuse. It is manifestly clear that one can intensely reach a large audience, there is lots and lots of Art of various media that does just that. Not, perhaps, universal, there still remain cultural differences that matter. But broad and intense.
It is possibly to connect broadly and intensely. It is very difficult, but that is the star you should steer by, not some half-assed "it's all subjective" streetlight.
Paradoxically, this is accomplished by looking inward. I believe, I think, that the most powerful work is executed when the Artist brings the world within, and then in that tiny inward, but somehow complete, universe, works selfishly and alone.
This is why the Artist so often consumes art voraciously and lives widely, it is to bring that world inwards, so that the selfish, narcissistic process of Art-Making can then connect with the wide world.
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