If you email, comment or otherwise communicate with me over the next two weeks, I will send you a free 8x10 print of either the Golden Gate Bridge boy or the Golden Half x golden hour image.
This offer is expired.
this isn't even that good, but do any longtime readers remember its previous iteration? yikes.
"Good things happen when you put the ball in play"
My dad always used to say this about hitting. This was most true when I was in Little League: the 11-year-old fielders were unreliable, so if you could avoid striking out there was always a realistic chance that a "good thing" would happen.
(I apologize if this is not obvious to some of my audience. I'm talking about baseball! I'd also like to make it clear that my dad was not an 'overbearing American sports father,' I'm grateful for the fact that he never yelled at me from the stands like other parents did.)
Maybe the same is true of photography. Instead of 'put the ball in play,' it's 'click the shutter.' I went through almost a whole roll of Golden Half pictures at the recent King Khan show here in San Francisco, and I was surprised to find a couple of pictures that I thought were not "half" bad, if nowhere near great.
In baseball, having a good eye means being able to lay off pitches out of the strike zone. In photography, is it just knowing how to throw out all your crap?
Some relevant quotes, sorted by relevance
"shoot film. its decadent. and it still looks better."
"Perhaps, unlike artists working in other media, a photographer is arguably always engaged in the process of selection and elimination- no other medium involves discarding as much of an artist's production. The process is akin, then, to the curatorial task."
-Jessica Morgan, curator of Contemporary Art, Tate Modern, cited by Very Young Millionaire
"What exactly is adaptive grandiosity? It is the artist’s exhilarating conviction of his potential for greatness, the extremely high value he places on the uniqueness of his feelings, perceptions, sensations, memories, thoughts and experiences, and on the importance of publicly exhibiting the content of his inner world through his creative medium."
-?, cited by jessicapetunia
"Because it is obscure, but not totally inaccessible, this makes it cool. This makes stupid people buy it. One day their children will dust it off and play it, and realise that I am the supreme musical genius of my generation."
San Francisco exhibits: Hamburger Eyes, Fraenkel, De Young
"The Low Road" by Ted Pushinsky at Hamburger Eyes
This is photography for the details. I'm not sure in the end that it adds up to a consistent vision, but there are a number of images that really stand out on their own. Ted Pushinsky captures the sidelong glance of a child at a skeleton pointing a mock AK-47 at him; his father is walking off, already looking the other way. Recognizing this moment is skill enough. This show is free! [from now until the beginning of August, 10am-10pm at Hamburger Eyes Photo Epicenter].
"Several Exceptionally Good Recently Acquired Pictures XX" at Fraenkel Gallery
This is a survey at what I guess is our city's most prestigious photo gallery—they represent some huge names including the big man himself, Hiroshi Sugimoto. Outside of some Lee Friedlander pictures, and two interesting photos of bomb drops taken from a warplane, there's not too much to get excited about. The title of the exhibit does a good job of setting expectations low, though, and this is also free. and you can buy a poster of a Sugimoto print for $8 so no complaints.
Dale Chihuly at the De Young
After Dan Flavin, this shouldn't cost an extra $5 for non-members to see. It's sad if this is what the De Young has to show to get people to visit.
Involuntary
The B blog is a regular source of clear thinking about shooting film. Here he's talking about a recent trip:
My only problem is that I didn't bring along enough film. The last few days I was forced into an uncomfortably deliberate style which felt very unnatural. It's impossible for me to take good photos when I have to stop and consider whether the exposure will be "worth it". Such conditions almost guarantee that no photo will be. I suppose I could get around this by shooting digital but then the opposite effect sets in. When there is no need at all to consider whether an exposure will be "worth it", that also guarantees that none will be. The middle ground seems to be in between: use film freely but expensively.
I am just starting to adopt this approach. Worry less about whether it's a "great" picture and just shoot. Is that the same as saying "don't think"? I don't think so. At the end of the day, you sit down with what you've shot and only focus on the stuff that came out well. Don't think while shooting, but think while editing. Piece together what you (weren't) thinking.
I'm visiting Chicago this weekend, with plenty of film.
My new favorite site
If you are looking at this on the web, the images will be cut off on the right side to preserve resolution. Extra motivation to click on the link!
Rei Sato, "Sun"
I don't have this book, but I want it — check out its microsite with many preview images. It costs 80 bucks here in the states! I'll have to pick it up on my next visit to Japan.
Rei Sato also has a show up in NYC right now through August 8.
Reader mail 3: "no such thing as no post"
The subtitle of this post comes from a message I once read in the forum of a Flickr group called something like "NO POST PROCESSING!" Someone started a thread saying: "when i take photos on my camera i'm shooting in RAW. is it ok if i change the temperature and stuff before i post to this group?" There was some back and forth, and a few people approached the question philosophically, but my favorite answer was this quieter one: "no such thing as no post :)"
"great contrast! lol"
On to the mail, which was in response to this recent analog vs digital post:
I tend to belong to the "pro-digital" camp but my main argument on the matter is that if any of these big film or vinyl people existed today, they would totally avail themselves of modern technology. You don't think a Man Ray or a Bresson would be using Photoshop? Anyways, I have definitely thought about the subject a lot and that's not to say that I don't understand the value of analog photography or music or whatever. But it drives me crazy when people cling to some idealized past.
To make it clear, I don't hate technology, and I definitely don't think that the existence of the Adobe program Photoshop heralds the death of "photography." Speaking as someone who claims to love film, I currently scan all my negatives myself so that I can edit them on the computer. That's not very romantic! I don't develop my own film either, which probably makes me a bad person in some militant photo-camps I don't even know.
"d00d, want a link to this kewl torrent site?"
I'm terrible at using Photoshop, but I recognize how useful it is to everything that I'm doing right now. I agree that there's no need to idealize the past. It's not like people were actually helped by their technical limitations, they just found creative ways to work with what they had. A hundred years from today, photographers will no doubt wonder how we, the godforsaken people of 2008, ever produced anything worth looking at using such a primitive tool as Photoshop. (But they will only think to say this while looking at our images!)
To answer the good question posed here, I am sure that Man Ray wouldn't be so foolish as to ignore Photoshop. He'd probably use it well, too, because I think Man Ray was on point. That's just a guess, though. Hey, everyone knows that Star Wars Episode 4 was so great because George Lucas' shoestring budget made him work hard for his visual effects. Everyone also knows that Star Wars Episode 1 was so wretched because it was a just plain terrible idea, which happened to have millions of dollars' worth of technology thrown at it. This does not mean that lots of technology makes for bad results, or that "bad" technology makes for good ones. Better ideas make for better results, so in terms of photography, the bottom line should always be the image. The way that it's produced should be secondary.
By the way, the only meaning of my Star Wars example is that George Lucas is a hack.
Camera as justification
Holding a camera is reason enough to put yourself in strange physical positions, or to act foolishly in general. Picture the photographer crouching down in the middle of the crowd, squinting through the lens at a party, leaning to one side to get a better angle—in short, doing the "wrong" thing. The camera justifies all of this.
Garry Winogrand, "Apollo 11 Moon Shot"
click for large
If the Winogrand photo does not illustrate this is concept well, open up this clip and skip to the 5:40 mark for an accurate representation.
You have to put yourself in harm's way to take photos. Of course this is not really true: can you imagine Sugimoto-san running wide-eyed into the street for the sake of a shot? But Hamburger Eyes has shown the value of curating photos that were created out of this approach.
Good criticism
About a week ago I started a discussion with people on our company photography listserv. I work for a technology company, so most of the email that goes back and forth on the list is about gear. There are some people that know quite a lot about lenses and stuff (one guy used to be an engineer for Sigma) but on the whole it rarely excites me very much.
I wanted to generate the same kind of discussion as on the now-defunct Hardcore Street Photography "Image critique thread." That thread eventually got out of hand, but while it was around it was a great place to post an image and have it picked apart. (I never did it myself.)
I posted the Kisekae image of the boy at the Golden Gate Bridge vista point to start the thread off, and as it progressed I got a really good response off-list:
[Yours is] a picture of something that is beautiful/meaningful within a particular context (where context is time, location, meaning, movement, detail). A very generic thing that I think about when I am trying to improve is: if my picture needs context, what are the things I need to have had in it to reduce the amount of extra context I need to add to make it interesting?
This comment reminds me of something that I used to see on the Hardcore Street Photography thread, "your image doesn't tell a story." Or, it does not answer the question, "what am I looking at?" Or, in more Brechtian terms, the image does not "speak for itself."
I like this picture better than most other things I've done recently, and there were even some things about it where I got lucky: there are no people in the middle ground, and the people in the background are turned away.
But I think it's true, it does not explain itself well enough. I know what I was experiencing when I took it, but there's not enough in the frame to explain what's happening here.
Not that it's a terrible image. Let's call it a good failure.
Analog vs. digital, part two of ∞
It's worth reminding ourselves that post-processing is not limited to digital. Using different solutions, develop times, contrast filters, papers etc in the darkroom are all just ways to influence the final print. The quality of the difference (however slight) between what the viewer sees and "what was really there" might be what makes a photograph "great," rather than just "interesting."
Counterpoint
This is from the introduction to Setting Sun: Writings by Japanese Photographers. The emphasis is mine, to make this post "more bloggy":
Even the youngest emerging photographers in Japan often find publishers for their work. In no other country do photographers so easily issue monographs; this is partly because, until the last three decades, few outlets other than books and magazines existed there for serious photography. Today, museums and galleries in Japan offer constant venues for fine art photography, and exhibitions abroad steadily increase. Established Japanese artists have worldwide audiences for their photographs. Still, most Japanese photographers prefer books as the ultimate "vehicle" for their projects. Often, they write the texts for their books, as well as magazine articles about their own work and that of other photographers. These opportunities to publish texts as well as images mean that their words have often been as influential as their photographs. Some essays have sparked controversy; others have set parameters for evolving aesthetic alliances, and have established lineages of influence.
I would like to align myself with this tradition.
Flickr star: UN LYS LYS
This last image was my desktop image for a while. It looks better if you click through for the larger version. UN LYS LYS's photos have a precarious sense of balance; the way that the hats of the meat attendants are cut off could bother me, but it doesn't.
Blog hint: I'm liking Blogger's feature which allows you to publish posts in the future. Today's a holiday, so you can be sure I'm not sitting in front of my computer! I could have written this post yesterday, or last week even. This provides a greater incentive to edit; the 'publish post' button becomes much less important.
"hamburger eyes" + discourse
This is what I mean by "the photo magazine San Francisco deserves":
remember when we did that show last month at hope gallery and we made a split totebag with them? we had one side and they had one side? well shit, we just got a box of them and now you can buy them, fuuuucckkkiiiin siiiiiiiiiiicckkkkkkkk.. the WORMHOLES online shopping adventure has been re-designed for ultimate deep space pleasure, so dont be a kook, credit cards to da max! [link]
I have more to say about Hamburger Eyes, and it will be kinder. I don't think they'd have a bone to pick with this, though—an unpretentious attitude towards photography seems to be essential to the production of their work. If that means doing away with serious discourse then so be it; that's a much more honest stance to take than publishing pretentious nonsense.
Moriyama & Araki
A couple of weeks ago I went on a small binge of photo book-buying. Over the course of a weekend, I bought Nobuyoshi Araki's Subway Love, Daido Moriyama's Shinjuku 19XX-20XX and the latest issue of Hamburger Eyes. I don't have much to say about Hamburger Eyes except that it's the photo magazine San Francisco deserves.
The Araki and Moriyama books provoked a lot more thoughts for me. These two are both two "gods" of Japanese photography. I might be wrong, but I’m pretty sure Moriyama only works in black and white. Araki uses color, but Subway Love is all black and white. The X’s in Shinjuku 19XX-20XX correspond to 67 and 04; the Araki book is from 1963-72.
Subway Love is a collection of photographs that Araki took while riding around on the Tokyo subway after work. He would use a wide-angle lens, and wait until there was a bump in the train to disguise the sound of the shutter. According to his interview at the back of the book, he'd try to wait until people were yawning or picking their nose until shooting them ("it’s the things that people don’t want photographed that are interesting"). He also relates that every so often, people would get mad and take him to the subway police. (They once asked him "why are you taking pictures when there’s nothing special happening?") It was pretty brave of him to shoot people on the subway – pointing a camera at someone isn't the easiest thing to do – but the book gives you a sense of his compulsion to shoot. Some pages show entire contact sheets, others display a few consecutive frames. You can follow his eye.
click for full page view
So while Araki was in people's faces on the subway, the Moriyama book is very much about surface. The first image of the book sums it up: it's taken at night, of a small parking lot with a couple of rain-soaked cars. There's a pool of water that shows up as entirely black, except for the stark white reflection of a sign advertising 100 yen parking. Another image is of shadows on a tiled building, another shows a thin line of daylight running between two buildings. People show up in these pictures, but they're not really the subjects. These pictures aren’t actually from the book but they were shot in Shinjuku anyway. The first and third pictures are very representative of the book.
It's impossible for me to look at Subway Love without thinking of Araki's later photographs. He became famous as a "bad boy" photographer for taking tons of pictures of naked Japanese women, in bondage or otherwise. There’s a link between the gaze on the subway and his later stuff. He became something of a lecherous old man, but I admire the way that he let his will to photograph take precedence above all other things. Both of these guys have been in my head lately: Araki for more so for his attitude towards photography, Moriyama for his style. There are a lot of pictures in his book that are just flat out blurry, or where the contrast is pushed really far. It makes me want to take more risks with processing.
I’m thinking of not taking color pictures for a little while. Black and white is so much easier to control.
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