Visual Field

With the website clutter mostly cleared away, I’ve been going over my photographs from the last year, trying to sort them into thematic groups so that I can make a few PDF portfolios.

One group that stands out is one I’ve mentioned before – a set of images that have little or no composition but are more just a cluttered visual field. Nearly all of those photos are bad. But the ones that are good I like a lot. To make things more interesting, if I arrange them chronologically, I can see that they evolved from being only loosely composed and gradually drifted toward no compositional organization at all. I don’t know what to call these photographs, so I’ve been calling them ‘visual field’ photographs, which isn’t really right but is better than calling them something which is definitely wrong.

Like my ongoing fascination with gates, I’ve no real idea of what’s going on with these photos. But it’s interesting all the same.

Apparently, art has been a verb for some time now.

“The word ‘art’ is very slippery. It really has no importance in relation to one’s work. I work for the pleasure, for the pleasure of the work, and everything else is a matter for the critics.”

-Manuel Alvarez Bravo

I don’t know that I have a whole lot to add to that sentiment.

Static website

My new, slimmed down and redesigned static website has been online at http://www.butzi.net for about 20 hours now.

Influences

  

If you haven’t been reading Gordon McGregor’s series of posts on influences, well, you’re missing out.

Go read them. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Then go look at this post; scroll down to the bottom photo. Cross. Boat.

Very interesting.

Obligation

In the comments on this post, Tim Parkin wrote:

For the sake of the internet (and for your search engine optimisation rankings) you should keep the old content or at least 301 redirect from the urls to your new blog posts (the latter will help people find useful old information – think of all the people that may have linked to your content in the past?)

Similarly, Hugh Allison writes:

It would be a real shame to lose some of your old articles (going off the silver standard, putting away the silver prints, toning black and white digital prints, if you meet buddha on the road).

This is an interesting question that I’ve struggled with quite a bit, and it’s what kept me from successfully doing anything about my static website for the last two and a half years.

The first issue is easy – I no longer care about search engine rankings. There was a time when such things (and traffic statistics, and other related measures of importance to the world) were things I tracked religiously. And now I find that I don’t much care, perhaps because I’ve gotten more clarity on why I’m doing this stuff.

And I’ll certainly put 301 redirect tombstones in place when I move stuff to blog posts – *if* I decide something’s sufficiently worth saving to make it worth moving to a blog post.

The deeper issue, though, is this: do I have some obligation to keep stuff on the web just because I once wrote it and some people find it interesting, or useful, or have linked to it? I’ve given that a lot of thought over the past two years, and I think the answer is that there’s no such obligation. I guess I’ve just decided that stuff on the web is inherently ephemeral. I write it, put it on the web, and it slowly but surely loses relevance as time passes. Sometimes it no longer reflects my current thinking, and now I”m running the risk of people misunderstanding what I currently think. It becomes factually incorrect. I don’t have any obligation to keep that stuff alive, any more than I have some obligation to preserve my grocery store receipts for posterity.

There’s this theoretical world wide web, where you publish something and it lives forever, free, without you doing anything. This theoretical world wide web bears little resemblance to the world wide web that is bringing these words to you. The difference is that when people think about the theoretical WWW, they somehow get this preposterous notion that it is self-organizing even though there’s no organizational mechanism at all.

In the the real web, it takes me effort to manage all the baggage of old, out of date, or irrelevant content. It has no physical presence but I must maintain it, answer questions about it, and when I decide to renovate the website or blog or whatever, I must spend inordinate amounts of time dealing with this large mass of stuff.

The other thing I’ve figured out is that we don’t really WANT the theoretical web. If there was no grim reaper slowly paring away the debris on the web, it would rapidly become impossible to find worthwhile stuff because it would be awash in a sea of stuff which was no longer relevant.

static website news

For once, I’m actually making progress on my static website update.

That’s partly because, in the update, a great deal of what’s out there now is going to disappear. All of the equipment reviews, for instance, are obsolete, annoyingly out of date, and frankly more appropriate fodder for blog posts now that I have a blog. I understand that some of it might be of historical interest. Sorry, the work of bringing it up to date and reformatting it is too large to make it worth going through.

The articles, too, will mostly go away. Most of them, though, were essentially blog posts but made before I had a blog. I may take that content and recycle it as blog posts. But the articles will vanish from the website. In some cases I’ll leave tombstone html files that will redirect searchers to the blog entry, I guess, to avoid breaking links.

The other big change is that all of the photographs will go away. I’ve looked at flash galleries, and they are horrid. I’ve looked at javascript galleries, and they’re horrid. I’ve looked at what feels like 27 million different kinds of galleries, and the bottom line is that all of them are horrid. Oh, they’re easy to add photos to, so they’re probably easy to maintain. But the actual user experience of viewing photos with them is horrid.

And it turns out that my long slow move away from single images or even collections of single images continues unabated, so web galleries that are just random easily maintained sets of images are boring to me. I’m interested in collections of images. Maybe sequences of images. I want to share larger copies of the final versions of these collections of images.

And SoFoBoMo convinces me that PDF’s are a good way to do this, so PDF portfolios are what is going to be on the static website. I’ve gone through the work that’s currently on the old site, and I’ve re-edited it (think: butzi.net remastered!) and put it into PDF portfolios.

So the static website will be:

• the obligatory splash page, very plain with just one image
• a page about how to contact me
• a page offering information about me and my photography
• a page for the PDF portfolios
• a page with info and links for buying books, when I have books available (e.g. Blurb versions of SoFoBoMo books, and Blurb (or equivalent) versions of the PDF portfolios.

The result will be a much, much smaller static site. There won’t be much there, which will improve the chances that I’ll update it more often. The good news is that this change will give me an easy way to distinguish photos I post on the blog (which are NOT always what I’d consider winners but are sometimes losers I find interesting for some reason) and the work on the static website (which will be ‘finished’ work, as it were).

Once I get that done, I’ll tackle the blog, I guess.

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Wessel

Colin Jago sent me the link to this video of Henry Wessel discussing his artistic process.

The part that rang my bell was this:

So the mind’s always in there saying “Ah. Look at that. You know… Telephone pole. Macadam. This, move right, move left. So you wind up making maybe five pictures, six pictures of the same stuff. The first ones, you can see how different they are than the ones when your mind got in there.

When your mind gets in there they start to look like photographs that you already know. They look like problems that you’ve already solved. They’re never taking you to a place that’s unfamiliar. They’re taking you to what you’re supposed to do.

Then they look like everybody else’s photographs.

This is where I’m at. I’m trying to make photographs without a rationalized checklist (cameras settings? check. Focus? check. Major elements of composition arranged artfully? check. Distracting elements of composition minimized? Check. Edges ok? check. Lighting perfect? check.) and instead just let myself do it. I’m aiming for look, look, look, see, raise camera to eye, let shutter go. Part of what I’m trying is minimizing the time between when I see something to photograph and the moment when the shutter goes ‘kathwap’.

Every second I delay is another second of opportunity for my rational mind to get in there and say “That’s crap. Look at that clutter. Keep that branch away from the edge. Jeebus, your’e screwing it up. Hold the camera level. This is going to be boring. You’re stupid. This is all stupid. You’re photographing the wrong stuff.”

Of the photos I’ve made in the last month, the ones I still like after looking at them over and over are by and large the ones where I saw something, lifted the camera, and let the shutter go without hesitation. They’re often the ones where afterward I was left standing, camera in hand, thinking “What the heck? What was that?”

I have learned one trick – when my brain says “photograph that”, I just photograph it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a photograph I’ve already made – I just go ahead and make it again. Making it again is the fast way to get past it. So I walk past that same tree for the 500th time, and I see the same photograph for the 400th time, and I don’t bother with thinking “No, Paul, you’ve *already* made that photograph” and the resulting struggle, instead I just give in to the impulse and make it. See, lift camera, shutter. The cost for the exposure is near zero. Just make the photo, put it behind you, move on to the next photo.

If you walk past the same tree every day for the next year, and you make the same photo 365 times, it’s not 1 new photo and 364 mistakes. It’s a series of photos that perhaps leads you to a new place. And would be part of what I’m looking for.

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