Musings on Photography

Over on Colin Jago’s excellent Photostream, this insightful and thought provoking post:

I’m not talking about the temptation to clone out the vehicles from the “idyllic” mountain view, or even the fact that there is very little landscape in the world whose appearance hasn’t been created by man (essentially none in Europe I would say). No, I started thinking about how many landscapes there are that are now managed to preserve a given look.

These specific examples are English and you’ll have to make up your own to suit your locality, but when sheep are put on downland not because of their agricultural value but because the grass needs to be cropped close to create the style of landscape that we associate with the downs, or when the National Trust maintains upland farms in order to keep the bracken at bay and the dry-stone walls maintained, what we are doing is retouching the landscape to present a perfect appearance on our current definition of perfection. The difference between lip gloss and spending money putting in hedges in a place where we expect there to be hedges is not great.

I’ve had my landscape photography described as ‘exploring the relationship between the unmanaged landscape and managed landscape’. It remains a conundrum to me that almost all of what urban America considers ‘pristine’ landscape is actually heavily managed.

Lip Gloss. Go read the whole thing.

Two different posts on two different blogs caught my attention this morning:

On Frank Armstrong’s Pitchertakin’, I found this post particularly uplifting this morning. I can’t articulate why, but somehow the combination of that particular photograph and Frank’s writing about the new greens of spring and the mood of a drizzly day gave me a boost at the exact moment I really needed one.

And on Paul Lester’s blog, I found this post on Daily Practice to be interesting. I’m a fan of regular practice, not just because it keeps my photographic skill set sharp but also because it’s like meditation and seems to help me keep myself in that somewhat elusive happy equilibrium.

I’m not sure why it is, but it seems to be particularly helpful if, during my more or less daily practice, I try to tackle some problem or make some small advance on what I’ve done the previous day. Pondering on that this morning brought to mind an old, old John Hartford lyric from a song titled “Julia Belle Swain“:

Well, I come up the river the other night
darker than the inside of a cow
Ain’t nothin’ like a crooked old river
to straighten my head right out

Sometimes tackling problems is exactly what we don’t want to do, and the problem solving we’re forced to do just disrupts our lives. And sometimes we need small problems that are just at the right level of challenge, in which we can invest our attention, and solving those problems keeps us happy and stable. I don’t understand why that is, but you don’t need to understand why to put it to good use.

I’m still in the post-SoFoBoMo recovery, so I’m not quite up to speed yet.

Nevertheless, via Joe Reifer’s Ramblings about Photography, I found this very thought provoking post on Tony Fouhse’s tonyfoto/drool.

And here I must rant a bit about digital being “easy”. While it’s never really the machine that takes the photo (it’s the machines’ operator) digital makes it way more likely that just about anyone can come away with an image that’s, you know, properly exposed. Then don’t you just slap the file onto your computer screen and admire it for, like, 20 seconds before you hit NEXT, never really living with the image? But the way digital technology has made so much disposable, made the generation of photographs (and photographers) so easy (and so easy to delete, thereby erasing history) kind of bugs me.

Hmm. Sorry, I’m not buying any. I read/hear this complaint about ‘digital’ all the time, and to be honest, it always seems like complete bunkum to me.

Part of the problem is that I just don’t believe, even for a second, that we can really control how any eventual audience reacts to our work. We can control how WE react to the work, and that’s about it.

So when Fouse says “Then don’t you just slap the file onto your computer screen and admire it for, like, 20 seconds before you hit NEXT, never really living with the image”, he’s saying that for some bizarre reason, he can’t make himself do anything else. There’s nothing to prevent him leaving an image up on his screen for hours or days and interacting with it the way he’d interact with a print on the wall. There’s nothing to keep me from taking, say, a print of Ed Weston’s Pepper #30 and running it through a shredder, other than the fact that I like the print enough to hang it on the wall instead.

So all the argument about digital being ephemeral and ‘not real’ and ‘disposable’ is really more about our own attitudes, and not about the technology.

The part that really fails to stick for me is the idea that in order to make artmaking worthwhile, we must make the process hard. We must pay our dues, the reasoning goes, and we must make the process so difficult that we exclude the vast seething masses of wretched humanity from art-making. And I think that’s blowing smoke. I think it’s little more than some sort of guild behavior. If you’ve been reading here for long, you’ve probably come to realize that’s an attitude with which I vehemently disagree.

But interestingly, Fouhse continues:

Another reason why I’m planning on using the 4×5 is that it changes the ways you work. It slows things down. Each time I push the button it costs me 6 bucks (film and processing). Not that I’m gonna use that as an excuse to become (even more) anal. I’m just interested in using a different process, giving the old brain a workout.

I think it’s interesting because Fouhse seems to have done an abrupt turn, here. He’s gone from saying that if the work is done digitally, it’s too easy. Now he’s saying that doing it the hard way is useful to him because it slows him down and is more expensive, and imposing those constraints on himself is actually helpful and not a hindrance. In other words, he’s saying that using the 4×5 looks harder but is actually easier. In other words, he’s saying that imposing constraints on himself actually makes it simpler for him to get at making the art he wants to make.

One reason I find that interesting is that I’ve long suspected it was true for me, as well. SoFoBoMo is, if nothing else, an experiment in how imposing some seemingly pointless constraints (e.g. you must do everything in a one month period) would seem to make it harder to get a book done but actually makes it easier.

Here are two blogs/websites that I’ve been enchanted with lately:

Things Seen by Oren Grad - It looks to me like Oren has been putting photos up here since last June, and it took me until just a couple of weeks ago to find out about it. If you’re like I am, you’ll probably enjoy it more if you start at the beginning and work toward the most recent photos.

Pitchertakin‘ by Frank Armstrong - Frank did a big road trip a while back, and I very much enjoyed following along on his blog. Lately he’s been posting ‘This Old Place’ photos, and I’ve been captivated by those. There’s no definite start, really.

Over on Julie O’Donnell’s blog this morning, I found this excellent post on meaning and photography.

Yes, I know, we’ve all been over this ‘is there meaning in photography/art is communication’ ground before. We’ve been over it too many times, perhaps. We all know the arguments, and we all trot them out again and line them up and then knock them down like toy soldiers. This time, though, Julie puts a different spin on the issue.

Quoting from the post (but make sure to go and read the whole thing):

I’ve been struggling with the concept of introducing meaning to my images by the process of thinking of something, then going out to make a photograph that conveys (or attempts to convey) what I was thinking. But the whole palaver seemed forced, awkward, difficult and more than a little contrived. It reinforced my opinion that I work best when reacting directly to what’s in front of me. I’ve conceded that while people can infuse their images with meaning this way, it just isn’t right for me, and trying to force myself to do it just makes me unhappy.

and

Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that I wasn’t conscious of changing my approach. I did it instinctively, and when I got home and looked at my shots I knew there was something going on there. And something tells me that it only happened because I’ve been there so many times, because I was in a particularly receptive state of mind on the day, and because I wasn’t trying too hard.

I’m glad I’ve chosen to base my SoFoBoMo project on the same place. I just have to hope that I don’t get bogged down and put myself under pressure to feel that again, so that I can be receptive to whatever comes to me next time. I think there’s a middle ground of meaning to be found.

What Julie wrote resonates pretty strongly for me. I, too, find that I can’t make pictures that are meaningful to me (let alone anyone else) by starting with the meaning and working forward. I can only go out into the world and respond to what’s in front of me, and use the process in the other direction; let the photographs teach me the meaning that I’m finding as I go along. This seems to be a fundamental thing that I’m unable to change, and I’ve learned over time to not fight it but instead just go along for the ride and see where I end up.
But the notable thing, as Julie points out in her post, is that the world of photographers is really broad. People make photographs for a wide array of reasons, and the reason I make photographs might be similar to the reason you do, or it might be wildly different.

The good news is that there also a wide array of photographers out there, writing about their process and motivations, and so it’s likely that there are people out there with motivations similar to yours. And there are people out there with motivations different from yours, but whose explorations of their own photography and their own process cast light on what you’re doing from a different and useful direction.

The more people who write about what they’re doing, the richer the world of photography will be. You don’t have to write stuff that appeals to everyone - it’s enough to connect with just a fraction. By writing what you think, how things are going, what you did today, and how it turned out, not only can you forge connections with a lot of interesting folks but the writing can become another tool in that search for what Julie neatly describes as the ‘middle ground of meaning’.

Best of all, you can set up a blog at blogger.com or wordpress.com, and it costs nothing. You’ve literally got nothing to lose but the time it takes to write the posts, and see if it’s useful to you.

In no particular order, several posts on other blogs that I enjoyed reading:

Where Do You Live? on Mike Johnston’s The Online Photographer.

Interview: Photographer David Hibbard on Joe Reifer’s Words: Ramblings about Photography

Buying art? … the fear to buy what you don’t understand. on Miguel Garcia-Guzman’s [EV +/-] Exposure Compensation.

Paul Lester has an interesting post on ‘working the subject’ up on his blog this morning, and it’s had me thinking all morning.

A brief excerpt:

The premise is that if you find a subject that calls your attention for some reason, make sure that you give it your attention. My implementation of it is that I don’t just shoot one or two shots and then move on. I work the shot. Try it from every conceivable angle that I can think of, even if I think it is silly.

I am, I admit, something of a wussy when it comes to ‘working the shot’, at least in the sense that Paul means in his post. I’ll make several related exposures, sure. But trying every conceivable angle? Once in a while, especially with closeups, I’ll go on a tear and try everything I can think of. But mostly, something catches my eye, I examine it for a while, and then I proceed to make the photo. Often, even for intimate landscapes, there just aren’t many choices for angle, and all but one are two are bad on the face of it.

I suspect this is a holdover from my view camera days, where if you tried to work every conceivable angle not only would you never make it to the end of the front walk, you’d succumb to exhaustion from continuously adjusting the tripod again and again.

It occurs to me, though, that I do something similar. It’s not ‘working the shot’ in the sense that I’m trying every conceivable angle. It’s more that when I do what I think of as ‘coming to grips with a spot’, I go back. I go back to that same spot, over and over and over.

There’s one spot in the valley, right next to a bridge where the road passes through a grove of trees. There’s nothing particularly scenic about that spot. I’m sure that Jeff Wall would call it an insignificant place. For reasons I can’t easily articulate I find myself there with the camera on the tripod, time and again. I could probably throw the camera and tripod in the Subaru, and the car could drive there on its own, like a horse heading home. And each time I come home, the photos are different. Different light, different vegetation, different sun position, different weather - it’s a wonderment that the very same place can have so many different faces. We tend to think of places as ‘one place’ but really they’re lots of different places that just happen to all coincide in space. Place is as much about time as it is about location.

Joshua Baer told me a story about his dad, the great landscape and architectural photographer Morley Baer. Joshua told me that he’d be somewhere with his dad, and his dad would look at something for a minute or two, and then announce “I think I need to do something about that,” which was apparently Morley Baer’s way of saying “I have to go make a photograph.” There are lots of places I visit or drive past, and I make a what I think of as mental Morley Baer note - “I need to come back here and do something about this.” The funny thing is that my list of places I need to do something about seems to grow but never shrink. I can’t remember ever visiting a spot and then thinking “Ok, now I’m done with this spot.”

Anyway, maybe I do ‘work the shot’, but I just tackle it in the time domain rather than the angle domain.

Laketrees has posted her most recent update to the Top 101 Artists’ blogs.

There are a few photography blogs in that list. (Note that this blog is the first blog in the ‘Top 30 Rank’ block). Most importantly, I guessing that there are lots of *interesting* blogs on that list.

I suspect I’m going to spend some time visiting the blogs listed. Ok, I confess - probably lots of time.

I’m hoping I’ll be able to make a wicked twist on Groucho Marx’s observation that “I find TV to be very educating. Every time someone turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book”.

Here are my recent favorite postings on various blogs that I read:

• Gordon McGregor explains why you should participate in SoFoBoMo. Wow. I wish I could write like that. Wow.
• Dave Beckerman exhorts us to feed our eccentricities. Seems like good advice. (I already added all those Lubitsch films to our netflix queue).
• I’ve been a fan of Matt Alof’s 1pt4 photoblog for a long time. It’s well past time for me to point people to his work. Go to this page. Just keep going back through time.

Things have been a little slower in terms of posting because things have been a little more active on other fronts.

For example, in the ‘interesting things that have arrived’ front:

• A short stack of different books on book design, which puts me even farther behind on reading (I got distracted by Extraordinary People, a murder mystery by Peter May). Comments on these books in a few days.
• The L plate for the Powershot G9 finally arrived from Really Right Stuff, so it is now easier for me to do some serious image quality comparisons between the G9 and the EOS-5d. Hopefully progress on that soon.

Last night, I walked outside to get something from the studio and the night was very clear, with a more or less half moon illuminating the snow covered scenery. I was suddenly overwhelmed by that deja vu feeling that I’d seen this scene on Joe Reifer’s website, so I got out the camera, fiddled around for half an hour, and made one ten minute exposure. The clouds moved in and spoiled my nice star trails and I should have turned out the lights on the house, but the result was pretty interesting, and now I think I’m going to have to spend a little time fiddling around with this. It’s interesting in that way that indicates that perhaps I’ll spend more than a little time, actually. I will have to start paying attention to which places have those dratted ‘closes at dusk’ signs, I guess. This naturally provoked a sudden desire to buy some equipment.

On the subject of my musings on the photos not to take, I found this post on Mike Johnston’s TOP to be one of the best things I’ve read there. I’m not saying that Mike is right because he seems to agree that some photos are better not taken, or even that I agree with everything Mike has written. But I do appreciate the fact that people are thinking about it and that it’s being addressed by folks in places where the issue gets exposure.

My little community, a town of under two thousand souls, was recent stricken by a multiple homicide - six members of a family all murdered on Christmas eve. The event itself was enough to have the community reeling. Added to shock of the event was the impact of having all sort of reporters, camera crews, and photographers overrun the town. I stayed out of town for a week. It gave me increased sympathy for the plight of all those folks who lived near Nickel Mines, PA.