Musings on Photography

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.

Colin Jago has made a very useful post which includes links to all the known blogs of SoFoBoMo participants. If you’re signed up and you have a blog, but it’s not on Colin’s list, get in touch with Colin and I’m confident he’ll add your blog to the list.

I’d like to encourage people to blog their SoFoBoMo experience. With a blog, it’s easy to just put your thoughts out there, as you have them. Others can read what you write, and they can respond to it in the comments or in their own blog. It’s easy to put up photos, there’s no limit to how often or how infrequently you write. With virtually all modern browsers supporting RSS feeds as well as a host of really good RSS feed readers, it’s easy to keep up with what everyone is saying.

Best of all, you might find that running a blog is fun, and continue with it beyond the end of SoFoBoMo. You can start a blog at zero cost at wordpress.com (that’s what I use), at blogger. com (also used by a fair number of photo bloggers) and probably at other places I don’t even know about.

Dave Beckerman clearly has too much time on his hands, and sent me a link to his video production, titled One Print with the Epson 4800, which you must watch.

It’s only three minutes sixteen seconds long, but it’s packed with emotion. Tension, innovative camera work, and excellent choice of musical backing seem to convey the anxiety, drama, tension and tedium of fine art inkjet printing. This is a masterpiece you’ll remember forever.

Or something. I suspect that Dave broke the legal fun limit when making this thing.

An interesting post on Joe Kazimierczyk’s blog about his current show and a talk he gave at the gallery. The title of the show, which I find intriguing, is “Finding the Extraordinary in the Ordinary”.

I’ve been following his blog for a while now. His artistic stomping grounds are not far from where I grew up, so I find his work both familiar in subject matter and interesting in approach.

More interesting things I’ve encountered on the web:

• Doug Plummer has an interesting post about using the various sliders in Adobe Camera Raw to eke out the most and best from an image captured under the nightmare lighting conditions - hard, direct sunlight with deep shadows from an open sky. I’m just beginning to get a grip on how to integrate recovery and fill sliders into my workflow (especially planning on their use when in the field making exposures) so this post was a huge treasure trove for me.
• From Doug Stockdale’s blog, Singular Images, this post on artist’s statements. I’ve been known to mock artist’s statements mercilessly, but the web site that Doug links to makes an interesting case for the artist statement as part of presenting your work.
• Also from Doug Stockdale, this post on pricing which would be interesting to people just getting started. I like the post mostly because of the photo that accompanies the text. There’s just something about gas stations at night, I don’t know what it is.
• From Mike Johnston’s The Online Photographer, this excellent essay on being an artist and making a living.

From the BBC website, a link which reads “Day in Pictures: Some of the most striking images from around the world“. (there’s no reason I’ve picked on the BBC version, here. I just saw it when reading an article on Vint Cerf. There are similar links on the web page for every news service on the planet.)
“Striking images,” I thought. I looked at the images, and they were, indeed, striking. Exotic. Unusual, extraordinary. Striking, fair enough. But, I wondered, what of the claim that this is represents a worldwide day in pictures? Um, not so much.

The news focuses on the striking. If it’s not something bad, it’s go to be something exciting or exotic, something the news people think lies outside our daily life. You don’t read about the pleasures of the quotidian in the newspaper, nor do you see still photos or video of it on CNN.

That’s fine, but I think it increasingly leads us down the wrong path. The problem is that it causes us to live out there, instead of right here. It’s not that out there is bad. Things and places and events which are ‘out there’ for me are, naturally enough, ‘right here’ for someone else. The difficulty creeps in when we attend to ‘out there’ to the extent that it interferes with our ability to be ‘right here’.

In that Jungian synchronicity way, I’ve been getting this message from a lot of different directions lately. From Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales (a book about why some people survive and others perish), the author lists the first rule of survival: be here now. And, from Paul Lester’s recent posts on photography, Taoism, and his personal spiritual journey - “This simply means that I need more practice in staying in the ‘now’.” And from Doug Plummer’s blog, where he writes so eloquently and transparently about his own creative process, “My entire work life and artistic life is dependent on deep connection and communication with my surroundings, and working from that place.”

And that sort of highlights a paradox. You can’t make good photos, it seems, unless you’re right here, right now, not just physically but also mentally. And yet, at the same time, I sometimes have to remind myself to put down the camera, not worry about capturing this moment, and just be here now.

So sometimes the camera is a tool that helps me be here now. And other times, the camera is a distraction that interferes with my ability to be here now.

As part of the household switch to Macs, we’ve taken delivery on one of the iMacs that Paula will be using. As a bit of a treat, I gathered up a bunch of photos that I’ve made in and around the house, and put them in a folder, and told the iMac to use the photos in the folder to make a slideshow as the screen saver. I don’t know what I expected - snap transitions, blah blah, but I thought it would be fun. But it turns out that the Mac does cross fades between the photos, and it also does a little Ken Burns style pan-and-zoom across/into/out of the photos, so that the slideshow is filled with motion. And, you know, I watched it go, and I thought “Hey, this looks pretty darn good. Especially for no effort!”

And that got me thinking about slideshows. It got me thinking about slideshows as a way to present a body of related photos, in a sequence. I’ve always hated, and I mean intensely hated, those web sites where portfolios are presented as slideshows. I hate that I want to flip through the photos quickly, and can’t, or that I want to go more slowly, and can’t. I guess slideshows are like children’s invented summer plays - when it’s not your children they’re excruciatingly horrid, but when it’s your children, the same play is a beautiful testament to the wonderful imagination and creativity encoded in your genes.

So I was sort of expecting that the next slideshow I came across I would think was the same old horrid painful dreadful stuff.

But no. This morning, I came across this slideshow on Dave Beckerman’s blog. I sort of winced when I hit the ’start’ button. And then I was entranced. A slideshow. A slideshow with MUSIC, the very sort of slideshow I hate, hate, hate. And, truth be told, I loved it. It doesn’t hurt, certainly, that Dave’s photos are awesome. It doesn’t hurt that I like the music, either.

But a week ago, I would have hated it intensely. Interesting.

There was a time when the online photo community was centered around a few USENET newsgroups - rec.photo and it’s various sub-groups. Other online photo communities formed in places like Compuserve, AOL, et al. Following on came websites like the large format photography website at www.largeformatphotography.info, apug.org, photo.net, and a slew of others. Layered across all of those were various mailing lists.

Communities form through pretty much any technology that lets people communicate.

My favorite currently is the loose community that seems to form among/between the blogs written by various photographers. Part of the reason is that the blog format seems to encourage people to write more thoughtfully and share more from personal experience, and it seems to discourage flaming (or, at least, it seems to cut the feedback loop that causes every disagreement to turn into a rapid descent into personal insult). It’s easy to ignore voices that grate, not too hard to find voices you enjoy.

Not long ago I started using an RSS feedreader. I’m not convinced this is an improvement over reading the blogs I enjoy by viewing the blog website directly. The RSS feedreader is a great way to cut the time needed to find the blogs that have posts I haven’t read, but it also divorces the content from the comments, from the layout of the blog website - not necessarily an improvement. RSS readers are great blogreading tools but perhaps not great community building tools.

Don’t know what I’m getting at, really. Just more musings, as advertised.

Browsing Matt Alofs blog, I came across this post, quoting Harry Callahan as writing a grant proposal that asked for money so that he might “photograph… to regulate a pleasant form of living”. Well, that really rang my chimes. But I’m wary of my old nemesis, the ellipsis, which often hides cunning retargeting of words. (it’s not that I distrust Matt. It’s that often the ellipsis is passed on, generation to generation, so Matt might have inherited it, as it were).

A quick search with Google landed me on this page (link points to the Google cache, because the full text page requires a subscription.) which gives a somewhat fuller quotation and a reference:

When he was 34, Callahan wrote what might remain the truest and most naïve of all grant proposals. He was asking for money “to photograph as I felt and desired; to regulate a pleasant form of living; to get up in the morning — free, to feel the trees, the grass, the water, sky or buildings, people — everything that affects us; and to photograph that which I saw and have always felt.”

Perhaps the most radical part of this extraordinary plea for help is the phrase “to regulate a pleasant form of living.” Callahan was not a verbal person, but after very hard work he sometimes found the necessary word. In this instance, I think he got it precisely right: The function of his photographs was not merely or primarily to express the quality of his life, but to define it — to give it shape and structure, by allowing him to spend his days seeking those occasional victories that confirmed the existence of a minimal, necessary beauty.

To ask for other people’s money in order to improve the quality of one’s own life is unusual; the common thing is to propose that one’s work will in some fairly direct way improve the lives of others, generally some group that is materially or spiritually less fortunate than the applicant, and much less fortunate than the prospective donor. Callahan seemed never confused about this; he understood that he was an artist, and that his work would help others only if and as they might be helped by art. He hoped that “when the photographs are looked at they will touch the spirit of people.” As a decent man, he hoped to be useful, but he knew that he had little control, or none, over whose spirits he might touch, and the question was in a sense irrelevant, since it would not affect what he was driven to do.

For me, this touches on an important point. As a pastime, artmaking is fraught with peril. You make some art, you put it out there, and after that, it’s out of your control. You can, as Mark Hobson has done, write an artist statement that attempts to direct your audience in their interpretation of your art, but (despite Mark’s umbrage) it turns out that you can lead an audience to your intentions but you can’t make them think. Well, you can’t make them think the way you want, anyway; people are annoying that way.

So in the end it seems to me that if there are reliable rewards to artmaking, the Callahan quotation suggests a good target. I like the idea that we might use artmaking rather the way we use regular exercise - as a mechanism to regulate our lives so that they are more fulfilling and more meaningful to us. If we’re quite lucky the outcome might have some positive impact in the world beyond. Or not - you make your art, and you take your chances.

Anyway, Callahan’s grant proposal gets my vote as the most sensible articulation of a good reason to make art that I’ve ever read.

Lately much of the energy I had been pouring into this blog has been going into helping get a local artists’ organization off the ground. Much of the focus of the new organization is on connecting with different alternative venues (restaurants, banks, etc.) and getting display space, then putting the member artists’ work into those display spaces on a rotating basis.

I think this is important, not just because it helps artists sell work but because it builds community awareness that artists live among us. As an example, we recently had a booth at a local equestrian fair, along with various other artists. The woman who organized the art portion of the fair had a huge booth representing several local artists. It turns out one of the artists she represented was Linda Adams. Now, the interesting thing is that Linda is someone I know - Linda is one of the baristas at the Carnation Starbucks. I’ve been buying lattes from Linda for years now, but I didn’t know about any of the art she makes.

It seems to me that our communities are better off with artists in them. Maybe that’s mostly an article of faith for me, rather than something I can demonstrate logically. It isn’t that I think artists are somehow morally superior to everyone else - in fact, I find that notion (common in the art world) to be more than a bit upsetting. But I do think that nearly everyone’s life is enhanced by a little artmaking, and it’s a lot easier to allocate time to do a bit of art after washing the dishes if everyone else is doing it too.

So although I’m constantly conflicted about the value of doing shows, about the value of getting your work out into the community where it gets seen, and how much I want to orient my photography around selling prints, I’m starting to realize that doing those things can have a big impact on the fabric of the community.

So I read with great interest this post by Dave Beckerman, about Ansel Adams trying to get Paul Strand’s work for a show in his gallery, and Strand’s refusal. Strand’s response to Ansel’s request was

Nevertheless I cannot say yes to an exhibition of my things at the present time. Actually I have little interest in exhibitions because at the basis they exploit the artist to entertain the public free of charge. I can never get used to the idea that pictures are free entertainment in the U.S., elsewhere too, that the people who claim to enjoy a thing never support the individual who makes what gives them pleasure.

Dave goes on to comment “Can you imagine Strand in the age of photoblogging?”

I think that Strand is missing part of the point - that by hanging his work in a show, he improves not just the art world but the world in general. Now, it’s Strand’s work, and I think wholeheartedly that artists should have unrestricted rights to decide what happens to their work. But it’s worth considering that when we get our work out before the eyes of our community (and here I mean community in the broadest possible sense) there are benefits that can’t be measured easily and are not represented by currency - benefits like finding out that Linda, the friendly barista, is actually a very good artist.