Another photographer and blogger Liz Kuball recently completed a month long trial by fire where she publicly initiated a “portrait month” project where she challenged herself to photograph strangers on the street. It is not easy to do this kind of thing, harder still to own up to the work as you do it.  She gives herself a passing grade but is not in love with most of the work. I posted some followup comments that I want to call out:

As a “task” goes, it seems the portrait month was a success in that you got over the approaching people thing. Now that you are over it you see from the other side that many people are just not that interesting…:)…which is not to say anything “bad” about ordinary people, it is just that you found nothing to hook your interest and that is normal. You can’t be “interested” in everyone, it just does not work that way. So the exercise was limited from the get-go, one by the fact that finding people that you are drawn to is difficult, so substituting anyone is not going to cut it mostly, and two, you had the limits of the street itself as backdrop.I think the challenge of portraiture is in selection mostly, the picture itself happens once you are activated and interested. This is why all those random craigslist projects look so bad, the selection methodology is less than intuitive. You really have to select carefully, look at Avedon, for example, he never photographed a face he was not intensely interested in for one reason or another. And he did that across all social types as well. The gift was he knew what he was trying to find out about people, so the selection process was self-generating. Once you can generate an inquiry about what it is you are searching for in a portrait of a person, the rest will be easier.  

What is so interesting here is the process of generating work. Looking around the internet, (which may not be a good thing) you see a lot “projects” with hooks, work made to satisfy a statement. And also there is that idea of “the sentence”. This was one of the ideas left moldering in the unplugged fridge of Alec Soth’s blog, like Christmas cake that won’t go away. When I try to think of the sentence for some of the photographers that I admire I get nowhere. For example, Lee Friedlander; how in the hell can you “sentence” him? He has done everything, flowers, nudes, self portraits, factories, parks, street, it goes on and on. Of course he has to write grant proposals like anyone else, but never in any one of his books that I have seen have I seen anything about a project statement. The project statement is “I’m a photographer, this is what I shoot.”

I linked to a John Szarkowski interview in LA weekly a while back:

Some photographers think the idea is enough. I told a good story in my Getty talk, a beautiful story, to the point: Ducasse says to his friend Mallarmé — I think this is a true story — he says, “You know, I’ve got a lot of good ideas for poems, but the poems are never very good.” Mallarmé says, “Of course, you don’t make poems out of ideas, you make poems out of words.” Really good, huh? Really true. So, photographers who aren’t so good think that you make photographs out of ideas. And they generally get only about halfway to the photograph and think that they’re done.  

I think the corollary is that you make projects out of pictures, not out of ideas. In other words, it is the pictures first. It seems to me that that is essential, the pictures should tell you what you are doing. Ok, you do have to have an idea of where to show up. Or what to show up for. But none of that is going to create good work on it’s own, in this case, “showing up” is not enough. Perhaps showing up long enough to find out what it is you are really doing is another way to look at it:

…but I hope you continue because you really have only scratched the surface, what if you did this for a year? there is so much you can’t tell what is going to come of it that just allowing the current process to continue might be good.I say that because I was in a cafe today and saw some work from someone else who had been photographing in my neighbourhood, and I could see that it was all the pictures I made in the first couple of months, same places, same ideas. More or less. But lately my own work on the same subject has changed and I am seeing things I did not see before, this is after almost two years of photographing basically the same few square blocks. It surprised me. So there is value in just humping it out for a long time with no intention of anything, just to do it. All of a sudden you get “it”, or why you are doing it.  

This discovery for myself was startling, it came out of being the most playful I could be with a camera, yet still seriously trying to make my pictures. And I started to see the narrative power of light by itself, which is another thing entirely.

I remember going to Washington DC the first time and seeing a show by Lee Friedlander, I bought the monograph, since lost, “Like a One-Eyed Cat.” If you have my copy, please return it! What was so great in 1992 was how totally bamboozled I was by this work, I really had no idea of how to make sense of what he was doing, you have a phonebooth with those holes drilled in the side of the metal shield and a city and a dumptruck all falling together. I really could not fathom the “why” of those pictures, in other words, “why would you do that in a picture?” Well the really interesting thing is that I don’t remember when I started to “get” those pictures. For a long time I copied that style, I shot store windows, reflections, self-portraits, but of course that is only imitation. Whenever it was that I started to get the work, it took even longer then to be able to talk about what is the “why of it,” and I think it is this: this is a language, these are the shapes and symbols of the city used like words and formed into sentences that express something greater than the parts. To say that his pictures are about the experience of the city is only halfway, the pictures actually exceed the experience of the city, they distill it into a kind of poetry that is only available to photography. You could say it is like jazz, but the difference between photography and jazz is that photograph gets a whole new set of notes every decade or so, jazz is stuck with the same twelve tones. That is contentious of course. But what I want to emphasize is how photography creates its own language out of the thing it records; reality. So a photograph can be anything as long as you define your language with the pictures. And the pictures define the project.

The new year is that time when we look forward to new projects, what is yours, or how do you go looking for it?

I”ll leave you with this cherry from Tod Papageorge in Bomb:

No. I think now that, in general—and this includes a lot of what I see in Chelsea even more than what I see from students at Yale—there’s a failure to understand how much richer in surprise and creative possibility the world is for photographers in comparison to their imagination. This is an understanding that an earlier generation of students, and photographers, accepted as a first principle. Now ideas are paramount, and the computer and Photoshop are seen as the engines to stage and digitally coax those ideas into a physical form—typically a very large form. This process is synthetic, and the results, for me, are often emotionally synthetic too. Sure, things have to change, but photography-as-illustration, even sublime illustration, seems to me an uninteresting direction for the medium to be tracking now, particularly at such a difficult time in the general American culture. All in all, I think that there’s as much real discovery and excitement in the digital videos that my students at Yale are making as there is in the still photography I see either there or in New York, perhaps because the video camera, like the 35 mm camera 30 years ago, can be carried everywhere, and locks onto the shifting contradictions and beauties of the world more directly and unselfconsciously than many photographers now seem to feel still photography can, or should, do.  

» Read the rest of this entry «

Anyone who knows me has heard these stories, so I beg your forgiveness…

APE (can we get a better acronym?) has a story up today about the language of photography and dealing with word editors in magazines to communicate why a certain picture should run. It made me think of when I first got serious about photography, it was because of a workshop I took in Toronto in 1991 with a great photographer and teacher, Henry Gordillo. Apropos of nothing I bumped into him here on the street about a month ago, and it brought back the class we did together, “Shooting and Talking Photography.” It was a basic portfolio review type class where we were required to put work up we had made in the intervening week and talk about it. Yes kiddies we had to process and print, none of this digital stuff existed. It was enough to pass around contact sheets, or if you wanted, cut out the contacts and stick individual frames to filecards so you could play with the edit. One of the students was working on a longterm project and we spread out what seemed like 500 to 1000 frames once, and all of us pitched in to boil that sucker down to 50 or so, it was an amazing process to see a consensus emerge, and also you had to defend your choices. Well that was what the class was about too. It was not enough to “flickr” it and say “cool” or “I like it.” You had to talk about how and why the image worked, how it supported the essay or extended the meaning. We also had guest speakers who came in and “spoke about” certain work. And this is how I learned the language of speaking about pictures.

The next definitive experience I had in talking about photography was at another workshop in 1994 in Maine. That summer we had the singular experience of hearing Richard Avedon speak extemporaneously for what seemed like three continuous hours about his life’s work while about ten slide trays were projected one after another brought in by his staff. We had hijacked a school auditorium in a nearby town, packed it, and were mesmerized by this performance. And if that was not enough, Sabastio Salgado got up and spoke some more! But Avedon was definitely on his game, what he talked about was what emerged in those publications made for the retrospective the next year, Evidence, 1944-1994 where he said portraiture to him was a performance that existed between the sitter and the photographer, and that what the photographer was dealing with was primarily surface.

Last experience I want to relate is with a great book. Near that time or later I picked up “Scenes of Wonder and Curiosity” by Ted Orland, and also the Daybooks by Edward Weston. Two very different collections of writing. The first is a series of letters written by Ted to Sally Mann over the course of many years, the years when they were both developing into the mature artists they did not know they would become. It provided a sense of what it was like to slog it out in photography’s trenches, albeit some pretty good trenches, the darkroom of Ansel Adams. Eventually Orland left that apprenticeship and the book ends in his accepting a teaching position, but the wonder of it has to do with how we all get to where we want to be when we cannot see the path we are on. If you read it it is going to feel old-timey, but that is really it’s charm.

So you really want old-timey, read the Daybooks of Edward Weston! He bitterly complains about the retouching he has to do to make the old rich hags happy with their portrait commissions, and gleefully talks about the drunken debauchery he gets into with Tina Modotti and Manuel Alvarez Bravo. You get the feeling he is a bit of louche and prig at the same time, he doesn’t seem too too concerned he left his wife and four children back in Glendale. And I almost forgot another great book, California and the West by Charis Wilson and Edward Weston, detailing their travels in the deserts of California and Death Valley making photographs on his Guggenheim fellowship. Charis writes so well, she was but 22 at the time. The shopping lists are priceless because of the prices listed, 8gals gas-$1.56 for example.

Do yourself a favour, push back the computer, shoot a roll of film and cut out the contacts to sort. You will find it so slow, which might be the point. » Read the rest of this entry «

Google “Harlan Ellison” and near the top is this often linked rant about paying creatives. It is a wonderful meltdown.

“City on the Edge of Tomorrow” stolen above, is considered one of the best Star Trek’s, although the version you see is changed considerably from what Ellison wrote. I actually like what aired because it hews closely to the kitsch of what Star Trek became, less sci-fi and more American exceptionalism on display. It features a radiant Joan Collins, Spock looking like a ‘Billburg hipster, and a curious parallelism that I am sure no one has noticed: The world of the Enterprise is uncannily close to the depicted 1930′s depression era New York. One, there is no money changing hands in either world and two, men line up to get their food from a window in a wall…seems like the future is offering little that we don’t already have.

Third tidbit of Ellisonia I will link to is this wikipedia entry and quote from Ellison on the subject of the holidays. I read it and snorted a good deal of my cereal milk out my nose.

“Christmas is an awfulness that compares favorably with the great London plague and fire of 1665-66. No one escapes the feelings of mortal dejection, inadequacy, frustration, loneliness, guilt and pity. No one escapes feeling used by society, by religion, by friends and relatives, by the utterly artifical responsiblities of extending false greetings, sending banal cards, reciprocating unsolicited gifts, going to dull parties, putting up with acquaintances and family one avoids all the rest of the year…in short, of being brutalized by a ‘holiday’ that has lost virtually all of its original meanings and has become a merchandising ploy for color tv set manufacturers and ravagers of the woodlands.”"No Offense Intended, But Fuck Xmas!” (1972) The Harlan Ellison Hornbook           

Here’s to you Harlan. » Read the rest of this entry «

Talking Heads
Once in a Lifetime (1984)

And You May Find Yourself Living In A Shotgun Shack
And You May Find Yourself In Another Part Of The World
And You May Find Yourself Behind The Wheel Of A Large Automobile
And You May Find Yourself In A Beautiful House, With A Beautiful
Wife
And You May Ask Yourself-Well…How Did I Get Here?

read on… » Read the rest of this entry «

Thanks to my friend Emmet Malmstrom I got a crack at a story for that most famous Swedish architecture and design magazine ForumAID…well, it should be, it is designed and printed beautifully and according to editor Daniel Golling, they go to great cost to actually translate the issue into English for us poor uni-linguals.

Hlynur Atlason is an Icelandic designer living here in New York, his firm Atlason has done all sorts of interesting work and meeting him was a pleasure.

I enjoy reading David Alan Harvey’s blog “Roadtrip” and especially his thoughtful and caring comments in response to many thoughtful and caring comments. (Gosh, after all my recent sarcasm, that sounds sarcastic, but it’s not) Buried in a recent post about something completely different, a student, friend, compatriot brings up the subject of what to put in a portfolio, what will sell vs. what is true to the heart, and David has this to say, I hope he does not mind that I quote him outside of his blog:

read on… » Read the rest of this entry «

A whopping 5 comments my alltime high-I RULE! Well, I thank you all for noticing, mainly thanks to Andrew. I wanted to post-forward a comment that Olivier Laude offered on an older post:

Back in 97 us 12 fools in SF tried to force the business to turn editorial into a viable business by negotiating better rates with the magazines. It was called Editorial Photographers and it was a miserable failure primarily because photographers in LA and NYC did not follow thru what we were trying to do.

Photographers are as guilty as the magazines who hire them for failing to turn editorial into a business because we bought into the BS philosophy that editorial is a way to brake thru to other more lucrative parts of photography. Essentially always give their clients the stick to beat them with. We are a sorry ass bunch of fools if you ask me but as they say,”divide and conquer” and we were more than willing to jump right in. Sure that model will work for some but the overwhelming majority will fail, regardless of their talent or the efforts they put in it. I, personally have been rather blessed, but like John Loomis says, it can be gone in a hurry. We have only ourselves to blame. Way back when a part of the site was called “cost of doing business”, it said it all. AS interesting as Robert’s musings are, they are old and sad news but don’t blame others for this state of affairs, blame yourself. In the meantime, the mags keep crying wolf but laugh all the way to the bank. Those execs in the publishing, they are the ones running real businesses, we are the ones running fragile egos.

http://www.editorialphoto.com/

Later as Olivier noted anyone who is currently working for BW or Forbes has the SF12 to thank, although they later did renege on the agreement of further increases, but the higher rate has stood. I myself have never worked for BW or Forbes, I think there was a stigma that if you worked for Fortune they did not hire you, but I don’t really know if that is true.

If you look at the history of unionization almost all of the significant action took place at the turn of the century, and it was a pretty bloody affair, but in all those cases you have a group of workers and you have a “workplace” to leave, and get locked out of. Solidarity is enforced bodily at the factory gates, and everyone knows everyone else who works there, you have to work alongside each other which makes scabbing very difficult. Photography knows no such workplace, despite my calling the still life studio the “coal mine.” Enforcing solidarity is practically impossible. Another part is you have two different kinds of workforces, on the one hand a group that was immigrant to this nation, largely poor, used to all kinds of hardship and with few alternatives, the other a privileged mobile group. You can’t herd cats. Read on… » Read the rest of this entry «

Olivier Laude contributed a comment to an older post that is a good follow up to my last post:

Back in 97 us 12 fools in SF tried to force the business to turn editorial into a viable business by negotiating better rates with the magazines. It was called Editorial Photographers and it was a miserable failure primarily because photographers in LA and NYC did not follow thru what we were trying to do.

Photographers are as guilty as the magazines who hire them for failing to turn editorial into a business because we bought into the BS philosophy that editorial is a way to brake thru to other more lucrative parts of photography. Essentially always give their clients the stick to beat them with. We are a sorry ass bunch of fools if you ask me but as they say,”divide and conquer” and we were more than willing to jump right in. Sure that model will work for some but the overwhelming majority will fail, regardless of their talent or the efforts they put in it. I, personally have been rather blessed, but like John Loomis says, it can be gone in a hurry. We have only ourselves to blame. Way back when a part of the site was called “cost of doing business”, it said it all. AS interesting as Robert’s musings are, they are old and sad news but don’t blame others for this state of affairs, blame yourself. In the meantime, the mags keep crying wolf but laugh all the way to the bank. Those execs in the publishing, they are the ones running real businesses, we are the ones running fragile egos.

http://www.editorialphoto.com/

I read the EP list back then and man, it was depressing. I guess there is a resistance to hearing truth, and maybe that is a good observation since I hear a lot of younger photographers floating photography 2.0 turds like, “a rising tide floats all boats” (hint-you need a boat, remember?) or photographers need to find a “new model” for doing business. Let’s say it again, this is not a business…wash, rinse, repeat…read on… » Read the rest of this entry «

After stalking him in the LaGuardia airport last week I got a call from thejackanory himself Andrew Hetherington. We did our best to solve all photographer problems everywhere or at least relieve Puckfair of some of its beer.

I am reminded that photographers are a similar bunch, although maybe musicians or physicists are a similar lot too, I don’t know, but we all share the same struggles, money, inspiration, finding time, finding direction. Andrew has talked about it on his own blog, but he reminded me of PrintSpace, which was a clearinghouse in the mid 90′s for many of us. I didn’t really spend a lot of hours there, the color darkroom never really hit with me. But those times I was there it was good to see work on the walls and react to it, either feeling good or bad depending. But it was a kind of trench to be in, and I miss that association…