Old School…

During the ‘Blizzard of 2010 I had the pleasure of photographing Beijing-born American artist Yun-Fei Ji for the weekend arts section of NYT.

Lots of fun outdoors to be had.

Full story here.

A New Year and a New Website…well, another update.

What’s that Crazy Font you say! – Well Sir, Madam, it’s “Eloquent Regular” by Jason Walcott after the long lost Pistilli Roman. Just the perfect Tonic to Pick You Up I say! Peppy? And How! Well, where can I get some? Veer!

There is some confusion on the intertubes about who created it first-either John Pistilli or some other blogs say Herb Lubalin and Lou Dorfsman-I am sure some typophile can correct me. Depending on how it is deployed it can either look playful or ‘eloquent’ or classic like Bodoni/Didot.

It gets a little funky small so I am not sure about the blog header, but I wanted consistency.

And yes, designed by me. The function parts come as before from Slideshowpro and Director, it is based on their layered thumbgrid demo for those that care, with some custom ActionScript thrown in. I posted before about it here.

The site coding is from Freeway Pro. I don’t know of any other web design software that allows a total idiot like me to make a decent website.

Every site is a trade off, for me my goals are to get people to see a lot of work quickly and big if they want to. So the update saw me redo every image for the site at 900 px wide-This is about as large as I want to go.

Also performed an upgrade on the portfolio-

Went for a couple portfolio meetings yesterday and one editor was surprised by the physical porfolio-she was seeing a lot of laptops. Really? Talk about No Plastic Sleeves! Speaking of, yes those are acetate sleeves, the International House of Portfolios kind (iHOP). I’ve read a lot kvetching over there about the practice-but Really? You want to change the order of your book or one image and you can end up reprinting most of the book? And what if you don’t want to print on any of the double side offerings- or on matt paper? I love Harman Gloss. It is what I print on Period. And it ain’t two-sided. You think I’m gonna glue that sh– together? Really? You think acetate is going to lose you work? Really?…I think bringing a laptop in is gonna lose you work. You have no idea what it really looks like.

Another editor said they were seeing a lot of Blurb books. For the price it might be cheaper even. But then you give away control of colour I would expect, and what you can print in CMYK is nothing like what you can print on inkjet or c-print. Which brings me to my final point; minilab develop and scan. I had a roll done recently just to see what was up, what was out there. Picked the wrong lab. L&I on 22nd. Can you say rip-off? 18$ for dev+scan-get this a whopping 15mb scan. Do you know what that really is? 2 Megapixels. Yes, your iPhone has 2mp resolution. But they call it 15mb-which is a to confuse the point, 1700px x 1100 px is ~5mb per channel RGB- there’s you double digit file size-15mb! Thanks a lot! And colour-don’t get me started! But it did make me think about what I am seeing from the gang rediscovering film-

wonky purple shadows, no detail, stained highlights. Excuse me while I book an ad shoot. Off to look for another lab.

Don’t get on the plane.

Room with a view

Pick one

a cloud follows me wherever I go

its just alec baldwin

how many jokes can you come up with that involve Tiger, POTUS, and Putter?

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright in the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? well…Frank Rich has a nice column about Tiger and the decade in the NYT

David Sedaris always makes my holiday brighter. With apologies to Eggleston.

you may recognize the colour scheme from my website. ?

When I let myself drift into the intoxication of inverting daydreams and reality, that faraway house with its light becomes for me, before me, a house that is looking out-its turn now!-through the keyhole. Yes there is someone in that house who is keeping watch, a man is working there while I dream away. He leads a dogged existence, whereas I am pursuing futile dreams. Through the light alone the house becomes human. It sees like a man. It is an eye open to the night….a rather large dossier of literary documentation could be studied from the single angle of the lamp that glows in the window….” Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.

Let me introduce you to some old friends.

I certainly don’t have the world’s best photobook collection, in many ways it is not even a collection. There have been no rules applied in its creation. Some are gifts, some were too cheap not have a look. Heteroglot I think is the word. Some are missing, loaned, purloined, misplaced in moves-Mark, you still have my Paul Strand and my Friedlander One Eyed Cat!

I don’t buy as many photobooks now as I used to, even though the availability and selection has never been better. A Photographer’s Place may be gone, but we have our friends now at Dashwood here in New York. It’s a treat going in there, I feel guilty because I rarely buy anything there. Aren’t we all a little cash-strapped? But photobooks are as much for the lookey-loo as they are to to buy and own. I can’t tell you how many hours I have spent as a young photographer scanning the spines of photobooks in a variety of bookstores over the years. I was not alone, this was part of “the education” of becoming a photographer. There was a distance and an intimacy that is the paradox of any obsession. Libraries, books and old things can do that. They create a silence, a place to dwell in.

Probably some good work but I will never get to browse any of them. How can I know if I like it? I don’t make friends easily…

Despite it’s inefficiencies, the old school publishing model put books in the pews of this old church and you could go in to worship every other sunday. Or like movie marquees, the titles on the dust-jackets offered a world that was just out of reach. Photobooks in days past had the element of the exotic and foreign about them, a club that you could never join, but aspired to. We don’t like that anymore, it gets labeled “elitist” or “un-democratic” or not “accessible.” And our aspiration has been exploited by innumerable contests where the only path to success is to win!

The photobook of yore was where I learned what is was to be a photographer. As unrealistic as that sounds. Almost by default, there was really no other place. You read Forwards and dust-jackets and biographies, all 606 pages of Shadow and Substance, the life of W. Eugene Smith by Jim Hughes, or the Weston Daybooks, a two-volume set-and you put yourself in their tripod sticks. There was no one telling you how, in art schools you surveyed the same books and imitated your professors, commercial photographers used assistants, so you assisted. Workshops offered a chance at shouldering up next to your idols, for a short while, but the photobook could be your constant companion. And through it you got to know a photographer’s work over time and with respect to what was relevant in your life at that moment. Most of the photobooks I “know” I don’t even own, but have tasted over the years, either in libraries or in stores. Let me share some deep dark secrets; I don’t even own a copy of The Americans! I’m such a fraud! And oh how I wish I had stolen that Life & Work Werner Bischof from the Kingston Public library in 1992! Now its out of print…

Joke: Brett, when you go down to the market don’t forget to get peppers…

December 21. I can’t go on this way.  I must acquire a formula for my portraits. I compromise anyway-and give far too much of myself to an unappreciative audience.

Yesterday, I quit-put down my prints on which I had spotted all morning. Poor technique? Yes, but not my fault-finger prints and scratches and bad retouching done by others-retouching necessary to make an American of questionable age look like a vivacious senorita. I quit, I say, and paced the floor the afternoon-the worst reaction to professional portraiture I ever had. It made no difference to me that rent was due and the work had to go on….

Yet here I am this morning at my desk, working harder than ever, attacking this negative almost with a ferocity, as though it were one of the tasks of Hercules. The outward and superficial reason that if it is not done by tomorrow I cannot go to El Toreo Sunday!-and five foot letters announce Silveti y Nacional!

(What was I complaining about portraiture the other day? Same as it ever was!)

Tell me what a twenty-five year old living with his parents in Ajax can learn from Edward Weston in Mexico in 1924 about being a photographer-? Maybe if I figure out SEO finally I can go to the Bullfights on Sunday? But this was part of “the education,” learning what came before. Photobooks were the cathedral of the ancients, but they didn’t seem ancient even when they were. When your only point of reference is the book on a shelf Weston is just as alive as the person next to you. Ansel Adams wrote The Camera, The Negative, The Print in the early 80’s, detailing principles that had been in use for decades. It was neither new nor old, it was just “Photography” and part of the curriculum.

One of my teachers said that a student of his had learned black and white printing mainly from looking at photobooks-he thought that this is what a good print should look like, and since he had no access to actual prints, it was all he had to go on. The point being, photobooks were responsible for many aspects of the craft and it’s transmission over the years. For many it was the sole point of connection to the medium. We now have the luxury of unlimited search the world over, seeing what is going on in Uzbekistan is now possible, in the days of the photobook, you were limited to what was published. Here we have another facet; for better or worse, the photobook was a gatekeeping mechanism. Making it to a store shelf confers a status on the work, it also reinforces status. Now from the point of view of me seeing what is going on in Uzbekistan I much prefer the internet. But from the point of view of separating wheat from chaff there is nothing wrong with a few barriers to entry.

Sadly, I never really internalized these rules.

We take the online community for granted already, but pre-internet, you suffered your successes and failures alone. Or you shared letters with friends and classmates. One photobook that was very important to me early on was Ted Orland’s “Scenes of Wonder and Curiosity”, mostly cobbled together from a correspondence between the author and another young photog-Sally Mann. It is sort of their modern day emails to each other, published. But because they are letters, we get a care and depth of expression that is timeless. In the book you get a picture of what “emerging” photographer meant circa 1973-1984, the drudge-work, the uncertainty, but mostly the idealism. It is not unlike blogs today, at least the blogs that I like to read. Photobooks were web “point-oh” you could say.

Ted’s Photographic Truths: Photographers fade faster than photographs…

The last point I want to make about photobooks is that recently some have become fetishized collectibles. I suppose in a world where images are in infinite supply, we must ration every possible point of purchase in order inflate their value. I don’t feel this is a healthy situation. It is a sad fact that inefficiencies of the old publishing model meant that photographers made no money creating books, they never sold well, and the bulk of them were then remaindered and then pulped. But you can go down to Strand and revel in the exhaust of this process, and pick up copies relatively cheap. In the secondary market they have long lives, like those people I suspect you see at company parties year after year but never find out their names. It is comforting to know that they are still there. Now a lot of good work is going into print on demand- a place where I can’t browse, move in alongside, live in, a virtual marketplace of limited runs that sometimes are created to sell out, be buzz-worthly, and appreciate in value. At least that is what the email blasts are urging me to do, only twenty copies left!

Obviously I have mixed feelings about this. I love that anyone can self publish a great book, except for the fact that it will have little impact beyond an even smaller number of people that the old publishing model serviced. But I’m ready to see the end of the day dominated by a few large imprints publishing yet another book no one needs to see. Taschen you know who you are. Breasts. Really? And I am a fan of the breast, clearly. But I am not a fan of the last few years of pseudo-porno photobooks depicting behind the scenes of any number of moral low-tide pools. Publishers think or know these books sell well enough to justify their production. And photo books where magazine fashion photography is paraded as art. Ya know, without the typography these pictures are BO-RING.

But I think the photobook does not serve the same purpose now. It is not the wooden church of the photographic, the point of first contact. It is becoming a quick status symbol. A collectible to flaunt your discerning taste. A tick box on the list of photographic things you try when you are starting out, like toy cameras and tilt-shift. None of them will be around long enough to show the next generation of photographers what it was like back in your day.

Following on the heels of a story in NYT here, I made a few changes, added the Flyover States video, and a random function to load a few images at launch. Yes I had to do a lot from scratch because blah blah blah Flash CS3 is not Flash CS4. Its 2:35am…Just pay for a site is my advice…

I miss the snapshot, I just realized.

I feel like we have gone back to the time of Matthew Brady, not in the least because men seem to dress like they are late for a nearby civil war battlefield, short stovepipe pants, felt coat and millitary cadet hat covering unwashed hair mingling with steamboat captain beard and mustache, a fleck of loose pipe tobacco at the corner of the mouth, but I digress. Considering the snapshot above, I should not offer opinions on fashion.

The decisive moment is now a good half minute. I believe it would be sufficient for Brady and his eight-ten on a sunny day.

…people are waiting everywhere…I see them. Like in that movie, I see dead people.

Bidden by the outstretched Franken-Camera they are immovable, locked in a death mask, waiting, waiting. If it was a subway they would not be so patient. I think the idea is, if I can just out-wait this camera, it will do what I want it to do. It will make that perfect picture of Me.

I watched a woman use her cell phone to make a self portrait on the B37 bus recently. Obviously the light was good or she was bored, her boyfriend was not proving to be an arresting subject. It was a curious case of mirror-mirror on the wall, except for the maddening fact that the mirror was turned the other way. With each picture she had to turn the phone around to see if she got what she wanted. I desperately wanted to intervene-hey this is my job didn’t you know?- I could see the image on the LCD that she was about to make. Higher, left, ok, don’t tilt the head, less smile. This will be the FB status update for when you dump this brohunk and move on…. I really don’t understand why some enterprising cell phone manufacturer has not simply made a camera exactly like a make-up compact, they are already small, shiny and colourful. Bury the lens in the mirror!  Then you could see yourself as you made the picture. Fait accompli.

The camera has now become an accomplice in our efforts to attain stardom and we are the lead character of our own lives! Born of two worlds and with a compelling personal narrative! We deserve a picture that confirms this. Head tilt, fish lips, squint. There. We need to control the media, even our own. Balloon Boy. Creepy White House Party Crashers.  I really don’t know why we worry so much about media censorship, when we edit our own stories much more heavily. Gone are all the random moments. Delete that. And definitely delete that off your friends phone or facebook page. Please do not tag me in someone else’s photograph. That is not an “official” photograph of Me™.

I miss the snapshot. I realize that what I am calling the snapshot and “snapshots” are very different things. Winogrand liked to point out when asked about his “snapshot aesthetic” that the garden variety snapshot was not very haphazard or uncontrolled, what his frames seemed to be suggesting, but actually a very staged and formalized genre of picture making, a subject in front of some object, owned or mastered by the person depicted. Like the photograph above. What I mean by snapshots refers to the vernacular use of snapshots and the lack of control and  innocence that film allowed. When you can’t see what you are doing instantly, you can’t be that self conscious. Or styled or controlling. The snapshot was a memento, like found beach glass, and it is made with the speed of our reaction to life, instantaneously. And permanent. I think this is why digital compact cameras have never really done it for me, they can’t focus and shoot fast enough to matter in this way.

If a camera cannot keep up to wit, can it say anything meaningful? And if you could take back what you say, as if it never happened, what does that do to our sense of selves?

A Camera, a Real Camera, is a subversive object. Robert Frank (I think) described carrying the Leica felt like having a gun in your pocket. Photographs threaten politics and vanity equally. I find this surprising since everyone has cameras and everyone takes pictures. Surely if everyone is doing it it means nothing? Yet still. I brought this contradiction up at a recent shoot and the sitter reminded me of the camera phone video of Neda’s Agha-Soltan’s death, the female Iranian protester, and how that video has gone on to be a symbol of the Iranian Resistance. The Youtube Revolution as it is called. Another Nick Ut moment. I am not so sure about this, I am not sure that the world can be galvanized for very long by such imagery, still or motion. Both moving. But are we moved? I am not old enough to know if the same questions were asked of the photographs produced during the Vietnam War, yet we tend to acknowledge that the images coming back from that War did much to change the course of our involvement there.

Photography is subversive, but it is subversive everywhere, which means nowhere. It is no longer the tool of one government, on ideology, but of all governments, and all people really. And I think this means that we assume all photographs are staged fakes since we are busy now staging our own lives for social media. The snapshot is dead, and we are all waiting for face detection to locate our true selves.

Dear recalcitrant portrait subject…

Do not bore me with your protestations. I have heard them all before. Yes I know Karl Lagerfeld photographed you recently and better, barely containing his joy behind those dark sunglasses and tight white collar. Ryan McGinley similarly found the pale of your flesh fetching as you tumbled out of your jeans in the soft desert night aglow with sparklers, a bitten peach spilling juice down your pimply chin.

And you D_____ , never do candids I understand, who would want to see your ample jowels mid-sentence frag-one eye drifting off to points unrelated to the other-

I agree wholeheartedly H____, posing for pictures is emphatically not art- i really don’t know what all those other artists might have been thinking, wasting their time like that when all along YOU had the answer-OH!-YOU are not comfortable, we must do whatever we can to make YOU comfortable, sedate even, we could go for tranquillized, I mean, tranquil- don’t worry, all that preparartion and equipment I brought with the intention of doing my very best, that will go unused in my back pocket, we will go with your best idea, I am sure after seeing yourself so, so many times and from so many angles, never from below of course, (you know who you are) that you really have exhausted all possibilities, thoroughly, and have calculated the best pictures come at an angle of 36 degrees with the north light in a month that contains an “r”.

And you are not interesting enough- we all see that now, something you suffered your whole life I expect, nobly, and I know you never look good in pictures, not a one, narcissism does do that to a person.

I concur, photography is the most cruel thing one human being can inflict upon another, perhaps second only to the indignities one might suffer in a foreign prison. I promise I will make this brief, your time is money isn’t it, not like my time which is spent like a found penny, and no, I don’t need to take so many just to get one-the true artist needs but one master stroke of the pen or brush, one fragile sheet of film, one hand coated glass plate sweated over mercury fumes by hand, with which to capture all that is so very

human,
famous,
noble,
beautiful,
glamourous,
witty,
urbane,
rebellious,
grisled or gamine about YOU.

Because this portrait is nothing if not about YOU, there is no one else in the room is there? That Mona Lisa really tells us a lot about Mona doesn’t it? I really don’t know why she agreed to that picture, definitely was dealing with some weight issues and depression, could this poor chap not come back at a more opportune moment, perhaps when I’d had a little more sun, these northern Italian winters are brutal on a woman’s skin after all.

I guess it is the paycheque, these Photographers all make a lot of money don’t they, another face in the rogues gallery, another payday, dining out as Jennifer Aniston likes to say, on my fair countenance.

Dear recalcitrant portrait subject, please indulge me.

Your humble servant,

Robert.