WhiteHouse Custom color is doing the printing, short runs of 25, 50, 100, etc. Makes it real easy to send out quick hits. About the only paper I like from them is their Art Recycled.

Got an email back from him saying he was really happy with the picture and felt it reflected who he is, which is interesting- you spend a couple hours with someone and try to put that into a picture. From experience I know that the way I see someone in their picture is often very different from how they see themselves. Nice when the two dovetail.

Another view;

Lots of fun outdoors to be had.

Full story here.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

I was thinking of photography too, your mind wanders off a lot when you are tired. You could describe different kinds of photographers or kinds of photographers with volume, intensity and frequency. Volume would correspond with the amount of work produced, for example, stock shooters produce a high volume of work. Intensity could describe the effort required to make an image. A high intensity photographer might be like Gregory Crewdson. Low volume, but high intensity, with the film lighting, etc. Frequency would describe how often the photographer gets to make images. Crewdson in the last example, would have low frequency. Editorial photographers used to have high frequency. You could also say the intensity was moderate, and the volume was low, usually a page or several pages. Advertising photographers would generally have Low Volume, High Intensity, and Low Frequency. Paparazzi would have High Volume, low intensity and High Frequency. You could make venn diagram or a scatter chart to plot us all!

Well in my training we are nearing the highest volume, the highest intensity, but moderate frequency. I am not running twice a day like olympic hopefuls. And those highs are relative, about one half or one third what serious serious runners do. And I’m getting my butt kicked.

I did mile repeats again on Thursday. Going in this is the workout that I really don’t like, but coming out, it is something that is very satisfying. I think it has to do with how well signposted the workout is. You have a 400m oval. Two straightaways, and two curves. A mile is about 4 laps or 1600m. The workout called for a warmup, 2 miles, and then 4×1mile @7:00/mile. This is nearly a full minute faster than my planned marathon pace of 7:54/mile, which yields 26.2miles in 3:28:23, or sub 3:30:00. Loyal and devoted readers will remember that my first marathon in rainy Long Branch NJ clocked in at 3:49 and change. So this goal of sub 3:30 is pretty ambitious.

There are all sorts of predictors of marathon times, I won’t go in to them. One of them is a recent half marathon time. My last half was the Brooklyn half in late May, which was three and half months ago. Taking that time the prediction is 3:38:00 or so. How to find those 8 minutes? Speedwork.

So this is the drill. I do the warmup and end up back at the RedHook track ready to go. Another high school age group is doing 400m repeats and nasty situps. A football team is scrumming on the inner field. Round we go. The splits are 1:45, 3:30, 5:15 and 7:00. You then get a 800m cooldown before the next interval begins again. Somehow the body knows exactly how fast to go to get around this oval in 1:45. Don’t ask me how or why. It might have something to do with the fact that my heart is pounding out of my chest and I can’t go any faster but I think it is that mental fight or flight thing again. Your body will only give you enough to do what you ask it to do. So I have these goal times already in my head. It will not give me any more. Dumb body, thinks I am being chased by a cheetah and might have to run for miles. So as long as I just stay ahead of death, that is ok. If it thought I was being chased by an old lady on a motorized scooter I guess I’d get 15 minute miles?

These are the splits: first interval 6:52, second 6:55, third 6:59, fourth 7:02. This is only the second time I have run this workout, and it surprises me how close that is. Well the first one is too fast but that is understandable. Perhaps more telling is the rest interval which grows each time, I take my own sweet time to do the 800’s in-between. They are the coaches little gift. I suspect a real coach would not let me take a full five minutes between the third and fourth interval but it has been a long week my friends.

So as I said, you hate it going in, but clocking the last interval, those numbers when you see them on the clock, 1:45, 3:30, 5:15, 7:00 become your little friends, they tell you actually doing it. You get cozy with the pain because it tells you the worse it gets the closer you are to the end. So you sort of bend yourself to it. I did raise my hands at the end in sweet victory, or perhaps trying to relieve that cramp in my side , probably reaching for the imaginary beer I was fantasizing about at the end just to get me through, but it felt better than running a twenty even, which is just long slow death. This is more like wedging a brick against the accelerator and going over a cliff death. Whee!

43 days till NYC Marathon. I live to paint the world red it seems.

This weekend is the Queen’s Half marathon which is most known for it’s inaccessibility from the outside world. There is a bus at the ungodly hour of 5am to get us all there. And no, this is not more punishment, actually it is a relief, the “official” workout was 16 miles, this is a piddly 13.1, and features water stops, gatorade, and maybe some dancing bears. It is a gift really.

Really.

I also think you should dress for who you are. I don’t know if people still do that, but when I was a kid, you had to get dressed up for everything. I’m not saying show up as a slob, but you know, I’ve had some interns show up in suits. I’m like, listen, never wear a tie to meet me. You’re in the photo world in New York now. No one wears a tie, man.

So what do you think? I have had to wear a tie but once-photographing in the New York Stock Exchange. Not even in the White House was I required to wear a tie, although I was shooting behind the scenes and not at a State Dinner.  I have had to photograph a lot of ‘Guy’s in Tie’s’ (GITS) and generally felt for them on hot days.

So do only Wedding Pro’s wear ties?

(mad man Thom Browne)

TO: ALL FREELANCE PHOTOGRAPHERS

This is a reminder of The Times’s policies on digital manipulation or other alteration of photos.

As you know, under the contract you signed for The Times, you warrant that any photo submitted for publication “will be original and unaltered (unless it is a photo illustration, pre-approved by your editor and fully disclosed in caption information materials).”

The Times takes this obligation very seriously; the integrity of photographs and other material we publish goes to the heart of our credibility as a news organization. The prohibition on unauthorized alteration of photos applies to all sections of the paper, the Magazine and the Web site.

This passage from the newsroom’s “Guidelines on Our Integrity” explains our rules in more detail:

Photography and Images. Images in our pages, in the paper or on the Web, that purport to depict reality must be genuine in every way. No people or objects may be added, rearranged, reversed, distorted or removed from a scene (except for the recognized practice of cropping to omit extraneous outer portions). Adjustments of color or gray scale should be limited to those minimally necessary for clear and accurate reproduction, analogous to the “burning” and “dodging” that formerly took place in darkroom processing of images. Pictures of news situations must not be posed.

In some sections, and in magazines, where a photograph is used to serve the same purposes as a commissioned drawing or painting – as an illustration of an idea or situation or as a demonstration of how a device works, etc. – it must always be clearly labeled as a photo illustration. This does not apply to portraits or still-lifes (photos of food, shoes, etc.), but it does apply to other kinds of shots in which we have artificially arranged people or things, as well as to collages, montages, and photographs that have been digitally altered.

If you have any questions about what is permissible under the rules, please consult the assigning editor.

Sincerely,

William E. Schmidt
Deputy Managing Editor
The New York Times Newspaper
Division of The New York Times Company

The gloves will have to wait. But they have come off. Obviously some battening down of hatches is going on after the Edgar Martins débâcle. It is to be expected. It is also the first time I have ever gotten any official direction in writing with respect to “a policy” on alteration…well corporate communication is always an oxymoron. I did know what was permissible out of common sense. You wonder who doesn’t? As for that bit about consulting your editor if you have a question, well, in my experience Photoshop is most useful to them as a box to make the monitor higher. Raw converters, high radius sharpening, LAB colour, moire, curves vs. levels, shadow-highlight, none of this is going to get you more than a wha? Honestly, it is not their job to understand digital capture technology or be digital referees. Their job is to understand pictures and make intelligent assignments. They do this very well.

Part of the reason I was approached by the Times to do work for them was that I was outside of the newspaper world. I had not cut my teeth on newspapers, I did not go to J-school, I had never shot a grin and grab nor a high school soccer game. I don’t have that memory bank of solutions to photo problems that go through a 24mm lens close to the subject if you know what I mean. Which is not to disparage what journalists have to do. There are necessary limits implied by the mandate, I will get back to that.

My development in photography had come totally through editorial magazine work, and the editors that were calling were also veterans of that world. Their learning curve was steep also. While some may have had experience on newsmagazines or financial reporting, none had significant newspaper backgrounds. But the sections I was being assigned to were not “news” sections, it was feature fare like Dining, Arts, Style. I was not being asked to “report” on anything. I still got chastised early and often however for my scant captions. I figured the less I said the better. I did not want the responsibility of reporting, since I am not trained. My mandate is to take the intelligent handoff from an editor and make good pictures in my style. That’s what they wanted me for. Which is not reporting, probably not journalism, and may or may not be reality either. By the standards above, almost everything I was assigned was a photo-illustration, in that I directed people, moved furniture and generally futzed around until I got the photograph that I wanted, whether it was a portrait, a still life or interior. This is standard editorial practice.

In some sections, and in magazines, where a photograph is used to serve the same purposes as a commissioned drawing or painting – as an illustration of an idea or situation or as a demonstration of how a device works, etc. – it must always be clearly labeled as a photo illustration. This does not apply to portraits or still-lifes (photos of food, shoes, etc.), but it does apply to other kinds of shots in which we have artificially arranged people or things, as well as to collages, montages, and photographs that have been digitally altered.

“Illustrations of ideas or situations” might encompass any situation where I was present and made choices about photographing a person or group. But portraits and still life gets a pass evidently, unless the “people or thing” is “artificially arranged”, which takes me back in a circle to almost all portraits and all still life. I am no clearer after this clarification. (secret answer: there may be no answer to this for newspapers, read on…)

Tangential to that, (going somewhere, I promise) my cable provider has seen fit to scramble the location of the channels, I now have C-Span and NY-1 in the low digits. I am enjoying the Wendy Williams show for the first time. How You Doing? Fine, thank you, and getting up early on Sunday mornings for my long runs means that I get back around 10am, just in time for Richard D. Heffner’s excellent program “An Open Mind” broadcast from SUNY somewhere upstate, NY. For the last two weeks he has been interviewing Alex S. Jones, an authority on media issues, Pulitzer Prize winner and former New York Times staffer through much of the eighties. He has a new book out called “Losing the News” “The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy.” Here is an excerpt from chapter one, “The Iron Core”:

Imagine a sphere of pitted iron, grey and imperfect like a large cannonball. Think of this dense, heavy ball as the total mass of each day’s serious reported news, the iron core of information that is at the center of a functioning democracy. This iron core is big and unwieldy, reflecting each day’s combined output of all the professional journalism done by news organizations — newspapers, radio and television news, news services such as the Associated Press and Reuters, and a few magazines. Some of its content is now created by new media, nonprofits, and even, occasionally, the supermarket tabloids, but the overwhelming majority still comes from the traditional news media.

This iron core does not include Paris Hilton’s latest escapade or an account of the Yankees game or the U.S. Open. It has no comics or crossword puzzle. No ads. It has no stories of puppies or weekend getaways or recipes for cooking great chili. Nor does it include advice on buying real estate, investing in an IRA, movie reviews, or diet advice. There is nothing wrong with any of these things. Indeed, pleasant and diverting stories are far more appealing to most people than the contents of the core, which some find grim, boring, or riddled with bias.

It has no editorials and does not include the opinions of columnists or op-ed writers or political bloggers. These things are derived from the core. They are made possible because there is a core. Their point of departure is almost always information gleaned from the reporting that gives the core its weight, and they serve to spread awareness of the information that is in the core, to analyze it and interpret it and challenge it. Opinion writers pick and choose among what the core provides to find facts that will further an argument or advance a policy agenda. But they are outside the core, because they almost always offer commentary and personal observation, not original reporting.

Inside the core is news from abroad, from coverage of the war in Iraq to articles describing the effort to save national parks in Mozambique. There is news of politics, from the White House to the mayor’s office. There is an account of a public hearing on a proposal to build new ball fields and an explanation of a regional zoning concept that might affect property values. There is policy news about Medicare reform and science news about global warming. There is news of business, both innovation and scandal, and even sporting news of such things as the abuse of steroids. An account of the battle within the local school board about dress codes is there, along with the debate in the state legislature over whether intelligent design should be taught as science. The iron sphere is given extra weight by investigative reports ranging from revelations that prisoners at the county jail are being used to paint the sheriff’s house to the disclosure that the government is tapping phones without warrants as part of the war on terror.

Alex feels we are eroding this Core, and are at risk of losing it altogether. The core cannot be maintained in any type of “free” way. Basic reporting is like digging ditches, rarely any glamour involved, you are not going to get an intern to go to Afghanistan for free to do this. It requires resources and commitment over the long haul. Notice also the distinction he makes between original reporting and opinion and analysis. Without the core, you cannot have the rest.

…So I get this email this morning reminding us all about the standards and practices involved and it makes me think-how do you square this circle? In other words, in trying to create a product more interesting to more people newspapers have enlarged the scope of their coverage well beyond the confines of the iron core that Alex talks about. Tthey have done this for a long time, except with staff photographers. Lately they have seen fit to hire outside the choir you could say. Which gets you Edgar Martins, an art star who has no connection to print and obviously no concern. Or it gets you Nadav Kander, (who I love) and a set of completely manipulated portraits that passes muster because as I read above, portraits and still life can be called photographs, except when they are photo illustrations. So is it not a photo illustration to completely change and insert a background? The Magazine, the website and the Newspaper all have to adhere to the same standard according to the letter above. If I am confused, imagine the lay reader.

Newspapers seem to be trying to have their cake and eat it too. The mandate to create compelling (which you can also read as trendy, fashionable, provocative) content may not always coincide with the mandate to report facts. When you start to mix up this iron core with sections from Agronomy to Zymurgy, (just leave my astrology thank you!) when you start to look outside the J-schools and newspaper ranks for editors and creatives, and when the pressure of the bottom line starts to pinch, then you get mission “creep”.  Profit and ambition can compromise integrity, and the reader loses faith in the core itself. News becomes confused with info-tainment.  Reporting start to look less like truth and more like the opinion of the newspaper owner.

We now are awash in opinion, mine included. I have no solution here but wanted to draw attention to Jones’ writing and his “core” idea. I believe that accountability reporting as he calls it is essential to our democracy. You are not watching your city council, but you know someone is. Dutifully, so that one day there is a paper trail, and a story can emerge of corruption or improvement. Technologists like to posit that the camera phone, the citizen journalist and the very transparency of information on the internet can provide what newspapers currently provide. But you cannot expect bloggers to be able to withstand the lawsuits that even a simple investigative piece could generate. Certainly that lone blogger could “tweet” for help but this is a naive fantasy. I heard Eric Schmidt of Google gush that the simplicity of fact checking on the internet means that politicians will have a harder time lying in public. Guess he has not tuned into C-Span lately. Maybe he needs to rescan his converter box to make sure he is getting all the channels…

A whole post and I only mentioned running once.

So I can twist this into being about photography if you follow me…

This year is the 40th running of the NYC marathon and it will be the largest field ever, with over 40,000 runners. What started 40 years ago with 127 entrants has morphed into a World Wide event that brings the city to a standstill for one day. Running is more popular than ever, in particular the growth of the Half-Marathon distance has been huge in the last few years. And with that, has come a measure of regret for those who enjoyed its less popular days. It has never been a big money sport, but increasingly some would argue, the purity of the sport is being lost. This was an opinion I ran across reading Christopher McDougalls book “Born to Run” about “the greatest race the world has never seen.” Particularly in the venue of ultra-marathoning, the athletes do it for the love of running since the awards are non-existent and the pain so great in running 50+miles. Why else could you do it?

Over about the same time frame photography has evolved from something that no one considered worth selling in a fine art gallery to being ubiquitous on the one hand, and in a few cases, valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars on the other. Consider that dichotomy. And along the way it has lost some of it’s innocence, I think there is no denying that.  These are not the days of holing up in the Strand to read a copy of Weston’s Daybooks. Not that you can’t do that. But you will be passed by in short order by the latest Twitter update that Marcus and Idrani are “back from insolvency” or some other ridiculous thing.

What are we to make of this kind of inevitable change? Do all movements that get massively popular and more accessible become shadows of their former unpopular and scrawny selves? Is the experience of the sport or art cheapened both for the participants and the observers when the barriers to entry are lowered? Many would argue that the emergence (interesting word choice) of the popularity of the half-marathon distance has taken something away from the pinnacle of “full” marathon achievement. Also the inclusion of so many charity runners who will probably walk a good portion of the marathon is another erosion of what it means to some to complete “the” marathon (no full qualifier required).

Well by my own logic then I should not be in the New York City Marathon. And by my own deduction photography is dead. OH AUGUST HOW I LOVE THEE! Perhaps I can reorient a bit. It’s about the money and the attention. Now I am on solid ground. The explosion of the half marathon distance is a real money maker for those race organizers. I believe only Boston and NY have no concurrent half-marathon distance, while many or most of the big city marathons do, and inevitably all small city marathons do. It is just too easy to take the entrance fee when you are gonna be out there already. I am mixed on it. I do remember distinctly watching all the half-er’s finish in Long Branch, it was emotional for me because I was still proud of them for getting to the finish line. 13.1 is still 13.1. And when there are 6000 halfers and only 2000 marathoners, the crowd cheering for the halfers is bigger and less bored on their feet! So rounding the next turn I remarked to those around me, “glad we have all this room now to run” but no one seemed happy to hear it. We had it to do all over again.

Like those halfers, emerging photographers are paving a bright shining path for those offering contests, consulting, portfolio reviews, websites, tutorials, branding, you name it. Aging photographers are looking at their 401k’s and thinking, like that Masked Magician, if I can show you how to saw a pretty girl in half, or at least light her with a beauty dish hanging off a speedlight or two, I might sail off in the Good-Ship Retirement unscathed. Increasingly the long tail starts to wag the dog as the industry turns inwards to capitalize on its young. It is not a good sign when a business becomes about itself. Think Mary Kay.

It is difficult to determine what the factors are that contribute to these sudden swells of popularity. In running it might be a simple demographic shift where a large number of people suddenly reach an age where they no longer feel invincible. So heath issues come to the fore. Others have speculated that running in essence is the flight response made manifest, and so in times of hardship it kicks in. The first mass wave of jogging (that’s yogging with a soft “j”) popularity was in the 70’s, as we were slouching towards Reagan.

In photography as I have said, the combination of the consumer credit bubble, mass consumption driving digital technology downwards in price, and the internet bubble itself (which was fueled by the previous capital bubble boom-bust) created the perfect storm of cheap digital cameras and an internet to share the pictures. We are all photographers, we are all Kenyans. Overnight it seems.

I think it is unfortunate for the new crop of photographers to have to suffer the label “emerging” and the intensity of attention and expectation that this label generates. Part of it is obviously the velocity of information speed on the internet and our corresponding attention deficit. The pressure to produce attention grabbing work or work that garners grants and awards, to produce “books” and completed projects is overwhelming. In the history of photography there are many many late bloomers, a mass of undiscovered talent. But what does that mean, is that tragic? Discovery is only the first step in a career. There will always be a surfeit of work produced, but it is hard to tell if our motivation to find it and blog (and then probably forget it) is because the tools enable this, or that the tools create a demand for something new every facebook status update?  And is it fair to our youngest and least experienced practitioners to focus on them this extraordinary amount of attention and energy?  Is our concern the promotion of new work or the exploitation of new workers? When we lower the bar to access what does it do to the field as a whole?

It is clear our world is brimming with information but so lacking in direct experience, which by nature simply requires time on the planet. Rubber on the Road. The Trials of Miles. Fogged film holders. Sheet film on the bathroom floor. The marathon was created initially as an obstacle for the human body to transcend that few considered healthy or possible. But to experience that transformation you need to commit to the whole thing. Now, we have this intermediate goalpost, the “half”, which before was only an early milepost in training for the “full” distance. But half is a misnomer. It is only a mathematical half.  It is not a factor of two for the body. When we make things more accessible do we alter the potential gift in return?

…

I got excited today signing up for all the fall runs that are coming, Grete’s Great Gallop, the Queen’s and Staten Island half’s, (maybe we should just call them 13.1 k’s?) the Joe Kleinerman 10k, some winter runs hopefully in the snow of Central Park. My experience of renewal in running means that the pure experience of photography is always available no matter how many photographers you see “crossing the finish line” next to you. And I realize that to a lot of running veterans, I am part of their problem! But choose how you experience any trial in life. And getting to the finish line is not really why we run. We run to run, we shoot to shoot. Like Fred was saying, “all for the t-shirt”, he’d show up for nothing really. Just to do it. I think photographers might want to accept less now in return for more later. We need more t-shirts! Bet you never thought you’d hear me argue for less reward in photography!

The heat has put a serious dent in my training schedule, last night was a track workout of 3×1 mile at 7:08/mile, with .5 mile rest in between and for the first time I visited the Redhook park oval to do it. Tough sledding, I kept forgetting what lap I was on-and Mr. Garmin was making it difficult to keep track-a plain old watch would have been better. Didn’t matter, my heart rate was pegged up against the wall anyway…memories of high school practices with the gym teacher exhorting us through wind sprints. In fact there was what looked to be a track club or high school group doing 400m repeats, a group of about twenty teens, the expected mix of diffidence, lollygagging and avoidance. Some seriously fast folks too. They would all start out as a group and quickly the bell curve would appear, the lone runner way out in front, the middle of the pack, and a back of the pack bunny or two. I think everyone was feeling mr. pukey nearby. These last few days have been difficult to keep to the plan-targets have not been met! It is all going awry! Chaos! I am hoping that it is the heat that is responsible and not my choice of the pursuit of Ludicrous Speed in my training goals. Trying to make a 3:30 marathon may not be realistic for me…?

Slideluck potshow came and went and I received a lot of great feedback on the presentation-thank you all. I will keep working on the project when the light returns in late September. Here is the piece: