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.
Thank you for a very thought provoking post. So much here. Working through creative issues and this post comes at a great time for me. Love the blog man.
Thanks for the post Robert. I recently found your blog and have been enjoying the discussions going on here and this particular entry strikes a chord in regards to my present feelings about photography. Sometimes, it is so easy to get wrapped up in producing the final image that I forget to enjoy the process. I’ve reached a stagnant place in my photography within the last few months and I would like to use the beginning of the new year to focus on the process . . . to let myself enjoy shooting just to shoot without any particular objective in mind. Thanks again for the post.
If I could offer a suggestion on something to read; Group Genius by R. Keith Sawyer available from Basic Books ISBN-13:978-0-465-07192-0. As a follow up to his other book which I also highly recommend, “Explaining Creativity”, he analyzes collaborations. I find it thoroughly refreshing to constantly be reminded that great creative and innovative people keep having ideas. Here is a quote from Group Genius, pg. 107 “Successful innovators keep having great ideas. they know that most of their ideas won’t work out, and they’re quick to cut their loses and pursue those that resonate WITH THEIR COLLABORATORS”, emphasis mine. In his chapter on Small Sparks, he lists the five basic stages that are imbedded in a collaborative process. quoted verbatim here from page 81:
1. Preparation, period of working hard, studying the problem and talking to everyone else working on it.
2. Time-off:the team member changes context and engages in other activities- often in conversations with others.
3. the Spark: During time off, a solution appears; but the solution is deeply embedded in the knowledge and social interactions of the time off and preparation phases, and it builds on sparks that others have had.
4.Selection: An “Aha!” feeling doesn’t always mean the idea is good. creative people are very good at selecting the best ideas for following up, or they collaborate with others in selection
5. Elaboration: Working out the idea typically requires a lot of additional ideas. Brining them together always requires social interaction and collaboration.”
I know this is related to groups but if you take some of the structures he sets up to provide optimum innovation and creativity and apply it to our endeavors as individual creators i think we can start to see that we are not really the lone operators that we perceive ourselves to be. Why do you think these blogs like this one or APE’s are soo refreshing? Collaboration. Again I can’t recommend his books too much. they might just be enough encouragement to inspire your most brilliant future work and help you understand in some part how you really got to your best moments. Enjoy. Thanks beyond Robert, YOUR collaboration is monumental and I hope people realize the value your contributions. Sincerely, SRE
@scott-That is a very interesting comment, collaboration gets overlooked often in photography but it is essential for many photographers. When you think of art directors, photo editors, stylists, setbuilders, makeup, hair, assistants, you realise that the commercial arts are extremely collaborative. Even in the fine arts, book publishing, preparing a show, developing a concept, scouting, etc, collaboration is there. Suggestion for 2008-find someone you trust and work together on something for a change…
I have a post coming about getting unstuck in the new year.
Really great post Robert. I too have been following your blog for some time. I too find it an interesting, intelligent, thought provoking read.
I have had portrait sessions with people that were not that interesting. No matter how I directed I could not get that “thing”. It end up becoming a frustration on my part, I would be down on myself for not having the skill to pull that thing out. And too be honest, I really don’t know what “thing” that I was trying to find. But I knew it was something better than a pose or a look. A certain amount of tension, emotion -sense of a real person that is so hard to capture. That I find very difficult to do. So I can understand why editorial photographers sometimes do formulaic material, not too many have the idea the get that frame.
Your note on Avedon is interesting as well. It seems that he found interesting people and tried to capture that interest, instead of finding people and making them interesting.
Thanks for your insights.
@sherman-99% of what you see in editorial portraiture is intended to flatter the sitter, and for the purpose of the picture that is enough usually. But most of the best pictures we remember we never made with the intention of flattering anyone, they were made usually as a reaction to the sitter. But this is a whole book in itself. You’ve got two days left to go to the Met and see “The Age of Rembrandt” which will tell you all you need to know about portraiture..!
Personal projects are really what photography is about for me. I really enjoy the commercial aspect, particularly since it pays well, and I always try to inject every commercial job with my own personal style, but really it’s the personal projects that get me the most excited.
Most of my projects last for years, and most seem to just go on and on with no end in sight. I don’t know if this is good or not, but as long as I’m getting something good out of them, I suppose there’s no need to end them.
Since I’m from Detroit, and still reside here, most of my personal projects have to do with the area. The post-industrial Detroit is not pretty, but there are some interesting stories to be told.
This past year has been unbelievably busy, so for 2008, I’ll be back to my on going personal projects. And hopefully, one day, I’ll get them online and/or in print.
Robert,
I am finding this post a bit late, but I wanted to let you know that I found it very enlightening. I had to sit down and write a statement recently about a group of photos. Writing the statement was a challenge, mostly because I’m not used to speaking about my work. But now that the statement has been written, I feel like it has solidified my purpose, and now I am much more clear on where I need to take the project. In this case, the photos led to the idea, which leads to more photos. It feels like a pretty natural way to go about things.