Went to see Stefan Ruiz last night at Aperture and he talked about his book “Portraits”.
He signed the book for me, although the “R” in Ruiz got wiped off. I have the only book signed by “Stefan uiz” in existance. Actually, I don’t have it, since I had him sign the wrapper as a lark. I have since discarded the wrapper meaning this is the only photograph of a Stefan Ruiz book signed “Stefan uiz”.
I like this work a lot. There is a lot of space in the pictures and a straightforwardness that I seek in my own work sometimes. And the lighting style provoked some thought.
For the past couple of weeks I have been mulling over an idea that I have had for a while, that there is a style of photography that I might label “reproducible”. It has to do with what I see on the newsstands over the past few years, and conversations I have had with editors about the quality of their paper stock. Time and time again I have heard “that won’t reproduce on our paper” with regards to some dark melancholy photograph I have made, or just recently when I wanted to run a story in black and white in the New York Times I was told the same thing, “black and white does not look good on our paper.”
Huh?
This is the “Grey Lady” we are talking about right? But it is not unique to them.
I think some of the best feedback I ever received from an editorial board was after a job I shot for Fortune too many years back to admit to. In a fit of desperation or you might say after exhausting all my ideas of “good” lighting I decided to arbitrarily put lights up in a kind of north-south-east-west fashion. In other words I was not going to let the subject dictate the lighting. It was just going to be “light.”
Technically this isn’t NSEW, this is more copy-stand like Stefan Ruiz. I was still trying to be nice. Depending on the room configuration I could usually get two or three lights going. But soon this was not enough, and I decided to break the “fourth wall” as it were, and put the remaining light in:
For one of the last issues of George Magazine, see, I am dating myself…
W:
To me, things were getting better. You could see less despite having more lights. Compounding the issue was that I decided to print the negs on Ilford Multigrade Fibre Matt. Yeah, some kinda wonderful…
A party for W magazine-this has flash on camera triggering strobes in the room.
More for Fortune, on risking retirement funds on the stock market. Love that flash glare in the patio door:
And the nadir, same story, but the editor asked, do you have any lighter frames?
I think a lot of this has to do with colour vs. black and white. Magazines Hate Black and White. I think it says, “you couldn’t spend the money for colour?” or “this is olde.” But I think most of it has to do with reproducibility. The paper is so bad that you cannot print anything with any depth. And printing is a significant cost of making a magazine. So do you think there is a style evolved out of the necessities of printing on bad paper that could be called “reproduceable?”
hey robert. what’s neat is that you’ve continued to break the fourth wall in your color work lately- seamless backdrop, the poles that hold it up showing, c-stand in full view. in the theatre, brecht “laid bare” the devices of the stage and special effects. this happened in postmodern literature too. “meta” anything. The thing acknowledging it’s “thing-ness”. Is it what it is is what they’re saying by doing this and…coincidentally, it’s what you always say. So, maybe this is postmodern photography? Calling a spade a spade…
“Magazines Hate Black and White.”
Not always true. When I worked as a story editor at Rolling Stone (‘90-’94), first Laurie Kratochvil and then Fred Woodward were always commissioning B&W photos to go with my articles. Which were much more often than not great images.
Still, as an editor, one wants to have a little input from time to time. I took one of my last features — about the Spur Posse — to Fred, and suggested/asked just this one time could we have color portraits. He looked at me as if I had just run over his dog.
The B&W portraits that accompanied the article were fabulous.
I particularly like the family on the patio; looks like nuclear war just broke out in the next town. It’s nice they’re still smiling.
I think you are right about newspapers and magazine preferences for photographs.
Whether you’re doing 4-color separations or just black and white it makes no difference. Printing photography on both of these paper products is ALWAYS a nightmare and the resulting style preferences of photography editors are for frontally lit, bright images that have clear separation.
This is probably more a preference that came down from the pre-press people and landed squarely on the desk of assignment editors who HAD to deliver a eye-catching product to the news stands.
This style preference is dominant today whether it’s news, fashion or something else and it’s also a continuation of a tradition especially in editorial and news photography where a black and white photograph shot by available light would be printed with the hand of god just to create that same kind of separation.
This preference for clear separation OR very frontally lit two dimensional photographs is nothing new, but its also very seldom talked about.
I know if I’m shooting for newsprint that this will dictate to me shooting a style that is reproduce-able.
@g: that particular family would have been rendered away by the rapture…no worries there mate.
@sean: when magazines go away and we are left with the LCD, does this mean there will be some latitude? A large computer monitor is much better for the reproduction of photographs. Poorer however for reading.
@eric: nice to hear from you! everyone click on his name and check out his new book: Breach of Peace…
Stefan’s book was one of my favorites from last year. His images are so straightforward, yet had a great deal of impact on me. Maybe it was his luscious color?
At my magazine (a national lifestyle/automotive title), it takes quite a bit of convincing to get the A.D. on board for a B/W shoot. The people here think B/W won’t “pop” (I’m hating that phrase these days), but how could it not in a sea of over-saturated CGI’d work?
It has to do with pacing in the magazine, a lot of AD’s can’t deal with ad placement in relation to the stories and fractional ads. Colour becomes an easy out putting things next to each other. You’ll notice W has no trouble running bw stories and this is because their pacing is so good. At least that is what their CD said to me and I am inclined to agree.
we can all agree on a moratorium on the word “pop.” I might pop my eyes out otherwise…
sorry, me is robert.
Hey Robert,
I don’t ever think magazines will go away. But might there be a photographer who doesn’t shoot for magazines or newspapers but instead shoots for this new lcd medium?
I know I’m seeing work online that would not reproduce appropriately and these are photographers who are loved online.
I wanted to write a post on the issue of “verticality” on the web vs. “horizontal-ity” in print.
So far no one has really dealt with this issue. Reading text up and down is not great, our eyes were made to scan side to side. Plus Cinema HD is horizontal. So basically you have display technologies that are trending in the opposite way to the semantics of the web. The web has no css for pagination that I am aware of, it needs a way to take data and format it for horizontal viewing and not scrolling.
Animated page turning is really really dumb. Another issue is frame rates, currently when you scroll something like T magazine online horizontally you get a lot of image shudder. This is another issue to be fixed. But the time will come although I think web/tech will need to be pushed somehow to think in this way. The verticality of “code” has their brains thinking this way I think.