Why am I doing this? The only reason I can justify is ego. I think I can do it better. I was getting frustrated with the level I was seeing on the web, what was passing for photography. Or even what was passing for “work.” I think it is not enough just have a daily commitment to photography. While is is true, as Sebastiäo Salgado once said to me, “every day you make pictures, there are pictures,” showing them is a different matter.
So you work every day. Are you committed to looking or just making? The making is easy. And Blogs have made it even easier to shoot work and share work with others. A lot of the drudgery is gone. Used to be, I would shoot and process the same day, make contacts, get the loupe out, despair. It was a real commitment to make pictures, at least the ones that I was paying for. Magazine clients helped, and eventually replaced most of the personal work that I do. But its not the same. The film is processed in a lab and proofed by people I seldom meet and takes on an average quality, a regression to the mean. I remember the winter all I had to proof on was Agfa Insignia Grade 2. It was soft, too soft it turns out for low light interior work, fine for the outdoors based on my exposures. So all the interiors were very sombre. It’s funny now, but at the time, if drastically affected my work, the simple fact that I couldn’t afford to go out and buy some more variable contrast paper. And on another level, I didn’t want to either, there was something about the mood of those pictures that expressed something I didn’t understand until years later. At the time, I was just frustrated, and very stubborn. So much was going on indoors and I couldn’t get it technically on film and on paper. I thought they were failures.
Recently I scanned all of that film and corrected the contrast problem easily. A few edits in Photoshop was all it took. But it took more than that to get me to understand what that work meant to me, many years experience in fact. So I go back to looking and making. While it is a lot easier to make pictures now, the looking part has not changed, and sometimes the looking is internal and not external.
Had I been working digitally then, and had I confronted the same problems, it would have taken only a few adjustments to sort out the contrast issues. I’m not sure that my understanding of the work would have been adjusted so easily.