The Online Photographer

I'm Team Process... (More on Process vs. Project)

That was a very rewarding discussion yesterday about "process vs. project," and I'd like to thank JH again, as well as Nick Hartmann and everyone else who commented, whether featured or not. As you can probably tell, I've been trying to figure out what kind of writer I want to be for the rest of my life.

Very interesting that our friend* Kirk Tuck said, "I have to be the most project driven person I know." Kirk is just the nicest and most considerate guy, and I think I'm pretty friendly too, and when he and I talk on the phone the conversations are very warm and tend to go on for quite a while. Yet there is an undeniable tension in our attitudes to each other when we're discussing ideas in writing. I think we may have just hit on the reason, because I can echo what he said, but in the opposite direction: I have to be the most process-driven person I know. JH said, in a private email, "It’s not binary but a continuum, however most people are not in the middle." I'm way over on the process side. I don't even like "closure" at all: to put it bluntly, I dislike finishing anything. I like things to stay open-ended, because that way they're still alive; change is still possible, they can still evolve, you can still think about them some more, still be creative, still catch and fix your errors, and so on. It's only very reluctantly, and with disappointment and misgivings, that I will come to a hard stop and concede that something is done.

It's possible that the reason I liked being a magazine editor so much is that it counteracted my process-driven tendencies. Each issue was a project. There was a series of defined hard deadlines for every issue (I still dream sometimes of missing them), and there were people to help get each deadline met. Then, when the issue was printed, it was done: there was no more possibility for change. I could let go of it because I had to. If all of it had been up to me, on the other hand, every issue probably would have been late and half of them wouldn't have gotten done at all!

It's not that I can't work. I've told this story before, but when I was a freshman at Dartmouth had the honor of attending a meet-and-greet with Saul Bellow, who had just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I waited in line after the breakfast to ask him a specific question, but I didn't get my chance, because the guy in front of me asked the exact question I wanted to ask: what's the best way to become a writer? Mr. Bellow didn't hesistate: "Write three million words." The guy who asked the question argued with that, but Mr. Bellow gave his reasons and didn't budge on the concept. The requirement was practice, and lots of it.

I was disappointed, because of course I was eighteen and wanted to be famous yesterday, but I headed right back to my dorm room, counted the words on a typed page (about 400), did some calculations, and determined that if wrote two typed pages a day, I'd be at three million words in slightly over ten years. I got right to work. Writing became a daily habit, and has stayed that way.

But then there was another problem. What the heck was I going to do with all that writing? I certainly didn't want to be responsible for it—keep it, catalogue it, store it. (Three million words with 400 words on a page is 7,500 pieces of paper, for one thing.) So I started writing letters. That way, I figured, each day's work was done and out the door in a day or three, and I didn't have to worry about it any further. It allowed me to get on to the next one.

I also wrote a lot of short stories, having the vague idea that that was how writers got started, and I might have made the switch to another kind of writing at a certain point. My girlfriend in art school wanted to get married soon and have six children, which greatly worried me. At that time in my life, I couldn't even support myself, much less myself and seven other people. (Ah, feckless youth—it never occurred to me that I could stay with her and not necessarily go along with her plan.) I knew enough about writers at that time to know how they work: John Camp described it in his comment two days ago. I had already met Larry McMurtry, and Larry's method was to write five new pages a day and revise the previous fifteen, meaning that he went over everything three times after composing it. I figured at the time that if I married Gina, I could pick a type of book, keep writing my two pages a day and revising six, and just keep letting them add up into books until the books started doing well. That was the wild card, though—I had no idea if, and when, they would ever start earning money. It got me no further toward a solution to my immediate problem. I honestly had no faith in my ability to earn a living at that point, and instead of courageously devoting myself to the one I loved and shoving off into the unknown seas of a great adventure, I broke up with her—a despicable, defeatist, cowardly thing to do, because I really did love her. (Although very bright, she's dyslexic, so there's little chance she'll ever read this.) Something I still deeply regret, all these years later. (Everything bad that happens to me in my romantic life I ascribe to karma, repayment for my perfidy. I'll either forgive myself someday, or else someday I'll die.)

I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that I've easily averaged 800 words a day, lifetime, even if it's a thousand words one day and six hundred the next, or whatever. (This post is about 1,500 words.) If I do the arithmetic for the 47 years between the day I met Saul Bellow and today, that's about 14 million words in my lifetime, give or a couple of million. Even if we put it at 500 words a day, which I think is too conservative, that's still 9,500,000 words since I was 14. So I surpassed Saul's Dictum a long time ago. Put in my 10,000 hours, in Gladwell-speak.

But you've probably detected already that "writing letters" is something I'm still doing, more or less.

Because that's another thing I learned too late: only practice exactly what it is you want to do, because that exact thing is what your practice will train you to do. Practice by writing letters, and you won't get good at writing novels; you'll get good at writing letters. Blogging is perfect for me because it's just an eternal flow of process. There is no project.

Even my photography is all process. I once got an introduction to John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art, and instead of taking a finished portfolio to show him (I had several), I opted to maximize the opportunity by taking a bunch of bits and pieces of things I was still working on, along with some interesting failures. Very much the wrong move, highly transgressive in light of expected behavior and protocol when an artist is granted an audience with a top curator. But I was much more interested in trying to engage him in a discussion about process than I was in showing off finished work and trying, like everybody else, to entice him to buy something for the Museum's collection. That didn't seem nearly as much fun. Big mistake, but the impulse was a reflection of who I am and the way I think.

You know, what should happen is this: Kirk and I should write a book together. Call it Game Theory for Photographers, the art of the medium from the divergent perspectives of a highly project-oriented professional and a highly process-oriented teacher-type. I'd be the one to slow it down and chew on all the gristle and edit and rewrite until it's all shiny, and Kirk would be the one to slap it into shape (an outline? What's an outline?) and keep it moving forward and and to drive us up to and over the finish line. (While I wail noooooo!) The only thing is, pace Charlie Ewers' comment on Saturday, it would not be good if Kirk and I ended up killing each other!

Mike

*Just as an aside, according to The Gotti Wars by John Gleeson, in the old Cosa Nostra, introducing a guy as "my friend" meant he was just a schmoe, but if he was introduced as "our friend" it signaled that he was a made man and couldn't be messed with.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

kirk: "It's wonderful that good friends can disagree so much and yet really enjoy the process of it all. I'm too reactive by far but I can't tell you how much I appreciate MJ's patience with me. It's comforting. And the fact that he's produced wonderful writing for me to savor (and sometimes disagree with) over coffee each morning makes me happy day by day (bird by bird?). Thanks to JH's comment I now get it. There is no right or wrong on the subject of writing. I need to stop believing that there is. Maybe that's the secret to enjoying both process and closure. Thanks Mike!"

Andreas Weber: "I'm leaning far to the process side as well (and a mechanical engineer with quite a lot of projects under my belt...). I may have found the ideal hobby in growing bonsai—they're never finished (unless you manage to kill one)."

Aaron: "You and Kirk would not end up killing each other. Rather, he would accomplish killing you because you would never get past chewing on how and whether to actually do it. Process can get you killed.  :-)  "

John Krumm: "Wonderful and slightly heartbreaking story. I almost succeeded in breaking up with my future wife when we were 21, telling her I wanted to end it after a summer romance. I returned to college 100 miles away, thinking I might get back together with a former girlfriend (shameful, I know). Fortunately, the former girlfriend had transferred, and intense loneliness, a phone call, and a bus ticket intervened, and we are still happily together. I chalk it up to dumb luck more than anything else. Sometimes the process works."

Project People and Process People

Reader JH wrote this as a comment yesterday. Thanks to him for permission to make it into its own post. —Ed.

Guest post by JH

According to a fellow I worked with back in the early '70s at a high tech company, there are two types of people that work at companies, project people and process people. Project people want to complete whatever they are doing and move on to the next project. Process people enjoy doing the work and often hate to see a project finished. Project people work toward meeting a goal. These types of people work in all fields, but those who become engineers or accountants tend to be more process people. For accountants, it's easy to understand. I've employed many engineers and often had to pry projects out of their hands to get a product to market.

It's like that with writing books. A project person will define the book well enough that they work to the goal of creating a finished work, starting with a table of contents and writing it in sections that allow putting together a finished work. Doing even a short book takes many hours, thousands in some cases if research is needed, so it's easy to see how a process person gets entangled in the work and has trouble finishing the project.

I'm a project person and doing books for me is easy. I've written 10 textbooks and one business/humor book over the last 25 years. Almost all came together from assembling short articles or web pages I had already written, with perhaps 10% requiring research, so they are more editing that writing. I had plenty to pull from; over that same time frame I have written over 1,000 technical web pages (created after I found what a mess trying to publish on Wikipedia was), more than 300 monthly newsletters, and over 400 technical articles. A few product catalogs and instruction manuals too.

What I learned early on was that I was not a fiction writer. I have a folder of ideas for science fiction stories or books, but I never liked what I wrote—too much like my technical writing.

My business book was droll humor about the tech industry—a put-down of tech—but it was too early, and no publisher would touch it. Self published, I think I gave away more copies than were sold. Maybe it's time to add a chapter about Silicon Valley Bank and reissue it.

The idea has been brought up that you, Mike, could do what I do, gather articles into books. The missing element is market—who or what is the market? Is it self-help for photographers? Critique of selected photographs? Ideas, anyone?

For books, the Internet has changed how people get information and it has become harder to get sufficient revenue from books to make them worth the effort. In my case I have an organization sponsor and a captive audience; the textbooks are tied to training and certification and generate good revenue for the organization.

I'm generally reluctant to offer advice, but I would say keep doing what you do now. Be honest with yourself about what you do well and focus on it. Trying to be what you ain't ain't no fun!

—JH

So, speaking primarily of working at photography, would you say you're a process person or a project person? Is that a useful conceptual framing for understanding how you work? —Mike the Ed.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Nicholas Hartmann: "A favorite quote from I don’t remember where or whom: 'There comes a time in every project when you must shoot the engineers and go into production.' I also found during my service in volunteer association leadership that the best way to get a project done was to give it to a freelancer, whose ingrained way of making a living is to complete a job, send the invoice, and go on to the next job. The best way to kill a project, conversely, was to give it to an academic, whose survival reflex is to string out projects as long as possible and study every aspect of a problem in order get more funding, add to his/her bibliography, and achieve higher staus in the cutthroat university hierarchy. (A Texan friend of mine once defined your 'project' mentality as 'git 'er done' [past tense: 'got 'er did'].)"

Adam Isler: "My own experience in business of the last 40 or so years, the last 20 in software, is that the process/project orientation is a useful distinction to draw, given, however, that we recognise it as representing a spectrum rather than a purely binary distinction. Most people will probably orient more to one pole than the other but few will do so absolutely."

Kirk (partial comment): "JH's comment, and defining of the way people work, is brilliant. Project versus process. I wrote five 40,000+ word books and did all the illustrations for them in the space of three years for Amherst Media. None of the books took me more than four months from receipt of contract to completion. I have to be the most project driven person I know because I did all of the books while maintaining a full time schedule within my commercial photography business. And I rarely missed a daily swim practice. Nicholas's realization that the best way to get a project done is to hand it to a freelancer is so true. We live to get stuff done successfully and then move on quickly. No question. Time is money."

Charlie Ewers: "The division into project and process folks certainly rings true in my experience. I'm very much a project person, although I'm an academic, but my co-author (also an academic) on a recent book is so much a process person that we almost came to blows before we got the final version to the publisher. There was always one more thing he wanted to work into a chapter, one more photo he wanted me to get, one more edit on material that had already been edited to death. We got it done and we're both proud of it, but it's truly a wonder that we're still friends."

Unexpected Epiphany (Followup)

I apologize for yesterday's post—it was a complaint, and thus annoying to some, and it was too personal—I try to make these posts personable but not personal, always trying to remain aware of how others will relate to them. You have to understand, though: on most days I sit down in the morning with no idea what I'm going to write about, and two or three hours later hit the "Publish" button. (Then, if I like the piece, I'll tinker and toil over little changes throughout the day.) Yesterday I hadn't even mulled it over the evening before, which I sometimes do, because I had planned to republish that "Self and Other" piece about Diane Arbus, not realizing that I'd already done so a few years ago. As my father used to say about his attempts to learn to cook French omelettes the old-fashioned way, "sometimes you get an omelette, sometimes you get a mess of eggs." Yesterday it was the latter, that's all.

However, it did result in a rather surprising epiphany! Last night I abruptly decided that I should stop trying to write books—give up, leave the idea behind.

In my life I have written school papers, essays, letters, a dribble of poetry, short stories, many magazine articles (like 250 all told), forum posts, and blog posts (more than 10,000). All of it short-form writing. That's what I do. That's who I am. As David Vestal often used to say and write: "So, okay."

The longest ever
In the midst of the release of the Harry Potter books, I sent a 50-page draft of the beginning of a novel for adolescents to Scholastic, the publisher of those books in the U.S. I got a rejection slip with a handwritten note on it that said, "This almost made it for us—please keep us apprised of your future projects." I have been wracking my brain, but I believe that that was the longest thing I've ever written that anybody else ever read (assuming they read the whole thing, which I guess is not something I know). On the other end, I took a class at Reed for which we were supposed to write one-page papers. It was maddening—the professor used to pepper the margins of my papers with compliments and praise, and then give me B's and C's. Some sort of didactic strategy, I suppose. It made me contumacious. But I do recall one of his scribbled reactions: "How do you manage to say so much in ONE PAGE?!?" [sic.]

Anyway, I have reached a decision. It's the opposite of what I counseled yesterday—and I will have more to say about persistence vs. quitting in photography tomorrow (or rather Sunday, as I reserve Saturdays to not do housework). No more effort wasted on books, no more daydreams of being an author, no more thinking diverted from short-form pieces. To quote my very early childhood idol, Popeye, I yam what I yam.

And now, I am very late for my exercise class.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

robert e: "My takeaway from all this is that the essential skill is, in the words of Kenny Rogers, '...to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em / Know when to walk away and know when to run.' Perhaps the next lines are also instructive: 'You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table / There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealing's done.' I've tried to read A La Recherche du Temps Perdu at least four times. I suppose that time is lost forever."

T. Edwards: "For what it's worth, I liked yesterday's post and didn't even really notice the 'complaint' portion until I went back and re-read. I loved the Malcolm piece to which you linked and that's what I remembered."

Dave (partial comment): " I hope that this decision, this revelation to give up the long-format, would be a level of freedom for you, a breath of fresh air, if you will...I, for one, applaud your decision to give up and carry on without that burden.... Bravo."

Ben: "I think that learning how to finish things is really important. I'll share a little story....

"My daughter, previously featured on TOP [top picture —Ed.], received an iPad for her ninth birthday, in early 2020. Round about April of that year there were a few things happening in the world, so she decided to start writing a book. She had started several before, but never finished them, so I told her I'd read it when she was done. So every day she sat under a blanket and tapped away with two fingers on glass. Sometime in late June or early July she shared the document with me, all 40,000 words of it. And then she revised it; I went over it with her; she revised it again; her mother proofread it, etc....until late 2021, when I realized that she could just keep revising it every six months, and every six months she'd be a little more sophisticated, have a little better vocabulary, and that this process could go on forever.

"She and I discussed; she decided to commit to her final revision, and we self-published it through print-on-demand. She spent a lot of time on it, and I really feel that finishing a long-term project, and then letting it go, is a skill that I didn't learn until much later in life...and then only in certain things. Not sure if it's all right to post a link to it, but if that's OK, Mike, here it is. She's now revising the sequel, and I'm just a proud dad  :-)  . It's different, I think, to create and then let go of a large, bounded project, than it is to build one over time out of smaller pieces. It's harder to let go of the former, to finally call it finished. But the latter is no less real, no less valuable, and something like this blog, the consistency of creation over time, is a real accomplishment. Something like what William Matthews wrote about Mingus, 'as the work of the body becomes a body of work.' (Apologies if I'm not recalling the quote correctly)."

Another Mike: "Mike, your parents and my parents must have gone to the same parenting school. The very sad fact is that no one gets out of a situation like that without serious damage. When the people who are supposed to love you the best are the ones who are sabotaging you and ripping your very sense of self to absolute shreds, it sets up your life to be an endless struggle. People who have had good supportive and loving parents have no idea and seem very glib about what we go through. Just do this, or just be that, they say. Sure, for you maybe. People brimming with solid self confidence who have known success and satisfaction their whole lives cannot relate to other realities so easily. Just know, you're not alone. There are a lot of us out here, and we see you, we get you, and we appreciate the struggle you so openly write about. Thank you for being honest. Mike."

Ed Hawco: "For what it’s worth, letting sh*t go is how The Buddha found enlightenment."

John Camp: "I don’t know why I’m writing this, since Kirk Tuck answered you well enough. Maybe because it’s snowing and I don’t want to take the dogs out.

"You (Mike) get up most days and write a column for this blog. That’s how a novel gets done. You have a time when you write, and that’s what you do. Doesn’t have to be too long. A couple of hours a day will do it. If you write 500–1,000 words a day, you’ll have a bestseller length novel (100,000–110,000 words) in half a year, more or less.

"If I sat in a chair and looked at the back of a Stephen King novel and thought 'My God, I have to write a *&#* brick like that,' I’d never get it done. So I don’t do that. Stephen King doesn’t either. So, I write 500–1,000 words a day, just like you do. And that’s what King does and Kirk does, too—and that’s why Kirk has a penthouse at the top of the Tuck Tower in Austin. You don’t have to be inspired, you don’t have to think deep thoughts, you don’t have to be overly bright, you don’t necessarily know what you’re going to write that day. You just have to work.

"Probably the best inspiration for me was negative: my folks were nice people, but didn’t have money, so if I needed some, as a teenager, I pretty much had to get myself. I started by doing fieldwork during the Iowa summers, detasseling corn and bailing hay, and the inspiration was simple: 'I don’t want to do this sh*t anymore.' I sold men’s clothes in a department store, and drilled holes in knobs in a radio factory, carried mail, and was an Army draftee, and it was all 'I don’t want to do this sh*t anymore.'

"I worked for newspapers, and it took a while—better than twenty years—and again, it was 'I don’t want to do this sh*t anymore.'

"Is it possible that you’re at that point? If not, then maybe you can continue to do the same ol’ sh*t.

"What kind of befuddles me is that I could take the columns you’ve written since you’ve run this blog, print them all out, get some scissors, cut and paste, and come up with the structure of a pretty good book on photography. The rest would be editing. Basically, carpentry.

"Couple hours a day."

Simon: "Like a significant number of commenters above, I cannot object to Thursday's post (a self-described 'complaint') but welcome it. Some (probably many) of your readers will take more from such a piece than you probably realise. Also, without it there would be no 'epiphany' post the following day. We are all shaped by our experiences, especially those in childhood, and many of us are unaware—at best only partially aware—of just how it has made us into the people we are today. Some things are good, some are not so good. But they are what they are and I think the value is in recognising or acknowledging them as much as we are able. As a parent I try not to make some of the mistakes my well-meaning parents made but I'm conscious that I will surely repeat some of them...and add some more of my own.

"I'm looking forward to seeing more photographs and your accompanying observations. My own ventures with my OM2n and 40mm ƒ/2 are frustratingly infrequent and irregular, but the process is still enjoyable. I am finding I now think more about the sense of place and composition as a result of viewing the recent images created with your Sigma fp."

The Creating Game

Well, rats. I had an old article about Diane Arbus all teed up and ready to go this morning, which would have given me a free morning for writing, but I see that I already republished it—in June of 2019 when I had my partial cornea replacement operation. In fact, I republished all of the old "T.O.P. Ten" articles I wrote back in the 'aughts, under the freshened rubric "Ten Iconic Photographs." Here's the one about Arbus; if you're interested, you can go from there either forward or backward and see the others.

Those articles are getting pretty dusty now. Can't rest on past laurels forever. You're only as good as your latest sh*t, as a friend of mine used to say. Otherwise you're Brooks Koepka, the golfer who was on top of the world in 2018 but hasn't done or won  anything lately. (Sport is brutal that way, by the bye.)

Shoulda, woulda, coulda...what I should have done is write another one of those articles—articles discussing specific individual photographs, I mean—every so often, and just kept plugging away. I had a strategy; I had a start. Those ten articles were the start. If I had started in 2006 and written just one more of those articles every two months or so, by now I'd have 112 of them in the can and I could have tried to market it as a book. I can't remember if I ever meant to do that. The idea still seems gauzy and vague to me, somehow. I'm never clear in my head.

John Camp is a reader of this blog. He's better known as John Sandford, the writer of 54 bestselling thrillers (like the number of my Mennonite friend Alvin's grandchildren, the number keeps growing. Alvin has about as many grandchildren as John has novels. I can't believe either one could name them all!). Here's a nice bio of John. I asked John years ago how to get a book published, and in the same email proceeded to provide my own answer, in the form of several long, tortured, idea-laden paragraphs about concepts and psychology and strategies and so forth. His reply was crisp and quick. I can't find it, so I can't quote it, but essentially he said: Nope. Just finish it. My observation has been that when writers finish things, good things happen. I replied that it can't be that simple and he said it is that simple. I'm paraphrasing.

How many books have I finished since then? None. How many books have I started in my life? The number must be in the low tens of thousands by now (I exaggerate, though not by much, *rimshot*). How many of them did I finish? None. Is it my aim to die with the most started-but-unfinished books of anybody? It appears so. I am in the running to win the prize for that. Well, except that I have lost most of those beginnings. Me and writing books is like that pop definition of crazy: doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.

[UPDATE Thursday evening: I'm just being funny, or trying to. I'm not actually all upset over this. Don't worry. I'm a writer of short pieces. I know that. I'm not trying to bring anybody down.... —Mike]

Did you know that Janet Malcolm, a sometimes photography critic who died in 2021 and who has a new posthumous book out called Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory, once wrote an article called "Forty-One False Starts"? It's about the artist David Salle, and consists of 41 attempts to begin an article about David Salle. The really funny thing about it, of course, and the thing that twists up my brain like a rag you're trying to get water out of, is that she finished it, and it was published, and it became famous even.

The older I get and the further I go, the more value I give to two things which historically I have not had: energy, and the ability to follow through. That is, to finish. I would probably place those two virtues at no. 2 and no. 3 on the list of attributes you need for success in the arts, and maybe in everything. I wonder how many parents start out with the intention of teaching their children the habit of "finishing everything they start"? Is it just a habit, one that should be started early? Or a gift, provided more by character than by training? My parents were forever telling me that I couldn't do things. If I tried something—anything—my mother would explain to me that what I was trying to do was too hard for me, and that the people who did that thing (whatever it was) were serious people who worked very hard, the implication being that I was not a serious person and would not work hard. Was she trying to protect me from disappointment? I never did figure out what was behind her impulse to throw cold water on everything. When my father found out I wanted to be a writer, he actually made an appointment with me to discuss the matter. We sat down alone together on the veranda of a rented house in Georgetown, D.C., at a scheduled time. He framed it that we were going to "debate" the issue, with me taking the "pro" side and him taking the "con" side, each arguing vigorously for our assigned positions. He prepared; I did not. It ended up being a spirited two-hour harangue, mostly one-sided, covering every conceivable reason why a.) a writer was a silly, foolish, disreputable, impractical thing to want to be, and b.) all the reasons why I, in particular, could not be one if I tried. I'm not kidding; that actually happened. He was a very persuasive man, my father. According to him, he convinced the Harvard Business School to accept him into the Masters in Business Administration program even though he had a 1.9 GPA from a little-known Midwestern liberal arts college; he claimed his was the lowest GPA of any student the Business School had ever accepted, although I would question how he knew such a thing. Later, he talked his way into becoming a Director of NASA* even though he was (again, according to him) the first NASA Director ever who was not a scientist. He ended up "our little talk" very pleased with himself, convinced that he had run roughshod all over the campfire I was trying to kindle and stomped out every spark and ember. When I read in a biography of Picasso that Picasso's father gave up painting on his son's sixteenth birthday, giving him his paints and proclaiming that, "from now on, Pablo is the painter in the family" (I hope I'm remembering that correctly), I could only marvel at it. Thus the no. 1 thing you need for success: self-belief, wherever and however you get it. (Funniest cartoon I have seen recently: a group of art students clustered around a computer. One says—I'm paraphrasing again: "AI started out strong, but then it got self-aware and now all it does is question itself and procrastinate.")

I'd like you to consider this for yourself, but I'd also like to recommend that you advise any younger photographers to adopt this habit, consciously and deliberately: resolve to finish anything you start. Right out of the gate, the mere idea of finishing confers a huge benefit: it forces you to set the terms of your own success. You can't very well finish anything if you don't know what "finishing" means. So there's that: to finish, you have to first define what it's going to mean to be finished. That provides a whole lot of clarity right there.

There's an even bigger advantage, however: namely, that you're also forced to understand what "it" is. What exactly is the project? Look through the work again. What part of it is most vigorous, most alive? What piques your ambition or satisfies your eye? If you've worked enough so that you have a start, then the answer is in there. The project doesn't have to have a "public" definition, rendered in artspeak all gleaming and pretty. It's between you and you, so the way you understand it can be crude and coarse if you want: I want to make black-and-white digital pictures of heavily lined faces. I want to work with models. I want to photograph exquisitely arranged collections of random found objects. Whatever it is. To finish something, you naturally have to first be clear about what that something is.

Once you understand what it is you're doing and how it's going to come to an end, you can throw yourself into the work and work steadily toward the goal. Those are two things you cannot do if you are just gadding about amusing yourself any old which way. And when that goal is met, you are free, free move on, with a clear head, and a clear heart, and a feeling of accomplishment, to something else, something new.

And that is how to put one foot in front of the other, I think, in this creating game.

Mike

*The head guy is called the Administrator; there are, or were, six Directors under the Administrator. My father was Director of Space Applications in Jerry Ford's Administration, and was (again, according to him) the highest-level Ford appointee allowed to stay on into the Carter Administration. That is, until he pissed off Carter's Chief of Staff. But that's another story.

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David Dyer-Bennet: "Modern rich people say 'fail faster.' That's kind of the opposite of 'finish everything you start'; they're saying be ready to abandon your baggage and move on when it's time to stop burning good money after bad. I strongly suspect different people need different mottoes to live by, because they have different characteristic failure modes. Certainly the importance of hard work is either ignored, or approached very badly, by parents throughout my lifetime (not my own particularly, I hasten to add; not actually sure where I acquired my semi-decent ability to persevere, but I had it by 8th grade at least). Inarguably, successful people, especially in the arts, are people who have finished a lot of things. I strongly suspect (and I've been in conversations with a lot of successful writers in particular) that nearly all of them have chosen not to finish some things and are good with that choice decades later."

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "As is often the case, and curiously so, this post comes at the exact moment in my life when it intersects perfectly. That has happened to me with many of your posts—to the point where I sometimes actually think you've been following my recent activities!!"

Mike replies: I promise I am not stalking you!  :-)

James: "Have you ever read Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu? A great deal of the plot (to the extent there is one) is driven by Marcel's desire to be a writer, and his parents' desire to protect him from that career path. Marcel succeeds, it turns out."

Mike replies: No, I haven't read that, but I did write a satire once claiming that researchers had proven once and for all that no one, not even one person, has ever read Proust....

kirk: "Mike, I'm serious here (for a change) but for the life of me I don't understand how you can give out advice about finishing stuff if by your own admission it's your own personal kryptonite. If it's something you have no clue about how to do. You have some conjecture but no proof of your suggestions.

"Getting stuff done all seems so straightforward. You don't need a plan or a strategy or a spreadsheet, etc. One just needs to decide they'd like to do something and then sit down every day and do it. At some point it's done. No excuses. As the universe's most famous Jedi Knight (Yoda) once said, 'Do, or do not. There is no try.' The intention to finish should be assumed."

Mike replies: But Kirk, you are blessed with energy, follow-through, and self-belief....

John Krumm: "You finish stuff every day, even if you also don't. I have to counsel my wife on this. People prone to depression tend to not take stock of their successes, or to assign them very little value, while failures are put up on a stage and given a trophy. Your blog is a big success that many, many writers would be envious of. To actually pay bills by writing about photography on the internet, without endless posts about gear, but instead full of insights into all sorts of subjects, that's something to be proud of. Dads can be awful. Mine was a master manipulator. At one point he assigned us chores, and instead of paying us an allowance, he paid us in 'dad time' coupons we could use for fun stuff with him. We didn't want to ever spend it, so it was worthless."

Severian: "At one level, I agree. Perseverance and finishing is a powerful habit and mindset. However, for the opposite perspective, Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) and Annie Duke (author of Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts and Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away and also famous as a poker player) make strong arguments that most people don't quit soon enough or often enough on all kinds of things. Check out their discussion on Steven's 'People I Mostly Admire' podcast, episode #93. Years ago, I used to feel bad when I didn't finish reading a book or a magazine article. I don't suffer from that delusion any longer, and I wish I had learned to 'quit' a lot sooner."

Albert Smith: "Sometimes finishing can be overwhelming simply based on the 'end item' being so far from the initial move to get there. So rather than being so obsessed with that end item, break up the project into doable steps, and then do each of those steps. You will get multiple dopamine releases and will eventually finish what you started. Could you imagine how hard it would have been to fulfill Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the moon within the decade if they didn't do the incremental steps of Mercury, Gemini and the development of the lunar module as stand alone goals? They were all moving to the final task, but were doable in their specific focus. If the task of 'get to the moon within the decade' was tried as a single event, they'd still be at a drawing board wondering how they could finish."

darlene: "Making a habit of setting and managing realistic expectations works too. I am not a writer per se, but I have had to write a lot during my professional educator career. And in the beginning, it felt a bit mechanical to me, but not so much any more after years of doing it. When I write, just as in photography, I know what I want to say; if I do not, I wait until I do. That is where expectations come into play. Aimlessly pointing a camera would waste my time and energy, as luck has never been on my side. I see that as setting myself up for disappointment. I alone have to care for myself, physically and mentally. I take full responsibility for my place in life, regardless of what my parents did, and they were both neglectful parents. But I forgave them the moment their selfishness overtook the right thing to do because you forgive others for yourself. Not everyone gets that, but that is my story, and it works for me. I made my living with a camera, so I had to be motivated and know what I wanted to say with it. My energy is limitless when motivated, whether in writing, photography, or any other creative endeavor. And I love to be in that energy cycle. It's a high like no other and can have a mind of its own, which can be fascinating as to where it has sometimes led me. It starts with realistic expectations, which is the gift I gave myself a long time ago. One step at a time, and before I know it, I am over the finish line."

Seven Strange Facts About Diane Arbus

—>She grew up—echoing the upbringing of Siddhartha Gautama, who became The Buddha—in very privileged, wealthy circumstances, largely protected from the outside world and from the suffering and "otherness" of the poor and unfortunate.

—>She had a sexual affair with her older brother, the poet Howard Nemerov, that lasted from childhood up to her death.

—>Although photography is a male-dominated field generally, there have always been women among the greatest of its practitioners. Arbus's two most significant teachers were women—Berenice Abbott, the rescuer of Eugene Atget and a major photographer in her own right, and Lisette Model, who is her most identifiable influence and who encouraged her to quit commercial work and devote herself to her art, which Diane eventually did abruptly and decisively.

—>She craved fame, and in her lifetime felt she never achieved or was rewarded for it. Not a little ironically, she immediately became world famous following her death and has been among the most famous photographers in the medium's history ever since.

—>An unusually talented and original painter, she excited great interest in her talent for painting while still very young, but was unhappy with her ability to realize her vision and definitively turned her back on painting while still in her teens. (Bill Jay: "True, there are photographers who are failed artists, but so are most artists.") Today, only a single one of her paintings—a surreal conceptual portrait of Allan Arbus, whom she met at 14 and married at 18—survives. The painting is owned by Ellen and Richard Sandor, who would be worth a post by themselves.

—>A small inscribed and signed print of "Identical Twins, Roselle, NJ" given by Arbus as a courtesy to the family of Colleen and Cathleen Wade, who were seven at the time she took their portrait, is referred to by the twins' father as "their 401k," because the print, with its sterling provenance, is now worth some undefined but doubtless huge sum of money. The little boy in Central Park with the toy hand grenade was not so lucky.

—>Arbus planned her suicide and seemed to desire it as if it were a kind of fulfillment. Even when she was young, she apparently felt that there was some sort of mysterious spiritual culmination in death. It brings to mind a quote attributed to Carl Jung: "Don't rush to help those who haven't asked you to, because not everyone who is drowning needs a hand; some want to drown." Her obituary did not appear in the New York Times until 2018, as part of the newspaper's "Overlooked" series.

Mike

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Diane Arbus Centennial

Diane Arbus by Allan Arbus

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Diane Arbus, one of the most popular art photographers in history.

Her 1972 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art is to this day the most popular such exhibition ever at that museum. Her monograph is one of the medium's all-time best sellers. Since it appeared in 1972 it has never been out of print.

(The picture above was taken in 1949 as a film test by her husband Allan Arbus, who later played the part of Dr. Sidney Freedman on the 1970s television show "M*A*S*H.")

There are many books about her, including biographies by Patricia Bosworth (1984) and Arthur Lubow (2016).

Diane Arbus (by the way, the name is pronounced "dee-ANN") died by suicide on July 26, 1971, at the age of 48.

Mike
(Thanks to Anton Wilhelm Stolzing)

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Kenneth Tanaka: "Diane Arbus's work leaves few on the fence; you're either strangely attracted to it or you find it repulsive and exploitative. And that, plus a rich and brief personal history, is precisely what's helped to keep her work in the public eye for so long. Arbus's 1972 retrospective show at MoMA was indeed extremely popular. (Although I think that Steichen's 'Family of Man' might have been the most popular show, at least worldwide, with over 9 million visitors. [Diane's was the most popular single-artist retrospective.—Ed.]) But many of those who I know attended recall it as more of an attraction to the bizarre rather than to the art, per se. Last fall (2022) David Zwirner and Jeffrey Fraenkel, two of the most influential art/photo dealers in the world and representatives of Arbus's works, staged a re-creation of Arbus's 1972 MoMA retrospective. Quite a rare recreation of a photo show."

More Questions and Answers

[Continued from the previous post.... This is complete now, or as complete as it's going to get. Thanks to everyone for all the questions!   —Mike]

Kye Wood: "WOW! What an engaged and thought provoking comments section—especially featured comments. Mike, you clearly have some very high-IQ creative people following your blog."

Mike replies: Kye's comment isn't a question, but man, do I agree. It's what keeps me coming back.

Beau Camel: "This might sound like a silly question, but it has been nagging at me for the many years in which I have been interested in photography: what makes a photograph 'good'? What is it about certain photographs that people who see them will say, 'that's really interesting' or 'that's really good.' Are there certain characteristics a photograph must have to meet that standard? Surprise? Beauty (whatever that is)? Singularity? Timing, either for the subject or for the viewing? Appealing composition? A combination of things? I don't think it's necessarily 'in the eye of the beholder' because there seems to be a consensus around examples generally deemed 'good' or 'great.'"

Mike replies: Pretty early on in my career I wrote a long article on just this topic, one I put a lot of thought, time, and effort into, but I'm really not sure how I would go about finding it now. I think I would find that my views have changed or evolved on the topic now. Still, it would be a good place to start. I'll make an effort to see if I can find it and post it here.

Doug Anderson: "When we travel we usually stay at a Hampton Inn, a part of the Hilton chain. A consistent element of the decorating scheme is black-and-white photographs, and they fascinate me. They are of a variety of subjects and in a variety of sizes but all of them are square format. And they were all clearly taken with that format in mind. I can not mentally crop any of them without spoiling the composition.

"Over the years my own photography has switched back and forth between 1:1 square format and 3:2 full frame 35mm format. And this is reflected in the assortment of my photographs hanging on our walls. I like the photographs individually but I have never liked the appearance of the mixed format groups. Do you think this is just a personal problem, or is there a more general issue with mixing the formats of photographs in groups (or books for that matter)?"

Rob Griffin: "What are your thoughts about print proportions? Do you feel photographic prints need to stick to standard aspect ratios such as 4x5, 2x3, 5x7, 1x1, or even 16x9? Do you have any feelings, good or bad, about square photographs?"

Mike replies: The three topics that seem to have emerged as loci of interest in this "thread" are format/proportion (i.e., aspect ratio), street photography, and museum/gallery shows and other ways of looking at original photography. I'll try to keep these in mind.

For me personally, I think either consistency or "consistent dissonance" in aspect ratio are important, because it's not something you want to call attention to in displaying work—it can be a distraction, like a written piece with a lot of distracting typos or magazine design that tries too hard to be edgy. Part of creativity is calling attention to what deserves attention and not distracting people with what doesn't.

With my Sigma fp-Monochrome, I have it set to 4:3, but of course it still records 3:2, and I find that there are a few shots that just work better at 3:2. Here's a shot that I shoehorned into 4:3 when the subject really demands a little more air (especially on the left); here's a shot that just worked better at 3:2 and so I presented it that way.

This is one of several reasons why I used to like to print 35mm to the blackline—because it made all the work consistent across multiple pictures (and it forced me to compose in-camera rather than after the fact, which improves your seeing). But this is the kind of nuts-and-bolts problem that you work on in art school.

As for square photographs, I think they're a little harder to compose consistently, because the aspect ratio is inherently less dynamic. But some people are good at it (Fay Godwin and Mary Ellen Mark come to mind), and no, I don't have anything against square pictures. In my past life as an editor I presented pictures that were square and presented as diamond-shaped, that is, as if tipped up to balance on one corner, and Sam Wang's circular pictures which I thought were beautiful. Linda Connor did some Asian landscapes that mimicked antique scrolls in being long, skinny verticals, and they worked nicely. Any format can work if the artist is good enough at making it work.

Not THAT Ross Cameron: "Q for Mike. To raise something that was touched on a while back, are you using colour, ND or polariser filters with your B&W digital photography? And why, regardless? Thanks in advance.

Mike replies: I'm using a dark yellow filter outdoors with the Sigma fp-Monochrome. I'm not sure it makes much difference—certainly not as much as filters make with B&W film—but I'm striving for a certain tonal range and I think it helps me to get there, at least a little bit. I haven't noticed much difference at all in artificial light, and I can use the extra sensitivity in low light, so I sometimes remove the filter shooting indoors or in low light. I presume and hope that clarity on this issue will be one of the things that will shake out as I do more work with my camera and get more familiar with its workflow.

Jeff: "Speaking of Leicas, do you still plan to assess the M Monochrom that was loaned?"

Mike replies: The owner is being remarkably patient with me, which I appreciate on top of his generosity. I've been a little scared of trying it because I fear demoralizing myself if it turns out to have an edge over the Sigma fp-M. But yes, I will get around to trying it and writing about it when spring springs up.

Terry Burnes: "I do think Kirk's questions about galleries (and perhaps museums) is a good one. I feel I've learned a lot by viewing the work of others. Where can I go to see reliably good photography? Or where can I get information about where it is on display? I've figured out a few spots. We go to Tucson every year and always visit the Center for Creative Photography at the U of A. And also the Etherton Gallery. When in Yosemite, always the Ansel Adams Gallery. The Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. Perhaps an occasional feature of TOP could be you and readers letting everyone who visits TOP know about worthwhile gallery and museum exhibitions of photography. For instance, there is an Ansel Adams exhibit coming up at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, April into July, that seems to take a somewhat different approach."

Mike replies: This has been a recurrent idea over many years, but it's far beyond my resources. I don't even get to all the shows at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, the major museum closest to me. If I won the lottery, however, I'd immediately do two very quirky things with the money: 1. build and staff a vast greenhouse so I could eat super-fresh fruits and veggies year-round, and 2. travel around the country and perhaps the world going to museum shows (art and photography both). One of my mother's friends did that with opera—her golden-years boyfriend is also passionate about opera, and the two of them travel the world going to operas.

So, the answer for your question is: as soon as I win the lottery, TOP will provide a comprehensive list of photography venues around the world, information about all the shows on offer at those places, and exhibition reviews, some of which will be written by me. So as soon as that happens....

Kenneth Tanaka replies to Terry (partial comment): "One of the best sources of very current news of photography exhibitions, collections, and curation moves is Photograph Magazine. It features an informative newsletter emailed weekly with lots of doin’s."

Terry replies: "Thank you so much to Kenneth Tanaka for the tip about Photograph Magazine. Just what I was looking for. I'll be checking this in advance of travel to see what photography exhibitions we might take in along the way. And it is clear that in the areas of the West we visit most, S.F., L.A., Tucson and New Mexico have lots of opportunities to see photography. I was just in and missed a lot!"

Robert Roaldi: "Why are photos of ordinary objects or places in our environment more interesting in photographs than in real life?"

Mike replies: That's a very deep question. The very short answer is that I think it releases an impression of the object into the "free world" of timelessness as discussed by Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory.

Jon Erickson: "As a writer and a photographer, are there similarities in how you compose a written work and how you compose a picture?"

Mike replies: The thought has never occurred to me and I think not, although I have always liked words coupled with pictures—anything from John Szarkowski's mini-essays in Looking at Photographs to the captions I like to write to go with pictures on Flickr.

Mike Peters: "Hi Mike, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the difference between taking photographs of a variety of subjects, and creating a body of work over one's lifetime that hangs together both visually and thematically by making photographs with intention. Also, the idea of photographs being original in this time of photography ubiquity seems like an idea whose time has past. It seems to me that making photographs that are authentic to who one knows themself to be is much more important these days. And of course, over a lifetime, that knowledge will evolve and change. What are your thoughts on these subjects, or are they completely intertwined?"

Mike replies: Well, it would take an awful lot to truly unpack all that. I could argue that my three years of college-level art school only partially answered those questions (and of course didn't take into account possible recent changes).

Bearing in mind that I don't know much about how photography is taught in art schools now—assuming there is any general commonality at all between them—I'd suggest that it might be most productive to think in terms of the traditional "body of work." As I understand it, a body of work might be anything from a brief albeit possibly intense project to a lifetime spent doing work that is virtually all thematically, technically, and/or visually related. An example of the first might be a photojournalist on a specific assignment overseas, to a fashion photographer reinventing herself by working out a distinctive style, to a hobbyist working on a Blurb book about the vanishing post-and-beam barns of Pennsylvania; examples of the latter might be the work of Edward Weston, say, or Michael Kenna. Thinking in terms of bodies of work can give us the benefits of both discipline and direction on the one hand, and freedom on the other.

As for whether the idea of originality is no longer meaningful, I don't think that will ever truly be the case. It might be that photography itself will not follow, in the future, the conceptual patterns that we developed for it in its first hundred and sixty years, but in any expressive medium, people will find ways to express themselves.  

David Aiken: "I noticed that there were a lot of comments which mentioned street photography so I did a count. Twenty-four comments so far and five mentions of street photography. Those responses asked questions about your thoughts on street photography, whether YouTuber street photographers using film Leica M's with 28mm lenses were foretelling the end of street photography, and composition.

"Your only comment, to Pete Komar, was brief but hinted at some interesting thoughts on what makes a good street photography and why the genre is so easy to work in and so difficult to do well. How about a longer, considered post about street photography including on its beginnings and ongoing artistic development, what makes a good street photography, and where you think it may be heading. Personally I think street photography is alive and well. I think the best work being done today is just as good as the best work done at any time during the history of street photography and I think there's more of it being done than at any earlier time.

"If as you and Alex Webb both say, street photography is 99.9% failure, a view I have no reason to doubt, then given that a lot more street photographs are being taken today than at any other time in the history of street photography there are definitely going to be more great street photographs being taken but we have to work our way through a lot more poor results to find those great results. The standard only seems to be higher in prior decades because it's easier to come across the great photos from those periods than it is to come across the bulk of the poorer ones, time does a great job of culling what we can see. It just hadn't had a chance to press the Delete button for 99.9 % of the photos being taken today but it will eventually get there."

Mike replies: Several people have suggested longer, more thoughtful posts about some of the issues and questions raised over the past few days, and I'm going to keep that in mind.

Bear: "Why don’t you do 'Ask Mike' as a regular feature?"

Mike replies: I could, I guess. Here are a few reasons why not: 1.) it's difficult. Many of the questions aren't simple, they're foundational. They require a lot of thought even just to construct answers that are responsive and not simply dismissive or trivial. 2.) I don't think I know all the answers. 3.) the format doesn't really allow each individual question or topic to "breathe"; it doesn't allow for a focused discussion either by me or by commenters. This thread has been entertaining and interesting (for me anyway), but we didn't really go into depth on anything.

But we will do it again sometime. Thanks again to all!

Mike

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Ask Mike

Got any photography questions? You'll be helping me out.

I can only answer the ones that I know off the top of my head. As I said to a reader once who had an insistent question, if one of us has to go do research, I don't see why it shouldn't be you.

I'm not the one to ask about technical niceties, because my interest, and hence my knowledge, is limited*. (The older I get, the less I think technique matters in photographs. You need what you need, and as long as you're not a professional doing work on assignment, you won't need much. Henri Cartier-Bresson said it took him three days to master his first Leica, and when Peter Turnley made the switch from film to digital he hired an expert to teach him, and they worked intensively for three days, and that was that—done, back to work.) But I'm pretty good with content, process, method, artmaking issues, motivation, direction, aesthetics, accomplishment, and so forth—mostly from the creator side, not from the perspective of the appraising art critic looking on from outside. I've always been on the side of photographers. I guess if you read here much at all you'll be broadly familiar with my strengths and weaknesses**.

I'm asking because I've got an empty tank this morning when it comes to ideas of photography-related things to write about. If you can think of a question you'll be helping me!

Mike

*And getting more so all the time. When he was in his retirement, I asked Rudolph Kingslake to write about optics and lenses for the photo magazine I edited. He had studied under the great Conrady at Imperial College London and was the former Head of the Optical Design Department at Eastman Kodak, the founder of the Institute of Applied Optics at the University of Rochester, and the author of six books on optics and lenses. His response was, "I don't know anything any more." I couldn't understand that then, but now I'm beginning to get it.

**Speaking of weaknesses, Robert Roaldi's joke: "A retired guy decided to get a part-time job for some extra cash. At the interview with the much younger manager, the interviewer asked the old guy what he considered to be his greatest weakness. The old fella said 'My honesty.' Young manager says, 'That's interesting, I never thought honesty could be a weakness.' Old guy said, 'I don't give a damn what you think.'"

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PaulW: "Would you ever consider writing a book on B&W photograhy? I love B&W photography, monochromatic really, but I've never become good at it. I've always felt like I stumble through the process haphazardly, and any success I have leans toward luck more than knowledge or skill. I'm competent with photographic technologies, lighting, composition, and I can even make a good color photo, but B&W really trips me up. With your years of experience I can't imagine you not having some great pearls of wisdom to pass on to others. You've done this in many of your posts here on TOP, but I'd love to see all that great knowledge put into one place."

Mike replies: Film or digital? Or both?

Actually the photography book I'd like to write would be called "Classic 35mm Photography" (or that could be the subtitle), and there would be two parts: one volume of history, how-to, and the technical underpinnings, and the second volume a selection of 60 or 80 pictures (maybe two or three of them mine) with commentary. Now would be a good moment for it, what with the renaissance of interest in old film cameras.

The trouble with books is that they require intensely front-loaded effort. Imagine promising to work for a new employer for a whole year, or two, at which time he will decided if, and how much, he will pay you. And your chances are maybe one in four that you will achieve minimum wage for the effort expended. You can see the problem. A body's gotta eat. People with more energy or more resources can take the risk; as a recovering chronic depressive (it's much better now than in the past, however), my energy has generally been rather on the low side.

William Giokas: "What would be a good travel camera? I could take my Leica and a 35mm lens to keep things simple. But, I would probably miss a zoom lens."

Mike replies: I once asked Ansel Adams what kind of camera he used, and he replied, "the biggest one I can carry!" Which was his standard answer. So the answer to your question comes down to, what's the biggest one you will carry?

My suggestion therefore has three tiers:

Small: IF (big if, get it?) you are only going to look at the pictures on your phone, tablet, or laptop, or post them on social media, a good late-model smartphone. The limitation of course is quality when zoomed in, and quality and maximum print size when printed.

Medium: Your choice of a good small, light Micro 4/3 body with one of the two Panasonic 12–60mm lenses on it. The smaller one is very good; the Leica-branded one is faster and a little better, but heavier. My feeling is that you don't want to be changing lenses on your carry-around camera when photographing is not your #1 priority, and having that extra reach out to 120mm-equivalent will be a crucial benefit of carrying a zoom.

Big: IF you want to make prints, ever, a Fuji X-T5 and you decide on the lens(es). Our friend Dennis Mook posted his thoughts about that paragon of camera brilliance (still my top pick as the most recommendable camera across all brands and models) at The Wandering Lensman. Alternately, for maximum capability and versatility in the smallest package, the OM System OM-1 with the 12–100mm lens as your only lens (a "nested" 20mm pancake is nice to have to make the camera lighter and smaller when you need that, say, when you're going out to dinner or traveling through airports).

Peter Komar: "Part question, mostly requesting your opinion on, so-called street photography and mostly film shooters. My view and opinion is that most of what I see on YouTube is that it’s all mostly very amateurish. Yes there are/were some real artists, the Turnley brothers, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Vivian Maier. My gosh I wish the current street photographers would just buy their books or view the body of great images the above three produced (in the case of the Turnley brothers they are still going strong). Well, I guess this turned into a rant but I would like to hear your opinion on our current situation where anybody shooting film has a YouTube channel and label themselves as a street photographer. Yes there are some good ones out there but mostly the rest are just boring."

Mike replies: Street photography is one of the easiest genres to work in and one of the most difficult to do well. So you just need to remember that most people doing it will just not have much actual aptitude for it, or won't have the time or dedication to do enough of it to yield consistently good results (it's very low yield per hour put in and number of shots taken), or won't have the discrimination and taste to know which of their own pictures are really great and which are average, or mediocre, or that just show them "playing the same old games" (we all have our tricks that we play, some of which become notorious as clichés among the self-appointed critics on the Internet). And there's close to zero market for it, so it's sort of like poetry in small literary and prestigious general-interest magazines: highly competitive but for no real reason.

It's an area in which gatekeepers and shared group experience would be very helpful. And those two things are sorely lacking, if not missing altogether, on the wilds of the Internet. So I'd be inclined to seek out websites dedicated to street photography, or cooperatives, or individual artists who post new work on websites or Instagram.

If the old rule is that 95% of everything is crap, then 99.9% of street photography is crap, but the remaining .1% is still a hell of a big heap of work and it's all out there. You just have to work to find it.

robert e: "How do you figure out what to charge for one of your prints? (Or, for that matter, a digital image?) You may have covered this before, in which case a link would be appreciated, assuming that finding the link doesn't fall under 'research.' ;-) "

Mike replies: Wish I knew. I think before you charge for prints you make a commitment to be the kind of photographer who sells prints. Just charging for a random print now and then is bound to be awkward.

When I was at the Corcoran, we were ostensibly being trained to be art photographers, i.e., doing self-directed creative/expressive work, having shows of framed prints occasionally in which prints were for sale, trying to get into juried shows and the like, trying to get gallery representation, getting published. Very distinct from professional photography, photojournalism, or hobby photography. If you want to know what an art photographer does, just go to the website of a successful one and look at his/her c.v., and you'll see the activities they target.

At that time, we were told that $350 (and this was in the mid-'80s) was acceptable for a student print, but once we graduated we should aim for $750 or so, $650 at minimum. But $650 in 1985 when I graduated from the Corcoran is $1,800 now, and I don't think I've ever gotten that much for one of my prints from that day to this. Of course, I never really played the game, so that probably makes sense.

A few things I think I do know: 1.) the less you charge, the more buyers will complain and push back; 2.) if you charge a lot, your print quality and presentation better be impeccable; and 3.) becoming a salable art photographer takes every bit as much marketing skill, savvy, and effort as being a working professional competing for jobs. Just a different kind is all.

Mike Plews: "How do I get a digital inkjet print that is as beautiful as the ones I used to get from Portriga Rapid back in the day? I can get nice prints from my printer but not that nice. Something is just missing."

Mike replies: Forget digital! How do you get a B&W film negative print on fiber-base gelatin silver paper today that's as beautiful as the ones we used to get from the old Portriga Rapid?!

Bob Keefer: "As a fellow chronic depressive, I'd be interested in your strategies for staying engaged with a photographic project—or with photography generally. I'm not looking for ways to deal with depression; over the years I've learned to keep it under control, mostly, with diet and exercise and the seasonal use of a happy light in the morning. I'm interested in what to do when your photography is in demand—you can get your work shown in a gallery or publication—and yet you're struggling for that next idea, wanting to find something that doesn't feel endlessly repetitive and that isn't boring to create. Travel helps, as does the occasional new lens, but you can sink a lot of money in that kind of diversion without getting much in return. Any ideas for curing photographic ennui?"

Mike replies: Just work. And you work by playing. Go out and do. Do something stupid or silly. Follow your id. Let the work come to you. But get out there with the camera in your hands.

Mark L. Power told me once that when his students complained, he used to sympathize, help them analyze, hold their hands, commiserate, soothe, etc. But finally he realized that they only complained when they weren't working. Go out and look, and look some more. Get the camera in your hands and start messing with it. If nothing works today, just shrug and try something else tomorrow. Shoot till you get one that turns you on and see if you can figure out a way to string another one to that one. Or set some silly goal that takes you places—nineteen pictures of feet in 19 days; ten good pictures that include clock faces; walk up and ask a stranger if you can make a portrait of them until you get 50 rejections. Find the highest point you can get to in five towns and keep going back till something happens. Anything can work. Work is what it takes. Just go work.

Aakin: "What are your thoughts on shooting in JPEG?"

Mike replies: Well, Bruce Fraser's Camera Raw was one of the turning points of photography in digital for me, and I've shot in raw ever since, but the times are very different now. In-camera conversions are excellent now, cameras no longer have problems with white balance, and high-resolution sensors have much better dynamic range. JPEGs from good cameras today are much more correctable in post, too. Raw can be better for some styles of photography, and can offer more flexibility, especially if you've mastered a sophisticated editor like Photoshop or Capture One. But JPEGs look great now, can be simpler to work with, and can streamline your workflow. I'd say go for it, and if it works for you, don't give it another thought.

The thing that will tell you if you need to do something differently are the pictures themselves. If you're getting what you want, then don't change. If you're coming away dissatisfied too often, then do something differently. There are no rote rules.

Kirk: "If you had ample funds, ample time and access to any gear you wanted where in the United States would you like to go explore? What kind of project would you make of it? How would you produce it? Where and how would you show it to an audience? Do you see the possibility for a resurgence of bricks and mortar photogrpahic galleries? If you had to choose between being out photographing your passion or spending the time in the office printing the results of past passions which would you choose? How would you choose? Given we only have so much time in front of us would you consider the idea of legacy (printing, arranging, showing) or rather, embrace the fun of the process of shooting? Which is more important to an artist, having a good and ample social media presence or chasing after publication in a book which might reach several thousand people? Is the black and white print still the gold standard in an age in which people can reach thousands and thousands of viewers using good social media platforms and the skills needed to attract audiences? Do we do ourselves a disservice as artists in constantly mining the past as opposed to embracing the future of our photographic craft? Another travel and value question: What are the 10 best places in the USA to see great photography in gallery environments? Can you speak to their individual attributes? What do you think the impact of images made solely through 'text to image' Artificial Intelligence will have on the market for collectible photography and/or commercial photography? How can we of a certain generation keep up with progress/changes in the art of photography (styles, content, craft) without defaulting to just mining the legends from a time when barriers to entry made defining 'stars' easier? What do you think of the current styles of street photography? It seems so many younger practitioners are copying each other by using film Leica M cameras and 28mm lenses. Snapping semi-candid opportunities and displaying online in the same styles. Is this the death knell of street photography? What would you like to see more of in this genre? Less of? Do photographers retire? Do artists retire? Why is there a resurgence of film based photography right now? Are there cultural trends that would explain this? Why are Americans so 'home centric' in their photographic interests? Should we be more open to international trends and styles instead of endlessly worshipping American documentary and landscape photography from the far past? How often do you get to New York City, Boston, Miami, San Francisco or Santa Fe to visit galleries? Of those galleries you visit which are your favorites? Recommendations for new shows of new photographic works? Given that publishers are disinterested in funding new books by artists, preferring to have artist help with both funding and marketing of books amid the skyrocketing prices for production do you see a time when photo books by any other than proven money makers like Annie Leibovitz just die out and photo books cease to become a venue for up and coming photographers? How will that affect future photo artists? Why do you disregard Leicas with such prejudice? So many of the cameras are so good and can still be had used for affordable prices. I'm curious to know what puts you off besides the 'idea' of price. Have you visited the Humanities Research Center at UT Austin? The Gernsheim Collection of Photograph, the recent acquisition of Elliott Erwitt's work and the Magnum Collection on loan from Michael Dell would seem to make it a top destination for critics, collectors and pundits on the subject. Do you have plans for a visit? Do you need a place to stay?  :-)  "

Mike replies: Wow. I can't top that, Kirk. My general answer, quoting David Vestal's mentor Ralph Steiner, is: "In Spite of Everything, Yes!" (It was the title of one of his books of photographs.)

(P.S. I am not prejudiced against Leicas. I've owned or shot extensively with a number of them over the years. More than I've owned Canons, Minoltas, Hasselblads, or several other brands.)

Open Mike: The Last of the Old Americans

Here's an exercise to try: don't complain at all for a whole week. I learned this from a man who never complained, Loyle Egger. He was a WWII veteran whose father, Fred, served in the armed forces for every minute of both WWI and WWII—not just of the US involvement, but the entire time hostilities were going on, anywhere.

If you complained, Loyle would let you go on for a while and then say, "aw, too bad!" As if to say, stop whining. I always figured it was probably something he heard a lot from Fred.

It's not that Loyle was perfect. He was cheerful, but with an edge—he'd argue with you, and he could be critical, and sometimes he would needle you until you wanted to strangle him. But he almost never complained.

One time he showed up for pool with a big bandage on his forearm. When we asked what happened, he said he was taking a drink to one of his guests, and while he was stepping over the sleeping dog, the dog decided to get up. "And I had to take the fall on my left arm because I was holding the drink in my right. So I hurt my arm. But I didn't spill a drop!"

I said, "Loyle, you're 89. At what age does it start to be prudent to walk around the dog?" He just shrugged and made a dismissive noise. Later, our friend Jerry said to me, "He's never going to walk around the dog. He just thinks he can do everything like he always did. That's the attitude that got him to 89 in the first place."

Sleeping in the garage
Here's my favorite Loyle story. Before he moved to his daughter's house in his dotage, he had some ten acres, give or take, parts of which were grassland, wetland, or woods. A key point to the story is that he had very few near neighbors—and they weren't very near. A large chunk of the land was lawn, and until fairly recently he still mowed his own grass himself with his John Deere. Anyway, one day, after finishing, he backed the John Deere into the garage as usual, but, as he was getting off, he fell backwards. He ended up lying awkwardly on his back on the concrete, jammed between the wall and the mower, with his legs awkwardly tangled up in the tractor. He tried to extricate himself but couldn't. So he lay there for a while. "I thought, well, I can't get up. So, what can I do?" he told me.

He decided the answer was...to scream. So he started screaming for help at the top of his lungs. Within just a few minutes he realized he wasn't going to be able to keep that up for very long, so he revised the plan. He would scream for help every fifteen minutes, in two stages. Scream for a minute or two, pause, then repeat. The idea was that people would hear him the first time, and then, while they were listening more intently, they'd zero in on the second round.

So he kept this up for three or four cycles. At that point there happened to be some workers across the road retrieving a load of yard waste for pretty much the only neighboring house within earshot. They weren't regular workers, weren't normally there, and were only there that day for a short time. But the plan worked: they heard Loyle screaming for help, went in the direction of the noise to investigate, heard the second set of screams, and eventually located Loyle and helped him out of his predicament.

"So everything worked out fine!" Loyle said cheerfully.

"Well, not really!" I retorted.

"What do you mean?"

"What would you have done if those people hadn't just happened to be there at that moment?"

"I guess I would have spent the night in the garage," he admitted. "But I would have been all right. My daughter Marsha calls me in the middle of every morning to check if I'm all right. If she didn't get an answer, she would have come over. Marsha would have found me. I wasn't in any danger."

"But Loyle, you would have had to spend the whole night on your back on the garage floor! It's Fall. It gets cold at night. What about dinner? What if you had to pee?"

"Oh, I would have been all right," he said, then added, in a quiet, rather annoyed tone, "I hope would have slept at least part of the night." You're 89, and you occasionally sleep on your back in the garage trapped behind the lawnmower. No big deal.

A good ending
I have a snapshot of Loyle in extreme old age that I might show you someday. But here's the picture I have of Loyle in my mind. A group of us used to play pool at the Moose Club. One day several years ago, before COVID, it was raining when we were leaving the Moose. I had parked on the far side of the parking lot, and for some reason was just sitting there in the car—maybe I was looking at my phone, or just thinking, I don't know. Anyway, I watched Loyle and his good friend Norm Wilson come out of the Moose. They were both lean but frail—Norm is a retired Xerox executive, as far as I know, a few years Loyle's senior (he's 98 now, despite the fact that he gets pneumonia every winter), and they're both widowers. Both could still get around pretty well at that point, although they might not have beaten the tortoise to the finish line. Well, Loyle was walking Norm to his car, shielding him with his umbrella. Loyle had his hand protectively on Norm's shoulder, and they were walking side by side, two old friends. I don't think they knew I was there. They walked into and out of the perfect composition—the right angle, the right distance, wonderful expressions, the protective gesture, the umbrella, the gray day, one guy protecting the other from the rain. I didn't have my camera with me. But I can see the picture in my mind's eye still. I could reconstruct it pretty precisely with stand-ins. I figure the two of them will be the last of the WWII generation that I know, anyway.

Loyle died last October, and he had a good death. The two of us and our friend Dan played pool just ten days before he died, at the bowling alley, with him ratcheting around the table using his walker, and at lunch he re-told a few of his favorite WWII stories that we had heard many times before. He died after an illness of just a few days, during which he was able to call some old friends, including Norm, to tell them he would never be seeing them again.

In my observation—I saw him every week for the last five years of his life, more or less—Loyle had about a three-year decline, soldiered through his extreme dotage stoically (with much help from Marsha and his granddaughter Becky and other family members, I'm sure), and expired at the end of a very short hospital stay. We should all be so lucky.

And here's the coda to the above: when I told the story of the fall behind the John Deere to his daughter Marsha, on a phone call just this past week, she had never heard it before! He never even told her. It would have been too much like complaining, I suppose. That was Loyle.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Tom Duffy: "The story reminds me of my sainted mother, God rest her soul. At 87 we insisted she use a medical alert pendant. She'd been resistant because of the monthly fee, despite money not being a concern.

"A week later I got a call, in the middle of the night, from the servicing company, saying the pendant had been activated. I drove to her apartment and opened the door for the police who had also been notified. We found my mother lying in the bathtub unable to extricate herself. After we got her back to bed I told her I was glad she had got the pendant. She insisted she didn't need it. 'Mom, you were stuck in the bathtub and couldn't get out.' 'I was perfectly prepared to spend the night in the tub!'

"I guess living through the Depression and World War II gives you some perspective."

darlene: "Your words weave worlds of wonderment, Mike. I feel like I got to know Loyle through your memories and storytelling."

Moose: "'Never explain, never complain!' I explain all too often, I suspect. I very seldom complain. I can't claim the apparent perfection of your late friend, but I'm pretty darn good. One benefit is that, when one eschews complaining, it seems that the number of things worth complaint diminish, rather dramatically."

Richard Nugent: "I am reminded of a story about my mother-in-law, Mary, who immigrated to the US from Ireland as a teenager. A widow in her mid-eighties living alone, she was very self sufficient, if a bit frail. During a visit I suggested that she might want to put a smoke detector in her home. She demurred, objecting that if it went off in the middle of the night it would “scare the b’jesus out of me.” Will our generation ever be as endearing?"

Hurry Hurry

Don't read anything further: go here, and check it out.

Our friend Paula is releasing some more of the many rare treasures from Lodima's storerooms in Pennsylvania. Once these are gone they are gone gone, so don't wait till tomorrow.

Just a hot tip from your friendly neighborhood photobook fan!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Craig: "I bought that whole series back around the time the 14th and final volume was added. Wonderful books! I actually ordered the first 13 (the 14th hadn't been announced yet) along with the Brett Weston books, and Michael Smith actually called me on the phone to ask if I wanted to add the 14th volume. I said yes. I wish he were still with us."

'This Is Genius' (The Motorized Self-Leveling Tripod Has Arrived)

I'm a member of "Generation Jones," born 1954–65. If "the world we expect is the one we're born into," then lots has changed. They say that older people aren't entirely comfortable with new technology, and that might also be what's going on here. But then, a lot of new technology seems gratuitous to me, like we're doing things just because we can.

here's a new product that I could almost not be less interested in: Theta, the self-leveling tripod from Benro. You attach a battery to it, and it levels itself. This is supposed to...what, save time? Will it really make life easier if I now have to manage the charging of batteries for the tripod? That seems like a much worse headache than simply loosening a collar and dropping a leg. I have enough trouble managing the batteries for the camera, not to mention the other multitude of things I have to manage batteries for. I have a battery-charging station in my house! The last thing I need is to transform another sturdy mechanical device that I can control into something that has to "work" and can break. My oldest tripod, that I got when I was 22 (that's been a while), is still out in the garage, considerably the worse for wear, but it still works fine.

On the other hand, my now-ancient rule as a reviewer was: never judge until you try it for yourself. And I haven't tried this for myself. So I'll reserve the right to change my mind, as well as the right to be shown I'm wrong. 

Generally, though, I don't like it when technology tries to serve me like a servant, to make my life more luxurious or pampered—spoil me by doing things for me that I can do perfectly well by myself. I don't need the rearview mirror to dim automatically—I'm actually capable of flipping the little switch to dim it when I want it dimmed. I don't need a "Tire Pressure Management System" (one of the persistent trouble spots on my otherwise pretty reliable car)—a pressure gauge and the air hose at the gas station is a system I never even thought about for many decades. As for cameras, I want cameras to stop doing for me things I previously did perfectly well for myself. Only Leica and Apple seem to try to simplify things without oversimplifying them. I use Apple products and Leica is too rich for my blood, but they're two companies with the right approach. When the spokesman says, "Theta is not only a tripod, but is also a smart console. Theta has three electronic ports which can connect to dedicated modules to expand its functionality." Save me, please.

It doesn't matter if I give a negative reaction. Theta has reached ten times its original $50,000 goal on Kickstarter with 43 days remaining, which means that a lot of people have put their money behind their interest. So clearly my opinion won't affect the project.

By the way—this is an aside—I don't think older people are resistant to new technology. I'm just as capable of getting excited about something that's cutting-edge as anyone else. When my stepfather tried to step away from his longtime position on the Harvard Graduate Admissions Committee, he was told he was still needed because the older committee members were the ones who were willing to take a flier on unconventional candidates, like the 20-year street cop who only had a BA when most of the candidates had a Masters. He told me the younger professors were the ones who tended to be hidebound and rule-bound and constrained to go "by the book," who were more apt to disqualify candidates for missing resumé points. Rather, I think it's just that we've seen it all before—the constant churn of marketing and the ebb and flow of popularity and neomania, the prestige of the new. People to whom it's fresher think it's more momentous than it is. Whereas I've learned such things are not all that important because "this too shall pass." But I was a big fan of carbon fiber from the first and bought a CF tripod as soon as I could swing it.

This has nothing to do with the Theta, of course. Maybe it will take the world by storm and we'll all soon be using self-leveling tripods. If that happens, I'll follow the old rule and try one.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

David Smith: "As I've posted before elsewhere, if I brought another tripod, my wife would kill me with it. This just makes the thing more lethal."

DavidB: "I keep a small level in my camera bag. Simple and effective. I have this model in bright yellow."

David Drake: "O please! People love gadgets. I remember talking with an appliance repair guy when our fridge was on the fritz, and he said to keep our older more basic model as long as we could. The more modern appliances have more electronics which are usually unnecessary. The fancy electronic parts typically cause the problems. What happens when the electronics go wonky and the tripod starts flinging around like a crazed robot? That would be funny to see, unless it was my camera!"

robert e: "Too bad the thing isn't designed to keep my own head on the level. Theta seems squarely aimed (if there's a pun there, it's unintentional) at the solo vlogger—perhaps traveling without a production assistant, and with few camera and tripod skills of their own. Not being a vlogger and having invested way too much time learning a hodgepodge of photo and video skills, I don't feel I'm in a position to judge such a product. But, wow, that tripod seems almost as complicated as a modern DSLR. Maybe they'll get along like birds of a feather."

Jh: "Re 'But then, a lot of new technology seems gratuitous to me, like we're doing things just because we can,' I would modify that slightly: 'But then, a lot of new technology seems gratuitous to me, like we're doing some things just because we can.' As an old person (just turned 77) who has been in technology for a lifetime, and still is actually, I agree that there are plenty of gratuitous uses of technology—but also a lot of very useful ones. You may not like all the new auto tech (tire pressure monitoring systems today are seamless and very useful, early ones were horrible to reset) but modern cars emit less than 0.1% as much pollution as cars from 50 years ago and get twice the mileage. And require tuneups at ~100K miles instead of ~20K. On the downside, the instruction manuals are typically 500+ pages, compared to less than 100 pages then.

"Modern cameras take great photos, cost zip per photo and don't pollute the water like photo chemicals, but can also be overly complex to use if you don't set them up right (or just like to play with all the features.) As someone who has employed plenty of hardware and software engineers, my opinion is that many of the options in products today are simply there because they were easy to add if marketing asked about it—'Well, somebody might want that feature'—not because of demand. Companies tend to focus on their competitors, not their customers, and that leads to having another feature or better spec irrespective of its relevance. Some modern tech is so thoroughly hyped that it's hard to dig out the truth. Electric vehicles are a perfect example. Someone explain to me how a 5,888 pound Mercedes EV costing $125,000 is good for the environment."

Nigel Voak: "I do a lot of architectural photography and this at first glance seems like a wonderful innovation, as getting the camera level with my geared head is always a bit a painstaking task. But on second thoughts it looks like just another bit of electronic gear that might not be precise if the electronic level goes out of tolerance, or a useless innovation, if the tolerance is not too precise. It also relies on the sensor in the camera being perfectly aligned with the base of the camera/ vertical grip. Just too many tolerances, in my opinion. I think I will stick to my 30-year-old Manfrotto tripod, with the junior geared head used with the in camera level. Getting the shot set up is part of the fun."

Bob Rosinsky: "I laughed so hard that I spit out my coffee while reading your commentary on the Theta."

Mike replies: I'm glad. I think I'm at that stage where half my readers think I'm funny, and the other half just think I'm being crotchety.

Terry Letton: "On the other hand, I have a friend who pretty much always produces wonky horizons. Even his paintings have them. I can see a good case for supergluing his camera to one of these tripods."

Open Mike: New Habits

Happy to report that my lifestyle changes are going swimmingly*. My problems are worse than some others have, and not as bad as some others deal with. But they're mine so they're all I can share.

I'm either supposed to do, or trying to do on my own, five things:

• Go back to my plant-food diet, and stop eating sugar;
• Wear compression socks;
• Lose weight;
• Resume using CPAP; and
• Exercise.

The Five Doctors (I seem to keep seeing different people) are more or less agreed that I was having heart problems caused by sleep apnea—my heartbeat had become uncoordinated and irregular and my heart wasn't pumping enough blood, so I wasn't getting enough oxygen. This was causing all sorts of symptoms. I've been back on the CPAP for 31 days and the difference is...astonishing. I've gone from extreme fatigue (four naps in one day being the signal that got me to the doctor) to no naps; from oxygen hunger and shortness of breath to breathing normally; from lethargy to energy; from badly fractured sleep (with an avalanche of nightmares) to almost normal sleep; from confusion to normal mental sharpness (such as it is, yuk-yuk).

I've been off sugar and back on my plant-food diet for a mere eight days, and have been working out for only six days, and I've already lost 9.3 lbs. (.66 stone). (I weigh myself first thing in the morning on an excellent scale.) Who knows if the weight loss is attributable to the return of normal heart function, or the diet and exercise, or the resumption of normal sleep, or all those things?

The exercise is interesting. I rather enjoy it. I just take my tablet and read, and that makes the time fly by. I use some combination of a total of five different cardio machines, alternating sitting with being on my feet. I get my heart rate to between 90 and 100 BPM and keep it there. It isn't hard. I'm going to add workouts with dumbbells sooner or later.

Books, books!
I'm really enjoying Bill Bryson's The Body: A Guide for Occupants. I love love love his guided tours of subjects far from my usual field of interest; I lapped up his lovely book on physics, A Short History of Nearly Everything. The Body is equally entertaining, and bits and pieces of fascinating information fly by. For instance, babies who grow up in houses with cats present almost never get asthma. (I'm on the chapter about the lungs now.) His vivid account of how long it took before we accepted that smoking was linked to lung cancer is very telling. There's certainly a parallel to the obesity epidemic: as Dr. John McDougall says, "People love to hear good news about their bad habits."  

Speaking of which, that's what I'm working on now, habits. I'll let you know how it goes. I'll report back in a month or two. I hope I can do this. (I initially mistyped "can't" for "can"...Freudian slip?)

And speaking of habits—to briefly get back on topic—I'm carrying the camera again. Too many pictures were going by in my daily life. From now on, where I go, the camera goes.

Mike

*Except that I'm having trouble with time management.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Keith Mitchell: "I also enjoy Bryson's writing. Despite being a recently retired registered nurse, The Body left me with a sad sense of my lack of knowledge but simultaneously a sense that more work and research will still facilitate big improvements to our health.

"Glad to hear you are on the right side of your health concerns and hope that your new habits become embedded quickly."

Steven ralser: "If you want to read further about one of the reasons why it took so long to recognize the link between smoking (and second hand smoke)and lung cancer, read Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, by Naomi Oreskes [and Erik M. Conway —Ed.]. See also https://www.merchantsofdoubt.org."

JoeB: "Good to hear the phoenix is rising from the ashes. I have found going to the gym an excellent way to organize my day—I enjoy the routine. I also enjoy the results of my workout. The social aspects of seeing the same folks at the same time of day cannot be discounted. Diet cannot be ignored. What and how much is eaten make all the difference in our life. I should have turned green if the saying 'you are what you eat' is true!"

MikeR: "Yay for you! And aren't those sleep apnea nightmares horrifying?"

Mike replies: They certainly are. I didn't think I was going crazy, but I did think the cause was fundamentally psychological. I didn't realize it was a symptom of sleep apnea.

No New Post Today

There won't be a post today. I know things have been torn up around here lately—unsteady—but I'm going to take the day to work on my book.

Very inconveniently, it's not a book about photography. This probably means it will die in a drawer, as they say. Photography is all anyone ever wanted from me; nobody has ever been interested in anything else I have to say. But I can't help it—I have other stories to tell before I shuffle off to Buffalo. (That's an old euphemism for kicking the bucket, itself a colloquialism. It's ironically symbolic that the actual Buffalo is close by.)

I always wanted to be a writer, and I am, so I can't complain. I made the decision when I was a freshman in high school, and I still remember where I was when it came to me—I was running an errand for a teacher in the middle of the hour, so the hallways of the school were deserted, and as I walked I was mulling over what I was going to do in life. It came down to painter or writer. Everybody knew me as an art geek, but I knew a lot about modern art by that time, how idea-laden it had to be, how obfuscatory the intellectual scaffolding had to be, and I had my doubts I could negotiate it. Halfway down the staircase, by the courtyard at the old South Campus of the University School of Milwaukee, I stopped cold and stood stock still for a while in the silence, thinking. I realized that writing was all I was good at, so I had better aim at that.

The idea was put in my head by an eighth-grade teacher, Worden L. "Sandy" McCallum. We called him Mr. McCallum, of course. He wanted to see me after school one day. I thought I was in trouble again and was going to get yelled at—I was very often in trouble. But usually, I knew what for. So I was mildly curious to find out what I had done wrong this time.

I was enamored of Mr. McCallum. English was my favorite class even with teachers I didn't like, and I liked him. He was different from the other teachers—for one thing, he wasn't a professional educator and I don't think he had been trained. He was a "gentleman teacher" of the sort who used to "pitch in" at old-time independent prep schools like USM—a volunteer, essentially. He only taught one or two courses. He seemed to be independently wealthy as far as I knew, and he had at least a few fine antique cars. I liked cars, so I would always go to the window of our fourth-floor classroom early and look down at the parking lot to see what car he would arrive in. My favorite was an MG, although at this remove I can't remember what model. Mr. McCallum was good-looking in a sort of preppie way and had the imperious air of old "quiet" money and the invisible upper class. I wanted to be like him.

When I got to the classroom—I could find it in that building today, and I can picture it in my mind—he had one of my papers in front of him, and he proceeded to ask me a bunch of questions about it. But he kept complimenting it. He read one sentence and said something like, "how do you do that? How do you know which words to use and how to put them together?" To which I thought, what? I decided he thought I had copied the paper and it wasn't my work.

I remember he had me read aloud a sentence with a semicolon in it. "That's right," he said, after I spoke it. "How do you know what a semicolon sounds like?"

"...Dickens?" I answered. I didn't know.

It might have been Mrs. Memmel, my fifth-grade teacher at the Bayside Elementary School. I didn't like her at all—she had teacher's pets who could do no wrong, and then another category of "bad kids" she persecuted, and I was one of the latter. But she did me a huge favor. For an hour after lunch, every day, she would read a book aloud and we had to follow along in our own copies of the book. Every now and then she would pause and call out a kid's name, and the kid would have to give the next word—that's how she tested whether you were following along like you were supposed to. She never called on me because she learned early that I was always right there with her. I learned how written words sound from Mrs. Memmel. Not only the proper pronunciations of lots of words, but the music of writing—the cadences, the flow, the starts and stops, the emphases, the silences in the right places. I still read aloud to myself occasionally, just to remind myself that the symbols on the page are actually sounds.

I later learned that Mr. McCallum was fascinated by a certain question, namely, how he could love writing so much and not be good at it. He didn't think I had copied that paper: he was merely interested in why it was so good and how I did it. Anyway, as I was getting ready to leave, he was still looking at the paper, and he asked me a question: "Have you ever considered being a writer?" I honestly didn't know what to say to that. So I just said "no," because that was the truth, and left. But obviously it stuck with me. 

He lived in fine big modernistic house in the woods across the ravine from my house, and when I was in high school he invited me to continue to write for him. So I would write stories and cross the ravine and walk through the woods and take them to his house. It was what would now be called an "inappropriate" relationship, because he and I would sit in his study and drink beer and smoke cigarettes and discuss our work and the work of other writers, like two friends, and I was only fifteen or sixteen. But other than the beer and tobacco he never acted the least bit inappropriate, ever, in any way. He had some number of sons, I think, who were all grown and gone, and a much younger daughter who was still at home. Maybe he just missed his sons. But he was one of the only adults in my life who treated me like an adult, or who ever bothered to "see" me as a person. I was grateful for that then, and I still am. My relationship with my own father was fraught and dangerous, and my father had remarkably little interest in what kind of person I was. I was always casting about for substitute fathers.

If you are looking for a post to read, try "Like a Sack of Bricks," from March about ten years ago.

I fear my book is a fool's errand, in fact the most foolish of fool's errands. If I were a book-writer kind of writer, I would have written a book by now. After trying two articles for The New Yorker and closely reading about fifty more with my tinfoil analyzing hat on, I've come down to the conclusion that I'm naturally a columnist. But I am trying, with the book, I mean, because I only have this one life—and, you know, there's Buffalo, down the road just a couple of hours from here. Time and tide wait for no man.

Sorry for the lack of a post today, but, like I say, there are other stories to tell.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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DaveB: "I drop into TOP…occasionally. I don’t really do it for the 'photography.' I like what else you write…kinda 'Off Topic.' Today’s post was EXACTLY the type of writing that you do that I like best. You hit the sweet spot for me with this one. My one suggestion…do more of it! There have been few writers in my 73 years who paint the picture in my mind with the way you use words.

"P.S., I’d like to read your book before you get to Buffalo!"

Anthony: "From the above post: 'Sorry for the lack of a post today....' Moving into koans?"

Mark P Morris: "Morning—it almost seems that you are downplaying what you write here. I enjoyed this essay very much. It was revealing but in a very good way. So, thanks for writing it and letting us in on how you feel and how you developed as a person."

Robert: "Re 'I fear my book is a fool's errand, in fact the most foolish of fool's errands.' Exactly why you should lean in and keep on doing it. Don't let fear stop you."

Mike replies: One of my favorite books for artists is Art and Fear by Orland and Bayles. And one of my favorite recent cartoons is two arty-student kids looking at a droopy computer, and one is saying "The AI art generator became self-aware, and now it just procrastinates and questions itself." (Looks like the author is "Coverly" of speedbump.com.)

Mike Chisholm: "Hey, don't think we didn't see what you didn't do there...."

Stephanie Luke: "Just discovered this today, and how delightful it is. I couldn't help hearing it with an upper-class English accent. Your work is done. By all means, write!"

Luci: "Hello, I am not sure what the definition of 'post' is nowadays for you, but let me tell you I enjoyed reading what you wrote today. Yes, photography's fine, but pieces like this are at least as enjoyable. To me, at least. So, thank you!"

Mike replies: You are welcome.

Kenneth Voight: "Very well written. This is why I read you. Have you ever considered being a writer?"

Mike replies: I'm gonna think about it.

Chris Kern: "Mike: 'There won’t be a new post today.' Mark Twain: 'It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.'"

Peter Barnes: "I do like it when you don't post."

Rebel Rebel

Rod S. asked, about the Canon post: "What's a Rebel? or What is this 'Rebel' of which you speak? It's a purely American thing, you know. Those cameras are called other names everywhere else in the world. I guess the label appeals to an element of American folklore. Or the 1959–1961 television series. Or both. Your thoughts?"

Mike replies: Here's the story as I heard it in the early '90s. I can't reveal my source, but it came from a guy who should know, a highly placed Canon USA employee at that time. Canon—through the same guy, as I recall—later officially denied the story. So do note that this post would not get a pass from the fact-checking department.

The original Rebel came out in 1990. Most professionals when the original Rebel came out shot with Nikon, which had been the leading high-end camera brand for many years and was the overwhelming choice of pros. And this led to an embarrassing little problem—a lot of the pros Canon hired to shoot their advertising campaigns shot them with Nikons! Ouch.

So evidently Canon went looking for a pro who actually used Canons. October 1990 was three and a half years after the launch of EOS, which initially cost Canon some goodwill among its established customers, because of the lensmount change which made all the old FD lenses obsolete. But by 1990 the advantages of EOS were beginning to kick in and Canon was starting to rebound. Eventually, of course, it would overtake Nikon and become the choice of many pros as well.

In 1990, 20-year-old Andre Agassi, with his leonine mane of golden hair (which later required hair weaves and clips to maintain because of his encroaching early-onset baldness), was literally and figuratively the golden boy of the tennis circuit. In 1986 he was ranked 91st in the world; in 1987, 25th; and in 1998, 5th. Tennis players tend to burst on the scene brash and aggressive because they're so young; they're immature when we first get to know them, and we don't find out their real character until they've been around for a while. It's hard to recover the moment now, but in those days the old customs of the genteel English game still held sway. Many earlier players at that time had tended to kind of push against the tradition of wearing all-white on court. Andre, at least the way I remember it, was the first young player to flout that tradition completely, unapologetically wearing boldly colored outfits on court*. He got a lot of criticism about it, and he didn't care—he did what he wanted and let his racquet do the explaining.

And it happened that one of the few top sports pros who used Canon cameras at the time happened to shoot a lot of tennis, and had a lot of pictures of Agassi in his portfolio, and had a very good relationship with Andre. And that's why Andre was chosen to be the spokesman for the new entry-level EOS.

So, Andre Agassi was the rebel. The name of the camera came from Andre, not the other way around. And Andre was chosen to be the spokesperson because a top Canon-shooting pro had access to him.

And if you want an international twist, Rod, Andre's father was an Iranian Olympian.

Here's a question that might stump even our Commentariat: who was that photographer? Anyone know who shot the first Rebel campaign with Andre Agassi? I don't recall. It would be interesting to hear what he has to say about this story, if he's still alive these 33 years later. I'm sure he knows a lot more about it than I do.

Mike

*After weeks of speculation in the press as to what he would wear on court at Wimbledon in 1991, he went against all expectations and wore all white.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Seven Reader Comments on 'Photographs Are Beautiful'

[UPDATE 2 pm Wednesday: All the comments are posted now. I have only one thing left to do, post the comments on the "Sunday Open Mike" post. But I have to go to the gym at 2:00, so I will do that when I get back. —Ed.]

I'm feeling great this morning. Very good day yesterday. And a big relief, frankly. My medical problems weren't severe, but they were, y'know, mine. And they turned out to be less threatening than they could have been. (I told more of the story in an email to my Patreon subscribers.)

But enough about that. The post "Photographs Are Beautiful Because They're True" (you might want to re-read the original post before proceeding), which probably should have been called photographs are beautiful IF they're true (or maybe photographs are beautiful if they're honest), elicted a lot of good comments, and I fell down posting the comments in a timely manner because of all my "lifey" distractions. (There is a saying in my 12-step program: "Sometimes life gets all lifey.") So here are seven selected ones to continue the discussion. If yours wasn't chosen, it doesn't mean it wasn't good. In choosing featured comments, I try to make the mix representative, rather than just a cherrypicking of "the best" ones, whatever that means. David Aiken's, for instance, was good, but at nearly 1,200 words it's longer than the original post, so I didn't post it here. But I might have. I read everyone's comment, and always have.

Be sure to check out Greg Boiarsky's link, and remember you're not looking at the real artworks, only small JPEGs of them. (Curious circularity: make an artwork of a photograph and then photograph it. Presumably it has a distinct numinous quality as a unique artwork that is then masked by the rephotographing, obliging us to imagine the artwork's true effect.)

Without further ado:

Tex Andrews: "Boy, I am so sorry to find myself vehemently disagreeing with you. As someone trained in painting/drawing/printmaking, I would argue that they are all more true—especially so-called 'abstraction' or non-representational art, but really all art in these media and sculpture as well—because all of them are what they are and it's quite obvious that they are. Even the examples of trompe l'oeil [French for "deceive the eye" —Ed.] works. Photography masks its un-truthfulness with a verisimilitude that we take for granted as true, and most don't question. Huge difference. Easy examples: what's outside of the frame, or, how is it processed? Is it a huge demonstration in the streets with combat between the police, or is it a few dozen angry people and several cops clashing with several of the protesters? Is it a gritty Bill Brandt shot of a grey and depressing outdoor scene, or was the day actually warm with the sun peeking through after a fresh rain?

"I only started becoming successful with my personal photography after I stopped beating my head against the wall trying to capture the truth of the scene and just started wielding my cameras like my other tools. Only in my work doing fine art repro do I try to capture 'the truth,' but I'm now a lot wiser in knowing that cameras/photography can never really do that."

Jeff Hohner: "Re 'Photographs are only beautiful insofar as they are true.' Hear, hear. I often struggle (in many more words) to explain this to photographers who started working after Photoshop became commonplace. 'You should clone out that branch to improve that shot's composition,' someone might say. 'This was the best position I found for the camera that balanced that damned branch with the other (glorious) elements in the photo. I love that tree though. I've photographed it many times over the years as it's grown. Would you like to see some of those photos to better understand this magical spot?'

"Thanks for the interesting link. Seems to me that in addition to AI and fraud, another part of this story is social media. The fraudster makes all kinds of excuses for his behaviour but it seems clear that he's primarily motivated by attention-seeking. Growing a following on Instagram can provide material gain as an influencer. His thorough thank you's may be polite but are also an engagement tactic. There are many people who work their social media accounts like a job and make some revenue from doing so. Looks to me like this guy was just working a new (dishonest) angle for traffic."

Jon Erickson: "Surely there is room for abstraction and impressionism in photography much as there is for realism in painting. The idea of accurately reporting what is in front of the camera still applies, with unwavering vigor I hope, to photojournalism, but did it ever apply to, say, commercial fashion? I think some of Sarah Moon's work is so beautiful it transcends that genre, and I would not wonder or care whether her images faithfully reproduce 'the sound of acoustic instruments playing in a real space,' so to speak, with a salute to the late great Harry Pearson [founding editor of The Absolute Sound magazine, whose signature thesis was that live music was the absolute standard against which reproduced music should be judged.  —Ed.].

"Accurate reporting does not apply to every artist or perhaps to even many artists. I recently met a portrait photographer who travels the southeast region of the US for sessions with children in the homes of well-to-do families. His professionally lighted and posed portraits are then rendered as oil-on-canvas paintings by someone else in the company he works for. There's no deception in this. The clients understand how the process works, and though I imagine the result is far from great art, it's at least more carefully and classically realized than applying a digital filter to a photo and outputting the file as a 'painting' through an inkjet printer on fine-art paper. The person executing the painting, however, is handed an image not of her own conception or composition. Who is the artist here? Would the Instagram fraud guy be a thing if he had avoided contriving back stories for some of his subjects and worked the AI photo-like 'original' as a painting instead of finishing it out as a photograph? Would he still be lying if he took credit for the images as digital paintings?"

Mike replies: I think you have just coined the perfect term for these AI contrivances: digital paintings. It's a dignified term, not pejorative, but it distinguishes it from photography.

Also, I saw a show recently of large paintings of portrait photographs. The paintings were made by an oil painting service in China. I couldn't get the question answered as to whether the named artist actually took the original photographs or simply found them.

Cliff: "I happen to agree Mike. I love photography, and admittedly my definition is narrow, and definitely unfair. To my mind it is a human being seeing through a camera (I’m enough of a snob that I prefer the camera to be mechanical.) I do believe this gentleman is creating 'Art' since the intention is to create an emotional object. His marketing approach (i.e., lying about his process) could be his performance approach. I have no hard feelings towards him. Looking at every one of his images it’s obviously heavily processed, and not the look I love, but honestly no different to me than the majority of what we see everywhere now.

"I’m resigned to being a fan of a niche art style now. My love of traditional B&W prints is really no different than some one who appreciates hand-cut stained glass or furniture produced with hand tools. The human, mechanical process and effort matter to me. I’m older and excited to live long enough to see the next generation of artists revive what I love. It’s happening now, as young people rediscover the beauty of a chemical darkroom. Creating new fine prints in silver. Vive l'art!"

Greg Boiarsky: "As someone who obsesses over every detail in their images (to the dismay of my family), I'm conflicted about this pseudo-photographer. He's so vague about the process he uses to create his images that they could be anything from true art to a sort of photographic paint-by-numbers. To be sure, the images look pretty good. But, it appears that he just generates hundreds of images using AI and then picks the best one and massages it in Photoshop. Whatever it is, it is not photography. The closest thing it comes to is hyper-realistic art, and I honestly find that kind of thing to be amazing but boring. It doesn't tell me anything beyond that the artist can depict something that could be mistaken for a photo of a real object. So, for me it also isn't art."

Kenneth Tanaka: "Re 'Photography is moving farther and farther away from the era in which the aim was to accurately report what was in front of the camera...', not really, Mike. It’s true that the goals of photography’s technology and basic craft skills have always been oriented toward greater fidelity—truth, if you will. But photography’s practice and applications have incorporated deception virtually from the first hour. Throughout the summer of 2019 I worked on inspecting and cataloging a large collection of wonderful daguerreotypes for a museum. I was shocked, shocked, at how many had been manipulated pre- or post-capture in some way. The most common post-mod I saw was hand-painting of details, such as gold buttons or flowers. Hand-tinting came next, especially in post-mortem portraits, to make the subjects appear to be sleeping.

"Moving forward, so much of the most admired imagery of the 20th century was heavily manipulated. Skilled darkroom techs could multi-print almost anything into images.

"And, excuse me, but you call black-and-white photography 'truth'? Certainly that not truth in any real terms of healthy human vision.

"Photography as a medium at its best moments has always been a means of expression rather than documentation. Dodging, burning, color-grading, cloning, etc., all devoted to present thoughts and ideas rather than facts.

"Still, I do share your future shock at the apparent widening intrusion of artificially-generated images. It seems like such a brazen lie. But, again, I must point out that this is also not new. A great deal of the product 'photography' that appears to be from a camera is, in fact, from 3D modeling and compositing systems. That includes furniture, clothing, household products, cars, architecture, and even food!

"Re 'Photographs are only beautiful insofar as they are true,' you quoted a terrific line by Peter O’Toole from My Favorite Year, above: 'I’m not an actor, I’m a movie star!' I will similarly offer a movie quote to suggest guidance toward future harmony with photography. In the 1957 film The Bachelor Party, Don Murray’s character picks up Carolyn Jone’s character at a party. When he tries to make a pass at her she stops him and demands, 'Tell me you love me. You don’t have to mean it but I have to hear it.'"

Darlene: "Beauty is always in the eye of the beholder. What is in front of the camera is not always beautiful or 'true' regarding what the photographer decides to frame in or keep out.

"AI will find its place alongside the technology of its day. Some of what we may call 'fake' or created out of thin air and technology will come and go just as innovations do and eventually become normal or expected by the majority.

"One benefit of changing technologies is the admiration for lost crafts. So let's keep the craft of photography alive and become part-time photography Luddites. Today I will run some 4x5 through my pinhole camera, which some photographers may scratch their heads over because the images will be soft due to the pinhole lens (or lack of, however one may look at it). I like soft sometimes. I like sharp sometimes. And I still enjoy shooting film and hand processing.

"I could never be a total photographer Luddite, as commercial photography paved my path to a successful career. I started with Photoshop when it first appeared. The funny thing is, a lot of non-Photoshop users would refer to Photoshop like it was AI, and some still do.

"They say people become old when they start complaining about the changing times in a cynical way. I choose not to be like that. Instead, I reach into my freezer for some film and feel grateful there is always a small stash waiting for me.

"Maybe positive therapy for photographers who may experience depression or anxiety over AI could be to have their favorite 35mm film camera in hand and keep a small stash of B&W film in their freezer, and some Rodinal, or whatever long-lasting developer they choose, in the cupboard. Then, when they feel their inners getting all twisted up, they can open the freezer for some cooling down and rummage into the cupboard to smell the developer while fondling a real camera in their hands.

"Does it matter how an image was created? If a photographer were paid to do a shoot but did not do as the contract specified, that would matter. If a photographer publicly lies about how they created an image, that should matter. But in the practice of creativity, the sky is the limit. How you get where you seek to go is your business."

Thanks to all, whether featured here or not.

[posted by] Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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