The Online Photographer

Quote o' the Day: Francis Hodgson

Francis Hodgson by Anton Corbijn, from 1000 Words magazine

"I still believe that photography is by far the most important medium of the latter part of the twentieth century—more important than prose and more important than cinema. No exaggeration. Photography is transnational, it’s transcultural. It is available to five-year-olds, it is available to professors of photography. It’s amazing how it is not a limited medium. No other medium equals it in its efficient transmission of powerful messages—certainly not prose. People are less literate than they were but they are more literate in photographs than they used to be, and that is pretty powerful. One could argue that photography is dropping off a bit from those great heights, and its other cousins are jostling up against it, but they’ve all developed from photography."

—From an interview with Francis Hodgson, described as a "critic, professor, photography consultant, co-founder of the Prix Pictet, former head of the photographs department at Sotheby’s, and an advisor specialising in fine photographs for private and public collections." The interview with Gemma Padley is at 1000 Words magazine.

Mike
(Thanks to Dave Sculthorpe)

Original contents copyright 2016 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.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

John Camp: "What utter nonsense. It's like suggesting that architecture is more important than music, or that golf is more important than fishing."

David: "In my humble opinion, Francis is the best writer about photography at the moment by a mile—check out his old reviews in the Financial Times."

Just Shoot, Shoot, Shoot: An Interview with David Burnett, Part II

Interview by John Camp

(Part I is here)

John Camp: David, on your days off, do you walk around with a camera under your arm?

David Burnett: About four years ago I needed a carry around camera, and ended up asking the Ricoh people to try out one of their R4 point-and-shoots. Great little camera, and I have progressed through several of them, and currently have a CX4 on my belt, for the last year. I make little movies (1280p) and make lots of pictures that I would never otherwise make. I'm a little lazy, like a lot of photographers. I don't always have a "real" camera on my shoulder. My bad. But the fact that I have a little ten-megapixel camera with me all the time, is way better than having the greatest camera in the world sitting at home on a desk instead of on my shoulder (apologies to Chase Jarvis). And now of course, camera phones seem about to take over the world. And there is the Lytron (I have not seen it yet.)  The assault of gear will only increase in the future, I believe. So finding something that works for you, and lets you feel confident in what you can do with it, is the key.

JC: Where do you get most of your information on such things?

DB: I read Shutterbug (my favorite), Pop Photo, American Photo (usually), PDN (rarely), and Digital Photo Pro (to see how the advanced-tech-half lives...). And online, I am swamped by all the good stuff. You need a fast internet line and at least an hour at a clip. It can really become the kind of surfing that the term was invented to describe. From one great site to another, and in an hour, you’re on overload.

JC: You’ve had a traveling show of photographs of Bob Marley. Are you an artist, or a reporter? Or both?

DB: I still think what I see as an artificial boundary between journalism and art is one that really ought to be more diffuse, transparent. I suppose art is art only if you premeditate what you're doing. So they say. But I think there is something inherent in the photographic process, the seeing, the understanding, which has every bit as strong an element of connection as anything in the art world. I have always thought the process a bit skewed in favor of those who decide. So perhaps we have to decide for ourselves. I remain a reporter, but, dare I say it, with an artistic eye.

Bob Marley by David Burnett

The Marley work [Soul Rebel: An Intimate Portrait of Bob Marley in Jamaica and Beyond from Insight Editions] was of course done as reportage for TIME magazine on the 'new, undiscovered music known as Reggae....' I don't for a minute feel obliged to try to justify it as art, but in the reactions I see from viewers, and the way the pictures draw people to them...I leave that judgment to the viewers. What I suppose is true, is that I think the most important work I have done is the black-and-white from the 1970s and early 1980s. It is classic reportage, and while I love what I am doing now, I see it with different eyes.

JC: Speaking of that, how important is a well-developed artistic eye in news photos, as opposed, say, to the ability (or the bravery) to stand in and get the shot? What do you need most—balls, or eyes?

DB: There are a number of really wonderful people working in the news business these days. People whose pictures you can usually spot before you read the credit line. What is very different is that today you can see some of those images just minutes after they are taken. I don't really think that makes much of a difference in how we see or interpret them, but it is very cool to see the pictures from the first quarter of a football game while they are still playing the second quarter. Speed aside, what I find most striking is the ability of some photographers to distill something special out of what might not seem to be a very special situations. (Damon Winter of the New York Times and David Guttenfelder of AP both come to mind.)

What we do know is that we live in a world where a camera, far from being the shield for the press that it once was, is now often seen as a target in conflict situations. Rather than be safeguarded, we become the target. That creates a new world of unease and mystery for those working in places where just being a photographer puts you at risk. It requires an extra sense of self, and smarts, to be able to not only make the pictures, but safely get them, and oneself, out. I have decided to leave the really dicey stuff to the  younger photographers—there are plenty of talented ones—concentrating now instead on more easily accessible subjects.

JC: What do you think about the use of Photoshop to "enhance" news photos? Is there any place for Photoshop in that process? What about in feature or soft photos? Of course, you can't use Photoshop to move things around in news photos, but what about the idea of, say, altering contrast, or dynamic range, or colors so that they "look more like what the photographer experienced"? What about "soft" set-ups, like shooting people who are dramatizing events and are obviously attracted to your cameras...in other words, news-based performances?

DB: In all the years of darkroom work, there came to be a number of accepted printing techniques (burning, dodging) that were invented primarily because of the technical inability of the camera to get what the photographer "saw." And now, in a world which questions the veracity of everything, the ability we have to alter the look of a picture in seconds, using software, adds even great question marks. Yet, there are times when the most simple of techniques can make a picture approachable, and perhaps believable. Raw files are just that, and they need to be moved to the next step to actually become that final product for publication.

In the end, when  you analyze the characteristics of Tri-X, Kodachrome, and every digital camera made now, each had its way of interpreting a scene. I think the real challenge we face is to try to create something which stays close to the real scene, which is a representation of what happened, and which avoids making the photograph just about the photographer. That is, of course unless the photographer is an "artist" and the photo is just the jumping off point where they add their own vision. We live in grey areas, but I think it's important to at least maintain a feeling of honesty about our work. Feature work, where you are going past an impression of an event, and entering the area where you are allowed to express your own view, as long as it is obvious in the photo, or it's explained in a caption, I think there is nothing wrong with interpretation. Just don’t confuse the two.

JC: In relationship to the previous question, do you see or feel a difference, sometimes, between the truth of a particular situation, and the actuality of what can be photographed? Have you ever been to a crisis spot or been on a political assignment where you have the feeling that what you’re shooting really isn't what's happening? What do you do about that? Is it your job to worry about that, or do you shoot what's in front of you and let other people worry about it?

DB: Much of what we do in politics really has nothing to do with how things operate. I like to paraphrase a Russian friend who used to describe his job, in the Soviet Union in the 1990s, as, 'We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us....' In much of political photography, the campaigns (for example) pretend to have an event, and we pretend to cover it. In the end you have to accept certain restrictions simply because for the majority of photographers, there simply isn’t time or access to see what is doing inside the campaign. So in a way, we agree that having a chance to see a speech, or a campaign event is where the public face of the campaign and candidate will be shown, and if that is what they want to show us, then that is what we can shoot. And all bets are off.  Campaigns which try to restrict and control the press find one thing for sure: Those photographers will do anything they can to get beyond those restrictions, and in the end I can't imagine a candidate being better off by having a whole team of angry photographers trying to make a picture.

Control is a funny thing; it is often used as a tool by the security people to limit what we do, while in the end, the security people should be forced to live by the standards that the campaign wants, not the other way around. There are times when you know what you are trying to show isn't the real deal, but it's as close to the real deal as you can get. We all make compromises in our work. Because of access, time, transport, distance issues. All anyone can do, is to press their effort to the maximum, and afterwards decide if it was good enough.  Of course in most cases, it's never good enough…and the  desire to keep pushing forward is what makes for the best photographers.

JC: You do workshops as well as shoot on assignment. How critical are these for the development of a photographer? What kind of education does a top photographer need?

DB: I have done a number of workshops, and I have to admit that in most cases, I think I get at least as much out of them as my students. What I get, usually, is being exposed to infectious enthusiasm. People for whom the need and desire to photograph is paramount to all others. Those are the kind of people I find invigorating and inspiring.

If they are able to take some little thing away from me, or be inspired in some small way, that's great, but so much of what we do requires a genuine commitment of time, energy, and effort. Most of the photographers I know who have been successful are self-taught, in the main. They assisted established photographers. They learned on the job. They paid attention when there were things to notice. Nothing—especially in the era of digital when you can set up a shot, take it, and look immediately to see if you were successful or not—surpasses getting out there and shooting. One of my mentors, Philip Jones Griffiths, the great Welsh photographer, explained it all in a nutshell to me early on during my stay in Vietnam. I was fixated on trying to produce a story for TIME, and spending all my days trying to figure out where to go, what to do. Philip just punched through, reminding me that "Vietnam isn't about a bunch of so-called stories for TIME magazine. What you need to do is put 50 rolls of film in your rucksack, fly to Danang, and don't come back to Saigon until you've shot every roll."

What he was essentially telling me to do was simple. Put yourself in a real time, real life situation (it can be around the corner from home, it doesn't need to be half way around the world) and just shoot, shoot, shoot. That's how you make yourself a better photographer.

I know a number of great photographers who started in the military, and used what their resources were to maximize their learning and understanding of photography.

JC: When I contacted you about this interview, you were in Dubai. How does working as you do affect your private life? Is it hard to stay married? Is it hard to raise kids? Have you ever had a dog? Have you ever thought about moving to the countryside, where you could draw water and chop wood? Or is it the Upper West Side for you?

DB: My wife and daughter have been very understanding. I hate being away, but I understand that for me, that's where the work, the stories are. We have a house in the 'burbs, and there is plenty of wood to chop if I had a proper ax or, don't tempt me, a chainsaw. But both of us have travelled significantly in our careers, and we understand what it takes. I try not to be away longer than two weeks (three for the Olympics every four years) as readjustment is just too great. My daughter moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting, and so we are away from each other. When I talk with her, I am reminded of how my life was when I lived in Vietnam, phoning home a couple of times a month (it was expensive) and trying to stay in touch with actual handwritten letters. The loss of letters in today's world is one of the great losses we are experiencing, though we shan't know the full extent of it for another twenty or thirty years when we'll wish we had those letters never written. I love New York, but am happy to be away from it. I really like small towns, with welcoming barbecue restaurants. In so many ways our private lives and work lives are one and the same. They meld together, and we share so much of it.

JC: Tell me one last thing about leading your kind of life that's important, and that might be important for photographers reading this.

DB: The one thing I think I would advise young photographers, in particular, is that in most cases no one can be as hard on you as you will be on yourself. Do not settle for easy. Do not settle for that first image. Craft it, work it, and make something more out of it. And finally, don't forget that the biggest joy in photography is making pictures of those things in your own life. It doesn't need to be a St. Patrick's Day Parade with thousands of revelers to be important. Your friends, your family, your own life—that should be the first subject you work on. It's a given your family will be tired of being photographed, but don't give up. In another couple of decades, those are the pictures you will be glad to have.

JC: Thank you, David.

DB: My pleasure.

-

Once again, here's David's website. Big thanks to David Burnett and John Camp.

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Featured Comment by Albano: "A great video interview, where he praises the Holga a lot."

Just Make the Damn Picture: An Interview with David Burnett, Part I

Interview by John Camp

Introduction: I'm a writer—a novelist—and a few weeks ago my publishing company sent a well-known professional photographer out to Santa Fe to take my picture for the backs of upcoming novels...which shows a bit of optimism on the publishing company's part, since the writing schedule is killing me. Anyway, I very much enjoyed the company of the photographer David Burnett, who turned out to be a widely read, deeply engaged, intellectual sort of fellow, who looks a little like a long-distance runner—and, I mention in passing, quite a good friend of the Turnley Bros., who show up here on TOP from time to time.

I was interested, of course, in the way David functioned in carrying out the assignment of shooting my photo. We'll skip the parts where I was powdered and rouged ("We'll just take a little of the dryness out of those lips") and I'll just say that he showed me something photographic that I'd never seen before: he had an assistant, and used reflectors and so on, but he also had a couple of battery-powered LED lights, a little bigger than bricks, and quite lightweight, which the assistant would sometimes use instead of the reflectors. [The subject of our friend Kirk Tuck's latest book, if I may interject —Ed.] That way, David was able to put the light anywhere he wanted it, in a matter of seconds, with the prime light, the sun, coming from any direction. David joked that he was going to buy an "assistant suit" made out of Velcro, and put Velcro on the backs of the LED lights, and then he could just arrange the assistant's arms and legs as he wanted and slap the LEDs on him…. Anyway, my first photographic thought was, "Hmm, I gotta get me some of those." (LEDs, not assistants.)

After David had gone on his way, it occurred to me that I should have asked him if I could interview him for TOP. I emailed him, and found out that he'd already moved on to Dubai. He agreed to answer some e-mailed questions; people curious about his work can take a look at his website. Here's Part I of the interview:

John Camp: I've always been curious about what particular kind of traveling assignment-oriented professionals actually do…so what have you been doing the last year or so? How much time do you spend on the road? Have you gotten rich doing this?

David Burnett: My work varies constantly, the result I suppose of some Attention Deficit Disorder, adult version, which I notice a lot of my colleagues also seem afflicted with. When you are a freelancer, you can either choose to do a story on spec…go do it, then edit and try and sell it afterwards; or, if your phone rings occasionally with one of those 'magic phone calls' which leads to a cool assignment, then that will presumably be what you end up doing. Most of us work in some kind of middle ground, trying to place the work of our own interest in the mix, and if lucky, actually find a client to finance it. In the last year or so my assignments have included the following:

• Spending nearly three weeks (just for the record, unpaid, save for travel expenses) serving as the chairman of the World Press Photo Jury in Amsterdam, nominally in charge of a dozen other jurors from as many countries, sifting through 109,000 images, and in the end naming the contest winners.

• I've done a half-dozen author book jacket photographs (a somewhat new field for me, but great fun).

• I traveled for five days with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on a Europe-Mideast trip, when the U.S. was trying to forge an alliance to deal with Libya. Key point: in the lottery for who-sits-where on the USAF plane, I drew a low number, and had the upside of getting a business class seat (one of eight) instead of an economy seat (there are about 25.) When you travel 14,000 or so miles in a week, that is a big plus.

• I drove a 15-year old, aging Cadillac across the country in about eight days to deliver it to a friend in need of a car. Perhaps more importantly, it gave me a chance to drive the southern route, and shoot a few cool pictures. The problem became that I would find myself just short of making something really satisfying, but then feeling I had to keep heading west. Travel can be addictive, but it's not always the tonic we hope for.

However, these kind of trips do lend themselves to certain kinds of shooting, and when, four days ago, the editor at my agency (Contact Press Images) said on an iChat call he had a book jacket request for "an old car, with a kind of run-down, West Texas look...," I was actually able to upload a half dozen images in the four minutes we were on the phone with each other. Sometimes you just have the right picture.

"He's been everywhere, but only for an hour" —American Photographer magazine (from David's website)

• In April, I went for People [magazine] to the Royal Wedding in London (Will and Kate) but didn't have the same luck I'd had at that of Will's parents in 1982. For one thing, the entrance to Westminster Abbey is street level, while St Paul's has a large length of steps, and the steps win every time, I'd say.

• Early July I was in Florida for the last of the Space Shuttle launches, and found myself on the same beach where, 42 years earlier, I'd photographed the departure of Apollo XI to the moon.

A few good pictures this time, but living in the age of TV/internet/twitter/Facebook, it all feels like it passes far too quickly. The velocity of photos and images that society has created and runs through on a daily basis means it's very difficult for a great image to stand out. It still happens, but I think we are all being deluged with imagery, and not enough time to appreciate them.

• Later in July, in Glasgow, I worked with a new group of photographer friends, where we create our own projects, and work, more or less pro bono, in trying to uncover significant social topics. The group (PhotographersForHope.org) spent a week coaching homeless newspaper vendors in the use of their new Canon point-and-shoot digicams, trying to capture some elements of the lives they lead. Those pictures, plus ones we did of them, were part of a show at the BBC Scotland headquarters, and later the Mitchell Library, giving some voice to the situation of those who experience homelessness.

• August: Bonneville Salt Flats—Speed Week. Another chance to get an amazing sunburn and pictures of fast cars. Mostly of fast cars sitting there making a lot of extremely loud noise, but occasionally of them actually going fast. I grew up nearby in Salt Lake City, and have been going there since I was first shooting pictures in high school.

• In September I was asked to join James Nachtwey in Lausanne at the International Olympic Museum, and speak about the power of the image. It was a wonderful evening, getting a chance with Jim to not only show images, but talk about them and their impact on our world.

• In October/November I made a number of drop-bys to the Occupy Wall Street encampment, and was, at the very least, pleased to see that 40 years after the street protests of the Vietnam era, there were, in this over-indulged, over-connected world, still a few people who understood the power of showing up somewhere and stating their case.

In addition I have been doing a number of speeches, workshops, and appearances at photographic get-togethers: The Atlanta Photojournalism conference, the Australian Professional Photographers Association, and just recently the Gulf Photo Plus week of workshops, exhibits and speeches in Dubai. In every corner of the globe now, there are thousands of photographers and would-be photographers who are striving to become better. It keeps us all on our toes.

This is just some of what I did last year. How many days on the road? I didn’t count them but probably somewhere between 100 and 125. It takes a whole day to actually count them! And to what end? In this age of diminished assignments in the magazine world which I worked in for 40-plus years, one doesn't get rich. Well, if you happen to get that one image of the right starlet, you can make a bundle, but otherwise, the democratization of photography, the proliferation of cameraphones, and the fact that "everyone is a photographer" has, I think, tended to diminish and cheapen what was once a world in which a minimal level of craft was required to do the job. You can still make a living, but in so many aspects of editorial and commercial photography, the world has seen a quantum shift. A few people are doing extremely well, in most cases people who have not only talent with a camera but the ability to create an aura about themselves using social media and blogs. I am constantly amazed at the number of "comments" I see on some of the popular photo blogs. Dozens, sometimes hundreds of comments from what must truly be a large population of people with true photographic interest. Proof, I suppose that the photograph isn't the only way to connect with your audience.

JC: David, unlike most online photography forums, TOP doesn't spend very much time talking about equipment. So, naturally, my next question will be about equipment. When I saw you a few weeks ago, you were shooting Canons along with a Leica M9 and a Holga, interchangeably. I've seen on your website that you also shoot a Speed Graphic from time to time. So tell me a little bit about your relationship with the equipment.

I would probably be considered a dinosaur in some quarters as I still use the Mark 0 Canon 5D (well…they really weren't Mark anything, but 0 is as good as 1) for my main digital needs. I have the whole slew of Canon glass, fast glass (the red line lenses) and a few wonderful old beloved bits of glass from my Nikon days (pre 1978)—namely my Nikon 500mm ƒ/8 mirror and a wonderful Leitz 400mm ƒ/6.8 Telyt, with EOS mounts on them. In the world where every high school kid is sporting a 400mm ƒ/2.8, showing up with a lens three stops slower does create a wonderful mutter in the assembled press pens. But I know how sharp my Telyt is, and how light it is (it breaks into two small tubes for transport), and I'll stay with what I have.

My latest acquisition, courtesy of my involvement with the newly formed group known as FacingChange.org (a group of independent photographers, gathered together to address the vast range of social and economic issues facing the country) is the wonderful new M9 Leica rangefinder body. It has given me the chance to take out my Leica glass (yes, I have three 50mm lenses!) from the cupboard they have been sequestered for the last eight or nine years, since 35mm film gave way to digital and all the ups anddowns that presents. Essentially, while I still shoot some medium and large format film, my 35mm film days are dwindling down to very few, so the addition of the M9 has given me a chance to see again the amazing quality of those Leica lenses. The Noctilux (a 1978 version) is something to behold when you can see the results virtually instantly.

My kit also consists of a Speed Graphic (actually, several of them) on which I shoot lenses in most cases older than I am, and which are all considered "fast glass" for a large format camera (ƒ/2–ƒ/2.8). I began shooting large format in "real time" situations—Presidential Campaigns, the Olympics—in 2003, as a kind of allergic reaction to the mass movement over to digital. I wanted something different from what all my pals were shooting, something that would force me to look in a slightly different way at the subject, which, if I was lucky, would yield a picture that had a little something special to it. It is a downright daunting task to force yourself to shoot with cameras that have no auto diaphragming, no auto advance, no autofocus, no auto anything...but when it works, it really is worth all the mistakes en route. And those are legion.

In almost everything I shoot these days, I try to include something taken with large format or, at the very least, with my Holga. I really do enjoy the simplicity of the Holga, and every now and then it rewards me with something sweet. They are making Holga lenses with DSLR (Nikon, Canon) mounts, but, for me, the joy in that glass is in the extreme edges of the frame, and all of that beauty is cropped on a 35mm DSLR.

In the 4x5 realm, I still have so much to learn. Every time I shoot with the Graflex cameras it is a learning experience.

So far I don't actually own a camera, shocking as this may sound, with an ISO over 100,000. I suppose that day will come. But for now, I'm entranced with the chance to again shoot à la rangefinder with the M9. It is a whole different way of shooting, looking, seeing, than a reflex camera. Instead of, essentially looking at a TV screen to compose, you are just putting your fingers up to your eyes...and squinting happily.

I have been quite amazed, actually, that neither Canon nor Nikon has come out with their own re-creation of one of their classic rangefinder cameras. In all the advances in photo technology, it just surprises me that none of the traditional makers other than Leica (the preeminent) has seen fit to create a camera (please, no harping about the Epson...) which recreates all those great 1950s cameras.

Not to belabor the point, but I'm still looking for a snapshot of Cartier-Bresson carrying a Practica or a Nikormat. The new Fuji cameras (I just saw briefly the X-Pro1) are a step in the right direction, but in the end they try and look like a Leica, and yet deny you the real joy of a rangefinder camera, which is the rapidity of the focus, and blending those two images together in the finder. The X100 for example seems to look like a rangefinder camera, but there is still that hesitation for it to find focus. Nothing is as sure as your fingers guiding the lens and finder to the right place.

Ten-years-plus ago I had the Contax G2 set, all the glass, too. It was, no question, the camera to be slinging if you went to a cool and groovy cocktail party on the East side. But every time I tried to use it, the focus servos would buzz and buzz and buzz, finding the actual focus long after that "moment" I was in search of disappeared. I ended up trading the kit to a friend for another M6 and a Summilux 35, confident that I could focus way snappier than the G2 (and I still can, I believe). Sadly, cameramaker engineers seem to value the hotsie-totsie of fancy, rather than simply giving us something that we can use. I still like to think that all this stuff we have is just a tool or set of tools, and that in the end, you figure out what you want for a particular picture, grab what you need (or if you're lucky, figure that out ahead of time) and just make the damn picture.

[Continue to Part II]

John

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Featured Comment by Jeffrey MacMillan: "David is absurdly talented, generous and kind. Having spent a little time with him on campaigns and elsewhere he brings an level of dignity to our motley crew. Go to his website and check out the large format photos. They are so beautiful you'll cry yourself to sleep after selling your gear!!"

Featured Comment by K. Praslowicz: "Years ago, probably 2004ish, I made a comment on a web forum regarding one of David's photos I had seen in a magazine. A day or two later he sent me a private message thanking me for liking it. I always thought that that was pretty classy for a working artist with a long history of success."

Featured Comment by Miserere: "Good call, John—you can't just let someone like David B. get away without an interview :-) . I'm ashamed to say I couldn't quite place his name at first, then I went to his website and looked through his galleries...oh, he's the guy that took that Holga photograph of Al Gore...oh, he's the guy who photographed the Olympics with a Speed Graphic...oh, he's.... Yeah, I know who he is. Damn shame he isn't making a good living off his talent and just shooting whatever he wants. Then again, if he did, he wouldn't have been hired to shoot you, and we wouldn't have had the pleasure of reading this fine interview. The Universe has a way I suppose...."

Featured Comment by Roger Overall: "What a wonderful piece of writing to wake up to here in Ireland. It's great that John has taken the time to write it, and David took the time to talk. That shows consideration and understanding of the interest out there in the work and lives of great photographers. John could have kept this encounter to himself, restricting it to airings at dinner parties only. He didn't. I for one am really grateful."

Featured Comment by W. Keith McManus: "Will be passing this along to the class I am teaching at RIT [Rochester Institute of Technology —Ed.] this spring."

We Hear from Ned Bunnell

Got this message today, and thought I'd pass it along (with Ned's permission of course)—

Mike,

Having just returned from my trip to Japan, it was a pleasant surprise to see the interview posted.

I noticed a few reader comments suggesting you should have asked about our full frame and mirrorless plans. I hope your readers know that until a product is officially announced, there’s really not much that I or any other employee of Pentax can say about what is or is not in the labs. I should add that we do keep a constant eye and ear on the market and provide these insights, trends and user needs to our folks in Japan.

Thanks again for taking the time to interview me, and I can’t wait to hear how you like the K-5 and FA 31 combination.

Ned

-

So there you have it. Now you know why I didn't ask....

Mike

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An Interview with Ned Bunnell, President of Pentax USA

Introduction: A couple of weeks ago I found myself composing an email to Ned Bunnell, President of Pentax Imaging USA, to ask him to clarify a rumor. I ended up including so many questions that I decided to scrap the email and just ask him if he had time for an interview. Fortunately, I caught him between trips, so we were able to get some exchanges in before Ned returned to Japan, where he is now. What follows is edited from our correspondence.

Mike Johnston: Ned, welcome again to TOP.

Ned Bunnell: Thanks Mike.

MJ: There are a lot of things I'd like to ask you about, but we might as well jump in at the deep end. The first thing is probably the most pressing thing for longtime Pentaxians. There was a rumor on the boards recently that Pentax's much-beloved Limited lenses, including what my friend Oren sometimes jokingly refers to as the "Pentax Numerology" Limiteds—the 31mm, the 77mm, and the 43mm—are being discontinued. I think that rumor has quieted a bit now, but can you shed some light on it just for the record?

NB: I'm glad you’re asking for clarification on this. The rumor appears to have started during Photokina. I can tell you we have no plans to cancel production of the FA Limited (31mm, 43mm and 77mm) lenses. In fact, we view the FA Limiteds and our newer DA Limiteds as being unique in the industry. I can share with you that we saw an increase of non-Pentax shooters adding a K-7 to their camera bag precisely because these Limited lenses were the perfect match for this camera’s compact, rugged and nicely balanced body design. I’m hopeful that this trend will continue with our recently announced K-5, which carries on the same design concept as the K-7.

MJ: That's a relief. Those particular lenses are probably more famous than any lenses without the L-word on them. And to mention another former rumor that's been put to bed, you and I have talked several times about the status of the 645D; and, since we talked last, the big dog has launched in America. That was great news...

An Interview with Simon Roberts

Simon Roberts, South Downs Way, West Sussex, 8th October 2007, from We English

By Ailsa McWhinnie

Simon Roberts is a British photographer who for a number of years worked on assignments for magazines and weekend supplements. His eventual disillusionment with being asked to produce what he describes as "the definitive story" on a topic, and then being given three days in which to do it, led to him embarking on a year-long trip across Russia. The resulting images were published to great acclaim by Chris Boot, under the title Motherland.

The success of Motherland put him in the position where he was able to raise funding for his next project from Arts Council England, the National Media Museum and the John Kobal Foundation. His latest book is We English.

Simon lives on the south coast of England with his wife Sarah and their children Jemima and Florence. Of his daughters, he says, "Jemima was conceived in Russia and Florence as we traveled through England, so I can’t go traveling any more as we can’t afford any more children!"

Ailsa McWhinnie: We English is photographed in a quite different style from Motherland. What prompted the change?

Simon Roberts: It’s not quite the departure it might look. There are a couple of pictures in Motherland that inspired the direction I took with We English. One in particular shows a Victory Day picnic at Yekaterinburg [a major Russian city on the eastern side of the Urals]. Victory Day is a very important public holiday when the Russians celebrate victory over Nazi Germany. When I blew the picture up for an exhibition I became really interested in the relationship between these constellations of people and the geographical space. There are all sorts of little signifiers in the photograph, such as the silver birch trees—which are a motif in Russian landscape painting—but also when you look more closely you’ll see balloons in the trees, so it becomes a natural landscape adapted by human presence. It was something I decided I’d quite like to explore in the England work.

Sunday picnic, Yekaterinburg, from Motherland

AMc: What inspired the project that became We English?

SR: I was quite struck by the relationship between the Russians and their geography, and it started me thinking about my relationship to England. I started to want to explore that sense of identity. There’s a very rich tradition of British photographers photographing the British landscape, from Benjamin Stone in the 1890s to Bill Brandt and Tony Ray-Jones, but there had been a bit of a lull more recently, so it felt quite timely to go on this journey. My generation has travelled abroad a lot, there’s this sense of the "exotic other"—and I’ve done it myself with Russia, albeit trying to take an anthropological approach. However, it was really important I wasn’t derivative of what had gone before in terms of photographing Britain—I had to find my own voice. So in summer 2007 I started exploring different ways of photographing.

Motherland was shot using a Mamiya 7, because I needed a light camera when travelling—but this time I started playing with a 5x4-inch camera and began to see something quite interesting when the people in the picture appeared small in the frame. I wanted the landscape to be as important as the people within it, but to make sure the people weren’t so small you wouldn’t be able to make out the detail of what they were wearing and how they related to one another.

AMc: So did you try to avoid the places that have formed parts of other photographers’ work?

SR: No. I deliberately went to New Brighton [the seaside town photographed by Martin Parr in his book, The Last Resort]. The pictures didn’t end up in the book, but I certainly went to some of these places because they’d been done before. I was intrigued, because historically we’re doing many of the same things we did a hundred years ago, it’s just we’re wearing different clothes. A lot of old traditions and festivals are being revived by local councils who are looking for new ways of getting tourists. Actually, there are very few photographs of that sort of event in the book, because I wanted to steer clear of events that were being quite deliberately marketed and promoted. The images that ended up in the book often depict quite mundane activities.

AMc: Were there any surprises as the project got underway?

SR: It was interesting to see that people are quite parochial. They end up doing things very close to where they live: the guy fishing on the banks of the river, or the Sunday-league football, these are very ordinary things, but to the person doing them they’re very important, so I wanted to make them more grand—and that was one of the challenges. When you’re doing a project in your own back yard you have to learn to tune into the ordinary things you see every day that you don’t consider to be a photograph—so in many ways I was looking for the "non" photograph.

AMc: You invited members of the public to submit ideas for places or events to photograph. How successful was that?

SR: What I liked was not just the suggestions themselves but also the way that people talked about them. What’s interesting is the way they think about England. A lot of it is about memory—how they remember a place and how that might be different from how they experience it now. If the person was writing from abroad, it would often be to suggest something they missed about England. I probably photographed only five or ten percent of the ideas, but it was a great way of generating interest. Other ideas would come from local newspapers, or I’d stop by the local village hall and see what was posted on their noticeboard. There were probably 12 main anchorpoints—places I wanted to be at particular times in the year, such as Ladies Day at Aintree—and then I’d build in other places around them.

Ladies’ Day, Aintree Racecourse, Merseyside, 4th April 2008

AMc: Even though you worked with a 5x4 camera, which by its very nature slows things down, the pictures are still very much about the "decisive moment"—I get the sense of you waiting for the choreography to come together.

SR: It was very challenging because often there were a lot of people in the frame, and how do you find the decisive moment when there are a hundred people moving around? Sometimes I would just take the picture and not really be too bothered if one person was standing in front of another, or if a lamppost was coming out of somebody’s head. But another reason for using 5x4 was because everyone’s a photographer now—whether with a mobile phone or a high-end DSLR—and I had to ask myself what differentiates me from them? So by using a 5x4 I was actually making a very public statement that I was there to take a photograph of this landscape.

People were quite interested in what I was doing but, more importantly, they didn’t feel threatened. If I’d been on a beach walking around with a 35mm camera I suspect people would have felt a lot more threatened. Funnily enough, I was getting quite spontaneous pictures with a very cumbersome piece of equipment. It would take five or ten minutes to set the camera up, so people would get bored with watching me and end up carrying on with what they were doing. There are only a couple of frames where you can see in the distance that someone’s looking at me, but generally it’s almost as if I wasn’t there.

AMc: What other considerations were there?

SR: I shot using only a 150mm lens, which is pretty much how the human eye sees, and I always wanted, where possible, to have an elevated position as this gives a greater sense of the people and their relationship to the landscape. So often I would photograph from the roof of my motorhome.

I wanted to explore the notion of leisure because often this is something we do quite subconsciously, and what people do with their leisure time not only says something about them as individuals, but us as a collective, too. I also knew I only wanted to work outside, to give a sense of the pastoral. And even though I worked in cities, too, there is still a sense of people gravitating towards the green spaces.

Mad Maldon Mud Race, River Blackwater, Maldon, Essex, 30th December 2007

AMc: Why England and not Britain?

SR: Because of devolution, and with Scotland and Wales having a lot more local power politically and to some extent economically, there is a sense of Welshness and Scottishness, but people often see being passionate about being English as rather dirty. I deliberately put the flag of St. George on the cover because I wanted to be quite provocative and suggest there don’t have to be right-wing connotations to it. I’m not suggesting I’m a nationalist, but I do find it interesting how people align themselves with a geographical border.

Saunton Sands, Devon, 23rd May 2008

AMc: Would you say the photographs are romantic?

SR: I was certainly inspired by romantic paintings of England, but even so there are probably only one or two images you would describe as picturesque. I did deliberately photograph in quite evocative light sometimes to try to generate a particular feeling, but yes, I did want to create quite beautiful pictures—and unashamedly so.

AMc: Thank you very much Simon.

SR: Thank you.

Ailsa

We English, by Simon Roberts
Hardback, 112 pages
Published by Chris Boot Ltd. 
Price £26.20

(U.S. link)

For more information visit www.we-english.co.uk

A major exhibition of the work will be on show at the National Media Museum, Bradford, from March 12th to September 8th, 2010

Motherland, by Simon Roberts
Hardback, 192 pages
Published by Chris Boot Ltd
Price £15.75

(U.S. link)

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My friend Ailsa McWhinnie, now a freelance writer and book editor, was founding editor of Black & White Photography magazine. My thanks to both Ailsa and Simon. —MJ

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Featured Comment by Len Salem: "I would also recommend Simon Roberts' blog. You can go back through its archives and see how the project matured, how he interacted with contributors to the blog to research ideas for his work, how the project grew, the final sequencing and editing and so on—as well as lots of interesting asides of a photographic nature on the way. I find it really interesting to follow such a motivated photographer as he develops his work."

An Interview with Kirk Tuck

Introduction: As I mentioned yesterday, Austin, Texas, commercial photographer Kirk Tuck's new book, Commercial Photography Handbook: Business Techniques for Professional Digital Photographers, from Amherst Media, will begin shipping from Amazon.com this morning. (I believe the release date for the U.K. version is October 8th, although you can pre-order it now.) I asked Kirk if he'd answer some questions from TOP readers, starting with a few of mine...

Mike Johnston: Kirk, welcome to TOP.

Kirk Tuck: Thanks very much. I wake up every morning and read The Online Photographer before anything else. Amazing to think that one morning soon I'll wake up and read this. Warps my idea of the time/space continuum.

MJ: You're not the only one who thinks I warp things. Insert rimshot. Anyway, your previous two books were a matched set about lighting, one about lighting on location and one about lighting in the studio. I particularly liked those books because of your clear and simple style, but also your clear and simple way of thinking about lighting, which is pretty rare. But tell me, why the change of direction with this new title?

KT: I loved writing the first two books because they are purely about lighting. I've spent the better part of thirty years lighting stuff, so at some point it just seemed natural to share it. I thought I'd write one book and that would be it. Who knew that we'd sell out the first book in a bit more than a month? I certainly never thought so. But it seemed to resonate with photographers who wanted to learn about leveraging small, battery powered flashes, and who actually like to read.

But after two titles, it seemed that if I wrote any more books about lighting, they would start to be very reductionist and I'd end up writing about stuff that was more and more obscure.  

It was my publisher who suggested that I write about the business of photography. He had listened to me talk about the challenges of being an ASMP* Chapter President and how much new photographers needed to learn about the business and the marketing end of the business if they had any hope of making a decent living, and he suggested that I write a book for a whole new generation of shooters who know tons about post-processing but very little about getting a client and servicing and keeping that client. Based on what I'm hearing back from people who've read the book, it's really hitting a nerve...in a good way.

And the change of title was good. How many books does one really want that start the title with "Minimalist Lighting..."? It can get confusing.

MJ: So who is this new book for? Is it just for people who are already commercial photographers? That might be a pretty small audience.

KT: I think this book is perfect for all the students who've sat through two- or four-year courses and learned to light and pose and print, but never learned how to assist and market and follow up on a direct mailer. It's for the IT guy who got laid off and thinks he might try his hand at professional photography. It's for the "mom with a camera" who's decided to get serious about her part-time business.

But what I'm finding to be the biggest market are legions of photographers who were content with surviving on the "low hanging fruit" only to find out this year that all the stuff on the lower branches dried up. Now they either need to pay attention to the nuts and bolts of the business or hang it up and learn how to make coffee. But finally, there's a huge segment of our market (and perhaps among the readers of TOP) who have great careers doing something else but always wondered what it would be like to step out of a traditional career and see what it's like working on the bomb squad, diving for sunken treasure...or trying to make one's way through life as a working photographer.

In the end I'm reasonably sure that my mom will buy a number of copies....  

I just thought of one more group of potential readers: photographers whose specialty has become less than special who are contemplating a move to a different subject matter. A different niche. Stock photographers who may be looking for a less "stock-able" subject matter, like architecture or executive portraits....

MJ: So basically anyone who has ever done any work for pay, or who's been contemplating working for pay. Got it.

Next question, what does this book offer that typical "business of photography" books don't? I assume it's more readable, for one thing (I should mention to readers that I haven't seen the book yet). Some of those titles can be, shall we say, yawn-inducing.

KT: I was thinking about offering a "yawn free" guarantee with this book, but my publisher said that would bring up too many liability issues!

To make it less about me and more about the concepts, I include three spreads from three incredible photographers who inspired me in my career and who are still working and surviving the recession. One is Wyatt McSpadden, who had an incredible photographer's book on Texas BBQ published this Spring. It's called Texas BBQ, and it is one of the most amazing books on the culture of food I've seen. Next up is architectural photographer Paul Bardagjy, who came to the field from an academic background of art history and design, and finally, Will Van Overbeek, who's worked for more cool magazines and Fortune 500 clients than anyone I know. He did a show of images taken at a local spring-fed pool, and the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin bought the entire show!!

Of course I am wildly opinionated and given to hyperbole, but only in the pursuit of getting concepts across.

Look, I've read a ton of "business of photography" books and they all came across as, "look at me, I'm a wealthy photography expert knocking down seven figures." I wanted to write a book that really opened the kimono, acknowledged that fact that the lessons we learn best are generally learned the hard way, and that my career is also a work in progress. The important thing that any book can do is to provide a new framework to build with. And I think a little humor is like the mortar in the building process. Thanks for the nod to my writing style but I just write the way I talk. (That's why the books are so long....)

MJ: And how about nuts and bolts? I'm surprised sometimes that people have ambitions to be art photographers but don't know about portfolio drop-offs, or want to be wedding photographers and don't know about marketing to wedding consultants. And I don't think most photographers have the slightest clue about the "buyer chain" from the AD on up to the client, or how it impacts how they have to sell themselves.

What I'm asking is, how good do you think this book is as a basic how-to, for someone who really needs action steps in order to get started?

KT: Michael, first of all I should say that the book doesn't really go into detail about wedding photography and what I would call retail photography. I mention pricing models, but working directly with the public is very different than the way commercial and advertising photographers work with their peers and clients. The pricing models are similar, but they sell to a new client all the time, whereas we try to focus on a small group over and over again. And ad clients already understand the market, the service and the pricing models.

When I meet with other photographers, they love to talk about gear but rarely talk about marketing. Having the best gear in the world is pretty meaningless from a money-making standpoint if you can't attract and keep clients. And most photographers are reticent to go out and meet people. They want to believe that all they need to do is get a good web site up and then concentrate on search-engine optimization. There's a lot more to it than that.

So here, in a nutshell, is the way the book progresses. There's the short history of commercial photography. There's a section on how we charge, and it's probably the critical concept of the book. The pricing premise (based on much historic precedence) is that you, the photographer, own the images you create and you license specific usages of those images to your clients. It's the same way Microsoft works in supplying software. You don't own their code, you are licensing very specific usage rights. This allows them to sell the software over and over and over. Once we get past that piece of pricing theory I head into a discussion of the different types of commercial photography, emphasizing all the way through how different clients and their expectations are in each niche.  

Then I barrel on in to the section on advertising and marketing. What are art buyers looking for? Can you really run a profitable advertising business with nothing but an online portfolio and some tweets? (No!) How do you put together a portfolio? How do you follow up? How can you sell without selling all the time?

Then I run through an exercise of estimating a typical job for my business and walk through the billing and collection processes. Of course there are sections about insurance and the "nuts and bolts," but in my mind the marketing is where the rubber hits the road.

MJ: So these aren't marketing formulas, but principles from examples, sounds like.

KT: The interesting thing is that these are all things that have worked for me. There's nothing set in stone. And the information is presented anecdotally instead of as a fixed "formula for success."  Everybody's different and what works for extroverts is anathema for introverts.

The underlying message of all my marketing stuff is that to be successful and happy you have to lose the idea of "us versus them" with regard to clients and potential clients and embrace collaboration. I know some famous New York photographers are legendary for their confrontational negotiation style, but I find that I have more long term honey when I join a client's "team" than when I demand and threaten, and that's a point that I hit on more than once in the book.

When I wrote this book, I did some research in my accounting and realized that I've had some clients for as long as 22 years. And they provide work year in year out. In fact I can probably point to one client whose payments singlehandedly bought my house...over time. Profitable collaboration.

Kevin Rollins, former CEO of Dell, by Kirk Tuck

Art photographers can benefit from the same marketing information as everyone else because their buyers (galleries) as pretty much like the art buyers in ad agencies. They do this for a living and have certain expectations as to approach and presentation. I think good business practices are pretty much universal.

MJ: Kirk, this is fascinating, and I know there's a lot more we could talk about, but we've already gone on a bit long for a blog post. It certainly sounds to me like this new book will be required reading for a lot of photographers who are interested in selling their work to professional clients. Good luck with it—I guess I don't have to explain that I think this is an important subject.

Will you be available to respond to comments and answer our readers' questions? Just selected ones, of course—you don't have to respond to every single comment.

KT: Absolutely. I'd love to answer any questions anyone want to throw out there. Thank you very much for getting in touch with me on this. I'm looking forward to reading it on TOP.

MJ: Thank you, Kirk. I'll open the floor to our readers now. Comments or questions, anybody?

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*American Society of Media Photographers, formerly the American Society of Magazine Photographers. ASMP has more than 5,000 members in 30 countries.

Featured Question from Robert: "Why do all the how-to books illustrate their techniques with bad photography? The photos on the cover are banal at best. It is far better to read PDN, Aperture and the French Photo than any of the technique books at Borders."

Kirk replies: I agree with you wholeheartedly. I am not the best photographer in America or even in my own city. If I were doing a picture book or another how-to book aimed at how to take photographs, I would illustrate it with photos from people like Wyatt McSpadden, Will Van Overbeek and Paul Bardagjy, and probably just cherry pick a few of mine. But. And here's the big But: If I can make a living with the quality of images on the cover and sprinkled through the book then you've got to agree I must know something about marketing, advertising and keeping clients.

This is absolutely not a book about how to make cutting-edge photographs or images that will impress other photographers. It is steadfastly a book about how photographers who want to make money can choose a market niche, find clients and build a brand.

I work for clients who need good, straightforward images done with an eye to conservative corporate values. This book is aimed at people who are coming in to my industry and those who are looking to move up into profitable fields. The people who can already do the kind of work that wins awards and large spreads in major magazines are probably not part of the audience for the book.

I wish I were a better photographer. I really like my portrait work. But I wanted to be honest and show the kind of work that we do every day.

It's not a very glamorous business when you practice it outside New York, Milan, Paris and London. Even though it has a certain cachet, Austin is still a secondary market. Like the markets that most American photographers work in.