The Online Photographer

Learning and Looking

Honesty: isn't it refreshing? Adam Paul of "A Quirky Guy With a Camera" said this at the outset of a 2017 review:

"I'm not a photographer. Though I may occasionally use my 'Spidey Senses' and put forth some wonderful results, I'm not a 100% true, dyed in the changing bag cloth, 'photographer.'

"I'd best describe my make up as one part photographer, one part history buff, one part collector, and one part 'gear head.' The result is a quirky guy who likes using multiple classic old cameras to take photos."

Helps to know yourself!

I'm not a photographer either, I'm sad to admit, although at one time I dearly wanted to be one. I'm one part photographer, two parts writer, and one part gearhead.

Maybe three parts writer.

The kind of photographer I wanted to be, back when, was what was called an "art photographer," as well as a fine-art printmaker. "Art photographer" is not a mainstream term any more; at the time it was an ordinary term, at least in Washington D.C. where I studied. It meant someone who didn't do assignments but photographed anything he or she wanted to photograph, sold prints for money, had shows in galleries, placed prints in museum collections, and published the occasional book. Many photographers work that way still, although most of them are older now.

I lacked something...perhaps talent, or drive, or self-belief, or something urgent to say, or consistency—the kind of consistency that imparts an identity that other people can grasp easily. (You need that, to become known.) One thing I'll give myself is that I didn't lack for a work ethic. I worked diligently. But a lot of what I worked hard at was learning, and looking. Rather than creating.

Another thing that might have hampered me, if I'm honest, was a mismatch between the type of photographs I aspired to make and my temperament and personality. I've long been convinced that people gravitate to making the kinds of photographs that are comfortable for them to make—that match their psychological make-up, you might say. A person who is introverted and likes solitude might gravitate to landscape, for instance. An adrenaline junkie might become a combat or adventure photographer. A person who loves problem-solving and a variety of challenges might become a studio advertising photographer, working to realize the visions of agency art directors.

I remember hearing about a wedding photographer who loved going to weddings. He thought they were great parties, he was wholly susceptible to the sentimental romantic vibe (which I always assumed was three-fifths fake—which says more about me than about weddings), and he was all-in with the idea that his pictures were going to be treasured by the lucky couple forevermore. He adored being a wedding photographer. He couldn't imagine how any other kind of photography could be more fulfilling.

...Whereas I've done two weddings in my entire life. I'm proud of the job I did in each case—I worked very hard and finished each of the jobs responsibly, although in both cases it took me a long time—but as far as I'm concerned, two weddings is plenty for one career! Two per weekend in season? I'd rather be a museum guard (my nightmare job, because I fear being bored).

Anyway, I like candid life-on-the-fly pictures of people going about their lives, but unfortunately I'm psychologically ill-suited to being able to take such pictures. I'm awkward with people. I radiate a sort of—what? Standoffishness, or reserve, or formality—that doesn't tend to put people at ease. And I have to fight against getting flustered and anxious when interrelating with subjects. I do get the occasional success, of course (because photography is like fishing—get your line in the water, and every now and then you catch one), but I wasn't made for the job. Ironic pictures of empty, lonely spaces and quirky, odd found objects, those are things my particular temperament is better suited for. But I don't really like taking that kind of picture and I'm not especially moved by the results.

The great photographers of people tend to either be forthrightly brash and brazen, simply taking the pictures they want without reticence or shyness, or else they're so mild and unthreatening that they blend into the background and become invisible, or they tend to be "people people." Bruce Gilden might be the paradigm of the first type. Helen Levitt or Vivian Maier (or so I imagine) might stand for the second type, while Alfred "Eisie" Eisenstadt was an exemplar of the third type. Even Jackie Kennedy, who famously hated being photographed, loved Eisie, and let him get close to her with his Leicas.

My early mentor, Steve Szabo, when students asked him, "What should I photograph?", would answer, "What can you photograph?" It's a subtle question. It has to do not only with what you have access to, or your skills, but what kind of person you are.

Know thyself.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 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.

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Featured Comments from:

Wenshu Chen: "I like taking pictures of people on the street and did get some good ones. But there were a couple of great pictures I only took with my eyes although I had my camera with me; I just didn’t have the guts to raise it. I wish I were a bit more aggressive in terms of getting a good frame."

Lars Jansen: "Re 'I'm awkward with people, I radiate a sort of—what? Standoffishness, or reserve, or formality—that doesn't tend to put people at ease, and I have to fight against getting flustered and anxious when interrelating with subjects': Yep, that's me. All the talk about getting out of your comfort zone does not tackle the problem that you need particular skills to do (for example) good street photography. In the case of people photography, you also need a genuine interest in people. So I'll just enjoy what others can create when photographing people, I would only radiate the intent to create a picture, not interest in the person.

"Probably why you are good at more formal portraits: you are in control of the environment and moment, and you do have that sincere interest in the other person. Actually, come to think of it: I think you would be able to do a form of street photography with people; just not the fast version where you quickly snap pictures of passers-by. Maybe first a conversation and then a more formal impromptu portrait on the street?"

Patrick Murphy: "I love your writing, especially when it adds the personal to the general. Kind of like the delicious icing on a fundamental cake. This was an insightful post, and also potentially helpful to persons starting out or struggling with expressing their photographic vision. To do really good work, I think you have to know yourself. You hit it on the head—go where your strengths and interests are. Simple, but not a lot of people really listen to their inner voice. You do that well and that permeates your writing. (P.S.—Plus you can change lives. I'm on a plant-based whole food diet because of you, so thanks!)"

marcin wuu: "I'm not either. I'm a portraitist. I just happen to use camera to make my portraits. If I didn't have a camera, I'd draw, paint, sculpt or whatever else medium I'd have on hand. It just happened photographic portraiture is so easy, and I'm lazy."

Mim: "Thanks for putting this so clearly Mike. I have a photography mentor who keeps pushing me to 'stretch myself' into genres (like portraiture) that I'm temperamentally not suited for. I keep trying to tell him that I'm happy to stretch in other ways but that portraiture doesn't work (and after 40+ years I should know).

"I have a talent for abstracts, landscape details, and a bunch of other things. Portraits, I can occasionally grab a good one but it's luck, not good management. I'm catching a candid rather than eliciting a response. Interestingly, most people that do have the right knack/personality seem to think that it's something that can be learnt, whereas to me it's clearly something innate that I just don't have despite decades of trying to learn.

"We have a tradition in the extended family to leave cameras around at family occasions and it's noticeable that almost everyone else's people photos are better than mine. Meanwhile I'm the only one who is at all serious about photography, and my non-portrait photos are streets ahead of theirs.

"I'll 'stick to my knitting' and build on my strengths rather than bash away at my weaknesses with very little result."

David Dyer-Bennet: "'Know yourself' is such a classic concept. True, even useful, to some extent even actionable (there are ways to test self-knowledge some, ways to increase it in some directions; though none of them are so magically powerful they can overcome an absolute mental unwillingness to see yourself).

"And this may be one of the most valuable posts on TOP, despite being short and only barely about photography (the examples are all from photography, but the principles apply universally).

"I've known I was a 'documentary' photographer from before I got in the darkroom. When I first got a camera (negatives back to second grade, so the camera was then or a little earlier) my interest was things in my world to share with others. While I play at other things, 'art' in the various forms largely, it's the documentation I really value (and some landscape, etc., is partly interesting as documentary, to me; that's what Ansel Adams, one of my early and ongoing favorites, thought he was doing for example).

"While I've done stuff that's essentially 'product photography,' for me it was for documenting the objects, or the process of working on the objects, or something. And I do not love working even one-quarter as carefully as a good product photographer has to to produce professional results.

"Weddings come fairly naturally, though—they're just a particular flavor of event photography, which is all about documenting the event. I've avoided commercial wedding photography (did one wedding for strangers) because the stress level of the primary participants can be challenging, and because the stakes are high, but that's a rational decision, not an emotional dislike of the work. I shot weddings for friends each of the last two years, and it was fun. (My friends' weddings tend not to be heavy on sentimental romantic vibe, which is fine with me.)

"I'm also getting more and more into collecting and organizing older photos of things I'm interested in, largely science fiction fandom. Making the documentary work available to people! It's all connected impulses."

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "I recall a time when I learned a bit about myself as a photographer. On a great trip to the Galapagos, I realized that what I love to photograph is people. That is something the Galapagos offered very little of. People intrigue me. I'm at ease with them. I'm very comfortable photographing them. And I like the challenge of disarming them for the process of photographing them. My next trip was to Cuba."

Gary Nylander: "Interesting when you say that people gravitate to making photographs that are comfortable for them to make. That's good advice. Although for me I was definitely stepping out of my comfort zone when I started my newspaper career in 1976. I didn't really plan on being a newspaper photographer, nor did I think that it would be something that I would enjoy doing for my entire working life. When I started my photography career I was 18 years of age and very shy. I guess you could say I didn't really know thyself, although that changed very quickly. Before my high school graduation, I had aspirations to be a photographer of some kind and had knocked on the doors of local photo studios which didn't get me anywhere. One day my father suggested I try the local newspaper, a new weekly had just started publishing a few doors down from the auto-body shop where he worked.

"So I went in there and talked to one of the owners, I showed him some of my pictures, he gave me some film, that led to me hanging around then I started doing the film development and printing for them. Three months later I was doing photo assignments for the paper and before the year was out I was on staff. From there I moved onto a small daily newspaper in Ontario then moved back to my home province of British Columbia and spent the majority of my career at another small daily in Kelowna, B.C.

"All in all a very enjoyable 41-year career. Even at smaller size newspapers, the job can be rough and tough and very competitive. Not really the kind of photography made for a guy like myself who is introverted and likes solitude, and yes, I did gravitate to making landscape photos on my time off. Anyways always good to know thyself or get to know thyself as the journey proceeds. Sometimes taking a more challenging pathway in photography can also be rewarding."

Notes on the State of Photography

It's funny, but I've been feeling a little demoralized lately. It's like my connection to photography is feeling a bit tenuous, and/or my interest is at a low ebb (like the tide, it comes and goes). I can't quite organize my thoughts on the topic, and I can't untangle a dispassionate appraisal of the "the state of photography in 2020" from what might merely be my own personal passing psychological condition at the present moment. (I'm recovering from a long sickness, so there's that...I'm not suffering and I'm not unhappy, but at the same time you know how that is—things haven't felt "normal" and I don't have my usual level of day-to-day energy. And it's Winter—a curious climate change / non-Winter Winter. It's been warm and rainy compared to what used to be normal. I'm a little "down." Is all that just carrying over into my other interests? Could be.)

So I've been trying to get a handle on what's changing in the field. Here are a few notes:

• Photographs are no longer objects. They're mostly files we see on screens. The implications are far-ranging and would need a lot of discussion and analysis to parse properly, but one gross difference is that things that aren't objects are more difficult to buy and sell, collect and archive, etc. Generally, information (of all kinds—writing and music too) detached from its carrier or container is more difficult to control as a commodity.

• Almost all photographs are color now.

• Expertise and specialized knowledge is not as important any more, and may be declining in the amount of respect it receives. When I posted about the demise of PDN, the former periodical for commercial and studio pros, our friend Kirk Tuck, an accomplished longtime pro from Austin, Texas, said "And professional photography has now left the room...." At almost every stage in its history, increasing convenience encouraged the incursion of interlopers on the turf of established photographers who were trying to practice photography as a business. So this is really nothing new—it's closer to a constant state of affairs than it is to a new problem. Whatever the objective state of the profession, though, it seems true that expertise just isn't as essential as it was even pretty recently.

• Mechanical means of recording an image from life (analog photography, roughly) rather strongly resisted easy modification, and revealed to the practiced eye all but the most skillful attempts at manipulation. Now, curiously, as technical excellence is becoming commonplace, photographs are simultaneously becoming more accurate and detailed yet also less trustworthy in terms of what they purport to record and present to the viewer. They're sharper and clearer and yet could well be less true.

• There's just a whole lot of confusion with video now, and video is running roughshod over still photography in lots of ways.

• Vast numbers of people, including many former enthusiast/hobbyist photographers, are apparently happy enough with smartphones for what amounts to point-and-shoot photography.

I should point out here that no value judgements are implied by these bullet points. With this item, for instance, it's a double-edged sword and both good and bad might be said to be coming of it. Really, it's not good, it's not bad, it just is.

• "Real" (i.e., dedicated) cameras are starting to become a little like fine watches...relegated to connoisseurs but fundamentally unnecessary. We're not there yet, but that's the direction it appears to be going in. And there isn't quite enough distinction between OK cameras and really good cameras to suit enthusiasts. Most of us would like it if there were more separation. The fact is, you can buy a really superb lens and put it on a very expensive camera, yet it's not that easy to tell the difference, in most images, between it and a merely decent lens on a merely good camera. Yes, you can tease out the differences if you try, and knowledgeable experts can (sometimes) tell the difference visually, but mostly when we look at pictures we're not really aware of strong qualitative distinctions—we're just looking at pictures. You'd think this would be a good thing, but humans like signifiers (of status, quality, intention, commitment, etc.).

• The boom period during following the digital transition (which I define as 1994–2011) is over. Growth has collapsed, and consolidation and failures are sure to continue. Along with this, is the popularity of photography in the culture as a whole also diminishing along with the camera business? It seems so to me, but I'm not sure I have any real basis by which to evaluate. It's more like a feeling, which isn't very useful.

• Question: Is "photographer" becoming less of a meaningful identity in the public perception? That identity has always morphed and changed, but it seems to me that "photographer" was always something fairly commonly understood and generally respected. I recall a joke where someone at a cocktail party is asked "and what do you do?" and answer is, "oh, I breathe," or, "I eat. Do it every day." It might not be long before answering that question with, "I'm a photographer," might be met with a retort such as, "of course, but what do you do?" What does it mean to be "a photographer" in 2020, and what does it mean relative to what it meant in 2000 or 1980?

• I have questions, too, about photography as an expressive medium. The apparatus and conceptual structure meant to confer claims of original individual expressivity to various photographers always seemed to me faintly contrived—the subversive nature of photography kept interrupting and popping through the efforts of individuals to bend it to what's now demotically called their "personal vision." But the fact is you'd never not recognize a Lisette Model, or fail to see a little of Arbus in any Arbus, or mistake an Eisenstadt for a Friedlander. I see less personality and more anonymity in a lot of photography these days. But that might be totally a false reading, the result mainly of the kinds of things I happen to look at and the infinitesimal slice of photography I get to lay my eyes on.

That last will be my final point for now—Sir Isaac Newton is reported to have said, "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." Substitute ocean of photographs for "ocean of truth" and you'll have something that's been unavoidable for a while now: "photography" as a whole is utterly unknowable because it's so incomprehensibly vast. It probably always was, but, nowadays, no one can pretend otherwise.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 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.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

Darin Boville (partial comment): "iPhones are amazing. They have brought the magic back to photography for me. I've actually giggled—I'm fifty-four years old!—as I watched a Night Shot photo appear on my phone when I first purchased it. My hear rate actually increased when I was shooting during an artist residency in the Mojave Desert—I could feel it, my God—as the images from my tripod-mounted phone appeared on the screen, blackness all around me, glowing pixie dust on the screen.

"I used to know, from a technical point of view, how photographs were made. When iPhones came I knew how the images were made—they were using techniques more or less what you could do on your own, though much more quickly and accurately. But the new phones crossed some sort of line in recent years, especially with the newest models. I don't know what they are doing anymore. They are not just doing regular darkroom stuff, just way faster. I'm no beginner. [...] I'm not afraid of inconvenience in the pursuit of excellence, not shy about expense or suffering to get the image I want to get. But the new phones are magical. They are incredibly exciting, incredibly freeing. People should be happy enough with these phones, my God, and to dream of the future!"

anthony: "And yet, in this vast ocean of truth/images, some speak to us as no others. Many years ago, at the start of a hitchhiking trip around the British Isles, I visited the National Gallery in London, with the intention of taking in as much as I reasonably could in a day. I was moving at a good pace until I came to the 16th century Dutch Masters, including Pieter Brueghel. That room and those images stopped me dead in my tracks, and I only pulled myself away after a couple of hours. I felt it then, and remember it now, as a state of reverie. And a dip in the 'ocean of truth.'"

PhotoDes: "Your remarks do seem to be dispiriting, which may have been your intention or maybe a consequence of your recent illness—or maybe a reaction to the gray winter days. I guess I'm fortunate that I don't feel the same way. I've been maintaining my interest in photography lately with my collection of old cameras and lenses and trying some new lighting techniques. It's fascinating how small changes in lights and modifiers can make big differences. I haven't been caught up in the urge for a new camera or tricking out my smartphone to keep my interest. For me, it's been trying new things with the equipment that has already proven itself. And I don't think I'm missing that extra sharpness or clarity—I'm still getting some photos published on occasion. Photography really is about 'doing,' despite the possible retorts."

Robert: "Best article for ages. Thoughtful and interesting. What you mention fits alongside many of my thoughts. It is a conundrum and cannot simply be addressed by reverting to the nostalgia of the time of exclusively analogue photography, though there was a simpler and more exclusive field of identification then. I would be very interested to see these thoughts develop further. One thing that strikes me is that image making used to be more of a commitment in analogue days—film was a finite resource meaning frames cost money and getting images into a visible form required more work. Of course, in the age of instant gratification that can be seen as a drawback, but I wonder whether it did not also bring advantages of work, craft, and the value that comes from that level of input, and also a certain type of prestige and an added uniqueness to each printed image. (Of course contradicted in book runs, if one was lucky/talented enough to be published)."

[I've only singled out a few to Feature, but many comments to this post were thoughtful and added a lot to the discussion. —Ed.]

David Comdico: "The State of Photography: more people then ever are making photographs and have an interest in photography. Film photography has made a comeback and new formulations are coming to market. Camera makers continue to refine their product line. And yet, the question of how to make Art with these tools remains as elusive as ever."

The Magic of Photography

Mike Plews wrote: "If you go to places where photographers tend to gather (like national parks) pulling out a vintage piece of film gear generally strikes up a nice conversation. If you break out large-format gear and get under the dark cloth you will attract a crowd of both photographers and non-photographers alike, and inviting them to take a look at the ground glass is an excellent way to generate a little positive energy in a time when we could use some. After all, as every TOP regular knows, half the fun of photography is talking about it with people."

That's something I forgot to mention yesterday about my long-gone old Wista view camera. I used it extensively when teaching photography classes. It was always a big day when students lined up behind the camera for a chance to go under the dark cloth and look at the image on the ground glass. There were always exclamations of amazement and delight from under the shroud. It didn't hurt that the camera looked so exotic and old-fashioned, beautifully crafted of beautiful materials. High spirits were the order of those days. They were events.

I even used this to get out of a potential mugging! One day in DC I emerged from the dark cloth to find myself closely surrounded by three inner-city teenagers, who must have been purposely stealthy as they came up to me. As soon as I saw them they began to talk threateningly about why a white guy like me thought he could wander around in that part of town and how much a camera like mine might be worth if they were to sell it. I stammered awkwardly for a minute or two about how there's no market for old cameras, then remembered an article I'd read: if you feel threatened, the article advised, make friends. People don't attack friends. If you feel a cop is about to penalize you for something, for instance, ask for his help with something—it transforms you, in his eyes, from a miscreant requiring correction into a member of the public requiring assistance. It changes his own conception of his relationship to you. I ended up showing all three of those guys the view on the ground glass, and explaining to them why the image was upside down and how photographs are made and so forth. As soon as the first guy saw the ground glass and exclaimed "Wow! That's so cool!" in an excited voice from under the dark cloth, well, then the other two couldn't wait to see it too. We were all quite friendly by the time we parted ways twenty minutes later.

As far as I'm concerned there are, or were, three magical aspects to photography. The first was what we're talking about—seeing the world on the ground glass. The image is at the same time remarkably precise and yet completely transformed. Movement becomes magical. It's Alice-in-Wonderlandish, somehow, literally topsy-turvy, both this world and an alternate world, at the same time. It's like it renders the world into an abstracted scale model of itself. Sometimes I would stare, transfixed, at the ground glass for many minutes on end. Sometimes I'd set up the camera just to watch the world that way. Photographs were, if not superfluous, secondary.

The second is the emergence of the image on the photo paper in the developer tray. There was something wonderful about a solution that looks like water under the safelight revealing an invisible latent image you'd just created with nothing but light. The magic of that might recede with repetition but it never entirely got old.

Remnants
The third is more complicated—it's the way photographs are physical impressions of the past which are always changing in their relation to the present. If you're walking in the woods and you find a bearprint in the mud, that's a physical impression of an actual bear—the real bear had to have made it, meaning she'd been there, in the spot you're standing, not long earlier. When you find an arrowhead or a Civil War Minié ball in the woods, it's not the objects that are magical in themselves—one's a bit of chipped stone and the other's a lump of lead. But each is a physical remnant of the people who made them and used them, and the objects are direct connections to a fundamentally mysterious past.

In an article about the science fiction writer William Gibson written by Joshua Rothman, I read this:

The ten novels that Gibson has written since [his first, Neuromancer, in 1984] have slid steadily closer to the present. In the nineties, he wrote a trilogy set in the two-thousands. The novels he published in 2003, 2007, and 2010 were set in the year before their publication. (Only the inevitable delays of the publishing process prevented them from taking place in the years when they were written.) Many works of literary fiction claim to be set in the present day. In fact, they take place in the recent past, conjuring a world that feels real because it's familiar, and therefore out of date. Gibson's strategy of extreme presentness reflects his belief that the current moment is itself science-fictional. "The future is already here," he has said. "It's just not very evenly distributed."

Couldn't something very similar be said of photographs? In fact, every single attempt to capture the present becomes a picture of the recent past. Human beings are most comfortable with what feels familiar (it's the secret to how we actually choose mates or partners, for example), and conjuring the recent past with photographs is comfortable because it's familiar. But photographs continue to change as they continue to move away from us, receding in time. Soon they become un-replicable and then they grow more and more unfamiliar. Finally they pass out of living memory (defined as experiences or events remembered by people who are still alive—the experience of buying a new Ford Model T, for instance, has recently passed out of living memory). As they do so, they simultaneously become both more and less valuable to us. Historical photographs are physical connections to irretrievable people, places, and things, but "antiques" stores often features tables of old photographs no one really wants.

It's like the old Mitch Hedberg standup joke: "One time a guy handed me a picture. He said, 'here's a picture of me when I was younger.' But every picture of you is a picture of when you were younger. 'Here's a picture of me when I was older.' You son of a bitch! How'd you do that? Let me see that camera." Michael Lesy's cult classic Wisconsin Death Trip was an early book that explored this aspect of photographs. Very briefly summarized, Lesy's insight was that sooner or later, all photographs of people will be photographs of dead people. This tension is a part of almost all photographs, in my view. A picture which is meant to be "read" and consumed right now, a reflection of the present moment, will always have some aspect of tension with the fact that the pictured moment can no longer change. I can't get too far into this here, but one thing I love is that the characteristic styles of the present moment tend to be invisible to us while the pictures are new, but are revealed much more clearly as the pictures age.

Joel Baldwin, Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, from the
pages of LOOK magazine, April 1969. A photo which was
intended at the time of publication to simulate a then-present
moment. June died in the Springtime of 2003 and
Johnny went to join her not quite four months later.

Whether you tend to value or dismiss aging photographs is up to you, of course. But all photographs are of the past, and personally I'm with The History Guy: "history deserves to be remembered." For me that's true of the comfortably familiar very recent past or the unknowably mysterious distant past. For me, that connection, like the ancient arrowhead nestled in the leaf-mold of the forest floor, always has been the essential third aspect of photography's magic.

Mike
(Thanks to Mike P.)

Original contents copyright 2020 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.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

SteveW: "Thank you Mike, I enjoy your blog quite a lot, but I think today's might be the best one you've written, at least that I've read. Please feel free to wax philosophical any time."

Mike replies: Thanks Steve. I got into quite a bit of hot water this past week so it's nice to hear a compliment!

Soeren Engelbrecht: "Interesting how the mast vajority of photographers (or, at least, people taking photographs, if you will permit that distinction) today will never get to experience two of your three magical aspects of photography. From my perspective, your aspect #3 is by far the most important one—and the reason why photography was invented in the first place, I would argue. Preserving moments. Personally, I would add another one: The joy of sharing photographs with others while they are physically present. Print, books, screen—it's always rewarding when you get to see people's faces or hear the words/sounds they make. Far better than the quasi-anonymous 'likes'...."

robert e: "Well said, Mike. So, in other words, a photograph (or a bear print, arrowhead, or musket ball) can engage our knowledge, imagination, and feelings about time, life and death, self and other—about being, really. Puts an interesting perspective on the making of photographs."

Paul Bien: "Here is an 8x10 I took of my younger son Trent about four years ago. Taken with a hundred-year-old Kodak 2-D view camera and developed using an original 8x10 BTZS film tube in my bathroom, it is still one of my most cherished images. Digitized by shooting the negative with a Nikon 750 and printed via inkjet printer. The tones one can achieve with large format can even be appreciated by non-photographers."

DavidB: "Re '...But all photographs are of the past....' Especially true if you do astrophotography!"

Sunday Support Group: What You Really Want

["Sunday Support Group" is an eclectic series of discursive digressions on topics random and sundry, offered in the hope they might help various subsets of our readership in their work and their ambitions, or that they might contribute to our mental, spiritual, psychic or physical contentment. It is meant to appear, as the title suggests, on Sundays; however, Yr. Hmbl. Ed. sometimes meanders, in many senses of that fine old word.]

-

Haven't heard from Ctein in a while. Probably been asleep for a day and a half.  :-)  Thanks again for last week—it sure was fun.

I'd like to mention something briefly this morning that is looming as ever more important in my thinking—something that's easy to say, but that might be profound in the way you approach your photography.

You've got to do what you really want to do.

I can trace the beginning of the time I started working to help other photographers to the summer of '83. Our classmate Sarah was in a motorcycle accident (she recovered), and, on short notice, I took over as the lab (i.e., darkroom) assistant for the Summer. Answered a whole lot of questions, including from people who wandered downstairs from the Gallery! (The school was located in the basement of the Corcoran Gallery, a public museum about three stone's throws from the White House in Washington DC.) The next school year, 1983–84, I did a teaching internship at Northern Virginia Community College under John McIntosh for a Photo 101–102–103 sequence of courses. That led to my first full-time teaching job, and I was on my merry winding way.

Time is short
—spend it doing
what you really
want to do

So it's been 36 1/2 years now. The only time I wasn't working for photographers during that time was a half-year stint as Senior Editor of Model Railroader magazine. While at MR, though, I did help judge the annual photography contest, and made friends with the in-house staff photographers and graphic artists.  Otherwise I've basically never not worked in photography in some capacity or other. Even when unemployed in the early years of the century, I was writing articles for Darkroom User (under the psudonym L.T. Gray—el tigre, the tiger, get it? My dad's idea) and Black & White Photography magazines in the UK.

But this isn't about me. All I wanted to mention is that old-guy refrain—time is short! Spend it doing what you really want to do.

Figuring out what that is might not be the easiest thing in the world. It has a definite psychological component—you've got to listen to your heart of hearts. And I've been always been convinced that it takes a certain fortitude, too. There are all kinds of things that might stop you from doing what you want to. Simple reticence, for example—imagine you're an older guy and you want to shoot nudes, but you're afraid of what your wife will think. I'd say, forge ahead. Work it out with her. Quit if you need to (your marriage is more important than your hobby or even your art!), but don't quit unless you need to. And don't quit without trying first.

A child of the times
Another thing I'm pretty sure affects a lot of people negatively (and not just photographers) are the expectations of others. We're all influenced by our culture in a variety of ways, both close (whether our family members take notice and care) and far (what seems to be the fashion in the culture at large—sharp, brightly colored digital images on screens, for example. That can't be very satisfying for people whose basic gratification comes from crafting durable objects). I think of this often when I come across people arguing passionately online about the corner resolution of lenses or the relative amounts of bokeh of different apertures on different formats. In '83 it might have been the relative graininess of B&W film developers and the efficacy of competing methods of washing fiber-base prints. (Common to both eras? "Leica is best. Discuss.") It doesn't matter, friends. As many of you know. Have fun with it if you find it fun, but it doesn't matter. My point here is that you might have to swim against the tide. The greatest geniuses (think Vincent Van Gogh or Thelonious Monk) do their own thing and let everybody else catch up to them.

I have a feeling that this is going to be one of those posts where the comments are better than the post. (In meetings of my 12-step fellowship, you give up the floor by saying something like "that's all I've got," at which point everyone else says thanks—thanking the speaker for contributing. But some people close by saying "I'll shut up now," to which the rest of the room choruses, "Thanks [blank]!," like they're thanking him for shutting up, which makes me smile.) I'll shut up now.

Mike

P.S. Oh, and an update: My book effort is going to be titled So You Say You Want to Be a Photographer, and I have approximately a hundred more days of work left to do on it. No telling how many weeks that's going to take (could be 100), or whether I'll get it done (I have a miserable track record, remember) but I've been working on it every weekend. Yesterday was a good day. It's basically going to be a really long, well-polished blog post, meant to flow smoothly from front to back. It's turning out pretty nuts-and-boltsy, with lots of concrete practical advice and tuff things to think about, but my main aim is for it to be good fun to read. That, I can do.

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New Word: Overtourism

Never encountered this word before that I can remember. "Overtourism" refers to major tourist destinations getting swamped with visitors and becoming degraded from overuse. I encountered it in this article, which essentially recommends that you help save major venues from overtourism by helping to ruin less well known and more out-of-the-way places, or extending the burden on famous hotspots into what was previously known as the offseason. Not sure if that would really help. Maybe a better solution is just "stay home"?

Of course, that's easy for me to say—I've already seen the Tower of London and the Leaning Tower of Pisa and a lot of similar places, and although I distinctly recall from my youth that feeling of freedom and adventure when setting out on a trip, even a weekend road trip, I no longer have the travel bug much. I do realize, of course, that for many it's a major aspiration.

As far as travel and photography is concerned, naturally I have nothing but support for those who like to combine the two activities. But I'm personally convinced that I take better pictures of places I know well than places I drop in on for brief periods. I'm also convinced that there are pictures everywhere. We don't necessarily need to travel to find them.

YMMV, as they say; everyone's different.

Mike

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Murray Davidson: "It's the other blight of our times—Global Swarming."

hugh crawford: "'Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.' Attributed to Yogi Berra."

Tom Bell: "I am lucky like you Mike to live in an area of real beauty. Luckily Dartmoor has a subtle beauty. But like many places it has one place,'Widecombe in the Moor,' made famous by the song 'Uncle Tom Cobley.' The result is that all the tourists go there! This has advantages in that everywhere else on the moor is empty...a glorious unspoilt wilderness. As time goes on I feel we need to take fewer flights and rush around less. For me I feel the time to see these great places has gone...the crowds destroy the ambience and must be a nightmare for locals. I remember a great travel book by Evelyn Waugh, in which he comments, 'I was not a tourist merely a traveller passing through...and I thank the Lord I went when the going was good.' That was written in 1950 or so...goodness knows what he would make of today.

"I am eternally grateful I have pitched my tent on Dartmoor for forty years. A life blessed and free of crowds."

Mike the Ed. adds: From Wikipedia, for those who don't know: "Dartmoor National Park is a vast moorland in the county of Devon, in southwest England. Dartmoor ponies roam its craggy landscape, defined by forests, rivers, wetlands and tors (rock formations). Trails wind through valleys with Neolithic tombs, Bronze Age stone circles and abandoned medieval farmhouses. The area is dotted with villages, including Princetown, home to Dartmoor Prison used during the Napoleonic Wars."

Nigel (partial comment): "I live in the industrial north, in a town which is off the tourist bucket list. Scratching around in local bookshops throws up a whole load of locally published books with places to visit near to home. It is amazing the interesting places you can find near to home if you dig around. I can walk in the high Apennines in some wonderful landscapes, without meeting another soul all day. I have a Renaissance 'perfect' city just an hour away as well as other interesting monuments that a bit of research brings to my attention. The good thing about local locations is that they are usually uncrowded and the people are happy to have somebody around who takes an interest in their town or village. I can usually get permission to use a tripod in some old dark monuments and other things that make my photography easier. I also get to have some nice conversations with the local people."

Stan B.: "While there's no going back in time, traveling to a far-off destination is like being revitalized, seeing with new eyes. It can be inspirational, life affirming, reinvigorating—add whatever reality-changing accolades you'd like. It can also change one internally, depending on what you see, where you go, what you do. Granted, you usually only get to scratch the surface when traveling, philosophically and photographically, particularly when limited by time. But travel is the introduction, not the endpoint; it is up to the traveler to pursue what he gleans from his travels and incorporate it into his life's journey."

Christer: "From an old tourist guide book I found on a flea market in France 30 years ago: 'A man who has seen a dozen cathedrals has seen a lot, but a man who has seen one cathedral twelve times has seen more.'"

Greg: "'How did Zion National Park become more popular than Yosemite or Yellowstone?' from the LA Times. Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr play a role in overtourism. Dobrovnik is limiting the number of cruise ships that can stop. The list goes on."

Misha: "Re '...help save major venues from overtourism by helping to ruin less well known and more out-of-the-way places...[like] the Leaning Tower of Pisa': I did my duty, and went to Niles, Illinois instead."

Mike replies: That's pretty funny. Photo Techniques was based in Niles, and I never visited the Leaning Tower. I also went to art school for three years a couple of blocks from the White House, and never toured the White House.

On the other hand, I was there at the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, I sailed around the world in the Vendée Globe race, and I've hung suspended from a rope in a pitch-dark crevice in a remote area of the Peruvian Andes. So I guess that says a lot about me.

Dennis: "This idea occurred to me only after spending some time wishing I could travel more to 'hotspots.' When planning a trip to Yellowstone, I bought a book that gave step-by-step instructions on how to locate great viewpoints. I recall standing at one well known picture spot for maybe 10 minutes taking pictures while dozens of other people came and went, including one guy with a Graflex! While in Jackson Hole, I visited Tom Mangelsen's gallery and on another trip to Moab, I visited Tom Till's gallery. I read up on how much time Mr. Till spends out in the field away from his family. And it dawned on me that I'm nothing more than a tourist on these trips, with no local knowledge, no experience-based expertise, a one week window in which to hope for good weather. And it finally struck home that the best photos of any place are taken by people who know that place and can visit it repeatedly.

"I still want to see new places and I want to take pictures while I'm there, but that's more about vacationing than about photography, and I'm not content to do most of my shooting close to home."

Steve Rosenblum: "There is another approach. In my travels I have found that most tourists won't walk more than 50 yards from their car or tour bus. You can visit Yellowstone at peak season and if you throw on a day pack and walk one mile up a trail away from the road you will most likely find yourself all by yourself. Ninety-eight percent of the visitors concentrate themselves in the 2% of the park near the roads."

Bill Tyler: "You write, 'there are pictures everywhere.' I agree, and have an exercise I like to do from time to time, when I think of it. Here it is. Assuming you have a camera of some kind (a phone is fine) make at least one photo you find interesting, without moving your feet. If you're sitting, don't get up. It's not likely you'll make great art, but if you can't find even one composition within reach, you need to try harder. Oh yeah—one more rule—you can't plan this. When the idea surfaces, that's when your feet get sticky. Having said that, here's one I did just now—a  self portrait in a conical metal lamp reflector made with my iPhone."

Mike replies: I love that exercise, and I like the picture! Even though it's not sharp. (Just kidding.)

John Camp: "When you read certain kinds of articles that 'rank' cities by some selected criteria (taxes, cost of living, weather, crime rate, beaches, whatever) you're not often told that whatever the ranking, you really don't live in a city, you live in a neighborhood. St. Louis is ranked as the worst city for crime in the US, but I've been there, quite a few times, and there are great neighborhoods in St. Louis that are perfectly safe. But you could also pick out a different neighborhood, go there. and get robbed.

"The same thing applies to these tourist destinations. They're essentially ranked, and promoted as 'best' for whatever your enthusiasm might be—art, beaches, slot canyons, whatever. Most tourists who go to Paris aren't really going to Paris, they're going to 'Paris.' They're going to the City of Lights, the Louvre, they're going to the Musee d'Orsay, the Picasso, they're walking along the Seine, getting croissants at Les Deux Magots, buying books at Shakespeare and Company...but I bet your friend Peter Turnley could take you to great places in Paris that don't see a dozen tourists in a week. (I once went to a fascinating place in Chartres that I bet Peter hasn't been to, or even heard of.) I mean, if you go as a tourist to places that are advertised as 'must see' stops for tourists on every website on the Internet, what do you expect?

"There are even great places, I mean really great places, that aren't overrun. A certain propensity for bad weather helps—Madrid, Vienna and Amsterdam have museums to rival the Louvre, but for much of the year, you won't see Louvre-size crowds there. Buy yourself a warm Patagonia ski jacket and some gloves, maybe long underwear, and Amsterdam and St. Petersburg are wonderful places in January, though a bit dark. I was once in the Breughel room at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in June and was almost alone.

"You just gotta avoid the Internet traps. Unless that's what you want. I'm looking at you, Malibu."

Of Old Days and New Ways

Well, we certainly have gotten a lot of comments over the past couple of days. All the comments sent me scurrying back to eBay to revisit film camera faves from days gone by, a bad habit I long ago left behind but that feels awkwardly familiar even now. 

It sure is fun to revisit the idea of old film cameras. I miss the sense of control I had using them, and the feeling of a direct connection with the world that an optical/chemical method of recording the lens image imparted. I feel neither with digital imaging. DI just doesn't have the essential magic of film photography—that sense, when you look at an original print, that you are seeing a shadow of the real world. I don't feel that with digital and never have.

However, it's mainly the idea of old film cameras that I like. In fact, I've been lucky—almost incredibly lucky—in that various advancements in photography have come along just as I needed them. Autofocus (AF) came along just as I was starting to have trouble focusing. Digital's short feedback loop came along just as I was getting frustrated with the ongoing complexities of visualizing ("previsualizing," in Minor White's redundant, yet somehow still superior, word for it). Digital came along just as I was getting burned out on all that work I used to have to do. High ISOs became a reality just as I was getting really interested in low-light photography. Image stabilization (IS) came to the rescue just as I was starting to have trouble holding cameras steady.

It's almost like whatever I've needed immediately gets invented. 

The journey not the destination
Each step along the way has come with a sense of liberation and fun. Just to name a few...my first AF camera was a Nikon N8008, and boy did I have fun with things like no-look shooting with one hand, knowing the camera would set its own focus. Whee! I "borrowed" my doctor brother's early Nikon Coolpix (950, I think it was) and shot all afternoon with it. Fabulous fun. Loved that thing. The first camera I owned that had IS—the Konica-Minolta 7D—was a revelation. And although it's controversial at the moment to admit, the most fun I've had in the past three (five?!?) years has been shooting grab shots with phones. It's as close as I've ever come to the imaginary visual notepad I always wanted. I always imagine it's the same feeling of freedom, liberation, and playfulness that Oskar Barnack must have felt when he was out roaming the streets of Wetzlar with his Ur-Leica. You're set free.

I will never regret having mastered film photography, or having learned to see in B&W, or having trained myself to guess exposures without a light meter, and I will always remember the darkroom with great fondness. "Rolling my own" film from bulk rolls onto cassettes and developing film by hand were merely chores, but I loved everything about printing under enlargers and I enjoyed working in—and being in—darkrooms. Using Leica rangefinders for four years or so really did teach me a lot about shooting skills. I'm grateful and glad for everything I went through earlier in my life in photography. Wouldn't trade any of it. And if I ever retire—okay, retire rich enough to have someone else develop my film and make my proof sheets—it'll be B&W film till the end for me.

More work for less return
But the fact is, I need the cameras we have today. Astonishing though this fact may be to me, I am no longer young (just because you can see it coming doesn't mean it isn't still a surprise). I need autofocus. I appreciate today's sophisticated autoexposure, coupled with what I can correct using my favorite program, Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). And I am reassured by IS. Having instant visual feedback and the ability to check results on the fly has made me a better photographer. High ISOs that can reach into the darkness, coupled with shadow recovery in ACR, has expanded the kind of subject matter I can consider—I've always loved low light and near-dark. And being liberated from a set per-exposure cost has made it easier, more comfortable, and more fun to simply play. Even though I never minded, the journey from viewfinder to finished print in 1980–2000 involved an awful lot of scut work. There was powerful austere beauty in the "purist" version of the way things used to be, but there seems no way around this conclusion: I used to have to work harder to get worse results. Or fewer good results.

I'm probably going to love well-made 35mm B&W prints best until the day I die—it was the chosen technique of my younger days and I seem to have been imprinted—but when it comes to color, finely-judged inkjet prints are prettier than any color printing method from the film days in my opinion. I find it curious that inkjet prints still have low status value. But then, humans are weird.

Don't get me wrong—I still have deficits as a photographer. And I suffer from some of the usual grumpiness, ennui, and disaffection that stereotypically goes along with my age and stage in life. I am an "adept" (noun form) when it comes to finding things to complain about.  :-)

But: much as I enjoy daydreaming about going back to the past, for me, and for who I am now, things are better today.

All that jazz
Now then, that's done. What to do now? ...I guess I'll put a vinyl record on the turntable and go listen to some '50s jazz!

Mike

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Mark Barton: "Very, very long time reader—first time commenter…. Speaking of eBay and film cameras, I was recently very surprised when I decided to sell a bunch of the gear that I’d 'accidentally' accumulated over the last 15 years. The surprise was that I ended up with an extra 20–30% above the original purchase price for each and every item! I’d always half justified buying stuff on the basis that I could sell it again without loss, but never expected to make a profit!

"And to bring things back to the post, I’m currently listening to Dave Brubeck at this moment on the speakers bought with the proceeds from the camera sales!"

Pierre Charbonneau: "The beauty of analog photography is hard to define for me. For some inexplicable reasons, I prefer my inkjet prints from well-scanned negatives. During five years, I was enamored of the Leica Monochrom. Quite a superb camera capable of splendid technical results. Sharpness and possibility of dodging or burning were fantastic. But since few years, there is a somewhat softer, a delicate highlight, and a unique and real grain, not fake, that pushes me to shoot 400 ISO film. The 13x18-inch prints are a fine reward for compensating the cost of film, and the time spent on processing and scanning. I guess there is something more organic to film photography. If the word does make any sense here."

Ernie Van Veen: "Interestingly, that is almost exactly the opposite of my emotional experience with photography. For the first 35 years of my photo-snappin' I was frustrated and mentally blocked by film and all of its 'magical' complexities. These were chores that I could (will) never 'get my head around.' In spite of the enthusiastic mentoring efforts of a couple of very talented photographer friends, film opened no doors for me; instead it always stood in my way.

"It was the purchase of my first DSLR in 2011 that set me free. That's when I felt that sense of control and that feeling of direct connection to the world that you feel with film. I have always been a technical, rather than artistic, person. But film has always left me bamboozled. A bit like prestidigitation; you can show me again and again but I will always see only the 'magic' and not the technique. Computers, however—these I understand. That's probably why I was a programmer and systems analyst for 30 years. I happily shoot in manual mode and I understand the usage of the camera and lenses, but I love the menus, I love the screens, I love Lightroom and Photoshop and I love inkjet printers (not the cost of ink). Without digital I would have given up photography years ago."

Gary Nylander: "For many years I split my time between using digital and film. When I was working as a newspaper photographer I used digital exclusively since 2001. I never wanted to go back to using film for newspaper work; with digital I could get time-sensitive pictures to my editor a lot faster, with no colour chemistry to mix up, which was a bonus.

"On my days off and holidays, I opted to use film cameras, mostly a 4x5 view camera. It was a lot bulkier and heavier than the digital cameras that I was using for work, but I liked the alternative way of seeing, I felt I was really on holidays when using my view camera, it was a much slower pace to use in comparison to the fast-paced work I was doing using digital cameras on a daily basis for the newspaper. But alas all good things come to an end and the photography department at the paper I was working at went the way of the dodo bird and so did my job. Now that I am investing in my own digital equipment, newer and much better than what I was using at the paper with their 15-year-old cameras. I have now found that my new-fangled digital camera has met and exceeded in some cases the quality I was getting from my scanned 4x5 view camera negatives. That I find amazing."

Michael Perini: "A near-perfect summary of the way I feel. We didn't notice the work because we were just doing what was required. Sometimes I think a film background is required to fully appreciate the wonders that are possible with digital. I have all my film gear, and keep telling myself that I'll make 8x10 contact prints again...but I think I'm lying. I hope I'm not...but I think I am. Thanks."

Film vs. Digital (Not What You Think!)

To yesterday's "I Feel Old" post, Steve Jacob wrote:

I bought my first SLR in 1981. I bought my first digital camera in 1999. It's now 2019. I have officially been a digital photographer for longer than I was a film photographer. It just doesn't seem like it because time passes so much faster when you get older.

Interesting thing to look at, I thought.

I caught the photography bug but good in 1980 when my Mom's first cousin's wife asked me to do a portrait of their family (we summered with them so I knew them well), and by 1982, after two years of being frankly obsessed with photography, I had enrolled in photography school. Although I used a digital camera for the first time in 1997 (a loan from Agfa of venerated memory), I didn't own my first digital camera until 2003. But I gave up my darkroom in 2000 so I hadn't done any developing or printing since then (the film I exposed in 2000–2003 I never developed. It's still in a box in the barn).

But actually I'd been pretty interested in photography since 7th grade (age 12) when I shot six 12-exposure rolls of Kodak Instamatic film on a class trip to Washington D.C. I did another six-roll project, with an SLR this time and 36-exposure rolls of 35mm, on a European trip when I was 14, and had a show in the dining room of my high school when I was 16. So really, I was a film photographer from 1969 to 2000, 31 years, and I would have to go till 2034 before I equal that in digital.

So my numbers are 31 and 16: 31 years with film (1969–2000), 16 with digital (2003–2019).

How about you? You don't need to give us the rundown; just the numbers will do. Plus any comment you might care to make.

I'm going to be disappointed if there aren't at least a few people whose first number is zero—and I'm curious to see whether there's anyone whose second number is zero!

Mike
(Thanks to Steve Jacob)

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Fritz: "Fifty-four and 16."

Dennis: "Zero and 16. Not counting some use of disposable cameras on family trips and whatnot. Got a Canon point-and-shoot in 2003, been at it with a variety of equipment since with a lean period between 2014–2018."

Bill Pearce: "Thirty-one, 20. The first number includes the transition years, where I shot film and had a lab scan it so I could use PS as needed and then place in publications. I miss the direct to-the-point nature of film. For the last ten or 15 years of my film career, I went out with a Hasselblad and a couple of rolls of film and never even used a light meter. The tyranny of menus was never a problem. I have seen no evidence that all the micro adjusments and the 'flexibility' of bloated camera menus have improved photos the slightest bit."

Bob Curtis: "Sixty-five and zero."

Mike replies: Hard core!

Peter: "It's interesting the assumption is that people start in film and move to digital—maybe reflective of the age of the readers here (older), whereas many millennials start in digital and move to film. As an oldster myself: 12 (film), two (digital), 12 (film)."

Sixblockseast: "About 16 and 14 for me. Transitioned to digital around 2005 with a Canon point-and-shoot, made my way to Samsung mirrorless in 2012 or so, and now Fuji since 2016, so I actually never owned a true DSLR! I do not miss film one bit, especially not the widely varying quality of retail developers/printers."

Greg: "Sixteen analog and 17 digital All my digital photos are sorted, backed up multiple times and sorted in different locations as well as tagged for fast searching (under 1 minute if I have the right key words). Scanning the slides and negatives I have left is this Winter's project."

Doug Vaughn: "Film 26, digital 19, film again 5."

Henning Wulff (partial comment): "I have glass plates that my grandfather shot as well as slides, so he made that transition."

Joost: "Film: 0-ish, Digital: 15. Though I've at times done some analog shooting, as a kid with my parents camera, later for fun, no more than 300 exposures. I did develop and print most of those myself. The feedback-loop for analog was just too long for me."

David Bateman (partial comment): "Seven digital, then two film, now eight digital."

Houses of Many Mansions

"In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you." (John 14:2)

-

Yesterday JimH wrote:

"In everything I have been involved with, photography, writing, managing businesses, racing, flying, etc. I have concluded that some people are naturals, some try hard and improve and some just need to try something else. I am sure the same thing exists in athletics because I have no relevant abilities no matter how much I tried. Thus I am skeptical that any number of repetitions will make anyone competent. Some things you can learn, like grammar, but that will not make you a competent writer. Reading what others think is great literature might help but where does creativity come from? Perhaps it’s innate. Same with photography, I think."

I'm finding this difficult to argue with, mainly because, as I read Jim's comment, examples popped into my head of each of his three categories. The line makes me laugh, it seems so bang on. I've definitely known photographers who were naturals, photographers who responded to deliberate practice and got much better, and (forgive me!) photographers who should just give up and go do something else.

The last category reminds me of a story told to me by one of my very earliest supporters on the Web, the aptly named Wendell Webb. When I was writing The Sunday Morning Photographer for The Luminous-Landscape, Steve's Digicams, Photo.net, fotopolis.pl, and several other foreign-language sites (I did not do the translations), I got the bright idea that if everybody who read my column—it was lots and lots of people—paid me a dollar for every installment, I'd be financially secure. So I tried asking everyone to please send a dollar every week. Only one person did. That was Wendell.

The officer's tale
As best as I recall, the story he told was this. He had been an officer stationed with the military at a post in the Middle East at a time when there was nothing to do. But the base was surrounded by a sea of hardscrabble desert, so he and his officer friends decided to take up golf. With some effort, they set up a golf course in the desert and commenced to play every day. They enjoyed it, and imagined they were improving. This continued for some eight months.

Then they got a new commanding officer who was a real golfer, and his new subordinates invited him to play with them. Wendell was nearing the end of his tour, and he was eager for a knowledgeable appraisal of his skills. So, after the round, Wendell earnestly asked the C.O. whether he thought he was any good and whether he thought he should continue to play golf when he got back to the States. He wanted to know whether he should take lessons and work at improving, and so on—whether he should become a golfer.

In response, the C.O. invited him to lunch. At the end of the meal, the man leaned forward and said, "Wendell, I'm going to give you the advice you asked for. First, I recommend that you take three weeks off. Just don't play any golf for three weeks. Take a break; give it a rest. Do you understand?"

Wendell said, "I see. Okay. And then what?"

The man looked at Wendell with the utmost seriousness and said, gravely, "And then, when those three weeks are over, I want you to give up the game of golf forever."

The power of the niche
Still makes me chuckle. And yes, I've known photographers like that...people who are so bad at it they don't even know how bad they are.

But here's the big difference, or one of them. What about the idea of finding your niche within photography? Because I think that can make all the difference.

A few people can do most anything, but most of us have things we're good at and things we're not. For example, you should see what happens when I try to write fiction. I butted my head against that ambition (because it was the conventional ambition) when I was young, but, really, I'm no good at fiction. I've tried it enough to know. I have no feel for it, no particular insight into people. The best I can manage is mimicry. And, if I'm perfectly honest, the whole enterprise of fiction makes me vaguely uncomfortable—I sometimes can't see the point in reading made-up stories someone else invented. Especially when I don't buy what they make their characters do. If I find myself thinking "no real person would do that" as I'm reading a novel, that's often the death knell of my interest in that book. I want, even need, "the slap of truth." (It's probably one reason I like photography.) The only way fiction works for me is if I think the writer is freeing him- or herself to write what they know about real life, but without the constraints and limitations of literal reporting. I don't think anyone could fail to see that Jane Austen, to name just one example, was a close observer of human nature, and was writing naturalistic portraits of her contemporaries even if her characters were not specific real individuals.

Many good writers, even great ones, have relatively narrow niches. J.D. Salinger had a very limited range, as did James Thurber and Hunter Thompson. James Herriot made a fortune telling just the kinds of anecdote-based yarns you might spin in a bar—in fact, that's how he realized he could do it, because his hearers down at the pub liked his little tales so much. But I don't think he could have written history. Can you image C.S. Forester, author of the Hornblower saga (the only series of books I've ever read twice), penning Samuel Beckett's plays? Agatha Christie was adept at plotting mysteries, but her characters almost resemble game pieces; imagine her trying to write a psychologically deep literary novel. I don't think that would end well!

What's "a photographer," anyway?
In that way photography resembles writing. Imagine Ralph Eugene Meatyard trying to be Joe McNally, or vice-versa. Could Karsh have been Diane Arbus, or Arbus Karsh? I don't think so. The sainted Ansel was said to have had such a bad color sense that his party guests were shocked at his sartorial choices; he seems to have been blind to color even though he was not color-blind. And so on.

And that's part of the work—part of the reason we keep trying things and continuing to explore. Because when you find what you are meant to do within photography, or within writing—the thing that really satisfies you and gives you a sense of inner reward—well, that's what's worth the trip.

When you think of it, there's not really any such thing as "a photographer," anyway. There's only the photographer each of us was meant to be.

Mike
(Thanks to Wendell)

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Homer Office: "It's all about decisions."

How Do You Become a Photographer? Want It, Then Find a Way

How do you become a photographer? You get to work, of course. You shoot a lot and you develop a daily habit of shooting, shooting whether you need to or not. You work out your style and hone your chops and get started learning. Find your style, but find it by working, not by looking for it or thinking about it. Every photographer I've ever known keeps busy at it. If they have nothing to do they'll make something out of nothing. Doesn't matter what kind of photographer they are. They find their work and find a way to work at it.

Jingna Zhang has a nice post on her blog about how she started out, which Pierre found for us the other day. It tells about how she got to work when she was young, "learning framing and how to work with what light you have." It's mostly about starting simple and how to pay for entry-level equipment, but it's a beautiful post, really. The work does look like student work—good student work—but both the words and the pictures reveal a young photographer who really knew what she was going to be good at, a young photographer who had little doubt about what direction she wanted to go. That's lucky, I'd say, that sense of direction. I love that mental image of her working tight in her impromptu studio, AKA her parents' living room after moving the couch out of the way. (It's tough to work tight—there's a reason studios are large even when sets are not. Lights need room.) Hardly a wonder she shoots Vogue covers now. People who want it find a way, and then work toward their goals.

I experienced something similar, but with writing rather than taking pictures. (Like I joked the other day, if nerds just learn about things obsessively and geeks do things obsessively, then I'm a writing geek and a photo nerd.) I gave a lecture at a school long ago. I drew a Venn diagram of three overlapping circles to represent the then-current photography scene in Washington, D.C.—the biggest circle was photojournalists, a smaller one was commercial and advertising pros, and the smallest circle represented what were then called art photographers, many of whom, the ones I knew anyway, were associated somehow with the Corcoran Gallery and School of Art and the Kathleen Ewing Gallery up on Dupont Circle. A hand went up in the back of the room. "What kind of photographer are you?" was the question. I actually kind of surprised myself with the answer that popped into my head: "I'm a writer," I said. Writing geek, photo nerd.

The first three weeks of my recent recovery period from surgery, which took place a month ago tomorrow, was the longest stretch I've gone without writing in decades. I believe that's literally true. I love to write, and I do it most days. It was tough to be forced not to do it for the better part of a month.

As I've said before here (sorry if I'm repeating myself), I started writing seriously after I was invited to a small reception for the Canadian-American novelist Saul Bellow, the last American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature before Bob Dylan, at Dartmouth. I waited in a short line at the end of the breakfast to ask him a question, and what do you know, the guy in line ahead of me asked him the very question I meant to—"What's the best way to become a writer?" Mr. Bellow had obviously been asked the question before, because he answered without a pause: "Write three million words." He went on to say more than that; one of his points I remember was that you don't even have to worry about finding your voice (a common problem for beginners); you can't help but find your voice over the course of three million words. Just keep writing and it will come. It'll work itself free. Well, anyway, I went back to my dorm room and got out my calculator. Three pages a day, I figured, 275 words per page, call it 300,000 words per year, and 3,000,0000 words would take ten years!! I remember being utterly dismayed. I was 18, so of course I wanted to be famous right then, or the next month or the next year, not a long trudge of ten years out toward the horizon.

But I'll say this for myself, I got right to work.

Before long I had established a daily habit of writing that is now more like an appetite. In fact (again, literally, and I do know what literally means), it's easier for me to go a day without eating than to go a day without writing.

Tomorrow's the Fourth of July, and my lakeside neighborhood is full to the scuppers of vacationers—people with Summer cottages and their families and their visitors, and rental houses chock full of gangs of folks, parked pickup trucks and SUVs from New Jersey and Ontario and Virginia clustered all around the houses like wildebeest at a watering hole. And one thing I notice is that older men at their vacation homes seem to love to get out and work. They're out puttering around, running things with motors (the noisier the better), cleaning stuff, fixing stuff up, tearing stuff down, going to get stuff, throwing stuff out, tending to the yardwork, hammering, carting stuff around from here to there and back. They're on vacation doing what they want to do—which does include "recreational activities," of course, but then, in the in-between times, work of some sort. You can tell they're just in the habit of working and working is what they like to do. Relax? Sure, but just as soon as I get this done.

I write even when I don't have to. If I have no reason to, I do it anyway. Keepin' my hand in, I guess. Whatevs.

Well, I'm no Saul Bellow, and my prose is the opposite of deathless—it has a sell-by date as short as that of a bag of carrots. But then, I get to write, and you're reading this so you know I get to have readers, which is an honor and a pleasure (thanks). No complaints. No complaints except when I'm forced to not work for three weeks!

I think that's how you know if you're a photographer. You work, even when you don't have to. Because it's what you do.

Mike
(Thanks to Pierre, Jingna, and to Saul Bellow 1915–2005
Illustration: my friend Llew with the old musket he found in their house.)

P.S. An interesting coincidence: Jingna Zhang says in her article: "Growing up, my family wasn't very well off. My parents argued about money, and often. I remembered once when I was 4 or 5, I was so scared and angry in the next room when they were fighting, I swore to myself that day, that I'd become financially independent as soon as possible and then forever, so I'd never be a burden or need to rely on anyone again. Ever."

Then, as I was looking for a bio of Saul Bellow to link to for people who have never heard of him, I ran across his "Memoirs of a Bootlegger's Son," a partial autobiography he started and then forgot about that was exhumed and published by Granta. The first page, before the paywall, vividly recounts his parents fighting about money. "Those are lucky who die when their childhood is over and never live to know the misery of fighting in the world," his father yells furiously at his mother. 

Pa would sometimes frown at me and say that I reminded him of [Ma's brother] Mordecai. He saw the faults of my mother’s family embodied in me. In my own mind I came to accept this, and was not ashamed of it even when Pa would say, ‘There’s insanity in your mother’s line. Her Uncle Poppe was a firebug, and he was very dangerous. He used to set the curtains afire. These things are inherited. There’s no taint like that on my family.’

‘Not if you don’t count hard hearts and bad tempers,’ Ma would occasionally, but too rarely, answer. Only occasionally, because she loved him. When he was away she’d say to the children, ‘If you told Mordecai that you needed something, he put his hand in his pocket and gave you what was in it, without looking.’

Good stories.

TOP will be off tomorrow for the U.S. holiday (Independence Day, AKA The Fourth of July)

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Mark Hobson: "Making pictures, lots of pictures, is the only way to find one's vision, i.e., personal way of seeing. My suggestion for doing so is simple enough...use a phone camera, if only as a handy picture-a-day device. My iCloud photos account has 12,000+ pictures, most of which were made over two years. For comparison, my 'real' camera picture archive has 7,000+ pictures—pictures processed to a 'final' standard—made over the past 20 years. Obviously, I make a lot of pictures, but more so since I began my use of the iPhone camera.

"So, here's my point....if one wishes to make a lot of pictures in his/her vision quest, taking a 'real' camera out and about and subsequently going about one's processing routine is a time-consuming endeavor, especially if one is making a lot of pictures (which is the point). On the other hand, taking a phone camera—which is probably always on hand—out of one's pocket, touching the button (shutter) and doing a bit of processing on the phone using a processing app is a five-minute task. After making 20 or so pictures, send the files—directly from the phone—to an online printing source for the making of small proof prints.

In my opinion, viewing prints is mandatory in order to judge what one is doing. Before one knows it, there will be a box full of prints from which, with careful/thoughtful viewing, a picture-making pattern will emerge and form the foundation for developing one's vision. CAVEAT: before anyone starts saying that camera phones suck—they don't suck, they are capable of creating very fine results—remember that the point of this exercise is to make a lot of pictures. Not 'perfect' pictures. Just pictures. Pictures that don't require a lot of thinking but rather a lot of just plain looking and seeing."

[Ed. note: I wrote about Mark here. (One of my all-time favorite post titles, by the way.)]

Jeff: "TOW...The Online Writer. Doesn’t have the same ring."

Mike replies: Well, in the initial conception, you are the online photographer...that is, each reader is. Me as well, but certainly not just me.

Actually, the initial conception of the blog was that it would be an outlet for my friends to write blog posts occasionally. Several friends had told me that they would start blogs but for the fact that they couldn't keep up with the day-to-day demands for content. Since I've always been wordy (ahem), my idea was that I'd take care of the day-to-day, make sure there was something up every day for readers to find, and then they could each contribute whenever they wanted to. That has been reflected in the blog with a fair amount of success, but maybe not to the degree I first envisioned.

DALI Oberon Loudspeakers (OT)

[Warning: Bloviation Alert. The second half of this is what I meant to write on Wednesday for "Open Mike" this week. Marcin's right, I do go on too long when I get my teeth into a topic.  —Ed.]

-

A few further thoughts about the concept of an "apex product":

It's not an average. Nor is it mediocre. It's an ideal.

...But a practical, utilitarian sort of ideal. One that takes into account more than just the normal hierarchy of status and expense. For example, with highly salable top-of-the-market products, such as, say, the VW Golf, which is the best-selling car in Europe, even though each iteration is not terribly costly, the company is justified in putting huge amounts of research, R&D, and engineering into the "template" on which the "workmanship of certainty" is performed (i.e., the production process). "Handmade" products, such as a Superformance, have an undeniable appeal, but handwork is simply not as good as when you can spend millions of dollars on a robot to do a specific type of precision weld. It's true that you can spend $300,000 on a Rolls-Royce, but a Honda Accord would cost $300,000 too if there were no mass market and it were made one by one in low total numbers by teams of craftsmen, and the engineering that went into it had to be amortized over a small number of sales.

So "ideal" for me incorporates a number of things not normally associated with status. Is it easily replaceable? Is it non-precious, such that it can actually be used, and, if it's appropriate for the product type, used up? Is it reliable? Is it easily repairable? Example of that: I knew a guy who bought his cars by picking his repair shop first, then asking the mechanics there what kind of car they most liked to work on. If they said Chevy Impala, then he bought a Chevy Impala (he tipped them a bottle of whiskey when they worked on it, too). By contrast, I also knew a guy who was a Ferrari mechanic in the '90s, and he told me that an oil change on certain cars had to be done by the dealer and cost $2,000. Guess which one I would judge to be more ideal?

And don't say "Ferrari owners can afford it," either—the same guy got out of the automotive field altogether because the average Ferrari owner—80% of them, he said—can't afford routine maintenance, and it just got too frustrating for him to so seldom be able to take care of the cars the way the manufacturer intended.

This little guy (3/8 to 1/2 inches in length) will cost me
at least $600 this year. Not ideal.

So, continuing with the list...parts availability; the exclusivity<—>anonymity spectrum and where you want to fall on it; the simplicity <—>complexity spectrum and ditto; ergonomics; residual value a ways out (five years for cameras, 10 for cars, 30 for houses) as a percentage of initial new price (digital cameras suck at that); and mandatory related expenses. As an example of "mandatory related expenses," I'm finding out that my yard here is a fairly big line-tem in my budget. Last year I had to spend $1,400 on a used John Deere; this year a beetle called the emerald ash borer just killed a full-sized ash tree in my back yard, and the lowest estimate I've gotten for removing it is $600. Ask me if I think spending $600 on account of a beetle, even one in a Doc Severinsen suit, is an ideal situation. There are maybe five more trees on my property that could come down if I were actually wealthy enough to live here.  :-)

I don't think there's any such thing as a complete list of these things, because we all have different realities, comfort levels, incomes, ideas, locations, tastes, and specific needs and wants. but the point is that in attempting to locate an apex product, you can get pretty subtle about how you determine what it is. For me, a Toyota Corolla with a stick shift (automatics being expensive points of failure) is a better car than a Rolls-Royce or a Ferrari. The Rolls is more luxurious and will impress people much more (although I saw a new Bentley on the streets of my semi-impoverished little town a while back and no pedestrian even looked up as far as I could tell), and the Ferrari is much more exciting to drive, assuming you have access to a race track now and then, but then, consider taking your dogs to the vet in the back seat of the Rolls, or plopping some wet bags of topsoil on the pristine wool carpeting in its trunk. The Ferrari is merely a toy that could land you in jail if you actually play with it. Neither can touch the Corolla at preventing cash from evaporating. The Rolls and the Ferrari are not in the Toyota's league when it comes to that. So what's best? Depends on what you value.

Danish Audiophile Loudspeaker Industries: DALI
How I got started thinking about this is that I was going to draw your attention to a new speaker called a DALI Oberon 3. As you might know I have pretty specific and idiosyncratic tastes in a lot of things, and two-way minimonitors with 7-inch paper (well, paper-ish) woofers (which I like) and soft-dome tweeters (I dislike metal ones, which is partly bigotry and partly not) are a holy grail thing with me. I love 'em. I owned a Swiss speaker called a Revox Studio 3 for years and I got imprinted. And I used to own Rogers LS3/5a's, which are legendary. Audio catnip.

I'd love to hear these DALIs. They tickle the endorphins. They look so tidy and minimalist and basic and simple and clean and pretty, don't they? Designed in Denmark and made in China, so they're well designed and well made but they only cost $800, which is well into the "sensible" range for a pair of minimonitors. (Compare here. Be prepared!)

But then I got to thinking...they're not the apex product.

In fact, no small stand-mounted two-way is. The problem starts with the fact that you have to buy stands, which are needed to hang the drivers in the right place in the air. And the stands have to be well-made because the coupling to the floor affects the vibration of the speakers. Good stands can cost anywhere from $200 to $1,200, but stands are something close to wasted money...necessary, but only because "bookshelf" speakers never sound very good on, well, bookshelves.

And minimonitors don't really have quite enough bass. They demand a small room.

But the biggie is that small speakers are, as a category, less efficient and harder to drive and thus require more amplifier power than bigger ones. Really, to pair with these, you should have an amp with decent grunt, something of good quality rated, I would say, in the  85 to 120 watts-per-channel range. So any money you save on the speakers you're going to lose on the amp.

A lot of people make this mistake. They think small, tidy speakers should go with small, tidy amps, and big honking speakers should go with big brutish amps. It's kind of the other way around, all else being equal. The small speakers need power, whereas bigger ones can be set free with less. Want a pair of Klipschorns big enough to hide dead bodies in? You can drive them with a flea-powered single-ended triode (SET) tube amp with only a handful of watts, like this little 3.5-watt [sic] SA3 amp from Bottlehead.

So the apex product in the DALI Oberon line is probably the more expensive and larger Oberon 7 floorstander. True, they're more expensive at $1,400, still a good bargain by audio standards. They sit right on the floor; no stands needed. They have two woofers rather than one, so they're three decibels down at 36 hertz rather than 47 hertz like the 3's. The sensitivity isn't that different—88.5 dB rather than 87; same drivers, after all. All in all they can probably load a bigger room and I'd say you could stick in the 50-100 wpc range with good quality solid-state amplification. Probably more satisfying in the long run than the little guys.

Besides, if you're going to get minimonitors—and stands—you should go all the way and get Falcon's loving remake of the BBC LS3/5a, the absolute all-time classic great holographic minimonitor, the "original gangsta." Drive them with a tube amp (Mike loves EL34's) that has at least 25 wpc and has 16-ohm taps. Nirvana. Don't have a small enough room of the right shape? Build a room for them.  :-)

Rooms!
Speaking of rooms—and efficiency and sufficiency—I seem to be annoyingly attracted to hobbies that need "room-sized accessories," as my friend Nick once called his darkroom. First I needed darkrooms, which caused me to always ask real estate agents to see the basement of a prospective house first, which they always thought was peculiar. Then there's pool—the real luxury of having a pool table is having a place to put it. I can tell you from experience that there aren't a lot of reasonably priced houses in Southeastern Wisconsin that will accommodate a full-sized pool table. I don't have space for one here, alas, and I feel the lack.

Then there's stereo. My brother Scott always thought it was fun to move, because then you get to know your speakers all over again—different rooms make speakers sound different. Most people put a stereo near where they hang out, instead of hanging out where they put the stereo, and that's perfectly sensible, but dedicated audiophiles, who are, as a class, very far from sensible, will sometimes build dedicated listening rooms. In audio, the amp-speaker symbiosis is very important and the speaker-room interaction is just as important.

The best place for the Oberon 7's would be a rectangular room of medium size, say 150 to 400 square feet or thereabouts. Say you have a room that's 15x25', so 375 square feet. I'd start by placing the optical axis (imagine a line running vertically down the middle of each speaker face, touching the front of the drivers) along the short wall 1/5th of the way out into the room—so, 5' into our 25' long room—and 1/5th of the room width from the sidewalls, so, three feet in our 15'-wide room. Then place the listening chair at the other end of the long dimension of the room, also 1/5th into the room, or five feet from the back wall in the 25'-long room. With the Oberon 7's I'd start with no toe-in, meaning, with the speakers facing squarely forward rather than pointed partway toward the listening chair.

That would be a good starting point. Then you could fine-tune the positions of both speakers and listening position based on listening. I should mention that assuming you have a pretty "regular" room, it's worth it to measure as exactly as you can even when first setting up—get the speakers to 1/4th inch of the intended placement if you can.

So, should you buy a pair of Oberon 7's? Well, I never said that! I haven't heard them. I've only read about them. They look interesting to me, but you'd need to hear them for yourself before committing to a purchase, whether you do that by going to a dealer or by buying a pair with a reasonable period of return privilege. Unless they seem just too excruciatingly cheap, however, they, or similar floorstanders for a similar price, seem pretty close to an apex product for me. Not the best, not the worst, just a very well-judged approximation of the optimum bang for the buck.

Mike

P.S. Before we leave the topic of audio for another six or eight or ten months or two years or however long it's going to be, here are three more current audio products I personally think are really cool: the Wharfedale Linton Heritage speakers, a modern update of classic 1970s three-ways, designed by Peter Comeau, a designer whose work I really like; the newest version of the now newly retooled Panasonic direct-drive turntable, the Technics SL-1500C, a semi-automatic (!!!) version of the new rebuild of the classic, which also has a built-in phono section and comes with a cartridge, truly plug and play; and the Benchmark AHB2 power amplifier, which is tiny and light and is mopping up awards and earning lavish praise all over the place. I was going to write about these, too, but I have run out of steam for today.

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Dave Miller (partial comment): "I enjoy discussions about hifi. I used to be an audiophile until I was cured. This happened when I met hifi design engineer Phil Marshall. Phil worked for Dolby Labs amongst other companies but for many years he designed NAD's amplifier range including the power edge models (1990s?). I met him for the first time after he replied to some questions I asked about articles on his website explaining the importance of the room environment to the audio experience. I ended up working with him as a volunteer for a while, just a naive pair of ears, helping him with listening tests and learning from him. Phil now runs a tiny bespoke loudspeaker company called Marshall Choong Audio. He moved to speaker design because that product still had a lot of room for improvement and a skilled and creative engineer had scope to advance the art.

"Phil taught me a fundamental truth about music reproduction understood by engineers but not so much by customers. The most important component in hifi isn't the amp, speakers, source, cables or even your own ears, but the listening room. Speakers sound different in different rooms—something that a lot of people know. But perhaps what many people don't realise is that the difference a room makes totally dominates any other factor. Nothing you do in your choice of components makes any difference if you have an unsuitable room.

"The magazines would love you to try and fix the problem by buying ever more expensive components but if the room is the issue, it won't help. The key factor is room resonances. A typical room has reflections and standing waves that create massive response boosts at certain frequencies. Phil showed me how to measure room response. A typical small living room in a typical modest UK family home (say a brick-built three bedroom 1930s semi-detached home) has room dimensions that create resonances at around the 50Hz region that can sometimes be greater than +50dB above a flat response. That is a ridiculous problem. Almost all speakers will have bass overhang and undamped resonance that make getting a smooth, accurate sound very difficult. There are few ways to effectively counter this problem (set up your music listening space in a cow field?)...." [For the rest of Dave's comment, please see the Comment Section. —Ed.]

Mike replies: ...Or the near field! This is one reason I like small two-ways so much—near-field listening. My current speakers aren't great shakes by audiophile standards but set up on my desk they're a reasonable approximation of near-field listening and take the room more or less out of it.

Of my two favorite stereos, one was a pair of Celestion SL700's (bought as cosmetic seconds for half price) that I set up in the middle of the barn-like living room of a rental apartment and listened to in a near-field setup. Wonderful. And of course a good way to manage room resonances in the 20–150Hz region is to not have the bottom half of it in the first place.  :-)  (My "personal standard" for "enough but not too much bass" was –3dB at 42Hz, which I arrived at because that's the response of Thiel 1.5's.)

The other was in the basement room of my house in Woodstock, Illinois, which happened to be almost an ideal room—best room I ever had, anyway. Shoebox-shaped, big but not too big, with a concrete floor and two concrete walls, heating ducts encased in drywall on the ceiling which turned out to be great for disrupting reflections, and a wooden closet that stretched all the way across the back wall that turned out to be great for breaking up standing waves. I placed two floor-to-ceiling bookcases at the strategic points on the sidewalls. It was carpeted wall-to-wall, and I experimented for months with the position of my desk (listening seat) which was at the back of the room, and the speakers, which were given most of the rest of the room. I ended up, entirely by ear, with a very close approximation of George Cardas's room proportions and setup. George's site was where I got that tip about measuring the position exactly—when I did that, I moved the speakers less than two inches, but the focus was improved remarkably. I wouldn't have believed it any other way except experiencing it.

That house also had really crummy AC, so the other revelatory change happened when Paul McGowan (who is a photographer and was reading Photo Techniques at the time, although I don't think he reads TOP) let me be one of the beta testers for his then-upcoming original P300 Power Plant. My prototype didn't have the fancy casework, though—it was built by Cullen Circuits in a Ayre amplifier box. I kept it for years and in fact might still have it.

I've certainly heard of Phil Marshall. Very cool that you got to work for him. I suspect I would like Marshall Choong's "bookshelf" speakers...I once started a website called "The Sealed Box" which was intended to list all the non-vented speakers available! That was not popular.

Peter Wright: "One of my theology professors once remarked that when considering something like the shroud of Turin: Had it ever touched the face of Christ? It made no difference to Christianity either way, so we could choose to adopt what she called a 'hermeneutic of trust,' or a 'hermeneutic of suspicion.' Now, when it comes to audio, I am definitely a 'hermeneutic of suspicion' type of person. (And I speak as an electronic engineer who studied tube and transistor circuit design at university.) I agree that different speakers sound different, but past say $1,000, the differences don't have any effect on how much I enjoy the music. Placement of speakers has a more significant effect, but most of us have live-in partners (used to be called a 'wife' long ago) who don't generally allow the sort of room arrangement you describe. As for amps and CD players, nope, they all sound essentially the same. (Don't get me started on cables!) My strategy for buying audio is therefore to get midrange NAD electronics with B&W bookshelf speakers, and then enjoy the music. That is my apex audio.

"The emerald ash borer destroyed the ash tree in my front yard, and all the other ash trees in town (in Ontario), so I feel your pain. The town management said they had come from China, but now I learn from you that they may have come from upstate New York!! I used to do a lot of wood turning, and frequently removed unwanted trees to feed my hobby. Ash is a good wood for turning, so you may want to see if there are any wood turners in the area who could have the ash for taking it away."

Mike replies: Actually, everything makes a difference—but saying nothing does is a pretty close approximation of the same statement. :-) 

And you're absolutely right to place the primacy on "how much I enjoy the music." Listening past the mechanics of the reproduction and hearing the music is the key skill, and stereophilia shouldn't be allowed to overwhelm that. In very much the same way that "seeing" through to what must have been in front of the camera and not getting too distracted in the technical aspects of a photograph is also the key skill that must be cultivated and protected. As we know, it's very easy to lose sight of the forest for peeping at the pixels.

And I hate to break it to you, but mid-range NAD electronics with B&W bookshelf speakers could well be a perfectly nice music-listening system. Not expensive or exclusive maybe, but potentially highly listenable and nothing to scorn. A perfectly fine proposition for being apex products!

Open Mike: Apex Products

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic, anything-goes Editorial page of TOP, wherein Mike scats and vamps and riffs off the top of his pointy head. When all is right with the world, it appears on Wednesdays.]

-

Thomas Riley Marshall, Vice President of the United States under Woodrow Wilson, was presiding over the Senate—one of the VP's duties in our country—when he was forced to listen one day to a litany of complaints from various Senators about what was wrong about America. When it came his turn to speak, he spoke a line that became famous: "What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar."

The phrase, usually credited to Marshall, went on to be used by several generations of Americans to complain about anything that was overpriced or fancier than it needed to be.

Marshall, however, was probably quoting a line from the 19th-century humorist Kin Hubbard, the author of a popular cartoon that ran in newspapers from 1904 to 1930. The Senators were probably already familiar with it. Another line Kin Hubbard made famous was, "It ain't no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be," quoted later by Kurt Vonnegut in his novels Slaughterhouse-five and God Bless You Mr. Rosewater.

Another of Kin Hubbard's many maxims might pertain to more than a few photo enthusiasts: "Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men."

Guilty!

Levels
I don't smoke cigars and never have, but, without ever thinking about it too much, I've always kinda liked the five-cent cigar thing. One reason might be because I'm a Hoosier* by birth, and Hoosiers cotton to cornpone. They like, or used to like, homespun, old-timey, good-natured down-home humor. And another might be because the notion of solid, unpretentious, middle-of-the-road, good-enough products, of whatever type, has a natural appeal to me on the level of idealistic principle. I like 'em. And I enjoy the task of finding that level.

So what level is that?

Products of all sorts by nature follow a bell curve, where the left side of the graph and the lead-in tail of the curve represents woefully insufficient quality and dolorous cheapness, and the far tail over at the right is excess, decadence, one-upsmanship, greed, naked status display, and the rubbing of one's neighbors' noses in the fatness of one's wallet. Both extremes are deplorable in my view of things. Both are unbalanced; both verge on the immoral; and both are traditionally un-American. I don't care for extremes. Just because something is good doesn't mean more of it is better. Seek the middle. Find balance.

It's raining, better get back inside
I'll give you an example. I saw a memorable interview on television once with a couple who were living in a dumpster. That is, the dumpster was their address; it was their domicile; it was where they slept and kept their things. As an abode, a human habitation, the dumpster had a few shortcomings. It was not big enough to stand up in, for one thing. It smelled bad, although the man informed the interviewer that "you get used to it." (I doubt many in the audience were eager to test that claim themselves, though.) Entry and egress were awkward. The roof—AKA the hinged plastic lid—did not keep rain out entirely, nor did it provide the ordinary security of even a screen door with a hook-and-eye on it.

A hook-and-eye latch—too luxurious for a dumpster dwelling

And of course, passers-by regularly threw a varied mix of trash and garbage down on their heads, which the couple then had to remove and stack on the pavement in the alley next to the dumpster. I'm just guessing, but I'll bet the lack of a kitchen or a bathroom in the home was also a drawback.

At the end of the interview, it started to rain. The couple apologized that it was inconvenient for them to get wet, because they had no place to wash or dry their clothes. Thus they excused themselves. The camera and the television audience then watched as they climbed into their house and closed the lid.

Contrast this to where another couple lives: a 37,000-square-foot mansion with thirteen buildings, forty bathrooms, three complete kitchens, a movie theater, indoor and outdoor pools, a bowling alley, a sauna with massage tables, a 20,000-bottle wine cellar, six bars, twelve bedrooms (seven with adjacent sitting rooms), a meditation room—and so on; the list of all the features of the home is longer than it is interesting, but you get the idea—on 52 acres of meticulously manicured land. In this house, the servants' quarters occupy more square footage than, well, several average houses. (In 2015 the average American house had 2,687 square feet of living space, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That would be a pretty lavish apartment in New York City but smaller than you're allowed to build in some Midwestern housing developments).

Both of these examples, the dumpster and the estate, are beyond three standard deviations from the mean—one at one end, the other at the other. Neither are very satisfactory.

You might say one extreme is noxious, whereas the other is obnoxious.

Seek the middle way
At the apex of the bell curve might be, what, a good, solid, tidy 3,500-square-foot house, nicely constructed of good but not lavish materials, durable, safe, with one kitchen, three or four bedrooms, two and a half or three and a half bathrooms, and an attached two- or three-car garage, on a half acre or so of land maybe, in a nice, friendly, safe, and hopefully not too sterile or "Stepford-wife"** neighborhood. Affordable but not cheap; nice but not too nice; gracious but comfortable.

That or something near it would be the apex house, at least in the areas of the United States where I've lived, and according to my middle class, middlebrow values.

Of course, the apex of a bell curve is, sensibly speaking, a region, not a single point. For instance, if I were to pick the Fujifilm X-T3 as the apex product among cameras, it would perfectly sensible for you to pick a product a little to the left of it (a little more basic) or a little to the right of it (a little fancier) as your own nomination for the apex point. In automobiles, the apex product has long been said to be the Toyota Camry. Or these days, maybe it's a good mainstream small SUV like the RAV4. 

You get the concept. The point is that there's usually a segment of the line at the top of the bell curve where sufficiency is reached, economies of scale are optimized, decadence has not been breached, and the product (whatever it is) is utilitarian, not too precious, and not too difficult or expensive to maintain—a place where usability is optimized, reliability is good, resale value remains robust, and where enjoyment and pride of ownership on the one hand, and practicality and a decent modesty on the other, are in balance. That kind of product is the best kind if you ask me. Somewhere in the middle ranges, a balanced option, neither too much nor too little, nothing too extreme.

That was Kin Hubbard's good 5¢ cigar***, back when.

Mike

[UPDATE later the same day: Believe it or not, this post started to be about stereo equipment. A family of loudspeakers from Danish Audiophile Loudspeaker Industries (DALI) to be specific. I figured it had been a while since I wrote an Open Mike about audio. But I just got going, and it turned out it wanted to be about something different, so I gave the horse its head. What can I say? I usually write a post before breakfast every day, and something's gotta get written, at least in first draft, before I fix my oatmeal.

But one of the points I would have made if the post had been about speakers was this: sticking within shouting distance of the apex can help save you from OCD. Stereo equipment and OCD go together like cheese and crackers (whoops, wrong eating plan: like rice and beans), so you have to be mindful of perfectionism. I'm constantly trying to tell myself that good enough is good enough, that I don't need the perfect car or the perfect camera or the perfect whatever—to get something that works and just make do. It doesn't always work. But it's one of the reasons why the notion of an apex product—"settling" for a practical, utilitarian, mainstream choice—can be helpful in real life.]

*Born in the state of Indiana

**Oh, how clever and cunning your humble host can be. The Stepford Wives is a 1972 sci-fi thriller novel by Ira Levin (who also wrote Rosemary's Baby and The Boys from Brazil) in which a woman moves with her husband to a suburban neighborhood and gradually discovers that all the other women there are submissive robots created by their husbands. The book was made into a movie twice, once in 1975 with Katherine Ross in the lead role, and again in 2004 with Nicole Kidman as the star.

So why is that sly? Well, the protagonist, Joanna Eberhart—in the book, at least (I haven't seen the movies)—is a photographer.  :-)

***Men a century ago clearly cared about their cigars. In his bawdy poem "The Betrothed" about a man who received an ultimatum from his wife to choose between her and his cigars—spoiler alert—the rascally but entertaining Rudyard Kipling, roughly contemporaneously with Thomas Riley Marshall's pronouncement in the Senate, had his character say, "...a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke."

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

B&H Photo • Adorama

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Matt (partial comment): "I feel like the best strategy is to look to the left at least one standard deviation for products you care very little about, and to move to the right at least one standard deviation for products you care a great deal about."

Al C.: "On the economic well-offness bell curve, I am now situated well to the right of apex. However, I was born and raised at slightly left of apex, which conditioned me lifelong to agonize over spending beyond +1 sigma, except, curiously, for the few big ticket items such as houses, cars, sound systems. For smaller items, including cameras, I have a hard time justifying paying more than five cents for cigars. Which, I have learned but not yet managed to correct, is often false economy, because, using cameras as examples, I end up churning through multiple good but not great apex purchases which in total cost more than if I had reached for the +3 sigma model in the first place. How many of us have a shelf (closet?) full of 'apex' cameras and lenses, gathering dust? Quality over quantity may be the better advice, and strategy. Besides, YOLO [you only live once —Ed.]."

Mike replies: Your cameras example was the subject of one of my more famous posts, "Letter to George" (2010).

Tom Duffy: "Didn't St. Thomas Aquinas say, 'Prudence is the mother of all the virtues'? Ironic since he's been described as very short and weighed over 300 pounds."

George Feucht: "Having grown up in Wisconsin with a lower-middle class background, I was absolutely raised to these same values and I would totally agree, but I've found a curveball: I moved to Los Angeles to go to school and ultimately become a cameraman. The idea of having a 3,500 square foot house here is laughable. That is far right side of the curve. The average house in my apex-of-the-curve suburb of Burbank is 1,400 square feet, three bedrooms, on a 7000-square-foot lot for about $800K. That is way left of your curve for size and way right of your curve for price. It's odd when I'm home for Christmas and tell my relatives that I'm in a house half the size of theirs but pay five times the mortgage. As for other indicators of where I like to live on the curve, I own a RAV4 and the previous middle-of-the-road camera standard: a Canon 5D."

Mike replies: I have a cousin who has a two-story house on a spacious lot about a block from the ocean in a place called Palos Verdes Estates in L.A. (He's in finance.) He said "It's a really nice house for L.A., but any place else, it's just a house."

James: I'm going to pile on and say 3,500 square feet is well to the right of the apex. Not insanely far to the right, but to say it is about at apex is pretty far from reality.

"While the AEI [American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-thank —Ed.] is not everyone's cup of tea, they do not lie about basic statistics: In 2015, in the US, the average new home was 2600 square feet. Here is a PDF from the US Census.

"Even at 2,600 square feet, I have no idea what I would do with the space. And I live in a household with three total humans."

Mike replies: Fair enough. I saw a study which claimed that most people do most of their living in about 680 square feet inside their homes, even if the homes themselves are much larger than that. Then add about 140 square feet per bedroom per adult, and 100 square feet for a child's bedroom. Even with large bedrooms which had "sitting areas" at one end or off to the side, the occupants never used the sitting areas...they used only 140 square feet inside the larger bedroom.

I think they also subtracted "halls," meaning any space that people walked through to get to another space but didn't spend any time in per se. For example, if someone has a 6,000-sq.-ft. home, they might have to walk a considerable distance to get to their bedroom, but the study didn't count the stairs/halls that were passed through on the way unless they were actually occupied or used for some other reason or at some other time.

I suspect that the 1,000 extra square feet Americans have now, per the AEI statistics, is not exactly "living" space...it's space for "stuff." We own so much stuff that one of the few recession-proof businesses these days is self-storage. The issue becomes obvious at the extreme. When hoarders fill their home entirely, leaving themselves only "goat paths" along which to walk through rooms, they radically reduce their living space even though they might live in large houses. I saw an episode of A&E's "Hoarders" TV show that profiled a woman who could not use her bed because she had heaped so much stuff on it, so she slept curled up on half of her living room couch...the other half being piled with stuff. And she lived in an apparently generously-sized two-story house. On another show, a man had blocked most of his staircase, such that he could only get upstairs and downstairs by picking his way gingerly along a very narrow pathway. No matter how much "living space" such people have statistically, they don't actually have that much space to live in. Anyway, the same is true for many of the rest of us as well, only to a lesser extent.

Random Excellence: Photographer Unknown

I thought I'd try something a little different for "Random Excellence" today. This isn't an expressive photograph; it's a descriptive one. That's its purpose. It's not "authored" in the sense we usually think of. It's an auction house catalog photograph of an object for sale.

For some reason I was struck by this Garry Winogrand comment, at the outset of the new documentary:

Winogrand: "Well, what is a photograph?"

Background voice: "I don't know. You tell me what they meant to you."

Winogrand (interrupting): Well I'll tell you, I'll tell you what a photograph is. It's the illusion of a literal description of how a camera saw a piece of time and space. Consider this. What does a camera do? What does photography do better than anything else, but describe? To use it for anything else is rather foolish."

There's something nice and neat and clean about description as a first principle for the way photographs work. I like it. Photography subverts any definition of itself, and we could come up with examples of photographs that describe nothing. But I've always been skeptical about meaning as the first principle. This picture describes a guitar. It doesn't mean anything. It tells no stories. It has no significance.

That doesn't mean there are no stories to be told. What the picture shows is a model D-35 acoustic guitar made by the C.F. Martin & Company, Nazareth, Pennsylvania, in 1969, serial number 244869. The guitar belongs to David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, who said that of all his guitars, it has the most songs associated with it. In 1969 he was on his way to Manny's Music, a guitar store in Midtown Manhattan, but bought this on the street before he got there. It was his primary studio acoustic guitar for both his Pink Floyd years* and for his solo recordings. You can hear it, for example, on the album Wish You Were Here. The title song starts off as though we're listening to a radio, and then at about 40 seconds in a much more present guitar chimes in, as if a guitarist were playing along with the radio. That second, more immediate guitar is the one pictured above.

That's significant to people who love classic British rock or are fans of Pink Floyd, but the significance isn't contained in the photograph. It's in the object the picture describes. Does knowing what the object is imbue the photograph with more meaning for you? Even if it doesn't, you can understand how it might for others. There is almost always more to know about things described in a photograph, which is why I'm not one of those who say "a photograph has to stand alone." All that means is that sometimes there's nothing to say...which is fair enough. But it doesn't mean there's nothing that could be said, if we knew more. To claim there is never anything more to learn about the world of appearances, never anything to know about what a picture describes, is a bankrupt attitude. Or at least a barren one. There is always more that could be known about what a descriptive photograph describes. Our curiosity about that, I believe, is part of what brings photographs to life.

David Gilmour's guitar collection is being auctioned off this coming June. This, along with several photographs of Gilmour playing it and facsimiles of repair receipts, is estimated at $10,000 to $20,000.

Curiously, the collection itself, like a rock act, is going on tour—selected highlights will be on display at Christie's Los Angeles in May.

Mike

*"The guitar was first seen in the recording studio during sessions for the 1972 soundtrack album Obscured by Clouds. [...] The acoustic can be heard on the tracks 'Wot's… Uh The Deal,' 'Childhood’s End' and 'Free Four.'

"Gilmour confirms that the guitar was present for writing purposes during the recording sessions for the band's 1973 masterpiece The Dark Side of the Moon at London’s Abbey Road Studios between May 1972 and January 1973, although no acoustic parts were recorded for the final record. The D-35 has become most readily identified with the acoustic title track of Pink Floyd’s next studio album Wish You Were Here, another concept album, built around the theme of absence [...] the acoustic can be heard on the track 'Welcome To The Machine,' as well as the timeless 'Wish You Were Here,' hailed by Rolling Stone as the band’s most enduring composition." (From the Lot Essay.)

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

(Not) everything must fade away

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Ben Rosengart: "Manny's Music, which closed in 2009, was part of 'Music Row,' a series of music shops on 48th St. in Manhattan. I would guess that Gilmour didn't obtain this instrument literally 'on the street,' but rather popped in to some other store en route to Manny's. Although I didn't haunt Music Row until some 20 years after Gilmour, I never saw anyone hawking instruments outdoors."

hugh crawford replies to Ben: "Across the street from Manny's Music and a little to the west, between Sam Ash and Rudy's, there was a store with four-foot high letters saying 'We Buy Guitars,' known to everyone as simply 'We Buy.' They served as the place that the clueless and desperate would sell guitars at low prices. I knew people who would hang out in front of We Buy on Saturday morning cherry-picking guitars. (I used to do the same thing on 32nd Street buying old cameras. I once got a Crown Graphic kit for $15 when a store offered $10.) Anyway, anyone who knew anything about selling guitars in NYC would know that you would get a better price for a Martin at Matt Umanov on Bleeker Street, so picking up a cheap Martin on 48th street from some clueless guy with a guitar to sell sounds perfectly plausible to me.

"Come to think of it, my wife bought a car from someone stopped at a red light in NYC. We were standing on a corner in SoHo and I said how much I loved Volvo station wagons, and one with a for sale sign stopped in front of where we were standing. NYC is like that."

anthony reczek: "Another level of meaning comes comes from actually owning and playing a (1975) Martin D-35; that personalizes the photo for me. It initially triggered memories of my brother, from whom I inherited the instrument, which morphed into memories of how it sounded earlier today in a gig as a strolling musician at a nursing facility. How the residents responded, the acoustics in different hallways etc., etc. That's just for starters; this 'descriptive' photo quickly became a veritable rabbit hole of 'meaning' for me."

Mike replies: That's great. It's perfectly valid, of course, and crucial. What the viewer brings to a photograph is a big part of how it operates. It's one reason why people can have such varied responses to art. One of the basic problems of art appreciation is that sometimes people who believe they "don't know anything about art" discount their own responses, dismissing their personal associations as being not valid because (they think) they aren't part of the maker's immediate intention and aren't sanctified by some imagined authority. It's odd that sometimes we have to be trained to feel our own feelings about things. I reserve the right to react to art as if my experience of it is a significant experience for me, and I reserve the right to bring to it whatever I bring to it.

I suspect the reason I wrote this post in the first place is because I bought that Pink Floyd album when I lived way out in the countryside after dropping out of college. It was a difficult time of my life. Seeing the guitar that struck those notes took me back to the first time I heard the song, sitting on a couch in that old house in Vermont.

David Comdico: "Winogrand is direct in his insights into photography in the same way that a photograph is direct. This parallel always strikes me in how performative it is.

"Gilmour's guitar is a good example of Barthes' explanation in Camera Lucida of how 'the referent adheres' which is maybe just a fancy way of saying what Winogrand said from the other side. A photograph resists becoming a sign and in order to observe the signifier (not just any guitar but Gilmour's guitar) 'requires a secondary action of knowledge or of reflection.'

"Barthes supports his claim that the photograph is unable to serve as a sign (the magical guitar that made spawned many Pink Floyd hits) by stating that the 'marking' doesn't take. Barthes says it 'turns' like milk—which I always associate with old advertising that in a decade often looks ridiculous—'buy this product' turns to 'can you believe people actually bought this product?'

"In a collection of photos of Martin guitars there is no Gilmourness to this particular photo that makes it stand out as such. It then turns back to being a description of a guitar—and the information in the image proves that the guitar is a 6-string not a 12 string.

"In short the photo needs to have a caption 'Gilmour's guitar on which he wrote "Wish You Were Here" etc.' where the solidity of the sign then relies on data external to the photo and is meta-photographic.

"Theory aside, the thing that strikes me the most about this photo is its impersonality, the flat, one-dimensional lighting and the white limbo that surrounds the guitar—not a whiff of the life of a musician in sight.

"The presentation is impersonal and austere, probably given to the needs of publishing, where directional lighting could clash with other images in a layout and the white background allows it to blend on a white page with text. On another level, the anonymity of such a presentation (i.e. the most minimal of information needed to convey that this is Gilmour's guitar—i.e. no Gilmour) highlights the importance of Christie's imprimatur and the brand's seal of authenticity which provides the crucial piece of information—again such authentication is meta-photographic. So, I read the proposed sign not as 'Gilmour's guitar' but 'Christie's Gilmour Guitar.'"

Mike replies: Actually, I think the guitar itself resists becoming a sign...I've always been troublingly disappointed by souvenirs, and my beloved grandmother's treasured French wall cabinet, which hung in her bedroom for many years, and which I thought would be a way to hang on to her memory, is just a piece of old furniture in my house. A nice one, but the referent does not adhere. Enough.  :-)

John Camp: "I read the occasional guitar magazine and one had a feature on this sale at Christie's. The article said that these guitars often sell at ten to 20 times the official estimate. There are two segments of the guitar world interested in sales like these. The first is musicians, who would treasure a D-35 of this age if it's in good condition. They would buy it to play and it might sell for a couple of thousand dollars and maybe a couple of thousand more because of the Gilmour connection. The second group is collectors, who would value it for its Gilmour connection alone, and they are the guys who might take it to $200,000.

"I do think the best photos (and other artworks) stand alone, and I think the photographer's intent is usually quite plain in the best photos. There's no puzzle. There are not many of those photos, though. There is a second tier of photos as excellent in form and meaning as the first, but whose meaning may erode over time and eventually the work may no longer stand alone. The same is true of other art works.

"For example, Annie Leibovitz shot a famous photo of John Belushi standing alone and a bit tattered looking on the side of a highway, with the red taillights of a car that has just passed him, and apparently (though probably not really) the headlights of another car illuminating him. Given his career, and how he died (from wretched excess) I think that photo had a lot of meaning for a lot of people of his generation. But as recognition of that complex set of face/facts/culture begins to fade, so will the meaning of the photo for viewers.

Annie Leibovitz, John Belushi, Staten Island, New York, 1981

"The first tier photos, though, and I would include such things as Ansel Adams's 'Moonrise' and Paul Caponigro's 'Running White Deer' among them, won't fade as long as there is a moon and as long as there is wildlife. They are not only striking as objects in themselves, but they elicit an almost automatic response from sensitive viewers having to do with such universal things as death and nature. Even if we eventually succeed in killing all the deer, a memory of such things will stay with us, if only as memories (even as they do with ancient Egyptian wildlife paintings.) And the intent of the photographers couldn't be clearer, in my humble opinion."

Alex Mercado: "I used to photograph items for an auction house. It was the task of photographing these items that imbued the photographs with more meaning for me. The results were straightforward and rather unimposing; however my part in creating those catalog photographs are now part of their provenance. Here are two descriptive photographs I made that are quite memorable to me [one two]."

David Raboin: "I wish I had more time to write a proper comment.... After 11 years of reading TOP, this is my favorite post and my favorite featured comments. This blog is a treasure. Thanks Mike."

Mike replies: And thank you for signing up to be a Patreon contributor! Very kind of you.

Michael Perini: "Good representational photography like this is not as easy as it looks, and I have always been attracted to good examples. Early in my career I shot for catalogs, mostly low end, but some higher end—which led to advertising 'still lifes.' A collection from Christie's has lots of requirements, including no techniques that call attention to themselves, a similar look throughout, perfect color balance, and preservation of relative size. I've been drawn to this kind of photography ever since I saw Walker Evans' 'Beauties of the Common Tool' [Fortune magazine, July 1955 —Ed.]  and Bernice Abbot's scientific illustration where 'the idea was to interpret science sensibly, with good proportion, good balance and good lighting, so we could understand it.' A very enjoyable post."

What Is Photography?

Photography is photographers.

...If you ask me. It's defined by the people who do it. That's whose side I'm on. That's my personal answer, and has been my approach for a long time.

Bob Shell, who used to be the Editor-in-Chief of the then-powerful Shutterbug magazine (even though he was technically an independent contractor, not staff) and is currently serving a sentence of thirty-two and a half years in prison for involuntary manslaughter in the death of one of his models,* once sent me a stern, scolding letter lecturing me on my responsibilities as a photo-writer. He was not my editor and I had never written for his magazine. He had at the time been involved somehow in helping orchestrate a campaign of retribution against me by a manufacturer I had offended with a comment in one of my articles. In the course of that kerfuffle, I was accused by the manufacturer of having falsely claimed to be a Shutterbug writer, which was untrue and also pretty stupid: I had credentials from the magazine I did work for, and had nothing to gain from pretending to have credentials from one I didn't work for. Anyway, one result was that letter. It outlined in succinct (and, I thought at the time, remarkably cynical) form the mechanics of what is sometimes called "advertorial." I wish I still had the letter—or could find it, as it's probably in the barn somewhere. Of necessity I'm paraphrasing, but one of his points was that our first and main duty as photo writers was to help advertisers sell their products. I wrote an indignant letter in return saying that I thought it was more appropriate to look after the interests of the reader who was thinking of parting with his cash, rather than the people who were trying to coax it out of him.

There was a positive lesson in that unpleasant situation, turned out. It led me to take a conscious stand for the rest of my career in magazines: "readers first." I always advocated for readers, tried to inform readers of biases or conflicts of interests, attempted to take them seriously, and primarily strove to see things in terms of their needs, desires and interests. Even if it brought me into conflict with my bosses, which it occasionally did.

Dispersed and dynamic
It's more or less the same thing with photography and photographers. One can see photography as a sort of automatic writing, if you will, that doesn't have much to do with the intentions of the maker—that is, you took the picture, but you are unaware of the ways the object you made will operate in the world. Fair enough. For example, Geoffrey Batchen, writing (in his first book, Burning with Desire) of John Tagg, says, "Tagg suggests that photography cannot be understood as having a singular identity or singular cultural status. Photography is, [Tagg] says, better regarded as a dispersed and dynamic field of technologies, practices, and images. The compliant ubiquity of this photographic field is such that it is indistinguishable from those institutions or discourses that choose to make use of it. Photography's history is, therefore, a collective and multifarious history of those same institutions and discourses." Later he observes, "[Tagg's] assumption here is that, as a thing with no fixed identity or historical unity, photography potentially belongs to every institution and discipline but its own." Which is such a delightful turn that reading it made me want to clap, even though I would argue with Tagg's position. (I would also argue that photography is essentially subversive, in that a photograph, no matter what "institution or discourse" is controlling it, can still potentially contain elements that can't be managed—which often becomes clearer after the passage of time, like the living take command of the dead. But never mind.)

Is it a cop-out, critically speaking, to simply get behind the makers of photographs and sympathize with their aims and interests? Maybe. But it's where I come down. It makes life easier. I understand my "mission," if you will (the word sounds a little pretentious) as simply to be on the side of photographers. Be sympathetic to their aims, aid them in doing their work, help them have fun, embody the audience, encourage them, and, of course, inform and entertain them. To be on their side, in short. (I don't get too carried away with Marxist, semiotic, capitalist, postmodern, etc. frameworks, either, which is a bonus.) As far as cameras and materials are concerned I don't really care directly about the health of any particular manufacturer or the success of any particular product; I want photographers to have what they need to do their work, whatever that is. I care about industries only in that they have an impact on the people they serve. As far as critical theorizing is concerned, I do enjoy it, but it frequently departs from the way photographers themselves conceive of what they are doing. I'm willing to look at it their way. Simple.

Simple
I try not to discriminate rigidly between types of photographers. Hobbyist, career artist, family snapshooter, corporate professional; Leicaphile, Photoshop adept, lens collector, amateur tester; intellectual theorist, archivist, sociological documentarian, museumgoer; and so on. I've seen many of the "types" over many years—or the usual multivalent mishmashes of types**. Of course it's impossible to have no hierarchy in mind, and I have my biases. Long ago I set the simple ones out in a long article called "The Photographer's Menagerie" that outlined a very basic typology in ascending order. I see it isn't on the Web, which might be for the best. The point is just that it's okay in my view to be a 13-year-old snapchatting with friends or a graybeard grousing about the QC problems of East European film stocks, and neither one has to be given more respect because they both get respect, and it's nice not to have to take sides.

What is photography? What photographers do. If that looks circular, so be it. If it makes me simple, okay.

Mike

*I encountered Bob Shell twice over the years. The second time, we had a brief exchange of words, and he encouraged me to try shooting nudes. "It's remarkably freeing," he commented. Which is ironic.

**I'm an advanced amateur (AdAm), enthusiast, photo-writer, photobook collector, and recovering lens nut. Each of us is a somewhat different mishmash.

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

(Not) everything must fade away

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Richard Tugwell: "'There is no such thing as Art—only artists' —E. H. Gombrich."

Mike's Idea of Photography (Creativity and Accomplishment)

Mike's theory of photography is that no matter how hard you try to curry favor with the gods of success, most of your pictures will suck (because we're essentially dealing with chance)...but a few won't.

But it's important to divide photographing into its components. On the one hand, you have the people who make the work: that's the "creativity" side of the divide. On the other hand, you have the big constellation of issues around how those people somehow intersect with the audience; that's what I intend by using the rubric "accomplishment."

Creativity
My basic idea of photography (indeed all art, craft, and endeavor) is this: most of it is bad or indifferent or tasteless or worthless, and a small amount of it isn't. No matter what the media, as long as it's viable at all, a few people will find creative and rewarding things to do with it. No matter what the style, it will suit a few practitioners. No matter how good or bad the equipment might be, it doesn't matter—the same rules hold. The reductio ad absurdum of this is the so-called Sturgeon's Law—"90% of everything is crap." I'd rather look at it from the positive side, because, when you think of it, it's incredibly uplifting...10% of everything—or let's say "a little bit," since using hard percentages benefits us nothing—a little bit of everything is not crap. Especially with photography. A fact that is amazing and encouraging.

Creativity in photography is mainly a matter of chance and taste. Broadly, chance determines what the raw material looks like; taste determines what we make out of it. (Skill, knowledge and strategy are all influential but not determinant.) You can try to "game" both sides of that—it's human nature to pretend we're in control—but the essence remains.

That's the "Gone Fishing" nature of photography—equip yourself, go to where you think the fish are, and put your line in the water, and you might catch one. If you keep at it, you certainly will.

Accomplishment
There are so many aspects to accomplishment that it makes the mind spin. Public perception, reward and support for the creators, difficulty or ease, levels of competition or just background noise, the interest of the audience, access to the work people want to look at, value, who gets fame, renown, and publicity and who works in isolation being ignored, all the various gatekeepers and "bars" that all together sort and sift the work we get to see from great work that will never be seen—you can't fit all these issues in a simple little blog post.

The point here is simply that creativity and accomplishment are separate, from the creator's perspective. I can assure you with 100% certainty that there are people out there right now for whom the camera in a smartphone or tablet was a revelation, and who are deeply immersed in the creative activity of discovering what they can do with it and getting what they want from it such that it satisfies their need to make what they're making. And I can all but guarantee that there are at least a few people showing their work on Instagram whose work will someday be treasured and valued by the culture. Just like the culture belatedly recognized the formerly obscure work of Fred Herzog, Vivian Maier, or Robert Bergman.

Granted, you're more likely to get good work when you encourage accomplishment—not for nothing did Shakespeare come along when theater was at the height of its popularity (maybe of all time—has there ever been a time or place when theater was more popular than it was in Elizabethan London?); there's a reason the Beatles came along when music was absolutely central, and crucial, to youth culture, a period that came and now has gone. At the other extreme, if you persistently ignore genius, well, yes, it will wither, probably. It will meander off and find something else to do. We don't work in a vacuum. And of course there's the issue of support—more people will be photographers if they can make a living from it, or get some other sort of non-remunerative reward from it that's meaningful to them. Purpose has to have a purpose.

Billions and billions
Most of the chaos in photographic culture right now comes from the "accomplishment" angle—how the work of creators intersects with the audience. As a member of the audience, I find it much harder to find good work right now than it was thirty years ago. Just the sheer numbers are agonizing—someone mentioned the other day that a single stock agency offers 36,000 images of the Eiffel Tower, and I did a calculation a few years ago that if you looked at three images per second for every waking hour for the rest of your life, you could look at all of the photographs uploaded to Facebook in one single 24-hour period. It was bad enough in the '80s when Kodak estimated that six billion pictures were taken worldwide every year—now, in the words of a 2017 article on Mylio.com, "...conservatively, if only one billion people have cameras or phones, and take less than 3 photos per day/1,000 pictures per year, that’s still 1 trillion photos captured every year."

On phones alone.

So attentiveness is simply completely inadequate to the task of keeping up with what's going on. Of course it always was; it just wasn't so bad, or so bald (obvious). Roland Barthes recognized years ago that when we talk about "photography," each of us is extrapolating from an exceedingly tiny subset of "all photographs," the subset being "the ones I've seen." It does seem fairly counterintuitive that I've been assiduously looking photographs my whole life and yet have seen only a vanishingly small percentage of all the photographs ever taken, but it's as true for me as it is for everyone.

There was a book that came out a few years ago that I think will be important in the history of photography: A New American Picture by Doug Rickard. Rickard intensively edited huge amounts of raw material taken by Google Street View and presented his selections as artworks. (He wasn't the only one working that way, of course—there are many people doing the same thing.) He received widespread criticism for the basic claim that the results were "his," since we draw a hard line at who pressed the shutter button (a concept highlighted at around the same time by David Slater and the so-called "monkey selfie copyright dispute." Trust us primates to haggle over ownership like it was the most important thing!) But really, Rickard's project and others like it offer a great analogy for the rising problem of the digital age: namely, that we need more editors, and more levels of editing, winnowing the mass of raw material potentially available to us into manageable form, if we are to stand any chance of actually seeing some fraction of the small percentage of it we want to see.

Same as always
But for creators, none of that really matters. The challenge is still the same: how do we decide what we like? Of that, is there anything like it that's available to us to do? Within that, how do we game the situation to stand a better chance of success? After that, did chance favor us? Were we able to recognize our success (that is, do we have taste)? If chance did favor us and we did recognize our success, how do we present our results in coherent and sympathetic form so that others might appreciate them too?

Smartphone or 8x10 view camera loaded with B&W film, Instagram or fine handmade prints in a box—none of that is really important. As long as you're doing what turns you on.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

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Rob de Loe: "The importance of the accomplishment side of the equation in photography can’t be overemphasized. It’s crucial in any creative endeavour, but the way it works in photography is something else.

"Contrasting photography today to academic publishing today is instructive. Academics are creators too—and like all creators they live or die based on exposure. Academics will whinge that getting published is hard, but it’s a matter of perspective. In most fields, you have access to dozens if not hundreds of outlets. There’s gatekeeping, but it’s not difficult to work around. If you’re persistent, you’ll get published. You can get exposure at conferences large and small. Specialized search tools exist to help you find kindred spirits, and to make your work easily findable. Today you also have access to various social media platforms; you can be your own agent, promoting your work through a huge range of channels. It’s still possible to languish in obscurity as an academic (and many do!) But there’s a huge infrastructure in place you can use to become known (so obscurity is basically a choice).

"Photography, in comparison, is missing most of the necessary infrastructure. Academic artists can tap into the academic infrastructure, but that’s closed to non-academics. What’s available to someone who wants to use photography to make art today, and wants to become known (i.e., successful)? Anyone can put their photos on the Internet on their own website; most of these web sites end up as vanity projects nobody knows about because unlike journal articles, there's no database. You can hand over your life’s savings to a photo book publisher and hope some critic mentions you positively. Maybe the local coffee shop will put up your pictures? Perhaps a gallerist will take a liking to your work (but don’t hold your breath). Platforms like Instagram and Flickr are usually just a different kind of obscurity—your pictures are lost in a sea of similar-looking work. Is it still possible to become known through old-fashioned person-to-person networking?

"I wish I could close this dreary comment with a clear path forward for the photographer who wants to be 'successful.' Unfortunately, I’m not seeing one. The best advice I can give is what Mike said: make photographs that make you happy, to please yourself; conversely, don’t link up your happiness to 'accomplishment' in photography. And if you’re going to ignore that advice, make sure you’re gifted at the things you will have to do on the 'accomplishment' side of the equation."

Charles Rozier: "An essay that deserves to stand out, even among the millions (thousands?) of essays written every day...."

Mike replies: Made me laugh, like when I quoted Maria Popova the other day saying "letters about lunch items have been supplanted by Instagram photographs of lunch items" and a friend sent me a snapshot of his lunch.

Andrew Molitor: "I have come to the conclusion that the billions and billions of photos taken are in fact irrelevant on the consumption side. We look at about as many photos as we ever did. We take far more, collectively, and so now everything and everyone has been photographed in a fairly literal way, but in terms of looking at pictures much less has changed.

"Part of the sense that 'we are lost in the sea' is a failure of the gatekeepers.

"We used to be able to rely on certain random souls, selected more or less at random, to draw out from the mass of stuff an interesting subset for us to look at. Curators, critics, publishers, and so on. So-and-so got a monograph, you say? Well, perhaps worth looking at!

"Not any more. There are a lot of monographs being made and most of them are, even to my thoroughly catholic tastes, complete trash. They are conceptual art without a concept, for the most part (I like conceptual art, but much less if it lacks a discernible concept.)

"Galleries, museums, all this stuff seems these days to be driven by politics and personality, which I suppose isn't much of a change. Still, it seems as if in The Good Olde Dayes you had to know someone, sleep with someone else, and also have something to say in your art. That last bit seems to have been dropped, or at least converted into 'eh, any sort of dumb political stance will do.'

"There are, of course, still the last stalwarts of the tail end of the 20th century holding down major shows here and there, but among the up-and-comers I see good work that's going nowhere, and terrible boring trash being pushed forward as the next big thing for what appear to be purely social reasons.

"The gatekeepers, at least the ones running what you might think of as the minor leagues, seem to simply not care much. They're interested largely in extracting fees from artists to do a book, put on a show, carry work to a fair. The ones that are not extracting fees are mostly just promoting their MFA own students, or friends of same. They're supposed to be sifting out the best of the new crop, and feeding them upwards to the major leagues, but they're not. They're sifting out the ones with a proven ability to fundraise, either out of their own pockets, or on Kickstarter, which circles back around to social influence rather than any kind of artistic strength.

"Of course, it could be that I am simply not seeing the merit in what I characterize as trash being pushed forward. Despite what I believe to be earnest and thorough efforts to find something to love in this work, I am unable to find any depth in the bulk of what is being offered to me.

"I do, from time to time, run across what I think is real depth is other work that's out there, but such work seems woefully unsupported by the gatekeepers. The good stuff, I feel, is out there. It's just made by people who are rather too busy making art to go raise $10,000 for a book or a show."

Ernest Zarate: "Re 'It was bad enough in the '80s when Kodak estimated that six billion pictures were taken worldwide every year.'

"And back in the '80s who, pray tell, looked at all those six billion photos? No one. What really is the difference between six billion and 100 trillion photographs, when it comes to the number of images a person can look at, to say nothing of the much smaller number of photographs a person will look at, willingly? How many of those billions or trillions are viewed by an audience?

"My point being, the vast majority of those unimaginable number (and unimaginative) of photos are slapped onto social media for the 'enjoyment' of a very minuscule group of persons, commonly referred to as 'friends.' And their friends spend all of a millisecond glancing it before they scroll onto the next posting, mercifully never to look at it again. How many smartphone photos of lunches are you actively seeking out in a given day, or week, or month, or year? I’d say most likely zero. I know I am not.

"So, the defining characteristic then, in my humble opinion, is who is out there actively and intentionally pursuing the goal of putting his/her photographs in front of a large, discerning audience on a consistent basis? Certainly, this is still a large number, but compared to the number who simply post everything they shoot onto social media, this number is quite small. A tiny fraction.

"I think we can safely ignore nearly every single one of those billions/trillions of images posted on social media. They are not a threat. Instead, let’s turn our attention to those who work with purpose and intention. For those who are working with sincerity, but in the shadows and without notice (like myself), the satisfaction of the work and the product is enough. I’ve enjoyed and found satisfaction with the notice my work has attracted, but I’ve continued to do the work even in its absence. If at some point after I’m gone, my work gains attention (not likely), then so be it. I won’t be the first, nor will I be the last. But it’s not a driving force that compels me to keep working."

Rob Campbell: "I empathise with the notion that we may, rather than be celebrating/mourning photography as she was in her virginity, be thinking, instead, of the decline of the once-envied successful photographer.

"Well, I had my golden years, and it hurt like hell for them to pass into memory, but I did continue to make pictures. Trouble is, making pictures does not equate with making pictures one wants to make; it more easily falls into the open trap of making them just because one can't stop the urge, a frustrated urge where the original desire is for a genre now unavailable to the individual. The result can go two ways: either frustration continues unabated or, with luck, something new comes up to replace, partially at least, the lost love. I have found a mid-point that keeps the artist inside sane, but fails to silence the voices of regret.

"The good bit is that it means I can be totally selfish in whether or not the results please anyone, yet...yet, there is no killing of the memories that only mental illness or death will ever dispel.

"I've suggested this before, but perhaps love always contains the seeds of its own destruction."

Has Photography Gotten Too Easy?

Is photography too easy?

Maria Popova—along with Virginia Woolf(!)—suspects that maybe it's gotten to be. Their point is that when something is rare and valued, more effort and care is expended on it. By becoming thoughtless and easy, it also tends to become trivial and devalued.

Maria, the Bulgarian-born Brooklyn writer who pens the famous Brain Pickings site, first quotes Virginia Woolf, the great author and woman of letters:

The Victorian age killed the art of letter writing by kindness: it was only too easy to catch the post. A lady sitting down at her desk a hundred years before had not only certain ideals of logic and restraint before her, but the knowledge that a letter which cost so much money to send and excited so much interest to receive was worth time and trouble. With Ruskin and Carlyle in power, a penny post to stimulate, a gardener, a gardener’s boy, and a galloping donkey to catch up the overflow of inspiration, restraint was unnecessary and emotion more to a lady’s credit, perhaps, than common sense. Thus to dip into the private letters of the Victorian age is to be immersed in the joys and sorrows of enormous families, to share their whooping coughs and colds and misadventures, day by day, indeed hour by hour.

The quote comes from a 1926 book called Victorian Photographs of Famous Men & Fair Women, a monograph of Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs originally published in 1926 by Woolf's own Hogarth Press, for which Woolf wrote an introductory essay. Woolf was Cameron's great-niece.

The book was later reprinted by David R. Godine in 1973 (who, coincidentally, I met in Oregon and to whom I made an unsuccessful appeal for employment). It was reprinted by others after that, but Godine's reprint was in the possession of the Corcoran School of Art library when I was a student there in the '80s (and in the possession of many D.C.-area gallerists and curators in the '80s, I noticed). Few students used the library, but I soaked up every photography book on its shelves. 

Maria comments:

Woolf’s point applies not only to letter writing but to the very medium celebrated by the book in which her essay appears, and in fact to every technology that ever was and ever will be. She couldn’t have—or could she have?—envisioned what would become of photography as the technology became commonplace over the coming decades, much less what digital photography would bring. But her insight holds true—the easier it becomes to convey a message in a certain medium, the less selective we grow about what that message contains, and soon we are conveying the trifles and banalities of our day-to-day life, simply because it is effortless to fill the page (or feed, or screen, or whatever medium comes next). Letters about lunch items have been supplanted by Instagram photographs of lunch items, to which we apply the ready-made filters that have purported to supplant the artistry of light, shadow, and composition. The art of photography, too, is being killed by kindness.

I mentioned the other day that my "root teacher" would have been Clarence White (because David Vestal was my teacher and Ralph Steiner was David's teacher and Clarence White was Ralph's teacher), which is when I discovered the nice story about Clarence White only being able to afford to expose two photographic plates per week during one period of his life. Because they were so precious, White, who was obsessed with photography at the time, would spend all week planning how he was going to use his two shots on the weekend. And a high percentage of those pictures are now among his masterpieces.

I'm not saying this is conclusive evidence of any particular answer to the title question, but it's hard to argue with the claim that the situation that exists in photography now is effectively the opposite of that!

George Frederic Watts' painting of Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Cameron's portrait of her niece, Julia Stephen,
Virginia Woolf's mother

George Charles Beresford's famous photograph of
Virginia Woolf, 1902. She committed suicide
by putting stones in the pockets of her overcoat
and walking into a stream.

So is photography being "killed by kindness"? That's the core of Maria Popova's point—"...the easier it becomes to convey a message in a certain medium, the less selective we grow about what that message contains, and soon we are conveying the trifles and banalities of our day-to-day life, simply because it is effortless...."

(A friend of mine just sent me a picture of his lunch, as a joke, based on this post. Well, I hope that was the reason anyway!)

Mike
(Thanks to Jim Schley)

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

(Not) everything must fade away

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Daniel: "Whether one is forced due to circumstances or chooses to slow down, this video on photographer Jim Brandenburg may be of interest. He was facing burnout with his photography. National Geographic shooter. He went home—and decided to expose one frame a day for 90 days. No do-overs, no fudging. Just one frame each day. A lot to be said with a slow, contemplative approach. But, without a good grounding the the basics it would be an exercise in frustration. Many of us learned when the cost of that one roll of film was a big limitation. When one lens was all we had. We learned to make things count and took time to explore before tripping the shutter. Mistakes were made and analyzed so they would not happen again—or if they did so they were somehow useful for creative purposes. Concentration and contemplation does wonders for fine results."

Mike replies: Interesting. When I taught photography, I wanted to have my students try two exercises: one was to shoot six rolls of film in one outing or shooting session (they were issued one roll of 24-exp. film a week by the school, so six rolls would have been a whole lot). And for the other, they were to cut a short strip of film, load it into the camera manually, and head out to shoot it—they would have just one frame to take a picture with—as you say, "no do-overs, no fudging."

The plain foundered for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that I myself couldn't reliably place a 2–3-inch clip of 35mm film in the film gate of a 35mm camera and get the back closed such that the film was where it was supposed to be. But Jim B.'s exercise isn't too far from what many large-format photographers do. Roy Stryker complained that Walker Evans would go out to shoot for a whole day and come back with six sheets of exposed film, and that was on a good day—sometimes he returned with fewer, or none. And Jim Sherwood told me of an old shooter he knew (I think Jim worked for him once?) who would head out to cover an assignment armed only with his Speed Graphic and six film holders—that's twelve shots. Try covering a basketball game or a political rally or a social event with twelve shots!

JOHN GILLOOLY: "Perfect timing. I made a quick Facebook post the other day while eating lunch at the Gardner Museum in Boston between assignments (the post included a photo of the paragraph in the book, but that is not really needed):

"Thumbing my way through an Edward Weston book during lunch at the Cafe G at the Gardner Museum I was struck by this: it said Weston was busy sorting through 800 negatives that were captures over an eight-month span that covered 19,000 miles and 24 states. In another section of the book, it was estimated that he made approximately 6,000 negatives during his life.

"It is amazing how technology has changed photography. Weston was mostly shooting sheet film, a single negative on a large format camera that then needed to be individually processed, developed and printed in the darkroom. During the trip mentioned, he was working at the prolific clip of three exposures per day.

"This is a pretty busy week for me as a photographer in the middle of one of the busy seasons of the year. I will easily shoot more than 6,000 images this week. And if needed, I could capture and store all of those images on one single card, carrying them around on something the size of a dime.

"It would be interesting to see how the photographers of that era, including Ansel Adams, would go about the process today. Would their end-product be better or worse with the option of higher volume capture at each location? While we often glorify their process, it wasn’t necessarily a choice; it was just dictated by the limitations of the time."

Mike adds: Here's another fun fact: On Weston's "eight-month span that covered 19,000 miles and 24 states," which would have been his Guggenheim trip, he didn't do very well. He had a pretty low hit-rate. I guess three shots a day of a chaotic variety of subjects he didn't know very well was "spray and pray" for him!  :-)

toto: "Oil painting is so easy now. You don't even have to stretch your own canvas or mix your paints. Just by a pre-stretched canvas and tubes of paint."

Dave Levingston: "I’ve had a personal experience that exemplifies this. Back in college in the 1970s I started photographing dance at Ohio University (where the Clarence White School of Photography is located, by the way). I was pretty good at it and the dancers were very happy with my photos. Shooting dance performances back then was a technical challenge. The stage was dark, the film had to be push processed, and of course autofocus was decades away.

"After I retired I decided to return to OU and make more dance photos as a way to 'pay it forward' for the kindness and support I had received when I was a student. That was in the early days of digital and it was still a challenge shooting with my Nikon D100.

"I would edit my photos and put them on a site where the dancers could order prints. I put the prices at cost. A lot of dancers bought the prints. But over the years the orders declined. Eventually they stopped all together. I realized that dance performance photography was no longer difficult. The dancers had plenty of photos taken by their friends with their digital cameras and even with their phones. And they had no use for prints. They just wanted small digital files for the Internet."

Stan B.: "Photography is not only easier (and of better technical quality), but perhaps more importantly, is now much easier to disseminate. And as is usually the case with any advancement in technology, society's knowledge of how to distinguish the wheat from the chaff lags critically behind. Growing up, I used to love special effects in movies—realistic, high-quality effects were a welcomed rarity. Now they can literally defy reality, and are overused to the point of replacing a cogent story line."

Yoshi Carroll: "Everyone talks, all the time, and deep conversation is painfully rare."

Paulo Bizarro: "It is a lot easier to do things today than it used to be five, 10, 20, 50, 100 years ago. Including: cooking; filming; writing; driving; traveling; space travel; weather forecasting; finding and exploiting underground riches; etc, etc. It is called technological advancement."

David Comdico: "There is some truth to this. Convenience is the mantra of modernity and is usually at odds with art (see Tarr's The Werckmeister Harmonies). Certainly, it is easier than ever to make a bad picture. But to do something well is always difficult. Letters seem quaint when compared to email and downright archaic when compared to texting. But neither of these make a good letter any easier to write. The other misguided notion in this essay is that photography has been made too easy by digital technology. This is a quaint notion. 'You push the button, we do the rest,' was the slogan Kodak used in 1888 to sell photography to the masses. 1888. That is not a typo. Photography has always been a democratic medium and the ease with which one can make a picture has always been a blessing and a curse."

RIP for a Reader

Allow me today, if you will, a reminiscence.

The other day when I wrote that April Fool's post, I hadn't been intending to write one. I just felt the content for that day had been a little sparse (I mean, how exciting is it to read that all the Print Sale prints have shipped, unless you're getting one?), so I bashed it out. It was one of those posts that takes only two or three hours from conception to completion. Sometimes coming up with a blog post is like pulling teeth. Other times words flow like water.

I think most people enjoyed it. (One or two really did not.) However, a number of people were actually fooled, which isn't the best result. What you want is for people to be fooled at first and then wise up to it as they get into it deeper, so they can kinda laugh at themselves but not end up annoyed about being lied to. In this case, though, I actually like the underlying idea—those phantom museums of new work, making ephemeral images from the electronic ether into real paper and ink prints as a good deed for the world—so I sort of segued into blocking out the idea. It's not a preposterous idea, just an idealistic one. I'd be seriously charged up about it if I could do such a thing. Although it might be good if I were  younger at the start of the project.

I was also surprised at the reactions to my plot-point about having gotten married. A number of people said they'd hoped that was true, because they want me to be happy, and I'm touched by peoples' good wishes for me. Thank you, if that included you. But I really didn't mean that to be a big point of the piece; it was just a means of explaining how the narrator (the fake me) suddenly came into a big whack of cash.

Kicks
However, one reader I did expect to hear from was a guy who I've been hearing from for fifteen years or more, who originally would sign his comments "Bryce Lee of Burlington Ontario Canada." Bryce was a railfan, a train photographer, and a loyal TOP reader...and a follower of my column "The Sunday Morning Photographer" before that, and a subscriber to my doomed print newsletter The 37th Frame before that. When my son was a boy I mentioned in a column that he couldn't afford the outlandish custom "kicks" (shoes) he had designed for himself using a website's customization tool. ("Daddy, you aren't allowed to call them 'kicks,'" to quote 11-year-old Xander, which was then spelled Zander.) I promptly got a check in the mail from Bryce, with the words "for Zander's kicks" on the memo line. Guess Bryce didn't know he wasn't allowed to call them that. From then on I'd get a donation in the mail from Ontario every year, regular as rain.

I heard from Bryce many times over the years. When his mother died; when he moved out of the house he was born in; when he sold his Nikons (although he kept buying more), and when he began distributing his vast collection of train photographs to interested parties hither and yon. When his medical problems proliferated and limited his mobility and his photography. Some missives were morose and pessimistic and spoke of his declining interest in photography. A few of his tales were lurid and made him seem just a trifle scary—he often mentioned that he was in the vicinity of seven feet tall and weighed 350 pounds, and he once told me he had killed an attack dog with a hatchet and a man with a car. (The latter an unavoidable automobile accident, not anything sinister, of course.) He loved dogs, though, and often asked after mine. Apparently he used to like to ride his motorcycle in full leathers, which, given his size, must have been a imposing sight.

He wasn't a friend any more or less than many other readers are—I've met hundreds of you and heard from thousands more. But over the years Bryce's quirk was that took a lively and good-hearted interest in personal details. He liked to give me advice, and many times lavished praise on me for being a good dad—reading between the lines, I guessed that either he had not received much parenting from his own father, or that the parenting he did receive was—how shall we put it?—less than it might have been. He consistently seemed gratified to an unusual degree by the signs and hints of care and regard toward my son that I showed glimpses of, here and there, in my writings. In any event, when I said anything personal on the blog, however glancing, Bryce would usually seize on it and offer up his 2¢.

So I didn't know and couldn't guess what the general reception of that April's Fools Day post might be, but I thought I knew one thing: that it would draw a response from one Bryce Lee of Burlington Ontario Canada. Even if he realized as he read it that it wasn't true, if he had read that I was getting married he would have had something to say. We never met in person, but I knew him well enough to know that.

A few days later it came to me that I'd been wrong. I hadn't heard from Bryce after all. Then it struck me that, come to think, he had been silent for several months. The light bulb went on above my head at that point, sorry to say—he had sometimes regaled me with lists of the many maladies he suffered from. I did a Google search for a possible obituary...and unfortunately that was what I found.

Very sad.

The family of photo-dawgs
Surely our ranks are thinned by death now and again...most of the time unbeknownst to the rest of us. There's seldom any way to know if a name that had become familiar has merely drifted away due to lessening interest or has left less willingly. Sometimes I go back and read old posts and feel a certain poignancy and sadness when I come across the name of a commenter we don't hear from any more. They might still be happily pursuing their pleasures elsewhere, of course. As is the case when someone leaves the 12-step fellowship I attend, it's usually not given to me to know what becomes of the missing.

I visualize photographers the world over—I sometimes call us "photo dawgs"—as a big, far-flung, extended community of people of like mind—united (as well as leveled) by our common interest. I feel the camaraderie even with people I read about who perished before I was born, and I fancy that a photo-dawg or two of the future, not yet born, will come across some of my words one day and perhaps feel the kinship too. We're diminished when one of us fades off and leaves this coil.

So to Bryce, and, insofar as he stands for them, to all those we lose, a few parting words: thank you for reading, dawg, glad you were one of us, and godspeed.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 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:

Robert Harshman: "Mike, I really liked the April 1st story. It convinced me that you should at least write some short stories if not a novel or two. And I thought your response to my question of 'what day is it?' was perfect—Monday. And your idea about what to do with a windfall of money stuck me as very good. A nice dream. The story was very entertaining. that's also why when one of the lotteries reaches above 1/2 billion or so I throw away a few dollars to entertain myself about what I might do if I won even though I know the odds are pure never going to happen. Sorry to hear about a reader passing away. A fellow dawg, gone by. May he RIP."

Rob Campbell: "That's a good, sensitive and thoughtful piece, Mike. It often strikes me that people who regularly frequent a site become much more than ships passing in the night; they assume a personality that we construct for them from the clues they slip to us. We might get close, or be very mistaken, but either way, unless we find out, they become those characters for just as long as they remain posting. Silence becomes a worry. I frequent the late Michael Reichmann's site, and over the years, people just vanish after regular posting, leaving that question mark. One, I heard, perished by being on ice at the wrong time or place and others have let it be known they have various illnesses, and you draw your own conclusions when posts end, especially from some who are obviously talented photographers. It is a reminder of the temporary nature of now."

Christopher May: "This feels all too familiar. Just about a year ago, I was in a similar situation.

"Many years ago, I crossed paths with a lady in the UK. We met thanks to common interest in a comparatively rare lens — the Tamron SP 180mm ƒ/2.5 LD IF. I had posted some images taken with the lens on my Flickr stream and she came across them while pondering buying another of the 3,000 copies that were made to celebrate Tamron’s 35th anniversary. She wrote me to seek out a more fleshed-out opinion of the lens. We soon discovered many similarities in each other, both in photography and in life in general.

"We ended up writing quite often. Sometimes it was about nothing—a new camera or lens—and sometimes it would be very deep discussing health issues or relationship problems. She helped me through a very tough breakup and we both leaned on each other for support with bettering our dietary and exercise regimens.

"I was also fortunate enough to be able to meet her in person. When my fiancé and I traveled to Kenya, we had a layover in London and were able to meet up with my Flickr friend and spend a day roaming with our cameras. I’m so happy that we had that opportunity and I had hoped to repeat it again someday.

"Last year, she had ventured off towards Ailsa Craig which was always one of her favorite photographic subjects. Before she left, we had chatted up lenses again and she decided to bring some Zuiko glass to use with her Olympus E-M1. A couple days after her arrival, I sent a message to see how things were. I never got a response. She traveled to quiet locations and didn’t have great phone service; sometimes I wouldn’t hear from her until she found WiFi at a coffee shop or such, so I wasn’t too worried. As time went on, though, it seemed more and more out of character for her to neglect checking in. She didn’t have any family that she was close with and I didn’t have any contact information for the few friends she kept up with in the UK. I kept trying email, Facebook messenger and overseas calls to her cell number. I even started wondering if and how I could contact UK authorities. My fiancé was also looking for information and eventually came across an obituary. She had died the day after our conversation about the Zuikos.

"I still have a lot of mixed feelings about everything. On the one hand, I’m extremely grateful for the Internet age that we live in allowing me to make and keep friends an ocean away. At the same time, though, it hurts that I didn’t find about her passing until weeks after the fact. I wasn’t able to attend her funeral. I don’t even know what happened to her. I try to let all of that go and focus on the gift of her friendship. I succeed a little more with that every day but there are still days that it seems unfair. As the axiom goes, though, life isn’t fair. It seems that death isn’t, either.

"My thoughts are with Bryce’s family and friends. I remember seeing his comments before and also made note of the fact that he was another rail photographer (we seem to be an even more select set of photo dawgs across the world and across the web). I’ll echo your godspeed wish, Mike but will add a little railroad flair to it. Highball, Bryce! Wishing you good light and lots of trains on the other side!"

Martin D: "That is a very moving piece about Bryce Lee, Mike. Thank you for writing it. Yes, we all occasionally encounter such strange associations with another person: distant at one level but close and selectively personal at other levels. The relationship develops quietly and becomes part of our lives, sometimes more visible, sometimes receding. Sometimes we already treasure it whilst it is alive, and sometimes we only realise its true importance when they cease. Either way: such associations make us better human beings. Losses hurt, they also make us grow, in appreciation of the lost friendship if nothing else. A fitting photograph of the end, Mike. Your old associate Bryce, wherever he now is, will appreciate it."

Killing Themselves Softly With Complexification-Saturation

Just wanted to reiterate this. (I've said it before, here and there.) This is a renegade, outsider, beyond-the-pale, meta viewpoint, but...

...I still think the camera companies are killing themselves with complexity. It's easier to figure out a new computer than it is to figure out a new camera. A few mavens can do it; nobody will admit to not being able to do it; but here's what I think is happening: I think most buyers of high-end enthusiast-level interchangeable lens (IL) cameras bought one new wunder-toy a few years back that they never quite understood thoroughly, then they replaced that with another one that was even more complicated and had even more features they never quite got around to figuring out, and then maybe rinse and repeat another time or two and...

...Eventually they reach a point of complexification-saturation, and they're exhausted by it, and they wander away.

Never admitting to a soul the real reason for their disaffection, which was that the darn things got more challenging than they are rewarding.

I'm not talking about anyone reading this site. Neither am I complaining on behalf of myself. I'm talking about the average mainstream potential buyer of any higher-end DSLR or mirrorless camera.

I know there are other reasons for the decline in the market for these kinds of cameras. But I think one reason (just one) that people are turning away from the product is that the product no longer serves them in a way that's gratifying. They've become too complex. Too hard to learn. Too hard to understand. Too confusing. Too frustrating. Too difficult to truly master such that they can be used fluently, instinctively, naturally, easily, comfortably.

Just one take.

Mike

P.S. Imagine, this is what passes as a "gear post" on TOP these days. I gotta get out more!

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

Want to help?

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

Bryan William Jones: "I don't want to make a case for any one manufacturer, but after having shot with 'pro level' cameras for 20 some odd years, I started looking around for something with more soul. It seemed as if everyone was chasing all the features that software allows and adding more bells and whistles. Certainly there is a market for that, but I found myself going with a very old brand that makes simple cameras with simple interfaces and manual focus lenses. It slows me down in all the right ways and leads to a level of satisfaction that I never got with the 14-FPS, incredibly impressive, almost prescient autofocus super-cameras."

Ger Lawlor: "Can we use the 'L' word? M10D...'nuff said."

Mike replies: Sure we can use the L-word. As I've written a number of times, Leica is the only company with the confidence to make its cameras relatively simple. 

Dennis: "It could be, but I'd need more evidence. People I know who have bought a high-end, enthusiast-level ILC have stuck with it. They don't tend to upgrade frequently (less often than I do!) but they haven't turned away from it.

"On the other hand, I know plenty of people who have turned away from entry level cameras (ILC or fixed lens) in favor of their phones, but I think that's due to the ease of sharing photos taken with a phone. As an aside, I truly believe that many people do not think that their phone is a 'good enough' camera (how many times do you read that phones are good enough for most people)—it's just that the ease of use/sharing is worth the compromise. I think a lot of people who shoot phones as their primary camera would love a better camera in their phone (and that is driving phone manufacturers to compete on camera capabilities)."

Jeron: "'Overserving' is a a term that describes that nicely. I admit that my favourite camera still is the Nikon V1. It serves me well, and works frictionlessly for me. I have much 'better' cameras, but I find that the larger files don't bring me much value, and the operation is so complex that I have a hard time finding the few features that I actually use. The few features I do use are scattered randomly among a gazillion of features that I don't need. I love it when settings change accidentally, and I find myself stuck in some sophisticated focus mode that makes no sense to me, and can't figure out the way back to normal. The sheer amount of features that I'm not interested in have diminished my user experience. It's frustrating—the camera sits unused for months until I feel guilty enough to lug it around again for a day or two."

Josh Hawkins: "I usually figure out how to change around seven settings. (Seven is a totally arbitrary number. I’ve never actually counted. It’s not many.) Everything else I set once and I’m done. There are to many settings to learn them all.

"I say as someone who uses my cameras to feed my family. It’s not worth learning it all, even to me."

Mike adds: Also, you used to manage a camera store!

Geoff Wittig: "I'm somewhat sympathetic for camera makers, as they're always looking for that extra feature or function that will magically capture buyers' interest, that will differentiate their very nice camera from all the others out there. Feature-creep is irresistible. But Mike is right; they're shooting themselves in the foot here. I have a four-year-old desktop computer I use for photo editing. It works fine, but its operating system is no longer supported by Adobe with the latest upgrade of Photoshop, so I can't access some of the newest functions. This will only get worse going forward. Sooner or later I'll need to get a new desktop computer. No doubt it'll be spiffier and faster; but the drudgery of setting it up, reinstalling all my apps, scores of printing profiles and printer software, and making sure it functions well with my large format printer is excruciating. Basically a lost weekend with a lot of frustrating 'gotcha's' that take time to iron out, now that live tech support is a thing of the past. New cameras present the same problem. Lots of cool new features, but accessing them requires a deep dive into the (generally badly written) manual and lots of finicky setting of preferences and custom menus. Canon has at least been pretty consistent with their menus and controls, so it's not too painful getting a new Canon DSLR. I will confess that the Fuji X-series cameras have so many options and obscure features that I basically use them as either a glorified point 'n' shoot, or keep them in straight manual mode. Life's too short to slog through hundreds of pages."

Jeff: "I think you might be right. I've thought I enjoyed digital much less than film because it totally devalued all my hard-won knowledge. But maybe the reason is much simpler, that with all the buttons, dials, settings, thick manuals, and the endless, incomprehensible menus, it just isn't much fun. And that's before you start with the 'fun' of the post-processing software.

"Maybe they are more fun to argue and talk about then to use."

Jim H (partial comment): "Agreed, but this complaint could apply to almost any consumer device today that uses microprocessors. Engineers can't resist doing things that can be done no matter if anyone wants it to be done, needlessly complicating the device."

Ken: "Perhaps a simple approach would be to take a cue from car manufacturers. The Toyota RAV4, to take your example from the earlier post, comes in four trim levels: each with an increasing number of features and increasing price. Depending on your budget and needs, you can get the basic model or the one with all the features. Why can't someone get a, say, Fuji X-T3 with two or three trim levels—from the bare-bones basic model to the fully loaded model with touch screen controls, flash, higher frame rates, video and more? Each trim would have the basics, including the same viewfinder and controls, but each higher trim would have additional features for those who need it."

Mike replies: Sounds good. Sony does something very close to that with the A6000/A6300/A6400/A6500.

Homo_erectus: "Having played musical instruments for most of my life, cameras strike me as being really odd art making devices. I've played bass for thirty years. I can pick up nearly any bass in the world and play music on it without reading a manual, adjusting anything, or even really looking that closely at it. There are tons of different manufacturers making them but the core design is essentially the same. In fact my familiarity with how to make pleasing sounds on one type of stringed instrument allows me to pretty convincingly fake my way through playing nearly any instrument that has strings no matter how radically different it might be from the bass. Why are cameras so completely the opposite of that? How come no one makes cameras that are as pragmatic and focused in their function as musical instruments are? Maybe in a few hundred years the designs will have matured into utilitarian simplicity."

Steve Jacob (partial comment): "I would love a camera that simply didn't support JPEGs at all. That would eliminate half the menu settings at a stroke."

Thom Hogan: "Camera makers aren't solving the biggest user problems. If you don't do that, you don't get new growth, you get a base that slowly erodes as they saturate out. What are the biggest user problems? 1. Communication (workflow); 2. Complication (as you suggest); 3. Customization (and I don't mean program anything to any button as Sony seems to think is the answer)."

Jim Richardson: "I hear you on the complexity theme. On the other hand. The progression I have seen in cameras and photography during my career has been about opening up new realms of seeing. Usually when people talk about the value of 'contemplative' photography what they mean in practice is taking pictures in pretty good light of stuff that doesn't move. Basically it means limiting the subject matter of photography to what a large camera on a tripod can do well. What digital photography has done is open of the world of really dark places and things that move quickly—and a lot. This has expanded photography and improved its ability to reflect the world (in my opinion). With it comes the hair-pulling complexity of digital cameras capable of such performance. But at least it is possible."

Bob Gary: "Mike, I think you’ve hit a nerve with this complexity issue. Very well could be we’re all experiencing the need to make photography fun again...."

Seven Featured Comments for Moose's 'Counterpoint'

[Yr. Hmbl. Ed. has been moderately messed up in the comment moderation. So that you don't miss them, here are seven "Featured Comments" from the post I SNAFU'd this week, "One Good Book: Guest Counterpoint" written by Moose. —Yr. Hmbl. Ed.]

 

Geoff Wittig: "Yes! Thanks for saying it, Moose. John Szarkowski was immensely influential, and no doubt he was extremely knowledgeable and erudite on the subject of visual art. Yet his opinion imposed a kind of stylistic straightjacket on what was considered acceptable art photography, a modernist view quite similar in my mind to the vision Leo Castelli imposed on painting. Many of the photographers Szarkowski embraced (Gary Winogrand and Diane Arbus come to mind) are pure nails-on-a-chalkboard to me, ostentatiously rejecting traditional aesthetic notions for the shock of the new. "

David Raboin: Looking at Photographs has been a favorite of mine for years and my wife recently bought me a copy of Szarkowski's Atget book. I don't believe either book is about the photographs they contain so much as they're about how to think about photographs and photography. Szarkowski is the antidote for the 'great capture' and 'stunning!' crowd. He's so careful, thoughtful, and educated. Szarkowski decodes the photographer's intentions and puts everything into historical context. He's my dream audience.

"In his Atget book, there is a beautiful paragraph about Atget's decision to point his camera into the sun where Szarkowski discusses the struggles of artists across all mediums to depict the feel of looking into the sun. If I ever received a comment like that on Instagram I think I would cry."

JOHN GILLOOLY: "I completely agree with Moose's take. I bought that book years ago after it was recommended here and just did not connect with it at all."

David Comdico: "Looking at Photographs is a great book. I had to pick up my copy to re-read the text as the essay here seemed woefully inaccurate. To begin, Szarkowski doesn't say 'there are only three ways of seeing the physical world.' He says that there are three ways of accepting the evidence of one's senses. There is a difference between the two, and not noticing this from a critical perspective is sort of...well, similar to not accepting the evidence of your senses.

"For Szarkowski, the nature of photography is that it is evidentiary. His text here is highly ironic (Szarkowski here falling into the humorist camp). He says, 'The consistent flaw in the system [i.e., photography] has been that it has recorded the wrong facts: not what we knew was there but what has appeared to be there.' Every bad or inept photo can be said to result from this 'flaw'— the camera recorded the wrong facts and instead of showing us what we knew was there, it captured what appeared instead.

"As the popular saying goes, there is no one easier to fool than yourself. The real dangerous bias we must confront is confirmation bias. Szarkowski puts it thusly: 'Faced with a contradiction between what he sees and what he reads, the average person will ignore what he sees.'

"So trusting my senses, I find it trite and unconvincing to say that Erwitt's photo is a putative indictment of the museum, in that it just houses old treasures (which is how Szarkowski’s makes his point, albeit very ironically). Similarly, Looking at Photographs isn't a mere vault of musty old photos. As a user of Instagram, I've seen variations of these photos thousands of times: DeCarava's man holding a briefcase, Friedlander's surreal refractions, Arbus' trenchant view of the proto-MAGA jingoist.

"Szarkowski is not above reproach (Janet Malcom's criticism is hard-hitting), but he is not only historically important, he is an astute and terrific writer. One of the few. Most writing on photography is bad; less criticism than narrative, or, worse, confused theory. Clarity and insight is more valuable than polarizing approbation or repudiation.

"Finally, the insight Szarkowski provides here is one that we need to take to heart. Ours is a culture in which we are constantly told to not trust our 'lying eyes.' Mere appearance has been de-legitimized. And so we have instead a photographic culture predicated on graphical manipulation, a broken financial and political system that insists it is the best ever devised, and an increasingly dangerous environmental calamity that we are told isn’t happening. Those that can see the reality peeking behind these fictions are indeed saints, simpletons, and humorists. Szarkowski’s essay on 'Venice, 1965' is not only astute but prescient."

Mark Roberts: "Although it's tangential to the main point of Moose's piece I can testify to the fact that sentiment expressed in the Russell Miller quotation is wrong: I teach college students, all of whom have grown up in a world in which color photography was invented first as far as they're concerned—it's the original, default way of shooting for anyone raised on digital—and making good monochrome photographs is always one of the most popular topics."

Eric Perlberg: "I agree with Moose's general argument. I personally have nothing against and can appreciate mid-20th-century photography for what it was, but in terms of interesting photographic art things have moved on. One of the historic characteristics of art (Art?) is that its in a state of constant renewal; what was once groundbreaking becomes part of the accepted canon, comfortable, familiar, but no longer pushing the envelope or making one rethink one's aesthetics. Such was Szarkowski pushing boundaries when he publicised, defined and explained a then-new generation of photographers.

"Today the photography he supported is comfortably classic, like Mahler's First Symphony, which was hissed and booed at its early performances but which now fills music halls worldwide, or Elvis's early music which shocked a Doris-Day-music-buying public with his wild guitar and shaking hips. Now Elvis comfortably lives on.

"Leaving aside the popularisation of mediocre photography due to smartphones and online galleries there are a plethora of excellent photographic artists pushing the boundaries of the medium (and they're often on Istagram too). Unfortunately (for me) these photographic artists are almost never mentioned or referenced on TOP or by its readership. It's an oversight I can personally live with due to Mike's otherwise thoughtful and humane writing style across a wide variety of subjects. But I personally cringe a bit when mid-20th-century photographers are held up as the pinnacle of the field."

Bob F.: "Couldn't resist commenting on the 'three-minute rule.' When I was a disk jockey on a local radio station (the late, not lamented KKJO in St. Joseph, Missouri) in the mid '60s, Marty Robbins' 'El Paso' was an essential part of the playlist because it was four minutes, 37 seconds long, allowing us to make it to the toilet and back while the record was playing, while the 'three minute' records didn't. I've always thought this had a lot to do with the song's great success."

[I wonder if from now on I should just publish comments? You'll are so interesting maybe you don't need me!  :-)  (Moose's post started life as a long comment.)  —Mike the Ed.]

(Posted by) Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

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Featured Comments from:

Ernest Zarate: "Moose seems to have two main complaints with the book in question, Looking at Photographs. First, he is not a fan of John Szarkowski’s writing. Second, the photographs suffer two fatal flaws: they are old and they are not in color.

"I happen to be in the same camp as our esteemed editor—I think the book is an important volume in my library and I encourage my photo students to seek it out. Szarkowski has written 100 brief, accessible, and sophisticated mini-essays that not only discuss the photograph on the opposite page, but also shed light on the complete history, development, joys and surprises, and cultural context of the art of photography. To do this using only 100 photographs selected from the thousands of photographs in MOMAS’s vault is impressive, in my opinion. To do all that to the level of excellence Szarkowki has is astounding. It is a tour de force.

"The current trend of writing on photography (and, Lord help us all, video blogging!) is dry, self-important, twisted and confused. I am grateful for the oasis Mike provides with TOP. (Note: I would say that Mike is very generous in taking into consideration the ideas and suggestions of his readers. If there are contemporary photographers and/or writers a reader like Eric would like to see on TOP, I’m sure they will get due consideration.)

"But, hey, to each their own. Some like Szarkowski, some don’t. I do think it’s a bit disingenuous to criticize a book published in 1973 for not having more current photographs in it, though. And to quote Szarkowki from the book’s Introduction, 'The future of this beautiful, universally practiced, little-known art will be determined by young and unborn photographers, who will decide how best to build on their rich and ambiguous tradition. A small part of that tradition is reproduced on the following pages.' Hardly the sentiment of a dictator of aesthetics.

"The other issue, of damning the photographs because they’re old and not in color, I certainly do take issue with. If one was to follow this 'logic,' then any work of creative effort older than, what, 50 years (the age of the last photograph in the book) must be tossed into the garbage? Art has a shelf life? And if it’s not in technicolor then it has never had any value at all? A photograph is damned because it was made using, horror of horrors, monochrome materials?!? And analog materials at that?!?

"I guess the good news is that museums the world over, once they dump their 'old' art into the nearest dumpster will have ample room to start collecting and storing all the au courant digital work.

"In closing I’ll paraphrase a rather famous writer: 'Moose doth protest too much, methinks.'"

Upshot

I had to laugh at JohnMFlores's comment to the last post, which was, in its entirety,

Yes

...But, overall, I think the point is made, in my mind at least: cameras don't actually cost all that much. I'm thinking that perhaps I should stop boxing myself in to one stratum of the pricing tiers by conceiving of things as "inexpensive" and "expensive." It's really just all relative.

Personally, at this moment, I can tell you what seems reasonable to me: I balked at paying $1,649 for an X-H1 body (before the big price drop) and did in fact spend $1,213 for a Panasonic G9 body (when it reached its cheapest price during the holidays). So there's my own price sensitivity in a nutshell.

But that's just me. (And I'm still not sure I made the correct decision. I'm having opportunity-cost remorse over the X-H1, and half of me even thinks I should stick to B&W with the X-T1. I like color but I love B&W.)

I do continue to believe, and assert, that expenditures make much more sense if you get one of two things out of whatever you buy: One is "use," and the other is "joy," not that the two are mutually exclusive. I guess really the only truly wasteful way to spend money is to get neither use nor joy out of your purchase. Buy it and stick it in the closet and never touch it, and feel nothing but a pang of regret and guilt whenever you happen to accidentally lay eyes on it—that's how something really becomes expensive. Please don't ask how I know. And please don't tease me.

For pros AND...
I do have to object in part to the refrain common in our comments that the E-M1X is "for professionals" and if you need it for calculated business reasons then you'll make the buying decision purely on that basis. Yes and no. I've been in this game a while, and I can tell you that "professional" equipment is made for two categories of consumer, not one. One is, yes, pros who need it and people who will do a hardheaded cost/benefit analysis before investing; the other is well-heeled amateurs who want to use what the pros use...or who just want the thing, full stop. There's no telling what the percentage of each might be, as I'm sure it varies for each individual product, and by region, and based on what ideas are popular at any given moment in time, and even possibly by the state of the economy. And sometimes the two things are different facets of one and the same supernice Texan dude (cough cough Kirk LOL). But a little story along these lines: long ago, in Virginia, there was a professional camera store that catered to professionals. It was a very slick shop, stylish, and stuffed with exotic, expensive gear. It sold mainly studio lighting equipment, in the days when the average studio pro might invest $30,000 to $100,000 in strobe-and-head systems, light stands, clamps, cables, light shaping equipment (gobos, skrims, reflectors, softboxes, grids, etc.), flash meters, camera stands (the average hobbyist today has no idea what a camera stand is), backdrops, and so on. (A pro I assisted for claimed he had $30,000 worth of Matthews C [Century] stands, which in some circles used to be called "Hollywood stands.") Of course the store strongly emphasized the professional portion of its clientele. But the manager of the store, in an unguarded moment, confided to me that only 50% of its sales were to working pros; the other 50% were to wealthy people, some of them women, who had artistic inclinations and time on their hands and the intention to become fashion or studio photographers, and the wherewithal to outfit themselves to do so. The store downplayed this segment of its clientele, but, to paraphrase the manager (who was a woman), "without wealthy lawyers' wives I'd be out of business."

(This is an aside, but the same woman lectured on the use of the Minolta Flashmeter IV, which until the advent of digital cameras was the most complex device intended for photography I ever encountered, at least if you bothered to understand all of its functions. She also confided to me that if more than three weeks went by between these Flashmeter IV lectures, she had to brush up on its features and operation by rereading parts of the manual before her talk. Made me laugh...if the person who taught it couldn't even remember how to use it....)

So the E-M1X isn't just for working pros who need its capabilities and advantages, and you shouldn't believe otherwise. It's half* for pros who need it and half* for people who want to be like the pros who need it, or who want to be outfitted to try the things it's made to be good at. Those people are a very important part of any "pro" product's market, too.

That's my 2¢ about $3k. More mañana.

Mike

*Actual percentages may vary

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

Harsh reality

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

Mike Plews: "As enthusiasts this discussion revolves around what we want versus what we need. Reality sometimes settles the issue for us. My way of dealing with this is to call things based not on what they are but rather on what they were supposed to be. For example, I have a Toro two stage snow thrower that can shoot a frozen dog turd into outer space. I call it my Epson 3880. If you look out over our back yard you can see my D850. It has a 750 gallon tank, a distribution box and three 80 foot laterals. Right now Mrs. Plews is waiting for the local septic service to come and pump out our Nikon. For much of the '90s we had a dog named Deardorff. Nobody in our family is named Deardorff but I asked for a Deardorff for Christmas and I got a beagle. It's all good."

Mike replies: Mike, I am going to have to come meet you and Mrs. Plews someday. It won't be to see your Nikon, though.

Øyvind Hansen: "If you can afford it it is very reassuring to own the 'flagship,' at least until the next version comes out. It keeps the upgraditis at bay. There´s still horizontal GAS to contend with though...."

John Camp: "I read all of Kirk's blog entries, and would comment there more often if I could only figure out how to do it. (Something to do with Facebook, or maybe Google, or maybe both.) In any case, he's down at his local camera store so often he ought to sublease a space in the back room and move in a bed and a microwave. Then he could try out cameras in the middle of the night, at his leisure. He also ought to give the occasional workshop on portraiture. I'd sign up in one minute."

kirk Tuck: "I'd love to reply to the mention of my buying habits, vis-à-vis camera gear, but I'm heading out the door just now on my way to the bricks and mortar camera store in order to buy a new Fujifilm 90mm ƒ/2 lens. Perhaps, finally, it will be the magic lens that makes my career mildly successful. If not, it may be another month in which we boil the leather camera straps to make soup...(sigh)."

Mike replies: Should we take up a collection for you?

Of camera straps, I mean.

I assume well-used, grimy, sweat-stained ones make better soup?

(Actually, I'd better watch myself here...best not provoke karma under this heading!  :-)  Or I'll be eating camera-strap soup myself.) 

Open Mike: Note to the Young

["Open Mike" is the anything-goes, often off-topic Editorial Page of TOP. It appears on Wednesdays.]

A note to young people: it's critical to practice what you want to do, and, usually, mastery will come to you in the thing, or a thing, that you practice consistently and for the joy of it.

But be sure to practice exactly what it is you want to do. Don't practice something else thinking it will help you with the thing you want to do. Don't practice one thing thinking that you'll get to the more important thing later. You'll get good at whatever you practice. If you spend all your time shopping for cameras and comparing specs and "testing," that is exactly what you'll become good at. (This story is probably apocryphal, but supposedly a Leica lens designer once said, "the best way to test a lens is to use it for a year. Everything else is a shortcut.") And beware spending too much time doing things that aren't what you really want to do.

Practice exactly what it is you want to do. Whatever it is and however you do it.

Heed my words, grasshopper!

That is all for now,

—An Old One

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Harsh reality

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bt: "That was like a post I posted here a few ago: 'Be careful about what you get good at.' Because that's what you'll end up doing."

Hélcio J. Tagliolatto: "Nelson Rodrigues, the most acclaimed Brazilian playwright, a caustic and direct writer, at a press conference one of the interviewers asked, 'What advice would you give to young people?' He had no doubts: 'Young people, grow old!'"

Ben: "This is good advice, but there is a bit more...you should also practice skills that are necessary complements to what you want to do. Looking at and thinking about photography, for example, if you want to make photographs. Reading, research, and organization if you want to write. Marketing if you want to sell something: your photography, writing, services, etc.

"But beyond all of this, you must practice bringing difficult tasks to completion. This is a unique skill that many lack, and all of us struggle with. But practicing hard work and seeing things through to the end develops a set of skills that will be useful in whatever you choose to do. 

"P.S. To echo Mike's example, shopping is never hard work, and bringing a purchase home does not count as 'completing something.'"