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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.]

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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.

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:

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.]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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

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.

Want to help?

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

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:

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.'"

Best Comment Ever

All in, I believe we're approaching 270,000 comments on two different sites since I became a blogger in 2005. This might be the #1 best one ever. It's a bit dense, but be patient with yourself. Relax and read it over a few times.

"The problem is that photography has always been a technical pursuit and the mediating technology required to make a photograph has always threatened to overwhelm it. To quote Donald Kuspit, 'Technology is the last valiant attempt to discredit and devalue the unconscious.... The unconscious is the bête noire in a scientifically and technologically managed world, which is why it must be killed or at least ostracized.' The endless upgrade cycle, the more and more laborious and tedious mastery of imaging software, the solid belief in technical improvement and control as a means to achieve success, all of this leads one further and further away from any possibility of making original or authentic work. This is the bind of the technology treadmill. What it gives, it also takes away. So in digital photography we have an inherent pitfall in the photographic process married to the culturally dominant fixation with technology and control which are themselves obstacles to the unconscious, the very source of creativity itself."

Written by David Comdico (with, of course, a little help from Donald Kuspit).

I couldn't have said this. But I've certainly sensed it. As we get further into the age of digital imaging, there seems something a little more serious going on than mere fanboyism and gearheadism. It used to be that tech and gear geekery was a sort of lighthearted sideline to the main project of photography—something to be indulged in, or "the work behind the work"—but everyone understood that you got it settled and then got past it, and, when faced with photographs of emotion and power, you backed down on questions of mere technical fussiness. No more. Culturally, we do seem to be involved in a project—the project of asserting that there's actually some sort of pot of gold at the end of the "technical image quality" rainbow.

What's the point of more detail in photographs when we already have too much detail? A photograph today highlights detail, forefronts it, spotlights it—detail at an almost microscopic level dominates so many pictures. I call the look "CAF"—clinical analytical forensic. It's when you see the crusty mascara on a model's eyelashes instead of a girl with thick eyelashes. I'm sure it's why people have become so passionate about big sensors, fast lenses and maximal bokeh—that's the only relief permissible from the relentless CAF.

In 2008 I had a minor epiphany and came to what I called my "theory of überkameras"—we had reached the point where the Sony A900 saw more detail in the distance than my eyes can see, and the Nikon D3 saw in the dark better than my eyes can.

I wondered at the time if I really need a camera that sees better than I do. That's my definition of an überkamera—one that sees better than your ratty inferior biological self.

The disappearance of the unconscious is a thornier thicket, but I know what Donald Kuspit means. Page through Charles Harbutt's Travelog from 1974—one of the subversive underground masterpieces in the history of American photography—and then trawl around on any Internet picture site for as long as you like. It's not just that the pictures are different. It's that the project is: glimmer of the subconscious vs. the detritus of "the scientifically and technologically managed world." Culturally, are we lost in what should have been a mere digression? We sense something is missing, but to supply the shortcoming, we just double down, determinedly, on the project. Fixate, as David put it. The bind of the technology treadmill indeed.

Mike
(Thanks to David)

P.S. As I was thinking about David's comment, I happened to hear a comedian on the radio. Health club owner: "Hey, you'll love this. It's called a Stairmaster. You know how you hate having to walk up too many stairs? Well, I've got one that's different. Mine never ends. It just keeps going and going. I've got a bike that goes nowhere too! You can ride and ride and never move. It's great. Instead of just doing real things for free, you can come pay me to pretend to do them."

Original contents copyright 2018 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 • Amazon

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

Mark Sampson: "I studied with Charles Harbutt for a week when I was 20 years old. Some of the lessons from that time have stuck with me for the 42 years of photography since.... I bought, enjoyed, and still have his book. I never knew that it was a 'subversive underground masterpiece' until now, though you may very well be right about that."

Yiorgos: "Yes, an excellent and much needed comment. I'd like to add a couple of other observations. Consumerism, not just technology, seems to be part of the force that has taken us down this cultural wrong turn. The artists I know disdain gear, which always makes me feel judged for finding it alluring (and not having the balls to call myself an artist). A new (to me) camera seems to reinvigorate my photography every couple of years."

Jeff: "I’ll repeat my comment to another recent post: the most important tools remain between the ears. That part hasn’t changed."

Andrew Molitor: "Regarding your postscript. When I lived in San Francisco, on Ninth Avenue there was a gym something like 100 yards from the entrance to Golden Gate Park. You could see people in the storefront on stationary bikes sweating away indoors, less than a stone's throw away from one of the most agreeable outdoor locations on the entire planet to take some exercise."

Rob de Loe: "Excellent comment and nice follow-up thoughts in the post. This all resonates very strongly. Some areas of human endeavour seem to attract people who are all about the technology and have no space for, or capacity for, emotion and the unconscious. Photography is definitely one of those areas. I think it goes beyond just different tastes. Extreme sharpness and detail are the end goal in many peoples’ photography, so upgrading to the newest lenses and sensors is essential for them. The result is often your 'clinical analytical forensic' pictures: incredibly sharp, but incredibly dull.

"For some people, the answer is to reverse course technologically: old lenses, old processes, Lomography, etc. Personally I don’t think that’s the answer. A crappy plastic lens can’t turn your dull photo into a thoughtful, engaging photo.

"I personally think the only way out is to focus completely on expressing ideas, emotions, and story in your pictures. We don’t all have to make photo essays, but if we’re deliberately and mindfully trying to say something in our pictures, for me that’s the only track that goes anywhere. Ironically, with those goals in the forefront, maybe you do need extreme detail to carry your ideas, or maybe you need 19th century photographic technologies. The key is that the technology is now serving the idea rather than being the end goal."

alan: "Tech takes us further away from original and authentic work? I couldn't disagree more. All extra technology does is give us more choices to take pictures and different pictures in more situations some of which would have been impossible before. How can that possibly lead to less originality or authenticity? It doesn't; it gives us more scope to be original if we have the vision and the imagination to use the tech to our advantage. Blaming photo tech is as daft as saying that after the invention of word processors no one would be able to write a good novel or that after we started making paper and paint in factories no one could possibly paint a picture worth looking at again. I can't agree. I think tech gives us the chance to do more and to do things we couldn't do before, at all. That's all. I disagree with the idea that tech removes creativity or originality. I think it enables more of it."

Dennis: "The bind is a terrible thing. I've attended PhotoPlus Expo many times over the last 10+ years. It's common to see prints on display in the 40x60" range from 24-MP FF cameras, a handful of much bigger prints from the higher-res models, big prints from Olympus and Fuji, even prints around 20x30" (if I remember correctly) from Fuji's little 2/3" point-and-shoots. Lately, I've been shooting less and less with my Sony E system and more and more with my RX10 III. I dislike the E-system for a variety of reasons and will probably sell it. I'm sorely tempted to make the RX10 my primary camera for the foreseeable future, at least until I have a real need for something else. And at the same time, I find myself inexplicably thinking maybe it's time to finally move to full frame...."

Charles Rozier: "I think you are very much on target. One little note—perhaps one element of 'CAF' is color itself, not just super resolution. For example, street photography now seems to be a different animal when in color, containing more 'data' but less psychological power, even when displayed at the same resolution."

hugh crawford: "Reminds me of how pop music became obsessed with perfection and clarity just before punk rock. Also umpteen art movements where as soon as a generation of artists figure one thing out everybody abandoned that goes onto the next thing to figure out. The real question is where to go now that photography looks more real than ever at the same time that the technology exists to make more convincing fakes than ever before."

Guiie: "Amazing Friday blogpost. Though I agree with the comment and your opinion I disagree with the general technology approach. Through the ages there has always been people mastering techniques and crafts, technology. But our time has been transformed by one 'simple' technology and its effect: Internet. The amount of information one can reach today is insurmountable and that exposure is what allows the 'technology treadmill' to exist.

"I'm from a little town in Patagonia and if it wasn't for the Internet I wouldn't have learned anything about digital photography. I like to think that my first year doing photography included the digital technology treadmill and later the argument 'the best camera is the one you have with you' and my lack of budget pushed me to not bother with the treadmill and try to exercise my vision...."

John Krumm: "To me half or more than half of the fun in art is when we experience it communally. That includes both art I create and art I enjoy. Those opportunities are indeed disappearing. Facebook and the rest of the internet is not a strong communal experience, despite us all being so 'connected.' Our 'unconscious' needs the room of real life to breath, and the experience of real community to grow. I never quite bought the 'I make my art for myself' line. Sounds like BS. I make art to share. On whether or not technology moves us farther away from making art because of the 'unconscious'-stifling nature of technology, I don't know. There are many other factors at play, like our economy's way of turning everything into a commodity, for instance."

Christopher May: "I think there's a very large part of photography involves cameras that see better than we do. Much of it has some scientific or otherwise prosaic purpose (infrared photography, for instance) but so many of these tools and techniques have later gone on to have artistic careers, too (Richard Mosse's work in Africa with the aforementioned infrared, for example).

"At it's very heart, all still photography is about seeing better than we can. When we perceive the world in our biologically limited way, we're forced to interpret significant moments at the speed in which they happen. No matter how perceptual we are, there are going to be some bits of missing information thanks to our human condition. On the other hand, as photographers, we can take a single moment and preserve it for as long as we wish to contemplate and free ourselves from the constraints of life in real time.

"The still photograph has been with us for around two centuries now. In that time, we've been able to utilize it to see the world around us in new ways. Muybridge proved that a horse could hover, if only for a moment that our limited faculties couldn't perceive. Macro photography has shown over and over again that the very small can still be very exciting. Fast apertures can make most of the world go away so that we're forced to contemplate the subject of a photo. And on and on.

"Ctein's TOP article on 'Stochastic Photography' is a great example of utilizing the camera's ability to see better than we can for artistic purposes. Photographers always seem to go ga-ga over cotton candy water (another form of the camera seeing in ways we can't) but that article made me realize how incredibly beautiful moving water can be when photographed at the other extreme of superhuman camera abilities.

"So I'll take whatever additional abilities the camera makers want to make available to me. The better the cameras can see, the more I'll be allowed to see. That fascinates me."

Take Heart!

First a definition: The Digital Tsunami, noun phrase: The fact that there are now as many pictures taken in a day as used to be taken in a year*.  

Weren't we really talking about the Digital Tsunami last week? You know, all the pictures have been taken already—people take the same pictures of the same things—it's harder and harder to make your work stand out or be your own—and so forth. Mass taste, instant consumption, and snap judgement are leveling critical distinctions and the possibility of subtle, thoughtful work getting noticed; etc., etc.

All that is basically just saying that there's this huge wave of new pictures inundating everything, and in which everything gets lost. The culture's been swamped.

So I was going to write an encouraging post taking the opposite stance. There are a number of things I could point out as to why new photographs still matter: for instance, recency. All photographs recede backwards in time, and the world constantly changes (Mitch Hedberg's photo-epistemological joke encapsulates this, and is good to keep in mind). So just taking a photo that shows something now technically makes any picture different. 

Things like that. There are a bunch of 'em.

But rather than trudge through all those arguments, let's make one single point. You know how, when you love to look at pictures, and you grow older looking at pictures, you gradually develop an understanding about what you personally are looking for in a picture? You might even develop an overarching concept that "umbrellas" what you think is the most important element in all photos that are good for you, as when the critic Owen Edwards declared that glamor was the linchpin of his critical outlook.

And photographing is essentially a scavenger hunt, isn't it? Very few of us can reliably make equally great pictures at any time, anywhere, on demand. Almost everybody takes lots of bad and so-so pictures, along with a smaller number that are really pretty darn skillful and good. This is what I meant when I wrote, back in 2005:

To be honest, most of my pictures suck. The saving grace of that admission is that most of your pictures suck, too. How could I possibly know such a thing? Because most of everybody's pictures suck, that's how. I've seen Cartier-Bresson's contact sheets, and most of his pictures sucked. One of my teachers, Frank DiPerna, said that it was an epiphany for him when he took a class from Garry Winogrand and learned that most of Winogrand's exposures sucked. It's the way it is.

But then there's this: the corollary to "most of everybody's pictures suck": every now and then you get one you really love. One that, for you, stands out even from the good ones.

Every now and then you get one you really love.

So isn't that like eating a really good meal, or enjoying particularly good sex, or having a really good day, or happening across weather you think is spectacular—or winning at gambling, or helping someone, or going for a great ride on your motorcycle, or whatever floats your boat? It's this: sometimes things go well. Sometimes things work. Sometimes you're happy.

No matter what we're "after" when you take photographs, sometimes one comes along that just hits on all cylinders, and you just love it. It will most likely be something different for all of us, because we all have different taste and we're all looking for different things when we photograph. One person might like clean geometrical patterns, another might like odd gestures from people on the streets, another might like subtle colors in nature, another might like tender moments between people, another might like a sense of menace and surreality...whatever it is you look for in pictures, whatever satisfies you, sometimes you get it. Maybe it's not fame, or fortune, or renown. But sometimes serendipity blesses you and something good comes along.

Is that alone a good enough reason to keep photographing? For me it is.

So take heart, my friends. Go forth and find that next hit. The next good picture is out there. Get out with a camera in your hand and something good will happen. Don't know where, don't know what it is, don't know when we'll find it. But when we do, then all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well**. Right?

Mike

*This formulation isn't formal: no one knows how many pictures are taken in a day right now, and even the estimates back in the '80s were pretty loose—the figure I saw came from Kodak, which estimated that approximately six billion pictures were taken every year on film back then, worldwide. Given the various metrics I see, I don't think six billion a day is an unreasonable estimate for 2018, given that most people who own cellphones now have a camera in their pocket, and use pictures for everyday communication. So maybe the formulation "there are now as many pictures taken in a day as used to be taken in a year" is simplified, indicative, even allegorical rather than strictly statistical, it still seems like a good way to say it.

**Julian of Norwich via T.S. Eliot.

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Devilish Question

I've been watching some of those little blips from the Jimmy Kimmel show where they go out on Hollywood Boulevard and ask awkward questions of passers-by. Most of the questions are essentially fluffy ("Did you have sex last night?"), but one of them has had me puzzled for two days:

"What's the most interesting thing about you?"

I've been thinking about this, and am forced to conclude there's nothing interesting about me!

How would you answer this? It's a bit devilish I think.

Mike

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Kurt Shoens: "Finding interesting things to say about ourselves is as hard as finding interesting photographs of our everyday lives. It's so familiar we forget what's unique and interesting. Then something abruptly changes about your life. Maybe you move from a medium sized town in Wisconsin to a small out of the way place in New York. And then, if you're like me, you regret the pictures you didn't take of the old place now that the opportunity is gone. So you might think you're uninteresting, but you've held my attention and that of many others, for years about a range of topics, many photographic. But what's interesting about me? I haven't a clue."

Adrian Malloch: "The problem with that question is that it is asked of the wrong person. Interestingness is in the eye of the audience, not the actor. The question is as mis-directed as the breathless reporter asking of a bystander who disabled a gunman, 'Are you a hero?' Of course he/she does not perceive of him-/herself as a hero. They did what they did because that was the best thing they were able to do in the situation—not because of some vainglorious motive. It is for others to appreciate and value the selflessness of their actions."

Peter: "That I got my wife to marry me. Not enough? Consider that she also supports my camera purchasing habits. Interested now?"

Mike replies: Hold on to her.

Bill Tyler: "If there is truly nothing interesting at all about you, that fact would be very interesting indeed. 'A paradox? A paradox, a most ingenious paradox!'"

Stan B.: "Me and the wife always ponder what we would say to Alex Trebek when he asks every contestant to reveal a little something about themselves during that particular segment on every show. We mercilessly ridicule each and every contestant for being more sensationally boring than the previous—while admitting we're hard pressed to come up with anything even remotely better...."

Mike Plews: "I can curse in Morse code?"

Eric Rose: "I'm not allowed to tell you  ;-)  ."

Michel: "Dude, it’s staring you right in the face. You’re your own boss. You created your own business. You had a few print sales and bought a house! As for me, well, one time I juggled on the radio."

Richard Parkin: "To bring this back to pool, the real subject of this blog, I must reference Steve 'Interesting' Davis, six times world champion snooker player. He was nicknamed 'Interesting' due to his unflashy/unexciting style of play, perhaps particularly in contrast with that of his contemporary Alex 'Hurricane' Higgins, though Wikipedia seems to think it was only his monotonous interview style. His Wikipedia entry has 23 uses of the word 'interesting,' which is interesting and may be a record."

Preserve Your Photos!

We heard from David Sparks about the Black Skimmer post. You might want to check out his response if you enjoyed that post.

David, who is 80, said, in part, "The Black Skimmer project and the other projects I am working on now is an effort to preserve some of the successful images in a format that will be more accessible to family and friends when I am no longer around. Unless I do something to give prominence to selected photos they will just remain part of the bloated Lightroom catalogs where they now reside."

I'd like to try to give heart to those who don't see any usefulness in their archives past their own physical lifetimes. I used to make two recommendations—one was to notate, on the back of prints, the people, places or things that appear in them, for the benefit of heirs and posterity. The other was to simply create a separate box and segregate all your best or favorite work into it, labeling it "---- ----'s Best Photographs" or something like that. The idea there is that your heirs might find it overwhelming to confront a roomful of photographic detritus and many boxes and filing cabinets full of unorganized prints and negatives, but few descendants are likely to throw out a single box labeled Grandad's best.

Of course, those recommendations seem very quaint now, unless you're one of the minority for whom printmaking is a part of the hobby. Few people have prints now and fewer prints start out as negatives, and you can't label a TIFF file with a pencil.

Still, there are a few logical ways to respect and honor some of the work you've done. A lucky few are able to find a repository for it, such an historical society or a curated archive, club, or local museum. (We're at an odd point in history, when exponentially more photographs are being made but exponentially fewer will likely survive the next hundred or hundred-and-a-half years.)

David's strategy is a good one—make small finished presentations that have a point and a purpose. I've always thought that another good way to insure the survival of work is craft—people tend to value beautifully made things, especially if they telegraph good craftsmanship even to people who don't entirely understand its value. Your own fame and the value of your work is another good preservative, as we've discussed several times, although that's neither really in our control, nor, for most of us, in the cards.

But generally, I'd say: try not to be fatalistic about it. Have some compassion for your own work! Have some sympathy for the effort you've put into your work and the fun you had making it, and don't shut the door on doing something that might help a little of it survive beyond your own span. Maybe you don't care, and that's fine—it's your work and you can do with it what you wish—but it's also not that hard these days to share it with others in a form that will let it last. Why not?

That part can be fun too, by the way!

Mike
(Thanks again to David Sparks)

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Rob de Loe: "Curate and print. I think those are the only two viable options. If you don't care enough to curate and print your own work, who else is going to care?

"Books are a great idea. I've been thinking about making simple photo books for projects. There are some very basic binding techniques that will get the job done, e.g., Japanese Stab Binding. Even something as basic as a nice archival box with interleave tissue sends a signal that something worth saving is inside.

"But the key is to curate. Choose your best work, and organize in ways that make sense (projects, themes, etc.). Or become famous so a museum will do it for you. That works too."

Nigel: "I am slowly making digital copies of my best negatives with a contraption I had made for the job.

"It is amazing and shocking to see London and Italy as they were forty to thirty years ago. These pictures taken when I was in my 'street photography' phase are now becoming historical documents, and certain pictures that were not interesting at the time have taken on a new life. The most interesting ones are the pictures I took for the short period when I first came to live in Italy and I was lucky to find a job with a local news magazine. Photography was much easier back then. There were not the neurotic privacy problems we have today if you shoot certain subjects.

"Regarding what I will pass on to the future: well, my theatrical photography will go to the musty archive of the local theatre. But I suppose most of my photography will disappear with me. It does not bother me at all. Most of my photography, particularly my hiking photography, is done to preserve memories for myself. I have/will make a few Blurb books of London and Italy 'as they were.' These are probably the only photographs that will be interesting to others and as they do not take up too much space may not end up in the house clearing skip. I am at an age where I have had to take part in quite a bit of what we call 'house clearing' of deceased relatives. It is a sad, brutal business. Inevitably one reflects on oneself whilst doing this awful job. We could only keep very little of what our relatives left us. It made me get rid of an awful lot of photographic gear that was lying unused for example. If my son keeps the few Blurb books I have made of holidays together and my documentary projects, I will be happy.

"Here is my ebook of Italy."

Joseph Brunjes: "My father died in October and I have the tough duty of going through his negatives and prints. He taught high school photography so he not only had thousands of his own negatives but hundreds of negatives from students. He photographed sports teams, clubs, and every day high school life for 30 years and has quite a visual history of his high school. Only a small portion of the entire collection was sleeved and organized. I found twelve 100 foot bulk canisters full of shot negatives with family and school related images intermixed. It will take me years to go through it all. Luckily for my dad, I still shoot film and can scan and archive his best photos in my spare time. His photos for the most parts are not artistic, but I have already found some real gems (and enough blackmail photos of my brother in his youth to last the rest of my life). It has also been fun going through the negatives of all the unknown students who left their negatives in the HS darkroom and were preserved by my father. It has helped me put my own collection of prints and negatives into perspective and I am currently working to make it easier for my family to know what is worth keeping."

 

Smartphone Pictures

Kenny showing us at dinner how he looked like Frankenstein
after dental surgery

As regular readers know I recently tried to embrace using a smartphone in order to engage with what's happening currently, a curative to my former anti-phone snobbery (which was admittedly pretty strong). I notice two strains in my smartphone photography today. One is the desire to make beautiful "public" images that might have been made with a more serious rig. The other is play—I just mess around with it—like, well, everyone does.

The first is a sort of fakery—trying to mimic with a phone what a good camera will give you. This sets up failure, because only when used well within its narrow "sweet spot" will a tiny sensor give you what a larger one can provide with ease. An example might be that "bird on a wire" picture from last May—I certainly would have benefited from having a better camera when I took that, although I still like the picture.

Sometimes I will simply take a picture of whatever I happen to be looking at, just because I happen to be looking at it. A scene, a momentary accident of light, a person I notice or someone I'm with, a detail.

Documenting your life is one thing everyone uses phone photography for. I tend to not so much "document" as "play"—I'm just curious about how things look and when I see something I like seeing, I like to see how it will look as a photograph. (That's almost cribbed from Garry Winogrand, but just because he said it doesn't mean I can't mean it.) Sometimes—most times—this play doesn't result in "good" pictures, but it does result in particular or peculiar pictures...pictures that are not generic or "general" but specific and particular.

Jim taking a picture of the moon with his phone
at Yatesville, a.k.a. The Spiritual Center of the Universe

There's absolutely no purpose to this. But it's fun.

I don't want to categorize all the reasons why I might take a picture of something—I'd only leave things out. Usually I guess it's just the joy of seeing, or some related cliché. It's just that. "That" is a pointer word—it says look! or pay attention over there or this is what I saw or for a moment this existed. (It's possible that the number one shortcoming of photographs is that the "that" in them isn't anything. It's not that there's no there there, it's that there's no that there.) Still, I really enjoy it—the smartphone ranks among my favorite cameras, and although it's not among the best it's no slouch for what it is. I would never talk it down now like I used to. 

I suppose smartphone pictures are ephemera. Nothing exists for long. The picture survives the moment, but only for a longer moment. And then it, too, is gone.

Mike
(Thanks to Kenny and Jim)

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The Quality of Your Attention

A rule that suits sports or art: and maybe love: what you get out of it is proportional to the quality of your attentiveness.

Pay close attention—really focus—immerse yourself, learn the background and know the stories, the people and the history—think, observe—feel—make your experiences direct and immediate and full; and you will be rewarded. Be casual, skate the surface, give in to boredom, expect to be entertained, let your mind wander or get distracted or frazzled or fragmented, and you will get very little back.

As true of a football game* as of a great painting or book.

Mike

*Either kind

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Hans Muus: "It is reported that when Gotama, the historical Buddha, was asked to sum up his entire teachings in one word, he said, Attention."

Benjamin Marks: "My father was an art dealer, but in his heart of hearts he was a painter. His specialty was near and far eastern antiquities, but his first love was the Western tradition. From his gallery in Manhattan, he was just a few blocks from the Metropolitan Museum and he would often go there at lunch. On many occasions, I saw him spend a half hour just looking at a single painting. Matisse was a favorite of his, but he loved the modernists too.

"When you visit a museum next, stop and look at how long the average viewer encounters any particular piece of art. In my observation, an average viewer looks at a piece of art for under a minute. In fact, a minute of really looking would be a really long time for most viewers. I'd be willing to bet a seltzer that the average is more like eleven seconds or so.  ;-)  Really engaging with any work takes time. And everything in our current multi-tasking, web-enabled, jump-cut current reality is pulling us as fast as we can go in the other direction. Taking the time to really see, rather than simply having a quick look is not merely a question of getting back a reward for what you put in; rather it creates a change in one's consciousness (and a worthwhile one, in my view). I realize that this is a grandiose claim, but I would bet that the average TOP reader has a favorite visual work in mind to which he or she could pay extended attention of this type. But then again, I think a lot of us and our mental abilities.  ;-) "

Brian Taylor: "This is most obviously true when playing music. The moment when your mind wanders, a blooper happens—often because you've been foolish enough to think 'this is going well.' The challenge with photography, perhaps, is that the evidence that things have gone awry, and thus the link between cause and effect, tends to be less obvious."

Sights Not Photographed

We had beautiful weather here for the supermoon last Sunday, perfect for the occasion—cold, cloudless, and extremely clear. Moonrise above the ridges and the supermoon in the night sky was vivid and dramatic.

My friend Eric was driving to church in Hammondsport (at the south end of the lake) last Sunday morning and saw a remarkable thing. As he drove along the winding lakeside road, he was joined by a huge bald eagle flying above and ahead of him. The eagle was carrying an animal in its talons, probably a small rabbit. He slowed a little to match its speed (speed limit on that road is 55 MPH), and he said the eagle flew for quite a ways as if he were following the lane lines, in synchrony with his car. He said the bird was huge, estimating its wingspan at five or six feet, and that it was an amazing sight, the best eagle encounter of his life so far.

On Saturday evening I was playing fetch with Butters in the backyard (we do this three times a day, four times when the days are longer) and I saw a less dramatic but still wonderful sight. It was past sunset—both Bluff sunset and real sunset—and it was fast growing dark, when I saw a jet plane high in the troposphere laying down a contrail. It must have been catching the very last rays of the sun setting out to the West of us, because the contrail was a brilliant sunset pink. It was beautiful, so I stood and watched it as Butters ran for the ball.

It was in the middle of a very clear Southern sky, far from any obstruction. I averted my eye from it for just a couple of seconds—just long enough to scoop up the ball and send it flying again—about four seconds—but when I looked up to the sky again, at the place the plane should have been by then, it had disappeared! The effect was startling, like a magic trick, like the heavens had swallowed the plane.

My conjecture is that I just happened to look away at the moment the sun disappeared from the point of view of the plane. No longer illuminated by the rays of the sun, plunged into in shadow, the jet and its contrail blended into the darkening sky and became impossible to pick out from the ground.

These things remind me that before photography comes the joy and the wonder of simply seeing. It's one of the reasons for photography in the first place.

Mike
(Thanks to Eric)

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Hans Muus (partial comment): "Beautiful! I couldn't agree more. Practising photography and enjoying the other visual arts from an early age onwards, have helped me to see—and thank god also to see more intensely without a camera present. Every one here on TOP will recognize the initial feeling of 'O, sh*t, I should have had my camera with me,' but in situations like these it is also a relief to be freed from the urge to try to possess the view."

Dogman: "It was in the late 1980s. My wife, then girlfriend, and I were camping in Arches National Park in Utah. I arose early one morning, before sunrise, and started the camp stove to make coffee. When it brewed, I took a cup and walked into the rocks behind the campground, preparing to watch the sunrise over this incredibly beautiful landscape. I found nice boulder that made a comfortable seat and began to sip my coffee, alone with my thoughts. There were a few people up and about besides myself, down in the little valley below. Among them was a man and two young blonde-haired children. They didn't notice me up in the rocks. As the sun came up over the horizon, it backlit the threesome to such a degree the blonde hair of the two children seemed to glow against the background of dark red rocks and sand. At that moment, a deer quietly wandered up between the three and myself. They did not notice the deer. The deer stepped up on a rocky area just above them and froze, looking down on them.

"The elements were all there, the most incredibly beautiful scene in my memory—the unearthly landscape of Southern Utah at sunrise with three human figures, blonde hair glowing in the rising sun, with that stealthy deer just above them peering down, rimmed by the same glowing sun. For a few seconds, I saw a perfect moment in time.

"I'm sure 30 years has allowed embellishment of this memory. But it remains with me today, vivid in my mind. I did not have a camera with me at that moment. If I had, I doubt I would have taken the picture. It was too perfect. No photograph could have done that moment justice."

Jim Allen: "Dogman's comment above was for me, every bit as vivid as the photo might have been. The way he described that moment, I felt like I was seeing it myself. Thanks for sharing that."

Dillan: "This is just the sort of thing that I wanted to read first thing this morning. Thanks for the (to me) encouraging thoughts. Reading this was so much better than the news."

The Fixed Object (A Spiky Thorny Question)

How very curious that even only a few hours after posting, we had gotten several diametrically opposed answers to the question in the the previous post.

One comment, however, spurred a different but related question in my mind. Paul Giguere said, "I recently bought a Sony RX100 Mark III for $750 and have pretty much used this as my only camera since then. To date, I have shot about 1,500 photos with it. So far, that comes out to 50 cents per photo."

Maybe it's just that I've had a private discussion going recently with a distinguished figure in the field (who does not wish to be quoted or named) who said that, for him, a photograph has to be an object—but the question that came to my mind was: has Paul shot 1,500 photos with his RX100 Mark III, or just 1,500 files?

The spiky thorny question is, are files really photographs yet?

I suppose they are in some sense, because they can communicate to another person. A file doesn't have a fixed form, however. It can't reliably carry the intentions of its maker to an audience once it's released into the world*.

I wonder if, when people talk about how many exposures they take, they're really making a fair comparison. For 1,500 exposures of B&W film I would have loaded 42 rolls of film onto cassettes, made 42 contact sheets, between 50 and 250 work prints, and maybe 12–15 finished prints. That's a huge amount of work and a considerable expense—so much so that I haven't worked this way in the past 17 years or so—but all the same, it's not entirely fair to assume that it's replaced completely by just making digital files that don't have a fixed, finished form.

To get to the same point with digital I would:

• Spend a fair amount of time at the computer and in Photoshop—not as much time as loading cassettes and developing film and making workprints, but enough time that it offsets somewhat;

• "Try" maybe 30 or 35 prints to see how they looked as prints, even if I were just "playing" or indulging my enthusiasm; and then...

• Make those 12–15 final prints, which would each require several sheets of paper to "get right" and, of course, the ink to print them.

Inkjet printing paper is (this is still astonishing to me) actually more expensive than sensitized silver gelatin photo paper, and there is no parallel to ink costs in silver gelatin printing except the paltry costs of the chemicals. Just as digital exposure are "free" whereas film exposures weren't, digital ink is costly in a way that has no analogy in traditional B&W film work.

The latest picture in my little iPhone portfolio of 12 or so prints that I hope to exhibit locally. It's called "Three Fish Jumped." It's destined to be a print but hasn't been printed yet. Illustrating this post with it constitutes publication, however. © 2017 by Michael C. Johnston.

Knocked out
These are just musings on the previous topic, that is, the relative expense of my photo hobby then and now.

I confess, too, that Dan Khong's comment made me shudder (except when I release my inner Buddhist and embrace my acceptance of the impermanence of material things):

Know when digital becomes expensive and you wished you had continued with film?

It's when your stored images get lost in a hard drive crash, or slowly but surely gets incompatible with the passing of time during which you got tardy and ignored the hassle of reorganizing your files.

That's when the nightmare begins, and decades of work gets knocked out.

Dan's words made me reflect that, out in my barn, I actually have these two things: a box containing old external hard drives from the 2000s, none of which will spin up any more and that require connectors that are no longer current—and the drives have pictures on them I don't have any other backups of. My bad, I know, but that's the situation. And a box containing notebooks full of negatives from the 1980s that I haven't touched in years, but that are still in perfectly good shape and could still be printed or scanned with no penalty.

My friend Ken Tanaka likes to chide us whenever the topic of film vs. digital comes up, as if everything new is simply better and saying anything in favor of old ways is hopeless reactionary regression and neo-Luddism, but my position is that when things change, it's interesting to be aware of what we have lost as well as what we have gained, even if the gains are greater. I'm newly sensitive to this as I get to know some of my Old Order Mennonite neighbors here in the region. There are definitely ways in which I would not be happy with the losses if I had to follow their way of life, but I—we—mainstreamers—have definitely lost some important things as well. In fact sometimes when I contemplate how my Mennonite neighbors live, I'm tempted to believe we "Standard Americans" have lost our way more than a little.

But I digress from the digression. What do you think of the idea that a photograph is not really a photograph until it becomes an object with a fixed form? Before you scoff and dismiss the question, consider that your descendants will probably never see it otherwise, and, certainly, posterity will never offer it at auction. But as long as we're taking that tack, do think this question is even, well, valid at all?

I might especially ask the people who bought Gordon's print "Precipitation" in the last sale, as you compare your print with the online JPEG representations you saw previously. Are they just different forms of an image? Do the two forms of the picture equate?

I have to admit, I think photographs are whatever they are...they can exist only on the cellphones of two friends, and only for two hours or two days before they're deleted, or they can be preserved as treasured artifacts in the vaults of great city museums, or anything in between. As a critic and commentator of the art and the practice of imaging, it would be foolish of me to believe anything else. On the other hand, I have to use myself and my feelings as a sort of compass or barometer as well, and I admit that at one time, I had difficulty accepting prints on resin-coated paper as "real"! I felt, somehow, that a photograph of mine wasn't really real, or done, until I printed it on fiber base paper. That's ridiculous and indefensible objectively, naturally, yet still, I did have that feeling. And I have to confess that there's a part of me, just a little part, that retains the sense that all my image files on my computer aren't really anything yet, that they don't yet quite exist. I can dismiss this feeling, and certainly reason my way around it, yet I can't quite banish it completely either....

Mike

*As an example of this, consider that in this post about two photographs by Nick Ut, both are crops, and I first presented the picture of Paris Hilton "being whisked off to jail" in the post as if it were the whole picture. Then we discovered a less cropped version, and then, later, one that was even less cropped. Which is the real photograph? Who got to decide—Nick, or the editor who assigned him, or someone else? Who cropped the most cropped version, and is the least cropped version actually the whole frame? No way of knowing. At least not without more research than I care to get into. Putting a picture into a "final, fixed form" is important if you work as an artist, because it's an important aspect of your intentions, which matter.

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Manuel: "A very interesting question. Do photographs exist before they're printed, enlarged, scanned or published?

"Recently I've made an in-depth research on the subject of copyright in photography. In continental Europe it isn't required that a work is fixed in order for it to be copyright-protected. All it takes is that the work is discernible in any way. Therefore, the moment a photograph is created—the one that determines protection—is when the photographer presses the shutter release button. Thus the photograph exists even in the form of a digital file (or a negative).

"This isn't idle. You might need to prove the originality of a photograph, and the metadata can be used as evidence. Likewise when needing to prove you are the author of the photographic work.

"Not so, apparently, under Common Law rule, where it's the copy that gets copyright-protected. In this case the photograph doesn't seem to get protection until it's reproduced by means of fixing it, be it on paper or any other means that bring it to the world of objects. According to the U.S. Copyright Act, a work is 'created' when it is fixed in a copy for the first time.

"Of course, the U.S. having signed the Berne Convention, courts might rule that the moment of the creation is when you press the shutter release button. The jury's out (no pun intended).

"So much for the legal side. Being 54, and having a drawer full of memories in the form of printed photographs, I've fought the idea that a digital file is a real photograph for some time, but now I've come to terms with the idea that what we see in the computer screen is a photograph. It is. I no longer care to print my photos, even the ones I find most significant. I'm not famous and probably my photos will never be exhibited, so why bother?

"I have no issue with virtual photographs. Of course it's always more interesting to see Bruce Gilden's portraits at an exhibition than on the computer (let alone on a smartphone); the experience is inimitable. But what if one never has the chance to see them at an exhibition? Better see them on a computer than never see them at all.

"Finally: 'when things change, it's interesting to be aware of what we have lost as well as what we have gained, even if the gains are greater.' That's what I call wisdom, Mike."

Keith: "A file is where you evaluate the technical qualities of an image, a print is where you evaluate the emotional qualities."

David Brown (partial comment): "Whatever was current when you were in your teens is the real stuff (for you)."

Mike replies: There's something to that, there really is. I used to put it this way: "The world you expect is the world you were born into." Everything else feels like change, or "the future," or things not as they used to be (or should be). But of course the world I learned about and discovered as a child was not the same one my grandfather, born 1902, found when he got here. I really am quite sentimental about the vivid experiences of my boyhood, it's true.

On the other hand I wouldn't trade the experience of living through the digital transition. I firmly believe that I've lived at the perfect time to have been a photography enthusiast—it was a great privilege to live before digital, in a time that was still so connected to photography's beginnings, a great opportunity to live through the change, and a great experience to live and work on the far side of it now, as well...to have made my entrance portfolio to art school in a little darkroom beneath the basement stairs, with my fixer-stained copy of David Vestal's The Craft of Photography opened on the sink, and to be making a portfolio with my smartphone now!  :-)

Ken Tanaka: "Two comments regarding your thoughts here, Mike. First, my recent comment regarding the film vs. digital topic wasn’t meant to be sarcastic or a reactionary criticism of 'old' media. It was an observation that you had presented a bit of a non sequitur for comparative measurement. That digital imaging is superior in every measurable technical parameter to chemical photography is no longer an arguable matter. But comparing the two beyond imaging capabilities is like comparing very different technologies, not simply old and new. The communications overlay, for example, makes the whole cost-per-frame measurement silly. What would it cost to make a film frame immediately viewable by hundreds of millions of people? And, let’s face it, how many die-hard film photographers are still wet-printing much, if any, of their work? For color the answer must certainly approach zero. Yet you can easily print nearly -any- digital image for the cost of a cup of coffee today. And so on.

"As I've said a great many times, here and elsewhere, photography for the vast majority of camera owners is a hobby. It's a diversionary undertaking for pleasure. I salute anyone who gets their enjoyment from the craftiness and tactility of chemical photography. But truly comparing its costs to digital requires that you first establish the field of view for those costs.

"As to your other point, a photograph becomes a photograph when an image is recorded…on any medium. But anyone expecting a digital image file to be an everlasting keepsake is a fool. There's simply no excuse for not making a physical embodiment—a 'print'—of your most prized digital images today. The permanence, quality, and affordability of today’s photo printing processes is superb. You don't have to have a piece of grand art to make a print. Nor do you have to make tableau-sized prints. But the only way to ensure the longevity of a photograph, especially a digital image, is to print it."

David Boyce: "Oh boy. Cat, pigeons. I am going to say film, but for a different reason than most I suspect. Digital makes it way too easy to spray and pray. I still use film for a lot of things, and the reason being that it makes me consider each frame. Each push of the shutter is thought about, composed and completed with conscious consideration. The plus side of this is that when I use digital I use the same approach which saves me time (which is money as we all know) in front of the computer editing and adjusting. When I find my frame rate in digital climbing and the actual good shots declining I head out with a film camera and reset my way of thinking."

JohnMFlores (partial comment): "I've grown much faster as a photographer with digital than I did with film."

Mike replies: True for me as well.

Richard Man (partial comment): "What I am most interested about is how many 'keepers' I get, not how many frames (digital or film) I have shot. The keepers are the 'photographs,' the rest are potential (some are much less than others)."

The (Many) Ones That Get Away

I saw a marvelous photograph just now. It's a dark, heavily overcast morning in Penn Yan. While not actually foggy, the air is laden with moisture and visibility at not-very-great distances is limited—the far shore of our narrow lake is muted in the gray air, pastel, pearlescent, its details indistinct.

Where Route 58 turns on to Liberty Street, coming North and West, there is a sweeping left-hand turn that doesn't quite make a right angle (the proper adjective is "obtuse," but "obtuse angle" is an obtuse phrase for people who don't remember high school geometry). As I drove East and South toward home this morning after an errand, I saw coming around that corner, first, a Mennonite horse and buggy—the horse a dark, sleek young bay, stepping at a brisk trot, the cab of the black buggy shrouded in shadow; and, following it around the corner, slowly, a hulking semi trailer-truck, all white, almost spectral in the half-daylight. It would have made a gorgeous photograph...

...For about half a second. Visually it coalesced, hung there poised for a fleeting moment in my sight, and then fell apart again.

I mused to myself that to have gotten that shot, I would have had to be on foot, walking, camera in hand. And I would have to have been on the lookout; because I am often lost in thought, I'm not always alert. It struck me that even if I had been situated ideally to encounter that wonderful momentary scene, I still would have needed some luck, not to mention good chops, to get the shot. Maybe better chops than I have any more, at my age.

I'll think about that picture-I-missed for a few days, holding it in my mind. Gradually it will fade, as most of the pictures-I-couldn't-take do. (Although a few I can remember for decades.) I don't know about you, but as I go about almost every day, I see far more photographs than it's possible to even try to take.

Mike

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Ken James (partial comment): "Walking around seeing pictures seems to be one of the side effects of being a photographer methinks."

richardplondon: "I recall someone (Henri Lartigue?) writing that as a child—before he had his first camera—he already longed to 'fix' or 'freeze' momentary sights and impressions as if captured by a camera in that moment. He would do this by blinking twice, quickly. Whatever flashed on his vision, isolated in time and in circumstance between those two black blinks, became an inarguable visual 'quantum.' Of course, this pretend-photo could not then be reliably remembered, let alone later re-manifested. Hence the camera.

"Yet, for example, the Impressionist painter Marquet was known for having precisely such a facility. He'd go for a walk, and when he got home, paint some scene he'd encountered—in lively and highly characteristic detail that was impressive to his fellow artists who'd accompanied him on that same walk."

Stan B.: "The ones that got away, the ones you almost got, the ones if only if...yeah, they add up after a while. The truth is, these magical visual moments of happenstance and grandeur occur in every city, town and path in between, all around the world, every hour of the day. They coalesce, shine and dissipate at a second's notice with your presence or not, with your recognition or despite it. And it's a wonder we ever get to pay any one of them any justice at all...."

Keith (partial comment): "I'm not sure which is worse, to see a shot you can't get for whatever reason, or being in just the right time and place for the shot but screwing up somehow."

Lindsay Bach: "I call shots like the one you saw 'retinagraphs.' My retinagraphs, etched in memory, are some of the most indelible images I know. Though they can be shared with no one, they are treasures nonetheless."