The Online Photographer

One More Thought About Sharpness

One more thing about sharpness. It's tempting to think of ourselves as outside of time and unconstrained by the limitations of our era and culture, but the opposite might be more the case. If you were a Greek in Homeric times and there was a storm at sea, it would be difficult not to believe—and perilous to propose to others—that the explanation was something other than that Poseidon was pissed off. I mean, duh—what else could it be?

Tastes change, and we change along with them. Victorian decor and dresses that hide that all-important erogenous zone, the feminine ankle, seem now like they must have been instantly old-fashioned, but they were once new-fashioned—hip, cool, happenin', the latest thing.

Our expectations change along with the changes in style and taste. Sometimes, older men (especially) stick with the styles of their youth, and resist change—I know two gentlemen here of my father's generation (still hirsute, the lucky dogs—I myself am going bald fast) who have never given up 1950s "greaser" hairstyles. Personally, I have trouble with the decline of proper cars and the capturing of the market by cargo-haulers as everyday personal conveyances. Bah humbug; a pox on pickups, etc., etc.

Anyway, all this long, moseying preamble is just coming around to the point that conventional tastes in image sharpness are always changing too. The other day I recommended End of the Caliphate by Ivor Prickett, and it's an excellent example. (Amazon is almost out—here it is from The Book Depository, with free international shipping.) Naturally the first few times you look at a book like that you respond to the content, with emotion; it takes a cold heart indeed to see a picture of a woman wailing by the bloody steps where her son was just killed and think, "they got a nice blue in that dress." So only on my fourth or fifth time through the book did I really consider the technique directly—I looked at it in the light of our sharpness discussion. When I did, it occurred to me that if I had encountered this book thirty years ago or forty years ago, I probably would have considered it to be bizarrely, garishly, intrusively oversharpened; it might have impeded my appreciation of the content of the pictures. As it was, when I took my first pass through the book I just sort of thought, in the back of my mind, that it's a good example of modern photographic style, and got right into the content. It was what I've come to expect. No big deal.

Ivor Prickett, plate from the book End of the Caliphate

In other words, aside from those few of us who are the equivalent of my older acquaintances with their '50s hairstyles, I would assume that most of us have adapted to the current tastes, and now have a much higher tolerance for sharpness than people would have had in 1970 or 1980. I do.

I'm kind of sorry, though, that I did examine End of the Caliphate with such a cold eye for technique...I'm finding it a little difficult to "unsee" that aspect of the pictures now that I've seen them that way. I don't want to see these pictures that way. I want to see "into" them, to the scenes they depict, the emotions on the faces. Like I did when I first looked through the book, and the second time and the third time. Eventually, though, all photographs will look "of their time." Nothing retains permanently the transparency and impartiality it had when it was new.

The upshot is that with any technical property, including what we call "sharpness," it doesn't just depend on the object—the print of the picture or the picture in the printed book; it also has to do with what we are used to—what is normal in our culture now, and what the audience expects and considers usual.

In that way, sharpness (and other aspects of pictures) can be considered to be not entirely under our control, no matter how many sliders we have at our disposal in our image editor applications of choice.

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.

The Online Photographer needs your support through Patreon

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

Dan Gorman: "Thanks for highlighting the work of Ivor Prickett. I wasn't planning to comment on the sharpness series, as it's rarely important to me as an attribute in my own pictures. But the image of the Iraqi mother shrieking at the sight of her son's slaughter on the family doorstep struck me to the core.

"In my last job I had the privilege of working with a student who had come to the U.S. straight from Mosul in 2014 - right around the time that ISIS took over the city and incorporated it into the self-proclaimed caliphate. Sana was a bright young woman, preparing for medical school, who was elected president of the student club I served as an advisor. In the two years I worked with Sana, I never had the heart to ask about her family's experience of leaving Mosul, but I enjoyed seeing her grow as a student and a leader—and took solace in seeing her laugh and enjoy goofy, lighthearted moments with her friends. May our country always be a welcoming haven for refugees from the kind of human-made hell-on-earth that Mosul became, circa 2014–18.

"I took a few moments just now to look at several of Ivor Prickett's pictures in Google Images—beautiful, amazing, and deeply affecting work. How lucky are we to live where where we do, and to have brave, talented people like Mr. Prickett who are willing to document the kind of horrors we can only hope our own children will never have to experience?

"Thanks again for sharing, and for all your good work."

Attention, Concentration, and the Right Attitude

Okay, well, that was fun. I've been meaning to do that last post for about two years, and I kept thinking I needed to wait until there was an occasion with some Lincoln connection. So I just missed the anniversary of his death, yet again (April 15th, like Americans needed more reasons to dislike that day), and I figured what the heck, I'd better just go ahead and post it or I'll die of old age first.

There's a serious point to the satire, however, and here it is. There are times and places for lighthearted, superficial fun and jokes, for bits and pieces, for fluff and nonsense, and for stuffing content to the gills with distractions, and then there are times and occasions when you actually need to concentrate. If I'm reading any serious piece of writing, interruptions that are in line with the story aren't just annoyances—they actually break my concentration and diminish the quality of my response to the piece.

I call it the Harrison Bergeron Effect. In the dystopian future of Kurt Vonnegut's 1961 short story of that name, there's a "Handicapper General" who imposes handicaps on anyone who has any sort of special abilities. The purpose is to enforce equality on everyone. If you're attractive, you can't go out of the house without wearing a clown nose. If you're a good dancer, you have to wear lead weights on your ankles. And people who have the misfortune to be intelligent are forced to wear an earpiece that emits a painful shriek at regular intervals. The purpose is to interrupt their thoughts. By destroying their ability to concentrate and follow their own thoughts, they are made to be as stupid as everyone else.

And that's what advertising does when it becomes too intrusive, if you ask me. What better analogy for the effect that insistent ads have on serious, contemplative, demanding content?

I'll tell ya, I just hate like hell when I'm reading an article or looking at a set of pictures and it's not clear where the text stops and the advertisement butts in, or when I'm looking at a picture in one state of mind and realize that it's an advertisement, stuck in with the rest of the pictures as if it belonged—and thus deserves a completely different state of mind. It's an imposition. And I'm not sure it's a win for us that YouTube just sticks ads in wherever and whenever, regardless of whether it's a natural break in the content or not. The networks were heading for half-and-half advertising-to-content when I got rid of my television five years ago, but at least they made some sort of effort to insert the ads after a pause.

And of course, constructing content intended to be imposed upon by advertisements changes the content. A lot of great art works by weaving a spell...by transporting you to a different emotional state, or a different state of mind. It's can be a kind of reverie. I think it's one reason people like movies—they're like a virtual visit to another world. In any event there are just lots of kinds of art that simply can't be interrupted or imposed upon. It spoils the effect. They require attention, concentration, emotional openness, and an acceptance of the art's alchemy. Regular, insistent distractions can't always simply be ignored—they actively create a hostile environment. Not for everything, but definitely for some things.

'Kay, I'll shut up now.

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.

B&H Photo • Adorama

(Aren't those nice little unobtrusive ads? Not bothering nobody.)

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

cecelia: "Completely agree...reader view is a huge help, but sometimes I forget it exists."

The Best One-Volume History of Photography

A spread from Photography: The Definitive Visual History by Tom Ang

A few reflections about histories—

I used to be a pretty good resource for histories of photography and their relative value. I'm not any more. I used to hungrily absorb a lot of the histories I came across; nowadays it's been quite a while since I did more than skim through one.

The histories I know mostly relate to the medium as it was practiced when I was younger, for the simple reason that I read them back then and the period they covered ended at that time. I mark the change from a show I saw in Chicago in the "aughts," the 2000s. It was a roundup of recent photography (it might have been recent acquisitions of the museum where I saw the exhibit; I don't remember). Most of the photographs were "made into art" in some ostentatious or obvious way—they had writing on them, or they were pastiche or collage, or staged or manipulated, or they embodied some idea or meaning using the tropes and means of then-current paintings. Almost all were large. And among all these were two photographs by photographers of the type Gilles Mora included in The Last Photographic Heroes, who were also the type who were presented to me as I was learning. Smallish, straight 35mm B&W enlargements of "found" scenes from life. And you know what? They looked out of place, almost awkward, slightly forlorn. Obsolescent, even. Photography had moved on.

So I don't think it's fair or very useful for me to talk about the histories I know well. My knowledge is out of date. What's the view from now? How do historians see the patterns of the last half century, now that more two-thirds of that half century have passed since I graduated from photography school? I could have talked about 1945–1995 with a fair amount of authority. A bit less so about 1969–2019. I've been paying attention to photography itself during that time, of course, but not so much to the books that attempt to summarize it.

I think it's due to a shift in perspective. I'm no longer the eager student. Now I approach synthetic retrospective with more cynicism—either I can see errors, or I know where they got their information, or I can trace their allegiances, or I simply disagree with their theses. Often I'll read some attempt at historical exegesis and simply know where to find the work of someone who did the same thing better. Most histories, of course, are by people who got their information by reading other histories and rehashing received opinion. Precious few authors are doing original research, mining primary sources, uncovering genuinely new connections. The novelty is just in different ideologies and biases, applied as though with a filter added.

The result is that it doesn't tend to engage me as I read. I'm not saying I wouldn't read a great history, or that I wouldn't like to read the digital-inclusive version, up to 2020, of something like Jonathan Green's American Photography: A Critical History 1945 to Present ("present" in that case was 1984—never put the world "present" in the title of a book intended to last!). I don't think I've gotten close-minded, or at least I hope I haven't. I guess I just got weary of the BS. I think of the fact that Abraham Lincoln read voraciously during his younger years and then at some point just stopped—maybe he figured he had read enough. Maybe that's how I feel. (He was quite a good writer, by the way.)

But I also don't want to blithely recommend histories that stopped in 1984 as though they are still fully relevant. Things really have changed since then.

Lightning in 17 bottles
So here's my other thought. I've always been borderline contemptuous of those compendiums that cover photography by tackling one topic per two-page spread, with a few splashy illos and some breathless summary text that amounts to a glorified caption. Usually organized alphabetically or in some other way that makes the topics into a cheerfully inchoate jumble. The strategy is typical of the kind of pasteurized processed book-product meant by publishers as bookstore fodder for the undiscerning consumer. But I noticed that's how Tom Ang's book is organized, and it occurred to me that maybe that makes sense for photography—photography really is sprawling and multifaceted, and it just doesn't lend itself to conceptual approaches that show it to be highly organized and orderly and moving in one direction like a tightly disciplined herd of cats.

You know what I'd like to see? I'd like to see a modern, contemporary, AD 2020 version of the Life Library of Photography. Seventeen or so volumes that attempt to corral photography, circa now, into rough categories that make sense today, compiled by a team of editors, writers, interviewers, researchers and graphic artists working to an overarching editorial plan. That would be interesting as all get-out. Because I think you could argue that photography has changed as much since 1970 (when the Life Library came out) as it did in the hundred years leading up to 1970. (Or at least since 1888.) Those charged with taking a snapshot of it in similar depth today would illuminate a very different medium, functioning very differently in the world.

It's certainly a fast-changing subject. What's that old expression—catching lightning in a bottle?

So what's the best one-volume history of photography, as of 2019? Beats me. I don't know if there is such at thing.

Mike

P.S. And please, people. The reason Newhall left Mortensen out was that Mortensen was horrible. He barely qualifies as a photographer. It would be like doing a history of serious figurative painting from Eakins to Hockney and making a conspiracy out of the fact that Frank Frazetta got left out. Why do you think?

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:

Michael Perini: "A wonderful post. I have quite a few volumes, at least a dozen that would generally qualify as history of all or various parts of photography, and it hadn't occurred to me to look for one that includes the last 10 or 20 years. Most of my touchstones are similar in vintage to yours. I'm starting to feel—out of touch. I subscribed to the Life Library of Photography series from the first volume through several of the 'yearbook updates.' It was a treasure and a revelation then. I still have every one. I fear the speed of change would make a modern one unfeasible, but it certainly would be nice."

James Cockroft: "I found the Color volume of the Life Library of Photography in a Friends of the Library book sale for $1. It's water damaged, most of the pages are stuck together, and the fastest films on offer when it was written topped out at 160, but it's still perhaps the best book I've seen on color photography. I'll be keeping my eye out for other volumes in my used bookstore travels, for sure."

Don Craig: "There, in a gleaming pool of abandoned hemolymph, lay the writer's severed hand. Conan grunted. 'Frank was a friend of mine.'"

The History of Photography

I have a question. Just personally curious. Have you ever read a history of photography?

I won't specify what or which. Long online article, ancient classic from the '30s, whatever.

You can answer just plain yes or no if you like, and I'm not going to slag anybody for a "no" answer.

Mike
(Thanks to c.d.embrey)

P.S. Also, check out the Featured Comments for the "Too Easy" post below—just added.

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:

David Miller: "Yes. I have five such volumes in my library. Since my collection of books of and about photography runs to several dozen and my accumulation of books of history must be numbered in the hundreds, it is hardly surprising that there's a bit of overlap. (I even have a volume titled A History of Histories.) But I can quit any time…."

Sherwood McLernon: "I have a little over 100 books of Photography (not counting how-to books which have mostly been given away) which according to comments written here, is a fairly modest collection. My earliest (and favourite) history is The Picture History of Photography by Peter Pollack which I've had since the mid-seventies and which I re-read from time to time. [Note to others: I'd get the Revised and Enlarged Edition —Ed.] Another one (that I purchased on a visit to George Eastman House) is A History of Photography from 1839 to the Present, published by Taschen, which takes a more encyclopedic journey.

"About a quarter of my photographic library is made up of biographies/autobiographies of photographers that I admire."

Timkey64: "Actually no I haven't. I would buy such a book, as long as it was international in flavour, not just US."

Mike replies: You might start with Tom Ang's Photography: The Definitive Visual History. I don't know it, but it gets high marks from buyers on Amazon and it seems to be in easily digestible form, and Tom Ang is British as far as I know.

Bob Keefer: "Yes, though nothing that I felt captured the story. Mostly the histories are written by people (John Szarkowski comes to mind) too rooted in the fine art/criticism/theory world, and so manage to miss the gut-level thrill of looking at photos."

[Note: The following two comments came in right next to each other in the following order.  —Ed.]

Pat Coddington: "I've read THE history of photography by Beaumont Newhall."

Andrew Molitor: "Yes, several. Newhall's is the worst."

Mike replies: At least that sums up the range of opinions about Newhall!

Personally I prefer the original edition. I didn't care for the extra chapters in later editions which were added to "correct" its perceived deficits and address its critics—if you just keep in mind that it represented an American photo-art-establishment view c. 1964 you'll be fine—it's a creation of its time and place. And people forget now how influential it was in helping photographs become accepted as legitimate content for art museums and as legitimate subjects for scholarly study. It was more valuable in its day than it's given credit for now. And it should be remembered that it was originally just an exhibit catalog!   —Ed.]

Edward Taylor: "Yes, Several. The first one I read was a series of Time-Life books in the '70s. I remember being unable to put them down. I still have them somewhere around here."

Mike replies: That was the Life Library of Photography, published by Time-Life Books around 1970 or '71, reprinted in 1980. There were "Yearbooks" for a few years after publication as well, in an effort to keep the set up to date, and there were editions published for several other countries. Originally there were 17 volumes: The Camera, Light and Film, The Print, Color, Photography as a Tool, The Great Themes, Photojournalism, Special Problems, The Studio, The Art of Photography, Great Photographers, Photographing Nature, Photographing Children, Documentary Photography, Frontiers of Photography, Travel Photography, and Caring for Photographs. It included a fair amount of history but was more of an overview than strictly a history.

Stephen Woolford: "Yes, but I rarely read histories of photography cover to cover. Mary Warner Marien's Photography: A Cultural History, for example, is a really useful book but I've tended to dip into it and I couldn't swear to having read all of it. I probably get on better with books of essays like Geoff Dyer's excellent The Ongoing Moment."

Peter Marquis-Kyle: "Oh yes I have—starting with Helmut and Alison Gernsheim's A Concise History of Photography which I read in the late 1960s. My LibraryThing catalog lists 49 books with both 'photography' and 'history' tags—an indication that this is an ongoing interest."

[Note: The following two comments also came in adjacent to each other. Sorry for pointing this out twice in one post but these coincidences make me chuckle. —Ed.]

Graham Byrnes: "I've read the plaques in the garden of the Institut Lumière down the street while eating my lunch...does that count?"

Andrew Lamb: "No, not all the way through. Have dipped into books like The Art of Fixing a Shadow (does that even count?)"

Mike replies: If you're forcing me to adjudicate, I'd say you each get five Life Points out of a max of fifteen.  :-) 

Francisco Cubas: "My first and only book on the matter is Michel Frizot's A New History of Photography. Frizot refused to see the history of the medium as a chronological list of great photographers, so he divided the subject in chapters by periods of times and themes, and assigned different authors to each one. It's a marvelous book, because it gives you a great vision of the complexity and flexibility of the medium. It was published in 1994, before the great digital meteorite, but it showed me that a single book on the subject is impossible, and that one should always be careful when using the word photography; its meanings are too diverse."

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."

Super Recognizers

We've talked before about prosopagnosia, the condition also known as face blindness. People who have it lack the normal human ability to recognize other people visually. The example I always think of is Oliver Sacks, the late great writer on neurology. When Dr. Sacks would go to a restaurant to meet his assistant of ten years for lunch, she had to raise her hand so he'd know which table she was at—he couldn't recognize her.

Turns out there's an opposite condition—a small number of people are so-called "super recognizers," sometimes used by police departments to identify faces in difficult conditions. They have the ability to recognize abnormally large numbers of people from clues and levels of familiarity too subtle for most of us. Even with the burgeoning use of face-detection technology for many uses (some legitimate, some worrying), "you always need someone at the end to confirm it," said Kenny Long, a former super recognizer with the London Metropolitan Police, as quoted in this article at c|net.

Back in photo-land, many Sony cameras (and maybe other brands, I don't know) have also become "super recognizers" of a sort. The feature first called Face Detection and more recently known as Eye Autofocus (Eye AF), has developed to a remarkable degree in recent models such as the super-speedy Sony A9. Here's a Sony page giving instructions for using eye autofocus in many Sony cameras. I saw a video that "tested" or demonstrated eye AF with the Sony A7rIII that impressed me a lot—in one situation, Stuart James was able to shoot a model through foliage and the camera zeroed right in on the model's eyes, where most cameras' AF would have been fooled. I'd think it would be a feature of great interest to dedicated portraitists and fashion photographers.

Dr. Sacks' book that includes his reflections on seeing and visual perception, and in which he discusses his prosopagnosia, is called Mind's Eye. Dr. Sacks was portrayed by Robin Williams in the remarkable movie Awakenings with Robert De Niro.

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.

(Not) everything must fade away

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

Joe Holmes: "My son apparently has mild prosopagnosia—to this day he rarely greets anyone by name, thanks to the odds that he's wrong or simply doesn't know if he's ever met them before. But it seems that the genes he lacks all accumulated in my daughter, who may be a super-recognizer. She'll spot a minor actor from a film she saw one time years earlier, and she's always right. It's like perfect pitch in a way."

(A regular reader and commenter): "I did an online test a few years ago that strongly suggested I am a super-recogniser. It's something I've always known I am significantly better than average at, and it has occasionally led to almost a precognitive experience where I know I am going to bump into someone in a few moments because, in fact, I've already seen them subconsciously in a crowd or at a distance out of the corner of my eye.

"But for me at least there appears to be something of a downside.

"I know of people who say they can, perhaps in times of stress when they need something to think about, imagine the face of a parent or friend and focus on it, hold it in their mind's eye, etc. I can't really do that. It's as if I am seeing stars at night but they disappear as soon as I look directly at them instead of out of the corner of my eye, or I am trying to hold too many marbles at once: I can't assemble the whole face in a way that is really stable, before it is lost. I know what they look like, and I can probably describe them bit by bit, but I cannot hold a still picture at all.

"I can visualise little parts of that face—a smile, or eyes—for much longer periods of time, and as a result I seem to have learned a way to visualise people through their likely reaction to some news or a joke, and I remember interactions and emotions (in conjunction with my own). So I have to evoke little mental vignettes; I have strong emotional memories and I often describe people that way.

"As an aside, I'm also almost totally unable to remember someone's younger face if I know them as an older person. I'm not sure how uncommon that is.

"I'm not sure if this form of 'aphantasia' and super-recognising go together, or indeed whether my ability to imagine a face is really abnormally bad, but I do know which ability I'd prefer to have!"

Mike replies: That's very interesting. I might be something like the opposite of you. I'd say I'm on the low side of average when it comes to recognizing people. I even embarrassed myself with a neighbor for that reason a few years ago—I met him about four times and each time asked him who he was. He took offense. But on the other hand I have a very stable memory for faces of people I know. In fact, a few years back I started to have age-related trouble with names (extremely common) and I started to fret about my memory (also very common in people of late middle age). But then I realized that when I thought of someone, the image of their face comes into my mind immediately. So it isn't my memory that's faulty, because my memory of faces of people I know is still instantaneous. It's just that the verbal name component is getting more difficult to collate with that visual memory.

Joshua Hawkins: "I've read a few posts just this morning about the new Sony 5.0 update and how it's helping sports photographers. It's huge for them. Shooting through nets, rackets and random objects between the camera and subject is just the norm for sports. This technology is really wonderful, if still young. I also really like face tracking, and especially the eye tracking, for doing editorial style work with 1.4 glass. It's really improving my hit rate on in focus shots. (I don't use Sony, but it's all the same idea between different manufacturers.)"

Tommy Williams: "I discovered that I have a well-above average ability to recognize faces when I worked at Microsoft, on the main campus, where there were more than 25,000 people present each day. I would greet people in hallways, cafeterias, and walking between buildings and many of them had no idea who I was. Rather than making people uncomfortable, I stopped greeting anyone who I suspected wouldn't recognize me."

Xf Mj: "Well okay, these made for a fun late afternoon: TestMyBrain: Super Recognizers and Face Memory Test. I always wondered...I do recall being remarkably bad at the color (shade? hue?) recognition thing you once posted."

Mike replies: Thanks for that, that was fun. I scored 61 out of 72 on the TestMyBrain one, average being 58.5 and average for my age cohort being 56.4. I'm a little surprised...I would have guessed that I was below average. It occurred to me that I might have done better if I had quickly assigned names to the six faces!

The Very Very Very Best Backup...

...Is still a box of prints! (Or a "few-of-a-kind" custom book like a Blurb book.)

Okay, maybe not the best backup but the best archive.

I had planned to make this point again two days ago (bringing us around full circle in recent discussions here on TOP), when this comment came in from David L. night before last:

"My engineering career was as a hard drive engineer and in server storage. My advice—make prints."

(That's his whole comment.) 

Ending up with prints is still a good idea, even though I know most people don't do it.

It's always been a good idea to think of a photograph in digital form as a transitory state—a state between the taking of the picture and the final object—a print, or printed book, or whatever the final creation might be.

Of course we do want to have a working archive—our shooting in mass unprocessed form—so that we can go back and print old files, reconsider our editing choices, or bring together different groups or pairings or whatever. It's the raw material for our ongoing creative activities as photographers.

A well-made print (pigment inks on stable paper) is a write-once, set-and-forget medium. It has to be physically protected, sure, but that's a different problem, and one I've written about elsewhere.

Ultimately nothing is permanent—but it's a good idea to remind ourselves every now and then that "backup" of the material we work from is just a fluid working state, and not, in itself, a final achievement.

(See what I do for you? I just said with 264 words what David L. said better with 17. Heh!)

Mike
(Thanks to all of you who helped me with my backup strategy)

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.

Everything must fade away

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

Tim Smith: "In my 20s I worked in a print darkroom for several years. We entered into a contract with Yale to make contact prints of their extensive collection of glass negatives. Aside from the fact that they were stunning and technically amazing, it strikes me that as long as they haven't been smashed or destroyed, you could do the very same thing today. I fear that the evolution of digital may someday make even the best drives obsolete or at least very difficult to recover. I can't even remember all the storage devices/methods that have come and gone, like: SCSI tape drives, ZIP drives, CD-RW, etc.

"So yeah, prints."

Felicities of the Smartphone (Guest Post)

Words and pictures by Mark Power

The TOP post from the other day, "The Most Amazing Thing About Photography Circa 2019," is a wonderful reflection on the growing acceptability of the cellphone camera. Mike's experiences with analog photography bought back a lot of memories because they exactly parallel my own experiences back in the day. Some time ago, I realized that everything I learned from doing analog photography has mostly disappeared from my conscious memory. A while ago, a student who had revived an old analog camera asked me how to use a light meter. At first it was as if he handed me an exotic animal—it was that unfamiliar. But as if they had a life of their own, my hands picked up the meter, took a reflected light reading, and suddenly it was all there. Somewhere inside me was a complete recollection of a Weston V light meter, one that I had used a thousand times in my own photography.

So those buried memories still inform my digital photography, although mostly in the post-processing with the enhancement and printing of the image. As far as the camera goes, the only technical thing I do is to adjust the HDR setting once in a while. For the rest I depend on the algorithms and they are usually spot on.

But that’s with a cellphone camera. In the eighteen or so years I have been doing digital photography, I've found using conventional digital cameras as demanding as working with film cameras. There are too many choices and too many confusing menus, and it got worse as the cameras became more advanced. I think Mike has commented on this phenomenon a number of times in his posts. So, I began to simplify. I went from a full frame Sony to a Sony RX10 because with the sizes I print—13x19 and 16x20 inches—I could see little difference between a full-frame sensor and the smaller one. That simplified the lens issue (the RX10 has only a fixed zoom) but there were still the menus, and before a shooting session I still had to check the screen to make sure I hadn’t inadvertently used the wrong settings. And there were a lot of settings to consider. And as I considered them, images were fleeing like bubbles in the wind. So the next step was the cellphone camera.

Of course I already had one, an iPhone, but I didn’t think the camera was quite enough for the pictures I wanted to make. Then came glowing reviews of the Pixel 2, so I traded in the iPhone and soon I realized that the pictures I was making with the Pixel2 compared quite favorably with the digital images made with larger sensors, and that was true for prints also. Yes, you could tell the difference by pixel-peeping, but given normal viewing distances with the sizes I print, the difference was negligible. So for the past year and half I have been photographing almost exclusively with the Pixel 2. The RX10 is gathering dust.

Which brings me to the meat of Mike's posting. Sorry, I thought this was going to be a short response but it seems to have taken on a life of its own.

Mike and his correspondent Dennis say:

Dennis: 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.

Mike: For some number of people, a number that's growing all the time, Dennis is exactly right. They will accept picture quality that's not quite good enough in exchange for the improved convenience of having their camera in a slim little pocket-sized wafer they have to carry with them anyway.

Yes, convenience was a strong motive, but the fact that picture quality met my standards was even more important. Then the more significant differences began to make themselves known. The separation between a "picture session" and life vanished. Because the camera was always in my pocket, life itself was a picture session. Now there were only about two or three settings I had to think about instead of dozens. I found myself happily surrendering control to the algorithms. Shooting suddenly became fluid and part of everyday life. There were drawbacks, of course, but even these began to seem benign. Cellphone camera screens don’t make the best viewfinders but I began to rely on my eye more than the viewfinder. I discovered as long as I pointed the camera in the general direction of what I wanted I would get a usable (and is some cases surprising) image. It was as easy to make four five variations of an image as it was to make a single picture. Cellphone cameras are also not very ergometric, they’re slippery among other things, but the advantage is that they easily fit into a pocket. As I think you noted, photography had become fun again.

And maybe even more important, when you take a cellphone out of your pocket you are surrounded by other people holding a cellphone. You’re just one of a hundred photographers at any gathering and no one pays you any attention. Well, I have been accosted a couple of times but nothing compared the how a larger camera on a neck strap isolated me from the herd, so to speak. Then I was a photographer among the people and it sometimes made the people nervous of participating in the ceremony of ‘getting your picture taken.’ Now if there is a ceremony, it’s the selfie.

I don’t mean to sound like a proselytizer. I don’t argue with my friends who still use larger digital cameras and if I were still teaching, I wouldn’t try to persuade my students of the virtues of a cell phone even though I am pretty much of the opinion that the future of digital photography lies with these small, palm-sized cameras with their remarkable algorithms.

Anyway, this post has gotten way too long so I’ll stop here but I did want to tell you about my two websites at beyondtheimage.net and markpowerdigital.com. Some of the pages on the digital site have many cellphone camera pictures mixed in with images made with my larger Sony. I would be interested in any comments you might have, pro or con.

Mark

Mark Power is a photographer and writer about photography with many shows and publications to his credit. Mark and Frank DiPerna were my third-year teachers in the Photography Department at the Corcoran School of Art on 17th Street and New York Avenue, Washington, D.C., either a million years ago or the month before last, seems like. The Corcoran had a fantastic faculty in those days—I didn't have a single teacher I didn't like. It was after seeing a museum exhibit of faculty work, an exhibit that included Mark's "Victor Carroll" series work, that I decided to apply to the program. —Mike the Ed., BFA, Photography, Corcoran School of Art 1985

Original contents copyright 2019 by Mark Power. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to TOP 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:

Kenneth Tanaka: "Thank you, Mark, for your open, thoughtful, and practical post. Of course you don't have to convince me of the increasing sufficiency of today's smartphones as serious photographic instruments. Your comment regarding the relative unnoticeability of smartphone photographers is particularly keen. It's a luxury I've often enjoyed.

"One point that I wondered if you didn't intend to make as a former teacher: As with any other camera you have to practice, practice, practice using a smartphone camera to become adept with it.

"P.S. I also enjoyed rummaging through your online work. I can see why Mike thinks so highly of you.

"P.P.S. As I wrote this comment I saw this very interesting, albeit marketing-driven, item posted at DPReview."

Jim Arthur: "FYI—Tonight's episode (March 25, 2019) of NBC's 'Tonight Show' will be shot entirely on a Galaxy S10+ smartphone and its wide-angle camera."

Peggy: "I think Mark is correct on his reasons for switching to a cellphone camera. I too am planning on upgrading my current cellphone to a Pixel 3xl just for the camera alone. Why? Simplicity and the algorithms. Because if I am going to have this mini computer/camera on my person all of the time, I want a better camera than what my current cellphone, a Galaxy S5, has. I've been using my Pentax K200D since it was first released. I like to think I know it inside and out. But sometimes I still struggle with all of the menus. I'm not ready to give up my big DSLR just yet. Although, if my arthritis keeps advancing at the rate it is, I may have to put the larger camera away. But not yet.

"And by the way Mark, I love the photo in this article of the elderly woman with the earrings. Beautiful lighting and amazing bokeh. It has a painterly feel to it. Just absolutely beautiful!"

Speed: "No matter how good the technology, we will find its limits. The technical limits of phone cameras are still more restrictive than those of dedicated cameras and likely will be as long as we still have 'real cameras.' My favorite picture from 2018 was made with my phone."

Rob Campbell: "Using a cellphone for anything beyond making visual notes has caused me nothing but frustration. Convenient for speech and text messages (whooda thunk!) but a self-defeating, masochistic perversion for photography. Perfect for snaps. The only difficulty all photography offers is finding a subject worth the effort. Regarding complexity of reasonable tools that could be called cameras: set everything as manual as you can, avoid priority programmes and try to learn at least the basics of photography as you did with film, and the electronic complications might as well not exist because you don't have to use them. If learning the basics is beyond you, then you are no photographer and yes, you may as well take your cellphone to bed with you too. If you want greatness in your visual life without having to learn anything, then just become a viewer."

Kjell H Andersen (partial comment): "I'm pretty sure the phone camera was the main reason why I got sick and tired of photography at some point. When I got kids a few years back, I ended up, as most parents, taking mostly pictures of them. It turned out to be a bit boring in the long run. I love my kids, but it wasn't all that fulfilling for me to photograph them only. The main problem was that during the first years, my carrying capacity was occupied by kids and accessories, no room for a camera, which meant my phone was all I had. I really hate those little cameras, good or bad as they might be. No ergonomics, slippery as a bar of soap, and a virtual shutter button on the screen which is only responsive when you test it, but not when you really need it to work. And last, but not least, they generally have my least favourite lenses fixed to them.

"But just around new year, I realised that the kids are old enough that I don't need to watch them all the time. I dug out my old Pentax K7, and I even treated myself with a used K3 (for a bargain price) and a new lens. It was such a joy. I finally enjoyed taking pictures again."

bt: "I was at a well-known building in Chicago in August. There were a lot of people with pretty nice cameras. But I noticed the even people with pro-grade cameras were using their phones to take and share some cell phone pix in addition to the shots they were taking with their real cameras. I did this once or twice myself. So it's not one of the other; you use the one you need. Cell phone pix are no replacement for a real camera when you are visiting the Farnsworth House and want the best images you can get, but there you are wanting to text some photo to a friend in real time and you whip out the phone and bam."

emptyspaces: "For me a lot of the joy is in going back and forth with cameras. I went through a film phase. I shot Canons. Now Micro 4/3. Had an intense affair with Instax for a bit. Lately it's the phone camera again, just because of a couple of apps I like. Action cameras. The variety keeps me moving, I think. Last year I traveled abroad and kept it light as I could—Nikon Coolpix A around my neck, with a 40–150mm loaded on my Olympus camera. Wide and tight, each with a big sensor. This year I am traveling again, and I am taking just my phone and a Sony RX100 VI."

Mark Power responds to the comments so far: Kenneth Tanaka makes an excellent point: it does take practice to get the most from smartphone cameras, maybe even more so for a camera that’s so radically different from hand-held cameras that superficially have looked and felt the same since the days of the first Kodak, or at least since the first Leica.

On the other hand, it is amazing how people who have only used a phone camera take to it so quickly, particularly children. Nevertheless, to make meaningful images, practice is necessary. And practice is pretty easy with a phone camera; in fact, maybe too easy; I went for a stroll the other day and in my mind I had taken about three pictures but the camera contained 75 exposures, most of which turned out to be just practice. Maybe the real practice, and for me the value in years of accumulated experience, comes in post-processing, and I have found that an image straight out of the camera is almost never usable; it requires fine-tuning with the ubiquitous three, Camera raw, Photoshop, and Lightroom or their equivalents.

When I was teaching (I retired in 2013) it was the rare student who used a phone camera for anything but having fun. I suspect students today would be using them as serious instruments and I hope I would be counseling the virtues of practice. One thing I would advise is to ignore all those presets (most are present in Camera Raw if you need them) and don’t try to process an image in the camera, cellphone or otherwise; it is simply too small a screen to do anything meaningful to the image. Like many, I do all my editing work on a desktop computer with a large monitor. In the old days, post-processing was called ‘printing,’ you couldn’t see the image unless you made a physical print. Now the image is electronic, and printing is the last stage that is often overlooked or ignored and I have to admit I am pretty far behind in my printing. Another subject that Mike has explored in some of his posts. Also, someone mentioned the lack of usable telephotos on current smartphone lenses and I have to say when I want to work with telephoto images I get out the dusty RX-10 which has quite a reach, going from wide-angle to 600mm and beyond. But the next generation of smartphone cameras are addressing the issue and apparently the Huawei camera has a very usable telephoto lens. So I will probably have to wait for the Pixel4 ( or maybe Samsung?) to give me that capability.

Finally, many thanks to Mike in being so generous by offering me his TOP space for the day and to you, his readers, for your many thoughtful and useful observations.

Smartphone Sunday

The two side-by-side camera modules in the Apple iPhone 7+

It's smartphone Sunday, apparently.

I finally downloaded a raw app (one of many) for my phone—Halide Camera. It lets the iPhone 7+ shoot in raw as the default, and improves the camera controls. It's allegedly an "expensive" app, but at $5.99 it's one of the cheapest camera accessories I've bought in years (he said ruefully).

I shot this quick torture test on the iPhone with the Halide app and the result was pretty good. I was easily able to adjust the exposure for the highlights. The shadow recovery wasn't what it would be with a Fuji GFX, of course, but it was adequate, just—by balancing the shadow, highlight and exposure sliders in Photoshop and then applying some judicious noise reduction I was able to get this acceptable result. It's not up to the standard of Micro 4/3 but it's certainly better than the OOP (out-of-phone!) JPEG.

The problem here was highlighted by Marco in a comment the other day. "Maybe I am digressing," Marco wrote, "but this point comes to me often when reading posts like this. How do you decide that you are going out to take snapshots (phone) or something more serious (camera)?"

That's been a big issue for me my whole life. No matter what my "current practice" might be, I'm always afraid of having the wrong thing with me when I stumble across something I really want to make a picture of.

Back when I "saw" in B&W, just having color film in the camera was a big liability—because I'd see a picture I wanted my "real" film for, and I was blocked. My camera bags always contained a few half-shot rolls of color film, because I'd encounter something I wanted to shoot with Tri-X and I'd hurry and get the dang color film out of the camera so I could load some of my "real" film. It was frustrating.

Because when I'm out with a camera I'm not just seeing. I'm seeing like the camera sees. Where "camera" means my preferred technique of the moment. Other cameras look different, and aren't always acceptable as a substitute.

So of course a big problem arises, as Marco says, when you're out and about and you only have your phone with you and you want your camera but it's not with you. Because you never know when you're going to see a picture.

And sure enough, I have maybe two dozen pictures I've taken with my phone which I dearly wish I had taken with my camera. In certain cases it's okay, I can live with it. But in about half a dozen cases it's just a loss. I got something good, something precious, but on the wrong camera. Too bad.

So maybe having the raw app on the phone is a capitulation of sorts—it's an acknowledgement that I actually photograph with an iPhone and not a dedicated camera* some of the time. Now, when that happens, I'll be able to shoot raw and stand a better chance of getting a decent file out of the thing.

(Wish I had taken those six precious pictures with the Halide app? I guess.)

Mike
(Lead photo by Kārlis Dambrāns from Latvia)

*By the way, how long before "camera" means "camera phone" in the culture, and we need a separate term for what we now call cameras? That day is coming, I'll bet. I already find myself using the term "dedicated camera" to say what "camera" used to mean. In the early days of digital we always had to distinguish "digital" cameras from cameras. Now it's the other way around—"cameras" are digital and we have to specify "film camera" when we mean one that shoots film. Ah, the warp and woof of terminology through time!

P.S. Today's the big day I migrate to my new computer. I spent half the day yesterday preparing. Wish me luck, although I hope I won't need it.

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 TOP?

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

Ned Bunnell: "Mike, I’ve been testing quite a few Halide images which I’ve printed at 8x10 and the results are actually pretty nice...especially the B&W’s. I’m also doing a lot more processing on my iPhone. You should try using Darkroom to convert your Halide images. It does a nice job."

One Good Book: Guest Counterpoint [REVISED]

[Ed note: Working in a rush, I made a big, bad editing mistake and posted only a truncated version of this article yesterday. This is the full version. If you already read the first part here yesterday, please skip to the subsection with the heading "Then and now" and continue reading to the end. My sincere apologies to author and audience for my error. Note to self: must never work in a rush and then rush off. —Mike]

 

Written by Moose

I bought Looking at Photographs by John Szarkowski based on Mike's recommendation. I would recommend that his hypothetical friend not bother. No single book is sufficient to be worth the trouble, unless it's a "check off the list of topics" library; in which case, who cares? I just don't get that book. And yes, I do open it and browse from time to time, hoping that it has changed, hoping that I have not, at least in that direction.

As Mike says, it's a history, a collection of historical photos. But also a specialized history, with a bias. He was one of the group of powerful curators and gallery owners who determined who did and did not become a successful photographer on the national stage. The book celebrates and works to reinforce that taste.

Although folks like Fred Herzog, safely off in remote Vancouver, were doing fresh work in color, it would be a few more years before William Eggleston more or less shoved color down those collective throats, through sheer brilliance and the pressure of a viewing and buying public that saw the value of color photos for more than reporting.

The situation in Art Photography at that time might be seen as analogous to the Three Minute Rule in commercial radio, before Dylan broke it; originally technological limits that became embedded in taste and practice. "In those days, if you recorded a song that was longer than three minutes and 15 seconds, they just wouldn’t play it," Thomas Tierney, director of the Sony Music Archives Library, said. In those days, if it wasn't black-and-white, and didn't follow accepted standards of subject matter and approach, they just wouldn't hang it.

Flip through Looking at Photographs, and ask yourself how many of the photos were not made from the perspective of a standing adult male, using a lens with an angle of view in the range from that of a 35mm lens on 35mm film to that of a 90mm lens.

Looking at Photographs is old: the subjects are all at least 50 years ago, most older, many much older. The medium is B&W, in part for technical reasons, but also as a matter of artistic judgement. The range of subjects and angles/approaches to them are rather limited. Again, tech and taste.

I lived through the latter part of the era those photos present, and much that is earlier feels familiar from the photos I saw back then. But it's not alive for me. Looking at Photographs is staid (well, OK, to me, boring). The text is all curator-speak, about the photographer's place in their world, repeated obvious observations about the content, and so on.

Elliott Erwitt, Venice, 1965

Szarkowski's commentary on "Venice, 1965" is an example. He starts out with a stated premise that there are only three ways of seeing the physical world, and ends with a statement that any opinion about the photo must fall into one of those three. He completely ignores other possibilities, including the first one that occurs to me when I see it.

A photo of mine that it reminds me of makes, in my mind, both when I took it and now, no comment on the content of the frames or the nature of the institution in which they hang. It's about repeating patterns of shape, tone, light and reflections, largely abstract. (The entire thing, by the way, is a row of hung art as seen in a mirror on the side wall, with a moon sticker on it, reflection of reflections.)

Erwitt's photo is of the same sort to me, an exploration of found shapes, with repetitive elements and reflections, that actually depends on not being able to see the content of the frames, which would detract from the arrangement of elements. Look, for example, at the echo of the ornate central frame in the doorway frame.

Then and now
If photography is to be Art, it must evoke an emotional reaction in the viewer. The vast majority of these photos don't do that to me. The commentary seems almost perversely designed to kill off any such reaction with distant, dispassionate, superficial observation.

"Why would anyone want to photograph an indisputably colourful world in monochrome? If colour film had been invented first, would anybody even contemplate photographing in black and white?"

—Russell Miller
Magnum: Fifty years at the Front Line of History (1999), p. 4

Anyone taking up photography today, unless interested in recreating the past, should be looking at good representations of how it is practiced today, what it means to people today and how current photographers create photographs that make them feel fulfilled and, with luck, engage others.

I'd suggest books such as:

The Practice of Contemplative Photography by Andy Karr and Michael Wood, to start to understand how the photographer's inner life and relationship to the world may be used to do individual creative work.

Why Photographs Work by George Barr, for insight into how others see photographs. The commentary is head and shoulders above that of Looking at Photographs.

Mother Earth, ed. Judith Boice (2nd. edition) for examples of the vast range of subjects and approaches to them possible today that can create such a wide array of beautiful, and moving (at least to me) photographs.

It's Not About the F-Stop by Jay Maisel, about all the above, plus seeing the artistic arc of a passionate and wide-ranging photographer's life.

Appointment in Venice by Alex Gotfryd, for something mysterious, using the techniques of the past to create a personal vision. Showing as well how a series of photos as a planned project may create something larger.

Such a small sample, for such a vast subject....

Moose

Original contents copyright 2019 by Moose. 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:

Peter Wright: "Don't beat yourself up on it Mike! It's not as if Moose was arguing one point for the whole of the first part and then refuted entirely it in the later half.

"Main comment: I find myself somewhere between the poles on Looking at Photographs by John Szarkowski. Many, if not most of the pictures are of historic significance only, and would have been largely forgotten if they did not appear in books like this one written by people with disproportionate degrees of influence at the time. However, I like Szarkowski's writing (could that be a major source of Mike's appreciation as well?), and think of this book as very much a 'keeper' in my modest collection.

"On Moose's recommendations: I own, or think I may own, The Practice of Contemplative Photography. But I could well have thrown it out, as I remember being intrigued by the title and ordering it, but when it arrived, I found it irritating and shallow. The picture on the cover about sums it up. (I'll have to see if I still have it, and if it still has the same effect.) If you want to see excellent introspective colour photographs, and understand more about how to improve your visual sense, then I suggest any of the books by Freeman Patterson. Moose's recommendation of George Barr's book Why Photographs Work I heartily second. It's a great learning source. Whatever your tastes you can't go wrong with that one. His other recommendations I don't know, and I will need to check them out, but I think I will need to see them before ordering. (Moose is only batting 500 here 😉.)

"On the topic of what one book your hypothetical friend of the vast empty bookshelf must buy, I would recommend "The Black Trilogy" by Ralph Gibson—Different, original, thought-provoking. And I have to agree with the suggestion from others for Here Far Away by Pentti Sammallahti. How did he ever 'see' those pictures?!!"

[Ed. note: Just as Neil Young's "Ditch Trilogy" was composed of three separate albums, Ralph Gibson's landmark "Black Trilogy" is composed of three separate books—The Somnambulist (1970), Deja-Vu (1973), and Days at Sea (1974).

Good news and bad news—the three books, originally published by Ralph's own Lustrum Press and now quite valuable in the original editions, were reprinted as a three-volumes-in-one edition by the University of Texas Press only a little more than a year ago (January of 2018). However the reprint is itself now out of print. I called UT Press, and they confirmed for us that the reprint will not receive a second press run...they are gone and there won't be more.

All I've been able to find are two copies of the French edition (with French text) at Amazon UK.

As for Here Far Away, I can only say I hope people bought it as I was urging them to when it was new. It now goes for $400 and up.]

Changin' Times

I'd like to thank everyone who commented on Thursday's question (if you could recommend one book, what would it be?). I was a bit surprised the post didn't get more comments (76 so far) and I admit I was hoping for a few more recommendations of more recent, digital-photography-related books. In part to educate myself.

I chewed on that for a while this morning, and I guess the bottom line is that I have to accept that photo culture is changing.

A long time ago, when I was strategizing how to become the kind of photographer I wanted to become, I remember scrutinizing the resumés of art photographers to determine what was expected of them. Mostly these consisted of five categories of items, not necessarily in the following order: teaching positions, grants and awards, work in collections (i.e., the artist's work has been acquired by the named institution or famous private collector*), gallery or museum shows, and publications (either of the artist's work or about the artist.)

Debbie Fleming Caffery, The Spirit and the Flesh book cover

If it was a full CV (curriculum vitae) these lists could be formidably long, bespeaking persistence and long and diligent practice. (Don't think that art photographers aren't trying to please clients—they're just after a very different kind of client than professionals or assignment photographers, in a very different kind of way.) Exhibits, whether in a modest community center or coffee shop or a major museum, soak up lots of time and money. And it used to be that the main way that art photographers of less than superstar status got into museum collections was to drop off your portfolio at a museum (well, I guess first you'd have to have a portfolio, which used to be a central task of preparation for a career as an art photographer) on an appointed day, and come back around to pick it up a week or two later. The museum might "accept" you into its collection by offering to buy a print or two at a much reduced rate—if you were really lucky, that is. All that required effort and diligence too.

I dropped off a portfolio once—one time. At a gallery. "These are...competent," the gallerist said when I returned to pick it up. She did not literally have her nose in the air and she did not actually sniff (or drip contempt, however one drips that) as she spoke, but she might as well have. Of course I was partly to blame: the portfolio contained not the work I liked best and was most passionate about, but rather work that constituted my best attempt to second-guess what I thought the gallery would want to see.

What most of these CV accomplishments spoke of, apart from the aforementioned long, diligent, effortful and expensive persistence, was that you had the chops, the cred, or the cool to make it past a variety of gatekeepers: hiring committees at Universities, museum curators and gallery owners, editors, the granters of grants, etc.

Right from the start, this didn't look appealing to me, and not just because, psychologically, I have trouble asking for what I want. What stuck out most prominently as borderline masochistic was having shows. You'd work to create your work, then you'd work to get accepted for a show, then you'd work to print the show, then you'd pay to have your own work framed—and then, after all that, the total throughput for the gallery space for the month your show was up would be 81 or 119 or 362 people or some such number. If the show was at a public space like the rotunda of a building with shops in it, or a hospital, you could stand there and watch person after person walk past every single one of your pictures without so much as glancing up. (I did that experiment once, but with someone else's show.) If it was a "successful" show, three people would contact you with a comment, you might receive a notice in a local (or even the local) paper, and four people would buy one of your prints for $650. Of that $2,600, the gallery would keep 40%, or $1,040, and, with the other $1,560, you'd cover the $875 you paid for framing and the $240 you spent on photo paper and other supplies and, with the rest, award yourself a princely 97¢ an hour for the time you put in—but just for the time you spent printing, framing, and hanging the show, not counting the time it took to make the pictures in the first place.

Now, of course, things have changed: galleries keep 60 or 70%, not 40 or 50%, and you'd be lucky to get $500 apiece for those four prints. /sardonic mode

I did exactly one show, too. I both curated it (six photographers were included) and participated in it (I was one of the six), and it was well attended, well received, and even reviewed in print. You'd think that this would have encouraged me, but it had the opposite effect. It seemed a long way to go for a line-item in a resumé. Of course there are advantages to shows—they can be fulfilling and satisfying, they impress your friends and relatives, they can serve as a deadlined inspiration for getting things finished up (several of my friends used them this way—as a goad to getting work done or serving as an endpoint to one project and the beginning of the next). And of course the work does get seen.So why didn't I continue down that path? I don't know. I guess you just know what your work is supposed to be, and that didn't feel like "it."

The beauty of beautiful books
But now books—books were another story. In those days a smallish printing might be 3,000–5,000 copies (now it's 1,500–3,000), and all those books were released into indefinite careers in the world, where they might get seen by many people, or seen by one person (who was literally "invested," that is, he or she bought the thing) over and over again—studied, contemplated, enjoyed. And, unlike a show, which went up for a month and then atomized like a mist in the wind, a book retained a corporeality that could slumber unmolested and then be rediscovered later, born into a new life of being looked at and appreciated, for instance when I bought it out of a cardboard box at a giant used book fair in a high school gym or something. My nearly pristine copy of the original The Decisive Moment (which really isn't that great a book...I'd rather have Henri Cartier-Bresson Photographer if I could have only one book of his) slumbered for many decades in a cabinet in my grandparents' house, for example. It was better, not worse, for having hibernated for so long.

I don't know, books just seemed like better odds. Moreover, books seemed like the way that photographers communicated, not only with their audience, but among themselves.

Of course, "book" meant something slightly different in the photo culture of my youth. It didn't always mean big, lavish coffee-table type books. A number of 1970s photographers made a name for themselves by putting out little paperback books of B&W photographs, sometimes with reproductions of indifferent quality. But they put out one after another and pretty soon found their audience. If you've ever seen Charles Harbutt's Travelog or Garry Winogrand's Women Are Beautiful or Ed Ruscha's Twentysix Gasoline Stations you know what I mean. There are hundreds if not thousands of other examples.

It's not like photo culture itself is in decline. It's just that the old photo culture is in decline. The way it was in the 1970s and '80s—the old SOP (standard operating procedure) of the five things I mentioned at the outset, holding teaching positions, amassing grants and awards, getting your work in collections, having gallery or museum shows, and putting out publications—is changing now. And has been changing for a while, even though, as T.C. Lin said yesterday, "the veneer of the old structures persists in an attempt to retain their aura of legitimacy."

...Changing into what? I guess none of us are quite sure yet, unless me poking around on Flickr is supposed to mean something. We're in the middle of change. Things are volatile, dynamic. Heck, even static websites with portfolios of JPEGs are already going the way of the dodo. In the first half of the 1980s I received my favorite compliment—a guard at the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress saw me leaving yet again, after spending hours looking at original portfolios of historic photographs, and he blurted out, "Jesus Christ, do you live here?" I was quietly a fanatic. To paraphrase what Thomas Jefferson said of reading, I had a canine appetite for looking at photographs. I sometimes wonder what "young me" would be making of the photo scene today, and what my younger counterpart might teach me about whatever new photo culture is taking shape. 

So anyway, I guess what I'm getting at is that maybe books are simply no longer the primary way photographers communicate...and that's why Thursday's post didn't draw more comments. Or, er, interest. There are more photobooks than ever being created, but they're published in ever-smaller numbers, they come and go more quickly, and they make it into fewer brick and mortar bookstores (which are fewer in number themselves) where people can pick them up and look at them. Older ones get expensive and thus less obtainable (note the price of the copy of Twentysix Gasoline Stations at the link above). There's less "shared experience"—ever even seen a copy of Peter Hugo's Permanent Error or Stephen Shames' Bronx Boys or Debbie Fleming Caffery's The Spirit & the Flesh? Probably most haven't, but all three made "best of the year" lists in 2011, 2014, and 2009 respectively. Even major publications seldom break into public consciousness out there in the big broad world, beyond the photo village. You can name exceptions, I'll bet, but any way you look at it, the big hits are smaller, the average publication gets less attention, and little guys get pushed off the back of the table pretty easily.

Young me from back when wants a young me from now to explain: which, where, and in what form are the new classics?

Mike

*Here's the list from Keith Carter's bio:

Carter's work is included in many private and public collections, including the National Portrait Gallery, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, George Eastman House, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

Special Collections: Elton John, Ralph Lauren, George W. Bush, Michelle & Barack Obama, Michael Stipe, Vanessa Redgrave, Diane Keaton, Elle MacPherson, Steven Spielberg, Bruce Springsteen, Richard Gere, Horton Foote, Hallie Foote, Julia Roberts, Robert Duvall

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:

Tom Hassler: "I think it’s too soon to know what the new classics in photo books are just yet. It’s certainly true that the landscape of 'career' photography in all its previous incarnations has changed much in the last decade or so. Seems to me the five categories you mention still apply for art photography, and getting established in that world is more difficult than ever thanks to the proliferation and popularity of picture taking in general.

"One exciting side benefit of the digital age is 'short-run' book printing a la Blurb, etc. Photographers can now get all the enjoyment of having work in print by self-publishing. Previously you needed enough of a reputation to get a publisher interested (or deep enough pockets to print books yourself to the tune of some thousands of dollars).

"Now it’s possible to have that gratification on a book-by-book basis. With a little practice the books can be quite beautiful, very rewarding in that tactile sense that only books have, and relatively cheap. They also make excellent marketing tools for photographers still looking to climb that mountain...."

Mike replies: But making a Blurb book, fun and satisfying as it might be, isn't really what I mean by "a book." Printing 3,000 copies that go to bookstores and libraries and get listed in catalogs and offered to reviewers and listed on Amazon is the point of publishing a book in the sense I'm talking about—it encompasses the possibility of meaningful, widespread communication. Just printing one for yourself or a handful for a few friends and family members doesn't serve the same purpose.

An analogy, in terms of exhibiting, would be like putting up a few of your pictures in the living room and going in to sit in your stuffed chair and looking at them, maybe inviting your wife and the neighbors to come have a look. It might be a small-scale version of the same thing we mean when we say "a show," but it doesn't serve the same purpose.

Open Mike: Kirk Tuck Takes a Break

I would usually make jokes about "Open Mike" ("the often off-topic Editorial page of TOP") being a day late, but this is no time for cracking wise. Yesterday I didn't feel like writing this. I was feeling a curious species of grief. I got an email yesterday from my Texan colleague-in-arms and e-friend-I've-never-met, Kirk Tuck, who told me that he is hanging up his spurs for a while and stabling his blog, The Visual Science Lab. 

Kirk

No problem
He assured me that nothing's wrong. He hasn’t been injured, he's not sick, not broke, and he's not miffed or having a spat with anyone. (Kirk is an uncommonly good-natured guy, as you might guess). Still, the news is bittersweet.

He's leaving the site up and not officially calling it quits—he's leaving the door open for a return one day. That's the sweet part. The bitter part was Kirk's characteristic straight, unadorned honesty about what it's like to toil in a declining field. (That the field—writing about photography online—also happens to be my own doesn't help soothe the sting.) In the public announcement he made yesterday, he said things like: "Photography has changed profoundly since the inception of this blog in 2009," and "I sometimes feel as though I'm showcasing a style of lighting (and portrait engagement) that's become more of a temporal sign post of past practices than any good learning curriculum about current styles and trends," and "[I] can hardly shake the feeling that photography as we knew it and practiced it has changed so profoundly that the Visual Science Lab is now, more or less, irrelevant."

Sad to hear him say that.

Doesn't matter if any of us agree with that assessment (I don't, and maybe you don't either). It's the way Kirk feels. I get that, because I feel mournful over a lot of things these days. Not just things in my personal life, but the "drifting away" of things like prints as the end-product of photography; books on paper as the way to read long-form writing; principled, orderly government in my native country; and even...email. Commercialism has more or less ruined email as a means of convenient private communication among citizens, and our methods of staying in touch have begun to fragment into different walled-off corners of a Babel called "social media." I think that's a shame culturally and socially. An opportunity missed.

Imagine, mourning for email.

There's a (German) word for that
Maybe it's just the Weltschmerz* of a good guy getting on in years. And if so we might find that fact hard to stomach because, frankly, we just like Kirk, that's all. He can write about swimming or whatever else he cares about, like I can write about things like pool and stereos and George Kittredge and the meaning of words, in his usual voluble, articulate, friend-over-the-fence way, and we're pleased to spend time in his company. That doesn't seem to require "relevance" to continue. But on the other hand, all good things must come to an end; things rise, things fall. Where the truth of that is concerned, there's nothing new under the sun.

Kirk has other ways to make a living and lots of other things to do, at least. He is an accomplished and energetic professional with a mutifaceted business. He has five times the energy and business ability I do. If I were faced with the task of supporting myself with my photography, hoo law, in no time at all I'd be a shivering little girl in a ragged shawl selling pencils out of a tin cup in Dickensian London! They'd cart me off to the grim 'n' grimy workhouse instanter. Kirk also decided early on not to monetize his blog, and he notes that "last month was the first month that the blog logged a negative fifty six cents for affiliate earnings." I'm loathe to make this post about me (in my 12-step program we chide each other for egocentrism with the phrase "it's all about me/you," which can be topped with a question mark or an exclamation point, can fire in any direction, and can be a reminder, a note of caution, or a zinger), but TOP is being preserved—saved!—by the 682 "core readers" who are sending along a few bucks every month via Patreon. It's a neat solution, if you ask me...it's like switching to a subscription-only model but without closing the doors to the public. I still need about 200 more supporters, or 300 if Providence is kind. But currently one or two more trickle in every day, so by Summer maybe we'll have made that mark.

But I digress. (Can we be generous and say that digression is part of my charm?) Anyway, I've offered Kirk carte-blanche** to pen guest posts here on TOP any time he wants to, about any subject he's moved to unspool his thoughts about. We have a fair amount of overlap in our readerships, so I figured it could be a nice way for him to occasionally connect with part of his old audience. Don't know if he will take me up on that, but I shall renew the invitation from time to time. It's the most I can do, but it's also the least I can do.

New chapter
Bottom line: New chapter for our friend. Let's try not to be sad.

Wishing Kirk the best.

Mike
(Thanks to John Camp and several other readers)

*A German word with a fascinating history. Literally "world pain," it's defined as "a feeling of melancholy and world-weariness."

**Literally "blank document" in French, it means "to give full discretionary power."

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.

Here’s the situation

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

Martin D: "Weltschmerz is a fine and essentially critical word describing a slightly over-the-top mental state that is, I think, particular to German-language culture and quite different from the kind of sadness you are reporting on. Your sadness relates to a feeling where someone who has experienced a certain richness in some aspects of social life now sees this social richness diminishing. The loss is real; the diminished reality is felt against the contrast of a richer one that was part of the sad person's actual experience.

"Weltschmerz I think is different, the image to have before you is 'young man who regrets all the things he could have done.' A young person who feels a kind of pre-emptive feeling of nostalgia and loss. Having had a small number of deeply-felt actual experiences, and a large number of imagined ones, the young man regrets the way the world is going, having barely done any real living yet. I cannot prove it but I am quite sure that this is what we refer to when we talk of Weltschmerz. I will think some more on whether we have a German-culture term for the kind of real loss of environmental richness and authenticity that you describe; many of us no doubt feel similarly."

Paul Richardson: "On a related note, just yesterday I was perusing a list of recommended photography blogs that I was unfamiliar with, for the most part. The list, as far as I could tell, was about four years old. Anyway, I checked the sites out, and sad to say, almost all of them had been inactive for at least a couple of years, some longer. I think this speaks to how exhausting it must be to stay at it over time, no matter how passionate you are—and I’m assuming you’d have to be pretty passionate about your subject to start a blog in the first place. I tried blogging for a while about ten years ago, and after a few months I started feeling like I was talking to myself. I got discouraged and gave up. So I congratulate anyone who stays with it for years. I don’t know how you do it, but I’m glad that you do."

John: "I’ve not been reading Kirk’s blog for that long, but I do recall this is the second time since I started that he said he would stop blogging. I’ll expect him back soon, expect and hope, because he and you are my only daily blog reads."

Bruce: "I, too, lament Kirk's 'slowing down'...my top three 'favourites' on my feed are TOP, Kirk Tuck, and LuLa...(loved, then left, revisited, and it's sort of growing back). Beautiful writing from you both; I can't begin to admire the output of both of you both—and, yes, I make a very small contribution through Patreon to you, Mike. Kirk's contribution to the business of photography reinforced what a huge job it is to make a living in this fickle world. Without any obvious monetisation from his site. Who could have predicted this conversation even fifteen years ago, let alone thirty (only 1989!!) The speed of change is only mirrored by the slowdown of us 'oldies' (I'm 70, and still active in a fairly diverse area of corporate photography) trying to keep up with the world. Fortunately, I'm still relatively fit, but can't hold a candle to Kirk and his swimming! But I still get gigs as a wedding photographer, 'cos I can interact with people and make them laugh.... What else do you need???"

Paul: "I’m a regular VSL reader and will miss his posts. I don’t know how he’s managed running a photography business, family commitments, taking photos for fun, swimming and blogging. Just writing this makes me feel tired. I wish him all the best at what ever he chooses to do."

Now It's a Verb?!

My fifteen seconds [sic] of fame seems to be having a nearly infinite number of millisecond extensions....

It's actually a pretty good ad...communicates the function of the camera feature pretty well.

Mike
(Thanks to Bahi Para and several other readers)

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.

Here’s the situation

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

Mark Roberts: "'Verbing weirds language' —Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes."

Lucian Pintilie: "Apple is wrong in its pronunciation. Not only in this ad, but also during their various launch events where they touch upon photography. For a company very proud of its attention to detail (obsessing over even minute details is something that Apple considers a virtue), getting this wrong is...well, wrong. What message do they send to the discerning public? Do they even realize that?"

Steve Renwick: "It's a confident company indeed that can run an ad making fun of its customers' self-absorption."

Vivian Maier, The Color Work

Vivian Maier: The Color Work
By Colin Westerbeck
Foreword by Joel Meyerowitz
Published by Harper Design division of HarperCollins Publishers
Published November 6th, 2018
240 pages
List price $80; Amazon $60.65, Kindle $27.99, U.K. £39

...Another book from the most famous photographer of 2010. As far as I can tell there are at least 1o books about her now; my favorite among the ones I've seen is Vivian Maier: Self-Portraits, because of my sense that she seemed to find the fact of her own existence so curious. It's by John Maloof, the person who bought most of her archive at a storage locker auction in 2008. I talked to John on the phone in 2009, to urge him to stop selling off the negatives in small lots on eBay, which was his original plan. I never met him or spoke to him again, but in my opinion he's done a responsible job with the helter-skelter task of managing his holdings and coping with his charge's meteoric rise to world fame. John's story is interesting in itself, quite apart from Vivian's story.

From Vivian Maier: Self-Portraits

Possibly the first stop for anyone who's curious about Vivian as well should be the film, which is called Finding Vivian Maier. Haven't watched it yet myself, but I will.

Mike

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 US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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

Mark Kinsman: "I though you might enjoy this homage 'graffiti' to Vivian in one of the Chicago neighborhoods. The artist did a fantastic job in the details—the color seems appropriate for today's post."

Mike Plews: "Finding Vivian Maier is one of the saddest things I have ever watched. Her photography amazes me but that film broke my heart.

"One positive thing did come out of it. The film made me feel OK about just being OK as a photographer as long as I can hit the couch and be buried under swarm of giggling grandchildren. Still, one thing seems certain to me is that Vivian Maier's reputation as a distinct American voice is just going to grow and grow. This book is going to look right at home next to my copy of Harry Callahan's color work."

Curt Gerston: "I've watched Finding Vivian Maier a dozen times or more, as I show it each semester to my middle-school photography classes. It's a really engaging story, which is important for my audience. For adolescents, who still often view the world in simple black and white, Vivian's story is more complex: she comes across as both caring and cruel, soulfully artistic and mentally ill, a competent adult and helpless child. Among other themes it explores the age-old relationship between artistic genius and mental illness, but for my students that's usually new territory. Mostly they come away inspired by her photographs and I've seen my more mature students begin to experiment with self-expression in new ways. Anyway...good movie."

Kenneth Tanaka: "Indeed, this is a very notable current release. A few additional notes. First, I believe that Howard Greenberg Gallery is a primary driver of this publication, as he’s also one of the primary dealers and exhibitors of this work. If you’re in the New York area be sure to visit the gallery to see the just-opened show of some of this work (along with Ed Burtynsky’s new work 'Anthropocene').

"Second, take special note that this book is also available on Kindle. (See Mike’s link, above.)

"I have been traveling for the past several weeks and my copy of the book awaits me in Chicago as I write this. But I have seen many of the images and am, frankly, surprised by their skill. Generally speaking, nearly without exception, mid-century B&W’ers suck at color. (And vice-versa, for that matter.). They just don’t see that way. Maier, by contrast, seems almost equally adept with color altthough she seems slightly less comfortable with it. Still, her eye puts the color where it’s most effective for the scene, a key skill that she may not even have known she had, since these images had never been printed.

"If you’ve been a Vivian Maier follower you owe it to yourself to see this work. John Maloof and Howard Greenberg have assembled what appears to be an excellent collection of the minority segment of Maier’s work for this publication and its associated traveling exhibition.

"P.S. Thanks very much for posting that mural tribute, Mark. I’ve not seen it in-person yet."

Andrew Molitor: "The Maier monographs always strike me as a collection of vaguely familiar pictures. '"This one looks like...' and 'that one looks like...', which leads me to suspect that the curators are selecting pictures not to represent a coherent representative of the photographer's work (if such a thing even exists—how would we know?) but to make a comforting collection that resembles the 'great photographs' we already know closely enough to support a profitable myth."

Soul Red

My friend KK is a color photographer. He's also a color maven. Loves colors. He gardens, and for him gardening is basically color management—a continuous creation of ever-changing color combinations. I used to not get some of his photographs, until I realized they're often about some precise color somewhere in the shot. Sometimes even just a little bit of color in the shot.

If you're a color photographer too, and you love colors, you owe it to yourself to go see a new Mazda painted in the latest version of "Soul Red." Soul Red Crystal Metallic Tricoat, to be more exact. Just gorgeous. There was video (I couldn't find it—I think it's been replaced by the new video) showing the original craftsman who hand-paints Mazda's concept cars. When the company decided to try to provide the show-car finish on production cars, they actually used the motions of this master painter to program robots that replicated his arm movements! So cool.

I saw a CX-3 in this latest new iteration of the color the other day. Stopped me in my tracks. The color changes with the light, too. If I get that Miata I want before I go shuffling off to Buffalo (hopes are fading), it'll be Soul Red.

Really worth seeing. Because let's remember, the joy of seeing precedes the joy of photographing.

Mike

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 US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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

SF Murph: "We got a CX-5 in the Soul Red. Cost $500 more, but so worth it. Such a great color to have in our lives every day."

Steve Rosenblum: "I have a Soul Red 2014 Mazda 6 and people still walk up to me after I park the car to tell me how amazing it looks."

Herman Krieger: "In the early 1950s I worked as a chemist for a industrial paint company in California that made auto paints for new cars as well as for repainting of autos and trucks. My speciality was auto finishes in lacquers and air-dry enamels. At that time the cars came in all sorts of colors, that make the present day cars look rather drab."

Mike replies: Why is that? These days you can go on the computer and "build" a customized car out of the options and colors available, which I sometimes do for fun. I've been struck recently at cars where the only colors available seem to be some form of drab. Some cars seem to have two kinds of black, three kinds of gray, a white and an off-white, and silver. It makes me wonder.

Marvin G. van Drunen: "Re 'Some cars seem to have two kinds of black, three kinds of gray, a white and an off-white, and silver. It really makes me wonder.' I own an automobile dealership. My lot is full of three kinds of gray, two shades of black and white and silver cars and trucks. We have other colors available, but when I stock them they just sit and sit without selling. I'm not sure why, but I've got to go with what the buyers want to buy. The favorite car I recall from my youth was my father's 1956 Ford Crown Victoria painted white and FLAMINGO! Flamingo was a wonderful, rich dark coral. I loved it."

Hugh Crawford: "So if you went to the Porsche dealer in 1973, this is what they offered.

Alaska Blue Poly
Amber/Signal Orange
Aubergine
Bahia Red
Beige Gray
Chartreuse
Dalmatian Blue
Delphy Green Poly
Earth Olive
Gemini Blue Poly
Glacier Blue
Gold Poly
Gold Poly
Green Poly
Gulf Blue
Gulf Orange
Indian Red
Irish Green
Kelly Green
Leaf Green
Light Green
Light Ivory
Light Yellow
Lilac
Marathon Blue Poly
Olympic Blue
Phoenix Red
Raspberry
Ravenna Green
Saturn Yellow
Sepia Brown
Signal Yellow
Silver Poly
Sunflower Yellow
Tangerine
Zambesi Green

"...and if that's unsatisfactory there is always this:

Hugh with the Huemobile

Mike Plews: "The Miata is a car I always admired more than lusted after. I have a couple of Triumphs, TR3 and 6, in my past so I appreciate the Miata as a roadster that does not drip parts as it goes down the road. That admiration turned to lust with the latest iteration of the Miata. It looks like a baby Ferrari and Soul Red is flat out gorgeous. Thank god they don't make this in BRG or I would be cashing in my 401K."

Mike replies: My Miata of sainted memory was BRG...

...And it even had a wooden Nardi steering wheel.

People News IV: Bob Gruen

The stamp sheet is designed to resemble a vintage 45 RPM record sleeve

Congratulations to music photographer Bob Gruen: one of his portraits of John Lennon has been chosen as a postage stamp.

The P.O. says, "The stamp design features a photograph of Lennon taken by noted rock-and-roll photographer Bob Gruen in August 1974 during the photo session for Lennon's 1974 album Walls and Bridges. For the stamps, the original black-and-white image has been treated in gradations of color."

You can see more of Bob Gruen's photographs of John Lennon's New York period here. "Bob's magical photos and brilliantly telling captions together present a kaleidoscope of John Lennon's New York Period. It is beautiful, clear, and truthful. I know. I was there." —Yoko Ono

Mike

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 US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

The Answer to the Nikon Question

How do you correctly pronounce Nikon? Turns out that Eamon, who used to work for Nikon, knew the answer.

Quoth he:

Aaaargggghhhhh!! This "debate" drives me insane. There is no debate. It's settled. Zero room for disagreement. Nikon Corporation (that's Nikon Japan) officially and consciously blesses all regional pronunciations of their company name.

This is policy, agreed upon decades ago—likely in the 1950s—in some meeting room somewhere in Tokyo. Nee'kon is correct. Neye-kon is correct. Nick-on is correct. Many others are correct.

This was explained to me when I was a Nikon employee by the Executive Vice President of Nikon Inc. himself, in the flesh. I can still picture the conversation, 25 years later. And to anticipate the usual objections: Nikon Corp. is the ONLY, the SOLE, the UNITARY authority on this question. "Nikon" is not a natural word in the Japanese language. The company that is now Nikon (then Nippon Kogaku, K.K.) made it up. It's a brand name—like Kodak or Xerox. A neologism, and maybe even a portmanteau (that's debated). It was likely first conceived in the Latin alphabet, not in Kanji. Nikon Corp. gave birth to this name, and they own it. They get to make the rules about it. And their rule is clear: all regional pronunciations are equally correct. If you doubt this, just listen to their own regional advertising, produced by the company's various subsidiaries around the world. You'll hear several different, completely official, pronunciations. Oy. I feel better now.

Addendum: Of course, it goes without saying that however they pronounce it in Scotland is wrong.

It was news to me, so I learned something today as well. So now we all know, and it's official: all regional pronunciations of "Nikon" are correct! I like it.

And now we need a few Scottish readers to post videos of themselves saying "Nikon."

Mike
(Thanks to E.H.)

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 US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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

Dave Stewart: "Ma Naekon D700 disnae day video, ye ken...."

Ian: "Now all we have to do is figure out how to pronounce 'Eamon'...."

How Do You Say "Nikon"?

Every now and then someone or other takes the opportunity to slag off Americans for something they claim we do wrong. I just got an earful from one one about how correct they are to say NICK-on and how wrong we benighted Americans are to say NIGH-kon.

Well, both are wrong. Or right. How is “Nikon" pronounced in Japanese? Do the Brits (short "i") say it closer to correct, or do we (long "i")?

Oren, who speaks some Japanese, answers, "neither. ニコン is pronounced 'neekon,' with the 'kon' part much closer to 'kohn' than to the 'kawn' that we say here."

Like this.

As Scott Daniel Ullman wrote about this question on rec.photo.equipment.35mm (top post at this link), Los Angeles "is of Spanish origin, and in Spanish, it is pronounced lohs-AHN-hay-lays. One might think that the only 'correct' way to pronounce the name of the city is the way in which it is pronounced in its language of origin. But, most Americans pronounce is laws-AN-jah-lis, and no one would think that this is a 'wrong' way of pronouncing the name. To complicate matters, almost every time I've heard someone from the UK say Los Angeles, he or she has pronounced it lohz-AN-ja-leez. This too is not the Spanish pronunciation, yet it too is not considered 'wrong.' In a three-way conversation about Los Angeles between an American, a Mexican, and an Englishman, all three of them would pronounce the word differently, yet they would all be pronouncing it 'correctly.' The reason for this is that it's just an accepted fact that people from different places can have their own pronunciations for some words."

Can we agree on that? NICK-on is not correct in Chicago. NIGH-kon is not correct in Sheffield. Both would sound foreign in Yokohama. Paraphrasing Scott, in a three-way conversation about Nikon between an American, a Japanese, and an Englishman, all three of them would pronounce the word differently, yet they would all be pronouncing it "correctly." And all would know what the others meant, which satisfies an editor's standard for clarity of meaning and avoidance of misunderstanding.

Lord knows there's enough that Americans do wrong. But that's not one of them. "It's just an accepted fact that people from different places can have their own pronunciations for some words."

Mike
(Thanks to Oren Grad)

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 US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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

MikeK: "To borrow from the British comedian Stewart Lee, in a routine about an exchange with a taxi driver: 'You can prove anything with facts.'"

Bruce: "A number of years ago, Adorama ran a series of photography lectures at their store in NYC. I attended a bunch of them and there were some really interesting speakers and topics. One of the last ones I attended was given by a guy who spent more time insisting on the 'correct' pronunciation of Nee-kon than saying anything of any value at all. I walked out in the middle since it seemed like he was never going to get on topic. What a douche!"

Mike replies: Wait a second...how exactly are you pronouncing "douche"?

Steve Jacob: "Any country that calls Leicester 'Lester' and Gloucester 'Gloster,' can't decide how to pronounce 'bath' or conjugate the verb 'to be' in any of its many regional dialects*, and adopted a spurious letter 'u' in many words that did not previously require them, such as 'color' and 'flavor,' is probably in a weak position to dictate to anyone on pronunciation, spelling or grammar.

"An example of the most indecipherable English dialect...Geordie Lessons

"*West country tradition conjugates the very 'to be' thusly...

I be, you be, he be, we be, they be.

"And the negative:

I ben't, you ben't etc. (pronounced 'beent').

"Then you have Estuary English (South East) which adopts a similar simplification.

I is, he is, you is, we is, they is.

"Negative:

I ain't, he ain't, etc....

"And that only covers a handful of the 30 or so recognised regional dialects in England alone. One of the best books on the subject is Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson, who is American (of course).

"By comparison, having travelled around at least 20 US states, and only once getting slightly out of my depth in New Jersey, the general uniformity is striking."

Connectedness

You surf, sometimes you hit flotsam and jetsam.

This still survives on Pinterest (I generally loathe Pinterest, by the way)—

Look at that handsome youngster! The text is "Meet Butters a Petfinder adoptable Labrador Retriever dog | Waukesha, WI" (top left). The original Petfinder page has gone 404. (He's actually a pit mix, though I would bet he's half Lab at least.) Butters was a difficult adoption—he suffered from anxiety, especially separation anxiety; coprophagia; leash reactivity; and DHD (doggie hyperactivity disorder. I just made that up. But he had it). He couldn't be crated (he would have an involuntary poop and get it all over himself), and it took a year to housetrain him. I probably walked a thousand miles while I was helping him get over leash reactivity, two patient and often challenging miles a day. He almost took me to the limits of my patience and fortitude...

...Not quite, thank God. Now he's a lovely fellow with a gentle heart who has a few residual peccadilloes but nothing out of the ordinary. He leashes fine, no more coprophagia, he's potty trained at last, and he just looks sad and hangs his head when I leave the house, as opposed to what he used to do, which was to go crazy and have an unintended bowel movement. Things have greatly improved.  :-)

Clickbait
I ran across this: "10 Photos That Flipped People's Lives Upside Down." Kinda interesting, although also a little creepy. It's hard for me to observe pop culture today—it's impersonal and omnipotent, flighty, fickle and airheaded but also a remorseless, irresistable juggernaut capable of crushing people like insects.

It occurred to me the other day that the future is probably going to be a neverending series of platform migrations. I like email myself, and I still center my own communication activities on it, but I distinctly remember thinking, in the 1990s, that one day it was going to become useless because commercialism would swamp it. That day is almost here—right now, less than 5% of my email is relevant personal communication from people I'm at least marginally interested in hearing from. And that's just counting the "good" emails, not including all the stuff that's sloughed off into my spam folder by my spam filters. For several years now I've already been meeting people of my son's generation who don't use email at all, and recently I'm having the experience of sending people emails who later tell me they don't get them because they never check their email any more.

So we move on to various other platforms. Texting, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. We're now defined in part not just by how much of our lives are online, but on the particular platforms we happen to favor. I actually sent an email not long ago and the recipient replied, "I don't read emails any more. Can you send that to me on Messenger?" Uh, really? No, I can't, because I don't do Messenger. Or "I don't Messenger," which might actually be proper English.

Young people already watch YouTube and Netflix more than broadcast television and cable. Many people, doubtless including the intrepid "Charlie from Top 10s" who posted the "10 Photos" video I linked to above, are entrepreneurs trying to meet the need by crowdsourcing (hey, remember that word?) content for YouTube, and profit from it. But YouTube is already less compelling to me than it used to be...I used to helplessly watch one video after another as linked videos appeared in an unbreaking stream, but now each one is punctuated by an ad. Even though I can skip most of the ads, or half of them anyway, the interruption reminds me that I should be doing other things, and that breaks the spell and I turn it off. Doubtless YouTube will outlive its own usefulness and currency someday in the not-so-distant future, as commercialism swamps it and, inevitably, clamps down on and crowds out anything original or creative or personal.

As with online photos, it bugs me that I could watch YouTube all day and still have no idea what's on it, because I would be seeing such an infinitesimally small portion of all it contains. That's an irrational feeling on my part, but I feel it anyway.

Photography online make me feel like the story of the Inuit Indian who won a trip to New York City. Asked during an interview what he thought of the experience, he said, "Too many faces! How do you remember them all?" Having grown up in a village of a hundred souls, his basic assumption was that he should memorize and remember every face he ever encountered. He always had. But faced with a mere day's worth of the numberless legions of NYC pedestrians, that portion of his settled worldview experienced circuit overload. I know it's irrational, but it bugs me that I could look at photography online all day and yet still see so little of it that it would statistically be extremely close to "none at all." It's not enough to be "connected"; I need some kind of shared culture, some kind of recognized culture, something I can keep up with and stay abreast of, to feel connected.

Mike

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 US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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

John Camp: "Your post is like a continuation of the last one; I almost commented on that one, but resisted, but I can't resist this time.

"At one time, long ago, most people lived in 'bubbles' that were actually physical. You married somebody who was born nearby because they were in your physical bubble, and you didn't usually move outside of that. With the arrival of mechanized transport, the bubbles of some people expanded, but most still hung close to home. At some point (I would say after World War II) the idea of physical bubbles began to break down, although many still continued to live in them. In my generation, in my hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, most people still married people who were from Cedar Rapids, and often from the same high schools. But quite a few married outside the town, and often from distant places, because for the first time in history, large masses of people went to college, and began marrying not because of natal proximity, but because of some other selection process, like intellectual or financial compatibility.

"That's now been further shattered by instant communications where people form relationship groups with other people they've never physically met...and even meet for dating and marriage purposes online, and across very large distances, before they engage physically. As physical bubbles continue to lose relevance, it's now become necessary for people to form their own (conceptual) bubbles. Bubbles are a way of limiting social and intellectual contacts to a manageable state—if you try to keep up with everything, all the time, you will live in a constant frenzy. So you gotta have that bubble.

"TOP is one chunk of my personal bubble. Because it's part of my bubble, I've actually met you (Mike) physically, when you were in Wisconsin, and even wrote a book with another person, Ctein, who I met in the TOP bubble. While I have lots of interests, as most TOP members seem to, I actually resist adding many of those chunks to my bubble, because when you get too many chunks, you get frenzy.

"At one time, and not really all that long ago, a few adventurous people made great efforts to expand their bubbles—they'd move from Cedar Rapids to New York, or Paris, looking for something they couldn't find at home. Now, you have to make a great effort to restrict your bubble to achieve some kind of person peace and coherency, or you will go batshit crazy."

Rodolfo Canet: "Interesting to read Mr. Camp's comment ten days after my older son returned from Argentina, where he flew to finally meet face-to-face his online girlfriend. They've been 'engaged' for...eight years!!!"

Mike replies: According to eHarmony, 20% of Western couples now meet online, and 5% of new marriages began as online relationships. Older photographers might remember Maxim Muir, who was once a leading expert on photo chemicals, especially print developers. He met his wife online and they decided to marry before they had met in person. They've been very happy for many years, at least as of the last time I heard from Max.

How to Become a Successful Fine Art* Photographer

Guest post by Gordon Lewis

SA**

Do you want to see your photographs shown and celebrated in art galleries, modern art museums, monographs, collections, and all them other high-class places? Well my friend, that won’t be easy. The fine art photography scene is a hard nut to crack, and worth the effort only if you are really into nuts. (That was just a metaphor. Don’t read too much into it.) But if recognition in the art photography world is truly your goal, here are a few tips from an outsider’s point-of-view on how to do it.

Have an exotic-sounding name.

You’ll never get anywhere with a name like Bob Brown, Karen Carlson, or Mike Johnston. Bijan Ravishanker is more like it. Better yet, strive for being recognized solely by either your first or last name, not both. If everyone knows you by a single name, even if it’s Rufus, you have truly arrived.

Be provocative.

If you aren’t shocking, annoying, prurient, blasphemous, or at the very least, irritating, then it’s clear you’re not putting real effort into your work. If you are so reckless as to allow your photographs to popular among the masses, how do you expect anyone in the art world to take you seriously? (And frankly, why would you need their support anyway?)

Embrace conceptual, not representational, art.

Anyone can take a photograph of a street scene, a landscape, or a cat. It takes a real artist to create a photograph of a cheap motel room that features an unmade bed, cracked mirror, sheets stained with urine, and a half-eaten watermelon resting on the pillow. (You will search the web in vain for such a photograph, by the way. I made it up. See how clever and conceptual I am?)

Print extra-large.

Your images have to be measured in feet, not inches; meters, not centimeters. Unless it takes at least two people to carry one of your framed prints and mount it on a wall, it’s obvious you never had any intention of seeing it displayed in a museum or a multi-million dollar mansion. The odds are that you may only sell three or four of these prints in your entire lifetime, but if the price makes it appear that the comma is at least two digits too far to the right, you’ll still do fine.

Print extra-small.

If you have the foresight to begin your career as a fine art photographer in poverty, then the extra-large strategy will present obvious challenges and contradictions. So, print extra-small instead. That way you can comfortably and confidently pitch a narrative about how your small prints are so much more intimate, remove the distance between your work and the viewer, reflect a “less is more” sensibility, etc. Your prints can still be exorbitantly priced though. You are still a serious artist, after all.

Go to art school.
This won’t necessarily make you a better fine art photographer. What it will do is expose you to the movers and shakers in the art world, teach you the rules of the game, and provide much-needed bona fides. Let’s face it: No matter how good a photographer you are, having been a member of the Colorado School of Mines photography club does not have quite the same cachet as being a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Be deceased.
It is so much easier for art critics to build a mythos around you and your work if you’re not around to contradict it. It’s also a lot easier for dealers to hype the value of your existing body of work if you are not around to produce more.

Can I guarantee you that embracing these tips will rocket you to fame and fortune? Of course not. It’s no accident I omitted other important factors such as talent and determination. But let’s face it, if fame and fortune were really what you wanted you’d be better off pursuing a career in reality TV or becoming a lottery winner. Your odds of success, in my humble opinion, would be about the same.

 Gordon

*I don’t mean to imply that "fine art" is somehow better than "regular art"—though many people mean exactly that. I am only using the term as a way to distinguish fine art from applied arts, such as pottery, or decorative arts, such as tapestries.

**Satire Alert

Old friend Gordon Lewis, originally a colleague of Mike's from Camera & Darkroom magazine and later the writer of the blog Shutterfinger, is the author of Street Photography: The Art of Capturing the Candid Moment, published by Rocky Nook. He lives in Philadelphia. In a former life, he wrote television sitcoms in Hollywood.

©2018 by Gordon Lewis, all rights reserved

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 US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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

Grant: "I'm confused. I thought this was supposed to be satire."

James Hildreth: "Shutterfinger, please come back to life."

Mike adds: Shhh! He might hear you.

John Camp: "If anyone would be interested in a serious and comprehensive treatment of Gordon's satire, I would recommend Art: A New History by Paul Johnson. First published about fifteen years ago, it's still available on Amazon. Johnson reviews the whole history of art going back to the paleolithic (it's a lavishly illustrated, large-format book more than 700 pages long) but when he gets to the 20th Century, he details what he calls 'fashion art' in which novelty and public relations skills become more important that the art object itself. The book is controversial, especially with the people he excoriates: gallery owners, museum curators more interested in ideologies than in art, and artists more interested in money than in art itself. Among them: Picasso, who he portrays as the godfather of fashion art."

Geoff Wittig: "There's a sharp dichotomy in the painting world. On one side we have contemporary art, which tends to be just like Gordon Lewis describes: self-consciously hip and snarky, pretty much adhering to what prominent (i.e. catering to wealthy collectors) art dealers deem is 'real art.' The witty concept is the point; craft is basically irrelevant. On the other side is 'representational art,' what most folks would recognize as paintings that depict something real: landscapes, portraits and so on, with an emphasis on technical skill as well as vision.

"Representational art is generally dismissed by the wealthy hipsters as 'kitsch.' But folks who can see that the emperor has no clothes tend to like it."

vince garofalo: "I have been very successful with my series of potential photographs for many years. I'm getting a camera soon...."

Mike replies: My art-school mentor, Steve Szabo, once threatened to have a show consisting of photographs hung to face the wall. All viewers would see would be the backs of the frames. Steve would be seated in a chair in the middle of the gallery and he would describe in words what each photograph looked like, to anyone who asked.