The Online Photographer

'Rescuing' Family Photographs (Or: The Turkey's Back)

At John and Jane's house. Oddly enough, wild turkeys live in the backyards of crowded, cramped Cambridge.

I'm back. This is not an uncommon situation at all, I'm sure. This past week I voyaged to Cambridge to see my stepfather John, who just moved into assisted living, and my mother, whose name is Jane, in the memory unit at a different facility (the first time I've seen her since well before COVID-19), and offer at least token help to my step-siblings who have been taking the lead in readying John and Jane's house of 31 years for sale, a huge task. I had been asked to come sort and retrieve the family pictures.

Here's a small sample of what I found waiting. How did I never see this before?

Kodachrome slides from 1943. I felt some dismay when I opened the top drawer and the only labels were "Trees" and "Houses," but other drawers contained "Family" and "Friends" among other things. The color still looks pretty good for 78 years down the road. I believe the photographer was my mother's father, who had a Zeiss camera and had dye transfer prints made from the Kodachromes, a few of which survive.

That's he in the oil painting, a duplicate of the one that hangs at his alma mater

I had to do triage on a great mass of material, and there's no help for it, a lot just had to be discarded. It was almost overpowering, I have to say.

Giant French tripods
I've always thought I caught the photography bug from my father, who was an enthusiastic amateur. He was a businessman, but he wrote and photographed articles for travel magazines like Holiday (published 1946–1977) and for gourmet magazines such as, well, Gourmet (1941–2009). I vaguely remember figures for one trip that I accompanied him on as a teenager: he spent $3,000 on the trip (about $16,500 today), and earned $650 for the resulting article ($3,500 today, a marker of the extent to which earnings for such work have fallen). In other words, it was a hobby for him. He worked hard at it, and did good work, but it was as much a reason to travel to France and dine in a succession of fine restaurants as anything else. By the way, that was the trip on which I learned to loathe tripods—we rented an ancient and enormous wooden and metal tripod we barely used at all, and it was my job, age 16, to lug it everywhere.

But now I wonder if I also didn't get my interest in photography from my mother as well. At her house there were dozens and dozens of her albums filled with the once-ubiquitous 3.5x5-inch (3R) "drugstore prints," documenting all sorts of aspects of her life. These 3R prints were everywhere, in every sort of state: finished books, boxes of the packets in which they came back from the processor, loose stacks, and jumbled in with other things. I just don't have clear memories of her taking pictures, although I have pictures of her with various point-and-shoots on lanyards around her neck and there was a box of all her old cameras. But she simply must have taken lots of pictures, and often. Come to think of it, there were a number of her albums of square Instamatic prints, too, from before the era of the 3R print.

The sheer amount of family-historical material was overpowering. The contents of my great-grandmother's attic were transferred to my grandmother's in the '50s, and then my mother and her sister inherited that; and of course the mass was added to at every stage of the way. (At the same time, it's also been diminished at every stage of the way, as it was this time.) Just a few examples: boxes (made to resemble books, so they could be stored on bookshelves) of purchased stereoscope cards from the turn of the 2oth century; sixteen eight-inch reels of movie film, in tins, from the 1920s (I saved half, although I hardly know why); cases of very early Kodachrome slides like the ones above from the 1930s and '40s (I brought home three cardboard boxes full of very old slides, which I shouldn't have done, but I'm too curious); a large number of large-format portraits in deluxe folders by a professional photographer named Russell; many dozens of pictures in all manner of frames; all kinds of wedding pictures from many eras; even a stack of loose black-and-white 4x5 negatives.

A large number of family pictures were lost in a basement flood a number of years ago, and I went through the remaining salvage, discarding a lot of it. I did find a few things I was looking for, like the annotated copy of the family history my great-grandfather wrote in the last quarter-century of his life after retiring from the railroads. There were many manila folders full of old newspaper clippings. With these, in many cases I couldn't even guess why they were saved in the first place. To give one example of how tangential a good deal of the material was, I found a college yearbook from 1922, kept because it related to my grandfather, but it wasn't even his class—as far as I could tell he only appeared in one picture, of the "Negative Side" of the debate team (the "Affirmative Side" was on the verso). Not something that needs to accompany his descendants through generations!

Despite consigning a large mass of material to oblivion, I drove home with the floor of a nine-foot U-Haul van packed mostly with boxes of photographs.

Serves me right, eh?

Loading the van on Thursday night I heard what sounded like a large critter walking around on the roof—the turkey. Not sure a turkey was the last thing I expected to see, but close. Real life can't be made up.

Anyway, I know my great-grandmother loved photographs—she must have been photographer Russell's prized client, because every summer she commissioned large-format portraits of just about everybody and then bought multiple prints of everything. (I remember the guy. He was a little man who worked so hard he sweated, and he liked to stick a nickel to his moist forehead to make kids look at him.) Her youngest daughter, my great-aunt (who died in 2008, I believe, aged 101) loved pictures. My mother obviously did. It wasn't just my Dad. Clearly I come from a photograph-besotted family, going back years.

I'll have some other thoughts on this task, and this material, in weeks to come. There are a few really interesting issues that relate to all this. Observations are a-percolating.

Memorable evening
It was an emotional yet engaging trip. Fractious and far-flung families under the stress of difficult transitions are not without friction here and there, but reconnecting with people was deeply meaningful for me at my age. I saw my stepbrother Stephen for the first time in many years and met his wife, Chris, and several of their kids for the first time—one is at Dartmouth, where I matriculated many years ago. His sister Trisha came from Rome with one of her daughters, who speaks excellent English with a lovely Italian accent, the inverse of her Mom. I have to admit I was apprehensive about seeing my Mom, who has advanced Alzheimer's—it's just so very sad, and I'm a chicken about strongly emotional situations—I have trouble coping with them—but it went almost better than I could have hoped; she enjoys visits and is still served well by her elemental social skills. It was so interesting to watch her try to relate and connect on the thinnest of threads. She always was socially adept, and that gift still glimmers. Over the years I've gotten extremely fond of my stepfather and it was great to see him. He's failing physically but entirely himself.

Stephen, Trisha, and Chris, by me

With their mother Barbara and me, by Chris

An absolute high point of the trip—and of my recent social life, actually—was a simple family dinner with my step-siblings and their children at their mother Barbara's house. Picture a grandmother with some of her children and a sampling of grandchildren of various ages, a gracious but very warm and friendly home, a simple but extremely tasty meal of homemade lasagna, salad, and steamed squash, and happy, warm, intelligent, and vivacious conversation in which  everyone, even the youngest, participated. Just a lovely evening, which I'll long remember. 

Of course we had to take pictures...but just a few.

Mike

Product o' the Week:

Ringlight for Zoom, Facetime, vlogging, streaming, video recording, remote working or remote learning. Holds a phone, or you can set it behind and above a desktop computer with a built-in camera. The following image is also a link: 

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

John Bennett: "My father died in May. We are selling his house of 60 years. There were photos everywhere. Just when we thought we had found them all, there were more. And then more. Our rule: If we didn't know anyone in the picture, we recycled it. On the other hand, if the subjects were part of the family, no mater how far back, we saved them. The earliest ones dated to 'the aughts,' as in the 1900s. First we corral, later we will sort. Good luck with yours!"

Clay Olmstead: "My mother, who would have been 101 this year, also took a lot of pictures of us boys as we were growing up. She used to say that if we had described her, we would have said she had a face like a camera!"

Mike S: "A few years ago, you quoted a blogger who believes (paraphrasing here) that present generations are taking more pictures than ever in the history of photography but because they're not being printed, they'll be lost forever. Unless people are very organized, when they pass away, no one will know which cloud service has their photos or the required passwords. And that's hoping that particular cloud storage still exists. And just as important, without those penciled notations on the back of the prints, no one will know who all those people are and what they are doing and yada yada yada. She is so correct."

Hermon Joyner: "FYI, that case holding the slides is something of a collectible in itself. Musicians buy them to carry their microphones in when they travel. Singer-songwriter Gillian Welch famously uses one when she goes on the road."

Bob Fogt: "I think I've written of this once before, Mike, but it seems somewhat apt to repeat it now. When my mother died, I found among her things a yellowed old drug store print order envelope. SUPERIOR PHOTO SERVICE—'Any Good Negative Will Make a Good Enlargement.' The envelope was empty. On the reverse, in her hand, was written: 'Pictures I haven't got.' The envelope now lives in my top dresser drawer, and will remain there until someone else discovers it."

Ron Hoffer: "Wishing you strength and patience as you work through both the care and archive issues. My mother did collect/hoard hundreds of photos, negatives, and mementos in a small suitcase that I picked up from her home after she moved to assisted living over 16 years ago. Since that time till last year I've stared at the case, occasionally in anguish and occasionally with nostalgia, but always with a sense of guilt that I not just pass it on to my son as is. Thankfully one of my pandemic goals was met last September—to turn this mixed up pile into a self-published book of family photos from around 1900 to the mid-1960s. Once I got into it, with some accompanying research on Ancestry.com and other places, it became a wonderful diversion. The initial sorting and triaging was so necessary. Some mysteries uncovered and some remain. About 300 images (mostly prints) scanned and (with text) self-published through Blurb. Perhaps the most fun was working with negatives from the 1930s and uncovering all sorts of interesting scenes. About two dozen copies of the finished book was then sent as gifts to relatives; the original prints/negs shipped off in packets to them as well. Glad it's done!"

darlene: "You’ve got a treasure trove of memories and wonderment ahead! Pretty nice realizing mom gave you some of her visual keenness, a welcomed surprise I am sure. My visual prowess is passed down from my maternal grandfather. I grew-up watching him create beautiful oil paintings, and have cherished photos he made with his Rolleiflex. His love for baseball seems to be in my DNA as well. After receiving all these gifts, I just had to name my son after him."

Don Parsons: "Mike, So sorry that you have to deal with this. I'm in a similar situation. My dad passed in late January. I just finished cleaning out his house, along with some help from my angel wife and a cleaning company. There are numerous small file cabinets filled with plastic bags stuffed with old pictures. There are three tomato boxed stuffed with old photos, many of which I had never seen before. I'm slowly going through them now, digitizing the best and the historic. It's fun, time-consuming and painful all at the same time. If I was there, I'd give you a hug and we'd have coffee my photo-brother. Stay strong."

Mike replies: You too, Don. Sending good wishes.

Did the Pandemic Affect Your Photography?

...And if so, for good or bad?

I know people of both types, so it doesn't have to be one way or the other (Peter did some of the best photojournalistic work of his life, for example). Anyway, I was just wondering.

Mike

Book o' the Week:

Byways: Photographs by Roger A Deakins. Damiani, September 2021. Note: PRE-ORDER ONLY. The little birdies are telling me that these will go fast. This is the first monograph by the legendary Oscar-winning cinematographer Sir Roger A. Deakins (born 1949), best known for his collaborations with directors such as the Coen brothers, Sam Mendes and Denis Villeneuve.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Tex Andrews: "Yes, in two ways. Did much less personal work, but somewhat more professional work, including work for our new catalog at the Hirshhorn, the first refresh of our collections catalog in 40+ years (as one of several photographers, plus existing images we had from our previous full time person), so very pleased about that. Includes some linkable video material as well. Other projects got attenuated or cancelled, sadly."

Ron Hoffer: "Having my photo memoir From the Bronx to Berlin and Beyond published by Kerber-Verlag in Germany right before the global lockdown meant a 10-month delay until copies made it to the U.S. distributer (you may recall I sent you a copy). I had been looking forward to an April 2020 launch in NYC, followed by fun book signings and parties in the U.S. and Europe; all of which were cancelled. Oh well, still some progress as I've had online presentations and featured on the Film Photography Project podcast. Hoping for a gallery show ahead. But the time was helpful in that I was able to put together an album of photos and mementos from my family's history, focusing on the period of 1900-late '60s, and self-published with Blurb. Still so fortunate to have a pension rather than rely on photography to keep food on the table!"

Mike replies: I did receive your book and I thank you for it! Strong work, and congratulations on publication. I enjoyed looking at it.

Jim Kofron: Yes. There were a number of non-pandemic factors involved (falling in love, selling a house, moving, getting a bike), but I've done virtually no 'serious' photography in the last couple years. And honestly, I'm OK with that. I'll get back to it when I'm ready."

Kodachromeguy: "Good! I Reactivated my 4×5" camera and made a serious exploration of the Mississippi Delta using black-and-white film of different formats. We were not restricted or made to stay indoors here, so there was no problem with traveling around the state."

Nick: "It basically stomped it out of existence. I need to get out of the house and see new places in order to take decent photos; spending months within walking distance of my house nearly killed the hobby for me entirely. I'm vaccinated and traveling again soon, which I hope will wake up my eye."

William Schneider: "The confluence of pandemic restrictions and a chronically ill relative provided a push into a new direction for me—bird photography. My wife urged me to send a photo-a-day (sound familiar?) of our splendid backyard birds to cheer him up. For over a year now, I have sent to him a daily email with a new bird photo and a short upbeat note. I learned to enjoy this project enough to purchase some dedicated photo equipment and the excellent book Mastering Bird Photography by Marie Read for inspiration."

Matt: "Definite negative effect. The majority of my photography was events, concerts, and portraits. The types of photography the are most accessible during lockdown don't really appeal to me."

Bob Rosinsky: "The pandemic had a huge impact on my choice of subject matter. During the early days of sheltering in, I started playing around with making ersatz UFO pictures. COVID-19 seemed to fall from the sky, and UFOs served as a perfect metaphor. I shot most of the pictures on film, then digitized the negatives and drew in the UFOs in post."

Mike replies: You are a very creative guy Bob.

Thomas Rink: "Definitely for good. In March 2020, my employer relegated all of us to work from home. For me, this meant two additional hours of available time per day. Since my current project is about a place close to my home, travel restrictions have not been an impediment, and the government of the German state where I live (North Rhine-Westphalia) has never significantly restricted individual mobility (as, for example, the French government had). During my past life—up to the onset of the pandemic—nothing much has changed. I've always taken this as a given. The events of March 2020 really challenged this certainty; it became clear to me that if I'd wanted to get something done with my photography, the time for that is now, as the future is always uncertain. In addition to photography, during the last year I committed a lot of time into producing a small edition of inkjet-printed, handmade books from one of my projects. For me, this was a deeply satisfying experience. Definitely something I will repeat in the future."

Markus: "Yes, of course it did, and admittedly I felt quite restricted when basically hobbled to my hometown. But soon I discovered a (for me) new theme that was easily collected on my various ramblings: minor landscapes like this one:

"In the end I turned out enriched, especially by the fact that I had to turn my head and change my way of seeing."

Marcin Wuu: "Ruined it would be just about right way to put it. In shambles is another one."

Kenneth Wajda: "I was extremely prolific. I did a project out my front door of people passing the alley across the street: https://kennethwajda.com/alley/

"Plus during the summer, I had a goal of making four 4x5 photos a day, which if you need four photos, you find four photos: https://KennethWajda.com/4x4x5/

"I continued to make photos for http://TheWisePhotoProject.com of elderly folks.

"And I worked on making photos from my car for my street photography gallery: http://coloradofaces.com

"Plus photos for my http://RoyStryker.com documentary project, which I published three times a week.

"I am a believer that the muse exists, but she has to find you working. So many people wait to be inspired but that's not how inspiration works."

Mike replies: I always enjoy looking at your photos Kenneth. I looked through everything linked here—whew! A lot.

Phil Martin: "Yes, it actually gave me the time to trawl through and edit all my folders and files and discover that I'd actually done quite a lot of work to be pleased about. I now feel much more positive about photography and working towards some more coherent projects."

s.wolters: "Artistic low but a peak of production. Digitized my slide archive and then some."

Tom Rawson: "We have lived in the Kansas Flint Hills for thirty years but had never really explored them…always opting to take vacations in other states (usually Colorado) and foreign countries. As a result, most of my photography involved mountain landscapes and wildlife. Since travel was so restricted during the pandemic, we were 'forced' to explore our own beautiful surroundings. In the process, I became interested in abandoned one-room country schools and began photographing them. After exploring and photographing more than fifty of these schools, I self-published a book titled Pioneer Prairie Learning: 50 One Room Schools in the Kansas Flint Hills."

Geoff Wittig: "The pandemic changed things dramatically for me. Lots of 100 hour weeks working as a physician, plenty of desperately ill patients, endless stress. Thankfully most of this is ebbing now in our area. Previously I would visit promising 'showboat' locations for landscape photography with a giant bag full of bodies and lenses, heavy tripod, filters etc., to try to get that one great image. This past year I felt the need for distance and solace. So I did a lot of hiking on remote trails with one X-H1 body and one lens, the 16–80mm ƒ/4 zoom. I've gotten to know the corners of my rural region far better than I did over the previous 33 years I've lived here, and my photographs are definitely different. Quieter, less dramatic, more meditative."

Mark Crean: "I’ve gone off and started a photography degree online during the pandemic. This has changed everything about my photography while also keeping me busy and focused (a godsend during difficult times). Having to concentrate on a few square miles around my home during the long lockdowns here has also changed the way I look, because this has obliged me to immerse myself in one place and research it. I’ve learned by walking and more walking. Research has uncovered layers of history and land use as well as amazing stories about past lives that I never knew were there. It’s so easy to overlook the past. Anyway, there is some richness in all of this even though it’s been a pretty horrible time for so many of us."

PDLanum: "I shot several thousand images in 2019. 2020—four (4) with my DSLR. I shot about six (6) with my phone.

"I did spend some of the time (most of it photo editing) keywording my 30,000 images taken over the years.

"This year I have taken less then two hundred images. I have removed my 'brand' affiliation from web sites and now post rarely.

"I am trying to figure out how to extract myself from shooting for the non-profits I shot for last year. The body I have is most likely the last one I will ever purchase. The lenses are starting to have internal motor failures and shooting just is not fun anymore.

"We had to cancel a vacation to Norway; maybe next year. I just got off of a 'staycation' (one day), took a few images. My better half and son were walking from the stadium to the Hotel and when I stopped to shoot something all I got was dirty looks and comments about keeping up.

"Seriously thinking it is time to just give up."

Keith S: "I thought I was done with photography. I still enjoyed it but my interest and energy for it were a small fraction of what they used to be. I was only getting one or two pictures a year that I liked. It had been like that for over 10 years.

"When the lockdown started, I was riding my bike more because of the quiet, empty streets. From April to June, the entirety of Marin Headlands (on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge) was closed to vehicles, turning it into a once-in-a-lifetime paradise for cycling. I rode across the bridge every day and climbed up to Hawk Hill which is one of the highest points there. That’s when I found the ravens, or they found me. I had no prior interest in ravens, photographically or otherwise. But something just clicked and I visited them every day, and after getting to know them, I began photographing them. I’ve been photographing ravens almost exclusively since then and my enthusiasm for photography is back to what it used to be.

"As the world is opening back up, roads are overflowing with cars, and life is returning to 'normal,' a part of me wishes it could remain in Spring of last year."

What Is an 'Art Photographer'?

Art photography, AKA fine art photography, is just a way of doing photography. It's either a mode of approach or a mode of practice. I'll start with the latter first because it's easy to describe.

Mode of practice: I'll just sort of sketch the standard traditional post-1970 convention; obviously there are many variations. An art photographer typically works on discrete projects, creating what are called "bodies of work." There are tandem goals: to "show" or to be collected. A show can be anything from inclusion in a juried group show or being displayed at a commercial art gallery, to a solo retrospective at a major museum (a "retrospective" attempts to represent the artist's entire career up to the time of the exhibition, and usually is reserved for mid-life or later). These accomplishments are typically listed chronologically, most recent first, in a curriculum vitae (CV) that also includes related accomplishments such as the photographer's academic education and photo-related awards and grants. To be collected is to have one of your prints purchased by a museum for its permanent collection, or by a private buyer known to be collecting along some sort of coherent guidelines or principles (i.e., not just someone who is buying a few pictures haphazardly as decor, for instance). These are also listed on the CV, although sometimes private collectors don't want to be listed by name.

Often, although not always, the art photographer will have a job that relates to her work, for instance teaching at the college level or higher. Many successful art photographers have what's called "gallery representation," meaning they have been selected to be among those artists with an ongoing exclusive or limited association with an art gallery. Finally, a crowning accomplishment for an art photographer is to have their work published in books, called monographs, produced by established publishing houses. A monograph is a book showcasing pictures by a single photographer. Really successful art photographers see their every project reach book form. The highest level of this—the apotheosis, you might say—might be Steidl attempting to publish virtually everything Robert Frank ever created.

Here's a typical exhibition record for a successful photographer, this one for British landscape photographer Jem Southam, maintained by his American gallery, Robert Mann.

Usually, many of these accomplishments support and amplify each other. In many cases photographers work very hard to add to their CVs, and looking at the categories exposes how their activities are focused. A thorough CV might include:

• Solo and two-person shows
• Selected group shows
• Awards and grants
• Collections (institutions or individuals who hold the photographer's work)
• Publications (meaning, of the photographer's own work)
• Selected bibliography (meaning, published writing about the photographer or her work)
• It also might or might not include a record of his or her education and a selected work history, depending on where the CV is presented and whether the education and work history is relevant.

Also, the bigger the name, the more selective the CV. Smaller, earlier accomplishments drop off the list as later, more impressive ones are added. Robert Adams's gallery lists just a few of his museum shows—but in formidable venues such as the Jeu de Paume, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the Getty, and SF MoMA—as well as a longer list of articles about him in major arts and generalist publications. That's considered enough. A comprehensive CV for him would run to many pages with hundreds of entries.

Sometimes, photographers are so "big" that they dispense with the CV altogether—the implication being that they're so famous they don't need one. But you'd be surprised at how many photographers who we would consider to be well established are still marketing themselves and struggling for their share of the available oxygen.  

Speaking of which, note that one thing that wouldn't be included in a traditional art photography CV would be a client list and tearsheets, meaning published advertisements or other kinds of commercial photography clipped from paper publications and so forth. Although, at a very high level, top commercial photographers segue (easily or uneasily) into art-photographer mode, a harder trick for lesser names to pull off without detracting from their status on one side or the other of the divide. An example of this was the subject of one of my earliest published reviews, top fashion photographer Richard Avedon's art-photography project "In the American West." From the other direction, a number of well-known art photographers now and in the past are available to be hired for commercial work, but you'd never know it from their resumés.

It's worth noting that the career activities sketched above are changing, in ways that are not yet standardized, defined, or universally accepted. Younger and newer photographers and digital imagers are sidestepping the traditional gatekeepers (and also sometimes the hegemony of mainstream academic and critical taste) by exhibiting their work and becoming known on social media and by connecting with new audiences in innovative and unconventional ways. The young Moldovan-American photographer Masha Sardari, to name a single example, has 8.8k followers on Facebook.

Mode of approach: Of course, you can still be an "art photographer" even if you don't practice as one. What distinguishes an art photographer in that case?

Don't hold me to this, because definitions are fraught with peril, but, basically, any time you see a picture that's more about the photographer and what they're trying to say than it is a record or a document of what's pictured, you're in the neighborhood of art photography. Art photographers are self-directed, and their work is about feelings, ideas, and effects on the viewer more than it is about the subjects of the pictures. The difference can be very subtle, as in the distinction between an advertising photograph of the Marlboro Man and Richard Prince's copy of the same picture, or the workmanlike photographs in Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel's Evidence transformed by being curated as, and presented as, art. Art photography is about expression. "Expressive photography" is almost a synonym.

But do note that in "self-directed," both parts of the term are important. Art photography isn't directed or dictated by others, and it might not serve an immediate purpose, but it absolutely is directed—in many cases highly so. Just because nobody tells a hobbyist what to do and he photographs whatever he pleases doesn't make him an art photographer. Look at the work of basically any famous art photographer you care to name and you'll see someone with a strong or even obsessive sense of what he or she is after, and, usually, highly developed and coherent strategies as to how to get there. Many of their aims, intentions, theories and philosophies, means of communication, and what they're trying to express can be radically different from those same things in other photographers, often highly distinctive just to their own work. Compare the work of Diane Arbus, say, with that of Bernd and Hilla Becher, for instance, or Julie Blackmon's work to that of Daido Moriyama. It's entirely impossible to mistake either for the other.

Julie Blackmon

Daido Moriayama

With different intents, means, and strategies, no one could
ever mistake one of these art photographers for the other.

What else it is
I'd also make the claim that art photography can depend on not only what the photographer is trying to say but how he or she says it, whether that means beautiful alternative processes such as Pt/Pd from LF negs, or intricate Photoshop creations, or photo-based mixed media. This claim is somewhat outside of current art establishment norms and links more to craft traditions, but hey, I've always lived and worked in the trenches, never in ivory towers; and I look at things primarily with sympathy to the concerns of the photographers.

In any case, "art photography" is a highly defined term, and very well understood among those to whom it's important (although such people do tend to like to play with the boundaries). It's no more pretentious to call someone an "art photographer" than it is to call someone a lawyer or a carpenter.

It would be great fun to run through a range of various kinds of art photography, with examples, but that's the kind of project a blog writer would never have time for...maybe a three-week to three-month writing project. Too much of a luxury for me.

Hope this helps, though, as far as it goes.

Mike

Book of interest* this week:

A Better Life for their Children by Andrew Feiler, University of Georgia Press, published last month. Read the description at the link—fascinating. It's the story of one of the earliest philanthropic collaborations between Jews and African Americans, one that drove dramatic improvement in black education. The story's told visually. *"Book of Interest" means I haven't seen it, but would like to.

The following image is also a link. You support TOP by buying through these portals.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Colin: "Fascinating! Thanks for this. I've often wondered about the term. Is it now slightly old-fashioned or still in regular use? Personally, I struggle with all such definitions as, of course, is the right of anyone making stuff. I've never liked the terms street, landscape, portrait, etc. I don't even much like the term photographer which I know is ridiculous because it's my primary tool and way of engaging with the world. No-one likes feeling boxed in, and language both defines and enables and limits and directs. The introductory text on my website keeps getting honed down and pared away; sometimes I wonder whether I'll end up with just 'My name is Colin Buttimer'!"

Joe: "Years ago I gave a lecture and slideshow to a group at the National Arts Club in Manhattan, talking about my work as a fine art photographer, and at the end I took questions. One very skeptical guy in the crowd, leaning back in his chair, arms crossed, challenged me, 'What exactly is a fine art photographer?' Off the top of my head I said that's a photographer who shoots with the goal of having his prints hang on a wall. I thought to myself, that's probably the most concise possible definition. Next question."

Kenneth Tanaka: "As a nightcap to this topic I think some TOP readers might enjoy this tangentially-related new book by Andy Grundberg: How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to the Digital Age. I've only recently started it myself but it's bound to alternately make you laugh and to probably anger you. Grundberg is a good, albeit rather dry, writer on photography in the art world with many seminal titles to his name."

The Future of Information in Two Images

Here's the future of the internet in two screenshots. (I ran across these looking at an archived NYT article about Dorothea Lange.)

(Photograph replaced by ad)

(Photograph replaced by nothing)

A joke of sorts, this. But with an unhappy truth underlying it. If information is printed in books, the information exists independently in many duplications. It takes a set form and cannot be excised or changed or lost at one stroke. If it exists as a file on a server, then it becomes subject to all the vagaries of maintenance, and has no "master reference": changes that are either visible and trackable, or that leave no trace, can occur either as the result of casual error or deliberate intent. 

It took culture a very long time to develop the system of reduplicated publication on paper along with the archiving of that printed matter, and the system was never perfect and is still imperfect. And I assume culture will catch up to the new realities eventually, and that enlightened societies will put corrective measures in place someday. But, until then, we will be in a new sort of digital Dark Age in which shared information tends to be at risk rather than tending to be stable and persistent.

Mike

Product of Interest this week:

As Porsche does with the 911, Fujifilm just keeps refining its perfect pocket camera and making it better and better. Also available from Amazon.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Gaspar Heurtley: "I work as an editor/publisher (those are the same position in Argentina) of social sciences and research papers. A few years back, when you quoted someone else's work you wrote down his/her name and the publishing house. That's it, no one ever needed anything else. But these days most papers end up on the web only, even those published by big companies/universities, etc. A lot of those papers sort of 'evolve' as time goes by, and the message they carry can be really different from the original. Now, when you quote someone you write down the name and publishing house and add 'available at www.etc., last checked on [hour.minutes.seconds].' Things change so fast that a you have to state the second you checked. It's insane."

Benjamin Marks: "Ugh. I couldn't agree more. Digital seems very ephemeral to me. When you think that it's all one and zeros sitting on remote servers, in various formats that will be unreadable in 100 years, it feels about as permanent as a spider web on a breezy morning.

"I have heard all the arguments about infinite digital copies and the easy dissemination of digital information. The problem is the specialization of the technology needed to interpret what's on the servers. When you think about the innovation of writing, but how accessible the printed word is, compared to all those ones and zeros. We have cuneiform tablets from 5,000 years ago, and Shakespeare's folios from 500 years ago, and first editions of Catch-22 from 50 years ago. And those objects have survived the rise and fall of civilizations. Well, not exactly true, as I think we are still in Joe Heller's world, more or less. But there isn't anything on a server that will survive the fall of this civilization. Even if there is no interregnum in our future—no dark age before reason and rationality rise again—I doubt there will many digital documents from the 1980s that will be readable in the 2080s.

"Of course, I won't be around to see whether I am right or not. I'll just leave my kids a digital archive of the terabytes of data my cameras have created and they...wait, they probably won't care a whit.  :-)  "

Edwin Land Predicts the Smartphone Camera

...In 1970. For context, start the video at about 10:44...

...And he pretty much nails it at about 12:30. Cool. The video was a presentation for a stockholders' meeting. Thanks to the reader who suggested this.

Land, as younger readers might not know, was the genius inventor behind the Polaroid camera and the genius marketer/businessman behind Polaroid Corporation, which is essentially gone now but was a great success story of its era.

Mike

Product o' the Week:

A fantastically comfortable ergonomic mouse for PC users. Should be considered incompatible with Mac unless you want to use only default settings. Available in regular and small sizes, right and left hand, and wired and wireless. WARNING to Mac users: Do NOT download USBOverdrive! It broke my computer. But really, for you PC users, you won't believe how easy on your hand this mouse is.

The link above is a portal to Amazon, through which most anything you purchase will be credited to TOP. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

And here is a portal to...

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

scott kirkpatrick: "Fascinating video, in many ways. The whole clip, not just starting at 10:44. His accent is incredibly Boston. I hadn't appreciated the size and complexity of Polaroid at its peak but he describes it all, down to the I.M. Pei factory that is probably still down on a hilltop in Norwood. I wonder what it does today. He sounds in some ways like a high-tech founder of today, but in other ways couldn't be more mid-century, post-WWII management."

Marshall Arbitman: "The Steve Jobs of his time. And, in many ways, twice the wizard. These days, the pretenders to the SX-70 throne, and inheritors of the title, cannot even manage a film that develops in daylight. Land invented it 50 years ago. As a kid, I'd ride past the factory at least twice a week, like Charlie Bucket gawking at Wonka's place."

Frank Gorga: "I enjoyed Victor McElheny's biography of Edwin Land titled Insisting On the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land."

Kenneth Tanaka: "Edwin Land sure did land awfully close to today’s world in that talk! (I’d never seen it, so thank you for sharing it!)

"Edwin Land is unquestionably one of the true heroes and great minds behind photography’s history. Years ago when someone asked me who I most admired in photography I immediately named Land. ('Who?' was the response.) Unlike most of my contemporaries who started with B&W film, the Polaroid Land camera was my first camera as an early teen. I loved it. I would scrimp to buy film packs to feed it. Many years later I began reading of Land’s accomplishments not just as an engineer but also as a promoter. He was a remarkable person.

"If you want to see just how good of an engineer and visionary Land really was try to get your hands on the three-volume (two-book) set, Edwin H. Land's Essays. It’s long out of print, but still buyable on the used market. Much of it is deep technical presentations aimed mainly at helping to attract capital for developing various photographic technologies, including instant photography film. The volumes are titled, 'Polarizers and Instant Photography,' 'Science, Education and Industry,' and 'Color Vision.' That third volume features extensive detailed treatises on Land’s 'Retinex Theory of Color Vision.' It’s a remarkable series of papers for the technically-minded reader. There is a more human biography of Land’s life (which I can’t seem to find at the moment) but his essays are the best way to know what a real genius and oracle he was to photography.

"Thank you, again, for posting that video link. What a character, eh?"

hugh crawford: "When I was a child I would see advertisements for the Polaroid Land camera and always wondered what happened to people who tried to take a picture on a boat. I figured it must be pretty dangerous if they felt compelled to put the word 'Land' in the name."

Mike replies: Ha! I had that very same thought as a kid.

The Mother... Logic Board

After spending nearly three hours in the car getting to the Apple store yesterday, I had to leave my computer with them. I don't get it back until Thursday. So I'm doing what I can on my upstairs computer (the one I bought in 2018 to use to write books—alas, my steely determination to write a book in 2018 was a failure). There's nothing on this computer, and I mean nothing. No passwords, no links, no bookmarks, no mail archive, and so on. 

The lure of new cameras
While at the Apple Store I played with an iPhone 12. I actually wrote to Apple's PR department when the iPhone 12 came out asking for a phone to review, but my request was either lost or ignored. So yesterday I took some sample pictures with the iPhone 12 Pro Max (Max Pro?) and emailed the pictures to myself. On arriving home, there was nuthin'. Shoulda figured they'd have some sort of filter in place to prevent people like me from sending content from store demo units to the outside world.

Sigh. 

The part of the exercise that amused me? The two pictures I took were of Chris, the Genius (that's not sarcasm, it's what Apple calls its in-store technical advisors) at the widest and narrowest of the three focal lengths. The reason it made me chuckle is because this is just the latest in a very long line of a generic type of shot I've been taking all my life: the Camera Store Counter Person Portrait. I go to a store, diddle around with a new camera I can't afford, and snap a few test pictures around the store, usually including one or two of the salesperson who's helping me. I've probably taken fifty such pictures over my lifetime and it could be twice that many.

I don't have some I'd really want, though. One would be old Mr. Baker of Baker's Camera on Tenley Hill in D.C. way back in the early '80s. That was a wonderful place—an old-style hole-in-the-wall photo store crammed with gear and materiel of every description, presided over by an ancient wizened gnome and his friendly wife who seemed to be taking care of him more than she was taking care of the customers. He had stuff for sale that he wouldn't actually sell! He liked his stuff. He was a swell guy, of a type that I always enjoyed. I wish I had pictures of some of the guys at Penn Camera in downtown D.C. too. I should have documented my life better!

It's similar to that other venerable genre, the Photo-Friend-Across-the-Lunch-Table shot. I have many of those slumbering in remote corners of the archives as well. 

"Camera store countermen" would have made a nice idea for a project, actually. Of course I never would have thought of such a thing.

Anyway, sorry I can't show you the pictures. But the portrait of the Genius taken with the latest smartphone camera in the store just goes to show that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Mike

UPDATE: The Apple Store just called to say the "logic board" of my computer is fried and needs to be replaced, and they don't have the part. There will be an unspecified wait. In the meantime, I've retrieved from my hazy memory the fact that this indeed happened once before...with my beloved Powerbook 160. It needed a new "motherboard." (Same thing?) On the good side, it was put completely right and lived a long life thereafter.

In fact I think I still have it somewhere–I kept it because Phil Davis's Plotter/Matcher program would run on it and wouldn't run on newer OS's. That was one heck of an interesting program, but it never got the attention it deserved, and now even fewer people care about matching film+developer and paper characteristic curves the quick and easy way.

Gear o' The Week:

I'm going to get a review unit of the Fuji GFX 50R as soon as the weather gets nice. Believe it or not what really appeals to me about it are the simplified controls. It has all the features I like and not many I don't like.

The above link is a portal to take you from TOP to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Here's a handy portal to B&H Photo, which also sells the GFX 50R:

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Moose: "The only mother board failure I've experienced had wonderfully propitious timing. I had built up a new desktop machine, installed the OS and was migrating various 'stuff' across, when the old one just stopped working. It was soon obvious that the MB was not working. I didn't try to determine how/why. I just thanked my lucky stars, installed the old boot drive as a data drive on the new machine temporarily, until I had transferred everything. Luck was a lady.... Report from the other side of the Divide."

Olybacker: "I wish I had taken shots of all the photo store fronts in London (UK) during the 1970s and 1980s as well as the people serving inside. They have mostly all gone now."

Donald Zochert: "Not having your computer for a while may be an opportunity."

Kirk Tuck (Safety director for VSL): "Pen and Paper. I have a small notebook that was specially designed to be a password book. It's tabbed. It's small. It's available on Amazon for about nine bucks. I write my passwords in there. Then, when lightning and meteors and volcanos strike I can still log on with any device. Again, pen or pencil, paper. $9. Fault tolerant to the max. Will even survive an EMP attack by a hostile power. But then you might not have much left to log into....

"If you are ultra paranoid and live near a bank you could keep your book in a safe deposit box. If you aren't all of the above just stick it on a random bookshelf. Burglars rarely, if ever, steal books. Just sayin'."

Kenneth Wajda: "Here's a wonderful post by John Dersham with his photos of Camera Shops. And I recently started a Camera Shop hangout on FB."

Photos for the People

Here's a nice story. A guy who works at a recycling center in the Shetland Islands, Paul Moar, discovered two bags of old slides turned in to be discarded. They documented local life on the Islands 30 and 40 years ago. A local history buff, Paul realized they were "a little bit of treasure."

The Shetlands, which are part of Scotland, are the northernmost outpost of the British Isles—about as far north as Anchorage, Alaska—and have a population of just 23,000 people, half of whom live within reach of the capital and the largest town, Lerwick, where the recycling center is.

The photographer turned out to be Nick Dymond, who used to run birding and wildlife tours on the Islands and was "just doing a clear-out." He has photographed around the world and his pictures of home didn't seem so special to him. He doesn't even own a slide projector to look at his old slides any more.

They've turned out to be a "sensation" to local residents, who feel like they've been given a window into their own pasts. Many are avidly identifying the people and places in the photos. For Shetlanders it's been a bright spot in troubled times.

Nick gave his permission for the photos to be digitized and put online, and for the 300-odd slides eventually to be donated to the Shetland Museum and Archives.

A fine feel-good photo-related story. The short article is called "A Glimpse of a Bygone Life on Scottish Islands, Plucked From the Trash," and it's at the world's greatest photography magazine, AKA the New York Times. Many readers tipped me about it. Thanks to all.

Mike

Paul Moar: "Hi Mike, thanks for your kind words and your little blog about it is actually much better than some of the newspaper articles I've seen! As someone commented to me, 'the right person was in the right place at the right time.' It's been nice to see it give a little uplift in theses trying times.  :-)  "

Book o' This Week:

In honor of Black History Month, an eloquent Black voice on the issue of race. Pulitzer-prizewinner Isabel Wilkerson's much-lauded book Caste: The origins of our discontents is a good book for our historical moment.

The above link takes you from TOP to Amazon. Here's the book at Amazon Canada. "As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases."

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Dillan: "This is what photography is all about. These photos have meaning. May they serve as a lasting record of the inhabitants and way of life of the people of the Shetland Islands. By the way, with so many of your articles, you keep reminding me to take more photos of people. It's hard to do at the moment, but when all this is over, I've got to try harder."

Mike replies: I agree, but with a caveat, which is that these photos are of people still well within living memory. Once people are outside of living memory, interest in most of them goes down quite a bit. It's because these photographs remind so many Shetlanders of their own history, and people they themselves remember, that they resonate so much. Another half century and most of the interest might be academic rather than emotional.

This is one reason I think stories are so helpful and that stories with pictures go together so well. Take for instance the mini-story of the person feeding the lamb. Doesn't it enrich the picture? It does for me. Helps me "see" his personality, almost literally, in that it "changes" the look on his face by reinforcing the meaning of his expression. A story can be as simple as a caption.

Thomas Mc Cann: "John Hinde was a famous postcard photographer and publisher in Ireland. Every tourist shop had his postcards for sale on display in racks. The advent of the internet killed the business. We were tasked with removing the contents of the company's premises. We had to dispose a very large number of filing cabinets filled with his original slides. Perhaps they had been digitised. Who knows."

Mike replies: I absolutely hate stories like that...much better when something like the Nick Dymond/Paul Moar story happens. Remember my post "The Trough of No Value"? That wall of glass plate negatives haunts me. There were masterpieces in there.

Virtual Staging Gone Horribly Wrong

I was talking about real estate photography the other day, when we visited the late Peter Lindbergh's apartment in Paris. That brings me to today's post.

(By the way, just by chance, the "handbook" sized edition of Peter Lindbergh's retrospective book is available from Taschen at a list price of $25, and currently discounted at Amazon. It's a smaller size than the coffee-table version. The larger one is not terribly expensive either at $70 list (currently less at Amazon). It's 9.8 x 13.8 x 2 inches, has 440 pages, and weighs a hefty seven pounds. The smaller size is 6.4 x 8.8 x 1.7 inches, 512 pages, and weighs less than half what the larger one does. Take your pick. I ordered the smaller one, to familiarize myself with more of his work.

Sorry, I'm getting sidetracked.)

Bizarro World
You probably know what "virtual staging" is. Staged homes sell better, to the point that "home stager" is now a real job and rental outfits will rent temporary furniture to make houses look more inviting to potential buyers. It seems like a lot of work to me, but then, I'm good at visualizing—to imagine a couch under a window, I don't need there to be an actual couch under the window. Most people have a hard time doing that, though, and homes that have been staged sell faster and for higher prices than homes that are empty.

One way around the cost and expense is to do it virtually—take a photo of an empty room and then "Photoshop in" the images of furnishings. Some listings will show you both images—the photograph as well as the Photoshopped illustration. One is the documentary photograph, you might say, and the other, a helpful suggestion as to how it might look if you lived there.

The following is from a real listing, I'm not playing with your mind here:

Here's an attic. A rather nice-looking attic. Lots of open space, sturdy old-fashioned framing, honest plank flooring. So far so good. Not able to picture how this space might look were you to purchase the house? Well, you're in luck. Get ready...

Photographs Everywhere and Anywhere

...So, time to take a deep breath after the shocking events of yesterday and get back to photography? It's one of the nice things about having persistent interests—as long as those interests are ethical and wholesome—they permit you some distraction or diversion during troubled times. I'm having some trouble this morning. But then I'm sure many of us are feeling disquieted one way or another. Even some non-Americans.

Anyway, one reason I found Peter Lindbergh's apartment a few days ago was because I wanted to write a brief post about finding photographs elsewhere. Other than on photography sites, I mean. I've enjoyed looking at photographs in all sorts of places. When I was young I'd go to museums but also archives and other collections, and a local gallerist (a mentor's S.O.) would let me look through portfolios in her storage room. And several times I got to wade around in large agglomerations of old snapshots, which is, if not exactly fun, certainly instructive.

Now I can find pleasure looking at photographs from many places, some of them where they're not featured as photography—where the photography's not the point—for instance, real estate sites.

We all have genres we like rather more or rather less, and I've always enjoyed interiors. There was a day not so long ago when it would have seemed like the most far-out fantasy to think that I could rove around virtually inside thousands of houses in cities and towns around the world. Not all of them of course, but a representative sampling in the form of those that are for sale. I sometimes take advantage of the opportunity.

A view from a Paris condo....

...And from a condo in Milwaukee, the city where I grew up. That's the War Memorial building front and center, designed by Eero Saarinen. Just to the right of it is the Quadracci Pavilion, known locally as the Calatrava addition, designed by Santiago Calatrava.

Not only do I enjoy interiors, but I appreciate being able to see the views from vantage points where I will never set foot in person. In the photos above, I like the way the photographers connect the views to the spaces, and tantalize us with the rich prospect of the visual feasts just outside the window. The feeling of "wouldn't you like to live here and look at this every day" is almost visceral.

I confess I also find it almost a relief to turn to the work of photographers who had a job to do. When you look at too many "test shots" like I do, you see a lot of "PCP"—pointless camera-pointing. That can exasperate me when I'm worn raw for some other reason. Real estate photographers have a no-nonsense brief to fulfill. They know what it is and we know what it is; everybody's on the same page.

How about you, is there anywhere you go to enjoy pictures that aren't being shown as art per se? Astronomy sites? Catalogs? eBay? Fashion magazines?

Just curious. And I wouldn't mind a little useful distraction.

Mike
(Photos courtesy Sotheby's, here and here)

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Book of interest this week:

PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice, Edited by Sasha Wolf
(clicking on the link above takes you to Amazon)

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

Kenneth Wajda: "I like this site [Window-Swap] and you may too, Mike. Best on a large monitor."

Mike replies: That's wonderful. I do like it. I'll probably waste significant amounts of time there. Thanks.

MikeK: "I spent 14 years working as a designer in real estate (well, we just call it property over here). I have seen and edited countless images over the years—and mostly the incompetence of the photographers just depressed me. These weren't professional photographers—just anyone who could hold a camera. They say you can't polish a turd, but I shudder to think how much of my life I've spent in Photoshop trying to do just that."

Mike replies: It depends on what I'm in the mood for. Sometimes I just look at high-end properties, because the photographs were often taken by professionals and are anywhere from competent to beautiful. But sometimes the pure whimsical randomness of really bad real estate photos can provide some surprises, a few of them pretty startling!

I'll tell an embarrassing story on myself that might be indicative of something in my psyche—sometimes I look at "daydream" habitations and imagine what it might be like to live in them. But I won't look above a certain price range. For example, apparently I seem to think it's okay to imagine myself living in a $20 million condo in NYC, but I balk at looking at a $70 million one and I'll click right by it. Like it's out of my imaginary price range? This makes no sense but it makes me smile at myself.

Curiously, when Paul McCartney and his wife bought a place in NYC, just by chance I had already seen the listing so I had "been in every room" you might say. That hasn't happened with anyone else. 

You're going to think I look at R-E sites all the time, but I don't. Just now and then.

John Krumm: "Real Estate photography is interesting because these days so much of it is just a realtor snapping a few shots with a phone and you are probably more likely to find funny mistakes. If you spend time browsing Zillow you can find some amazingly bad examples. This website I enjoy uses it to find examples of particularly garish McMansions—it's called McMansion Hell."

Mike replies: You guys are really encouraging me to waste time today. I did ask to be distracted. Thanks?

Jeroen Pulles: "I like to take a close—photographer's—look at the photography in gardening books. Some books have a hodgepodge of images of various cameras and qualities (Phaidon Press's Landscapes in Landscapes), others have a consistent series from a single camera (Vivian Russell's Monet's Garden: Through the Seasons at Giverny with 1990s Velvia shots). As with architecture, part of the challenge is to visualize what the designer had in mind with the garden. And, a perfect garden photo needs to evoke the feel of the place; that needs to shine through in the photo as well."

Rob L.: "Aviation and automotive magazines are a great escape for me—some really great photography in there, often by folks who truly love their subjects. I've also had fun for the last few weeks reviewing submission for Photography merit badge—lots of technically limited, genuinely wonderful pictures. The way families, obviously stuck together a bit more than normal, are playing into the shots has me smiling a lot, as did the photo essay of 'The Cat That Ate Christmas Dinner.' I dunno, stop treating photography as art and more as conversation and it's a lot more fun."

Dave: "How about nasa.gov? Artful photos of space and technical photos of the equipment used on missions. Something for everybody!"

Ed G.: I'm a bird-watcher and I look at the photos in the Macauley Library often. There's a searchable interface at eBird. A lot of the photos are pretty bad because even a dark, blurry photo can often serve to identify a bird, but you can have it sort the search results by 'best quality' (based on crowdsourced ratings), which works pretty well. You can also choose a variety of search filters, to find (e.g.) birds feeding their young, or doing courtship displays, or in particular locations."

Alan Whiting: "Seattle's Fremont district has a weekly flea market, and at least one booth regularly had old, anonymous snapshots for sale when I lived there. Mostly they depressed me; these people meant something once, but no one knows who they are now. But one week I found a stack of 6x9 cm glass plate negatives of ships. I bought them and had them printed, and it turned out they showed the visit of the Great White Fleet to Puget Sound in 1908. I donated them to the Washington Historical Society (but kept prints)."

Beware the Roving Photo Geek!

I was poking around eBay the other day looking at photos for sale and saw this:

"Rare War Photo WW2"? Misinformation! It's a movie still, probably from Downfall. That's Alexandra Maria Lara, a Romanian-born German actress born in 1978. Maybe the seller didn't know, but now he do, because some busybody photo-geek schooled him. Me, that would be.

Never fall for what you find on the Internet! (Er, wait....)

By the way, I tried to watch Downfall but had to stop partway through. Talk about a horror film. It's a conscientious attempt to show real events, which is what makes it too horrible to contemplate. Why humans want to create Hell here on Earth is way beyond me. I got to the part where the movie started foreshadowing what was going to happen to Joseph and Magda Goebbels' little children (the two murdered six of their own children, Helga, born 1932; Hilde, 1934; Helmuth, 1935; Holde, 1937; Hedda, 1938; and Heide, 1940, during the fall of Berlin), and that was enough for Yr. Squeamish Ed. Maybe six more was just the merest cipher considering the vast number of deaths Goebbels was already responsible for instigating and condoning, but I just don't want to see that depicted. Goebbels was beyond a doubt one of the most vile and evil persons in human history.

I'm starting to suffer a little from what I call "St. Francis disease" as I get along in years...an excess of compassion. It's getting so I don't even like to kill bugs. The other day I surprised a mouse raiding the kitchen, and chased him back and forth across the countertop a number of times before I managed to trap him under a (plastic) glass. I couldn't bring myself to kill him. I took him out behind the woodpile and let him go. He was probably back in the house in less than an hour, but you know what they say: oh well. To paraphrase the immortal words of the great Popeye, we are what we are, and that's all what we are.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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

Steve Rosenblum: "I could not watch Schindler’s List past the first 30 minutes…."

Mike replies: I get it. If you don't already know its subtleties, look up the word "enormity." I've been reading a biography of Hitler, and I think I'm going to desist and just consider it "stipulated," as the lawyers say...I don't think I need to know the whole awful tale chapter and verse.

Mystery Woman

Who are the people in this 1970 picture?

One of them is an important "first" for a female...TOP's first Mystery Woman. I promised last time I did a "Mystery Man" that the next one would be a woman. Pretty sure this honor will be going on her CV. Or maybe it might get overlooked somehow.

Readers of a certain age will recognize the hallmarks of a Kodak Instamatic snapshot—the square format, the paper-white border ("paper white" was the term for the color of the paper base, regardless of what it was), the month and year imprinted thereupon.

The Instamatic was really very similar to what later would have been called toy cameras. The "Flashcube" seems primitive now, but was an innovation at the time.

An Instamatic was my first camera—I might have gotten it in fourth or fifth grade—and the first camera I did a project with, at the Gettysburg National Military Park. I always think of it when people denigrate smartphone cameras as "not real cameras." The iPhone falls short when compared with a GFX, true ($1,000 off right now), but it stacks up pretty well against an Instamatic, you've got to admit. I can still conjure in my mind the smell of just-fired Flashcubes after all these years.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Thanks to all our Patreon contributors!

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

Henri van der Sluis: "Hey Mike even in the Netherlands we can deduce that...Kamala Harris with her mother and sister."

Pritam Singh: "The lady is Shyamala Gopalan Harris seen here with Maya and Kamala, her daughters. Kamala is the Kamala Harris we all know today."

Mike replies: Left to right, Kamala, Maya, Shyamala. So now I have to make another promise for the next Mystery Person: It will have to be harder!

Kenneth Tanaka: "I confess that I’ve no immediate idea who this woman is. Re 'I always think of it when people denigrate smartphone cameras as "not real cameras."' Wait. You were one of those denigrators just a few years ago, weren’t you? Don’t I recall a lengthy, and somewhat tiresome, discussion here following an article along the lines of 'The best camera is the one...,' during which you dissed phone cameras (despite still using a very old model at the time)?"

Mike replies: Moi?

Adam: "I don't know if this is me retroactively inventing the rationale, but the Instamatic is inadvertently responsible for my interest in better quality cameras: We were doing a family outing to an airshow and I remember taking a photo of a flying plane with the camera. I was very excited when we finally got the prints back to see how the photo had come out, and was so disappointed when it was just a tiny blurry dot. My first lesson in how a wide angle lens behaves...."

hugh crawford: "The first thing I noticed was that it was a photo of West Berkeley down near the bay. Spent a lot of time there in the late '60s in the summers when I was 12 or so, and still go there a few times a year. Funny how you see a photo and think 'I’ve been there, where is it?' So I’m guessing that’s our new Vice President?"

Mike replies: Hugh, you are the best. Only you would recognize the place but not the people.

Craig A: "Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, on the left, with her mother and younger sister. As a long-time Oakland, CA resident (and knowing that she grew up in Berkeley), this photo immediately felt familiar to me the first time I saw it. So, I did some Google Street View sleuthing! It was taken in Berkeley at the southeast corner of Milvia Street and Berkeley Way. The office building behind her mother’s head and the building along the right-side edge of the photo are still there."

Mike replies: Craig, meet Hugh. Hugh, Craig. If you become friends, you can say you met at the corner of Milvia and Berkeley Way.

Graham: "Mylvia and Berkeley Way? How’d you come to that? I too thought “Berkeley” as soon as I saw it, but I’d put them a few blocks further south...."

Adam: "I didn't recognize the people or the place, despite having lived right around there for 20+ years...."

Open Mike: Exemplary Badness

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic Editorial page of TOP, when Yr. Hmbl. Ed. gives vent to his impulses. It appears on Wednesdays.]

As far as photo sharing sites go, I hang out on flickr for the most part. Social media, as if anyone has not noticed, has been descending into a sort of Babel; people communicate by different means and share via different channels, and some people are into one channel and others another. I have friends who are all into Facebook, which I don't use because each time I learned it they changed it, which annoyed me. Other friends are deep into Instagram, but to me, the pictures on Instagram just seem too small to see. A photo on Instagram just creates this nagging itch in my brain—I'm looking at it, while at the same time I'm wishing I could see it. Some are into Twitter; some like texting. Facebook has something called "Messenger" that has caused many friends to think I'm ignoring them. And email, which has long been my preferred way of Internet communication, has been rendered almost useless by the avalanche of spam, advertising, politics and PR that swamp everything else. I try to look over my incoming email carefully but I still miss important communiques because they're lost in the confusion like the proverbial needle in the haystack.

One condition of sharing is that people should have things in common. The more fractured and atomized the Internet gets, the less shared experience there really is.

Anyway, I like flickr because people often (but not always) give information about their pictures that's potentially useful to me. Camera, lens, processing. To get a seat-of-the-pants sense of how a certain lens renders, or how a certain film looks, I'll search it just to see what I can see.

I run across some great pictures that way...but I also notice some really bad ones. I found myself looking at one particular picture this morning (I woke up today sort of angry at the world, which I'm trying to work on), of a picture of a liquor bottle on a small table. As I was looking for the telltales of lens performance, it struck me that the picture had about every flaw it possibly could have. It was poorly organized, badly balanced visually, and taken at too wide an aperture. The tonal scale was ugly, harsh and with depressed midtones. The massing of the out-of-focus blur was awkward and had probably been sharpened, which sometimes makes the blur sort of sickness-inducing. The picture wasn't even straight. And to top it all off, the label of the bottle was mostly but not entirely visible, creating words that my brain sort of wanted to read but couldn't.

It wasn't just a bad picture, it was a sort of model of a bad picture. Exemplary badness? If the assignment were, "take a competent picture of a bottle and a glass on a table outdoors," it would have earned an F.

As I was musing about whether there were any mistakes that could have been made that weren't, I lazily scrolled down to the comments. There were only about six, but they were all positive and congratulatory. Almost as if the exercise were to stick to the old adage, "if you can't say something good, don't say anything." One said, in effect, "You got the bottle in focus! Nice!" to which the photographer had replied, thank you. So I guess that's one mistake that could have been made that wasn't! Made me laugh.

Anyway I was feeling rather grumpy and wicked, as I said, and it occurred to me that it might be amusing to post some deliberately bad pictures to photo websites to see what kind of comments they might get. And yeah, I know there are lots of ways that deliberately "bad" pictures can be good—but I'm not talking about that. I mean just plain bad bad pictures.

Maybe people are just being courteous, or encouraging, or mindful of how they'd feel if their own pictures attracted negative comments online. But I think if it were me, I'd prefer honest criticism—cordial and sympathetic, yes—not just insulting—but honest all the same.

I guess the status quo is greatly preferable to the opposite—it wouldn't be pleasant if everyone were viciously insulting each other's photographs no matter what. So I shouldn't complain.

It's a fool's errand, of course, the whole business. There are millions of photographs uploaded to public view every hour, and one guy could comment on them all day every day and never make the slightest dent. And besides, nobody asked me for my opinion. So I have every reason not to pipe up. I kind of miss the old culture, though, when less was shared but we all had more of what was shared in common.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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Featured Comments from:

john cecilian: "I recently posted a liquor bottle photo on Flickr, and I was worried you were critical of my photo, but then realized that nobody had commented on my photo, so I figure it wasn't me. Felt better. Haha."

Eolake Stobblehouse: "Re 'contest to come up with a new name for me, one that's more unique. Like Eolake Stobblehouse or Engelbert Humperdinck.' On behalf of myself and Engelbert, I beg you to not use our names. I suggest Wombelfort Timlybuht. Oh; one downside I did not predict when I made the name up 30 years ago is that so many would ask how to pronounce it. Eee o lake. —Eolake Stobblehouse."

Mike + Video = ?

Well, I've been trying to learn how to make short videos for the Print Crit feature. I've received six prints in the mail so far, which is great—that'll keep me going for a while. The video thing, though, is not going too well, because I have a tendency to "give up early" on things that don't intrinsically interest me. Not such a bad characteristic in my case because the opposite is true too—if I'm motivated to learn something, I'm on it like a dog on a bear. So I'll keep trudging, for a while at least. I can picture what I want, but for now it's like the old New Hampshire joke: "you can't get there from here."

Maybe my friend Jerry could tutor me. He's great at making videos. For years, Jerry recorded all sorts of talks and lectures about this region and its history, made multiple DVDs of the recordings, and donated them gratis to local libraries, historical societies, and other appropriate repositories. He's just retired from that activity, but isn't that great? I believe he made over a hundred videos for the edification of future generations. Nice gift to the community.

The GoPro isn't going to cut it for me, by the way. The problem with a GoPro on my forehead is that I can't see what I'm recording, which wouldn't work for this. Well, that and the fact that it's got a wide-angle lens with lots of distortion.

Home Theater?
At least I'm consistent, though, when it comes to pictures that move. For six months in '93, after taking a business seminar for photographers, I took a job moonlighting at a high-end audio salon. The teacher of the seminar, who was a business whiz and made a fortune as a photographer, had revealed that the average professional photographer billed only two and a half days a week, and exhorted us to find ways to earn money in all the extra time. I analyzed my work patterns, which revealed that I was...yep, billing two and a half days a week. So I took the job at the stereo shop on Wednesday evenings and weekends. It was a highly entertaining little sidelight of my work life—wouldn't have missed it for the world. But the thing that frustrated the boss about me was that I wouldn't learn home theater, which was all the rage at the time. I learned a whole lot about the two-channel music-listening equipment we sold, but when it came to movies at home, well, not only was I not teachable, but I was kinda antagonistic to it as well. I wrote an article during that time called "In Praise of Theater-Theater." The premise was that you should go to movie theaters to watch movies.

(By the way, sadly, COVID-19 is going to be the death-knell of movie theaters. You watch. The studios have been itching to get around the exclusive-release clause that's been jealously guarded by the theater industry, and the pandemic is going to provide them their excuse. Without exclusive rights to new releases for that all-important early period, in-person movie theaters are going to wither and fade away. Is the Uptown theater in D.C. still operating? Or was it, rather, when the contagion hit? That was the nicest movie theater I can remember. I hope the pandemic doesn't kill that.)

In the late 'aughts I got interested in film noir (mainly for the cinematography, which I've always appreciated) and got it in mind to collect DVDs of movies. Well, I found the box of them in the barn the other day. Looking through them, I realized a bunch of them are things I've never watched. Kinda funny. Of maybe three dozen movies I bought before I ended my DVD collecting phase, I've still never watched about a third of the ones I bought. Hey, give me time. I've only owned them for a decade.

YouTube videos are problematic for me too. They mean I have to turn off the music. Every time a video pops up that I probably should look at, the cost has to be weighed: is this really worth turning off the music for? Most of the time I'll think, yeah, I'll watch this...but, later. If you subtract pool and snooker matches, I'd say maybe half of my YouTube viewing is things like this wonderful old TV footage of Dizzy Gillespie in his prime. I love the interaction with the crowd that starts out where he says, "I am eternally grateful for your boundless enthusiasm." Classic Diz. (I got to see him live at the Cellar Door in D.C., although my ears are still ringing.) Check out James Moody murdering that flute! He could really play. The only thing wrong with this video is that they end the show halfway through a James Moody sax solo. Augh! Sacrilege!

So even when I'm watching videos, half the time I'm still listening to music. Like I say, I'm consistent. I like the written word over video presentations of information, I like two-channel music reproduction over moving pictures. It's just the way I am. We've all got to have our priorities. On the other hand, I like photographic prints on paper, too, so that's my motivation here: sharing my thoughts about them with you in the most effective way. Short of mailing them on to each of you.

By the way, the teacher of that photography business seminar, despite his great success in our field, eventually quit photography to concentrate purely on finance, where he earned ten times as much money. We each have our priorities, like I say.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Marshall Smith: "I thought you might get a laugh out of this photo from 2013, when a GoPro was a novel item. This guy recorded his dog as he competed at a yearly discdog event in Dublin, Ohio."

Photo by Marshall Smith

Tom Zillman: "I’ve enjoyed photography as a hobby since I was a kid, a time period that’s approaching 50 years now. Many times I thought I would enjoy videography as well, but every time I tried it, I ended up with a product that I couldn’t bear to watch, much less subject anyone else to.

"A couple years ago I saw an advertisement in our local paper seeking volunteers for the local public access TV station. Now after two years of volunteering at the station, adult education classes in TV production and video editing, and making numerous videos for our local library and my church, I finally feel that I can produce a watchable video. The point of all of this is to say hang in there. There may be people who can pick up a camera and make a compelling video, but despite what book titles may say, learning videography in a weekend may not be a realistic expectation for many of us."

Ed Kirkpatrick: "I believe the Uptown closed a few months back. Great place except for the few roaches that had a tendency to crawl on you mid-flick. Out of Africa was the last film I saw there and it was amazing on that big screen."

Mike replies: That's so sad. What use are billionaires, when no one will step up and save a thing like that?

James Z: "I'd like to comment about the Uptown. I don't know if it is still open, but it is a very nice theater. Right up there with the Ziegfield in New York, NY. One nice little tidbit about the Uptown is that it was one of a small number of theaters designed for three-strip Cinerama projection. There are three projection booths, and the original screen was deeply curved, and was made of a bunch of 1" wide strips of fabric, attached to a frame at the top and bottom of the screen. Each booth had a pair of projectors that would cover one-third of the screen. The projectors in the booths were synchronized together. It was the ultimate wide screen system. Of course, that is all long gone, and was by the time I visited there around 2000. There were only a few movies released in three-strip format due to cost. But the Uptown was a special place due to that history."

emptyspaces: "Video is harder than everyone thinks, so don’t feel bad...my job is producing videos for a retailer and we have three full-time videographer/editors doing it. All three of them went to school for it. I am a converted copywriter who kind of keeps track of them and keeps them on brand, but I am impressed with their skill and have learned a ton through osmosis."

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.

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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.)

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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

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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)

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(Not) everything must fade away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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

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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."