The Online Photographer

Seven Reader Comments on 'Photographs Are Beautiful'

[UPDATE 2 pm Wednesday: All the comments are posted now. I have only one thing left to do, post the comments on the "Sunday Open Mike" post. But I have to go to the gym at 2:00, so I will do that when I get back. —Ed.]

I'm feeling great this morning. Very good day yesterday. And a big relief, frankly. My medical problems weren't severe, but they were, y'know, mine. And they turned out to be less threatening than they could have been. (I told more of the story in an email to my Patreon subscribers.)

But enough about that. The post "Photographs Are Beautiful Because They're True" (you might want to re-read the original post before proceeding), which probably should have been called photographs are beautiful IF they're true (or maybe photographs are beautiful if they're honest), elicted a lot of good comments, and I fell down posting the comments in a timely manner because of all my "lifey" distractions. (There is a saying in my 12-step program: "Sometimes life gets all lifey.") So here are seven selected ones to continue the discussion. If yours wasn't chosen, it doesn't mean it wasn't good. In choosing featured comments, I try to make the mix representative, rather than just a cherrypicking of "the best" ones, whatever that means. David Aiken's, for instance, was good, but at nearly 1,200 words it's longer than the original post, so I didn't post it here. But I might have. I read everyone's comment, and always have.

Be sure to check out Greg Boiarsky's link, and remember you're not looking at the real artworks, only small JPEGs of them. (Curious circularity: make an artwork of a photograph and then photograph it. Presumably it has a distinct numinous quality as a unique artwork that is then masked by the rephotographing, obliging us to imagine the artwork's true effect.)

Without further ado:

Tex Andrews: "Boy, I am so sorry to find myself vehemently disagreeing with you. As someone trained in painting/drawing/printmaking, I would argue that they are all more true—especially so-called 'abstraction' or non-representational art, but really all art in these media and sculpture as well—because all of them are what they are and it's quite obvious that they are. Even the examples of trompe l'oeil [French for "deceive the eye" —Ed.] works. Photography masks its un-truthfulness with a verisimilitude that we take for granted as true, and most don't question. Huge difference. Easy examples: what's outside of the frame, or, how is it processed? Is it a huge demonstration in the streets with combat between the police, or is it a few dozen angry people and several cops clashing with several of the protesters? Is it a gritty Bill Brandt shot of a grey and depressing outdoor scene, or was the day actually warm with the sun peeking through after a fresh rain?

"I only started becoming successful with my personal photography after I stopped beating my head against the wall trying to capture the truth of the scene and just started wielding my cameras like my other tools. Only in my work doing fine art repro do I try to capture 'the truth,' but I'm now a lot wiser in knowing that cameras/photography can never really do that."

Jeff Hohner: "Re 'Photographs are only beautiful insofar as they are true.' Hear, hear. I often struggle (in many more words) to explain this to photographers who started working after Photoshop became commonplace. 'You should clone out that branch to improve that shot's composition,' someone might say. 'This was the best position I found for the camera that balanced that damned branch with the other (glorious) elements in the photo. I love that tree though. I've photographed it many times over the years as it's grown. Would you like to see some of those photos to better understand this magical spot?'

"Thanks for the interesting link. Seems to me that in addition to AI and fraud, another part of this story is social media. The fraudster makes all kinds of excuses for his behaviour but it seems clear that he's primarily motivated by attention-seeking. Growing a following on Instagram can provide material gain as an influencer. His thorough thank you's may be polite but are also an engagement tactic. There are many people who work their social media accounts like a job and make some revenue from doing so. Looks to me like this guy was just working a new (dishonest) angle for traffic."

Jon Erickson: "Surely there is room for abstraction and impressionism in photography much as there is for realism in painting. The idea of accurately reporting what is in front of the camera still applies, with unwavering vigor I hope, to photojournalism, but did it ever apply to, say, commercial fashion? I think some of Sarah Moon's work is so beautiful it transcends that genre, and I would not wonder or care whether her images faithfully reproduce 'the sound of acoustic instruments playing in a real space,' so to speak, with a salute to the late great Harry Pearson [founding editor of The Absolute Sound magazine, whose signature thesis was that live music was the absolute standard against which reproduced music should be judged.  —Ed.].

"Accurate reporting does not apply to every artist or perhaps to even many artists. I recently met a portrait photographer who travels the southeast region of the US for sessions with children in the homes of well-to-do families. His professionally lighted and posed portraits are then rendered as oil-on-canvas paintings by someone else in the company he works for. There's no deception in this. The clients understand how the process works, and though I imagine the result is far from great art, it's at least more carefully and classically realized than applying a digital filter to a photo and outputting the file as a 'painting' through an inkjet printer on fine-art paper. The person executing the painting, however, is handed an image not of her own conception or composition. Who is the artist here? Would the Instagram fraud guy be a thing if he had avoided contriving back stories for some of his subjects and worked the AI photo-like 'original' as a painting instead of finishing it out as a photograph? Would he still be lying if he took credit for the images as digital paintings?"

Mike replies: I think you have just coined the perfect term for these AI contrivances: digital paintings. It's a dignified term, not pejorative, but it distinguishes it from photography.

Also, I saw a show recently of large paintings of portrait photographs. The paintings were made by an oil painting service in China. I couldn't get the question answered as to whether the named artist actually took the original photographs or simply found them.

Cliff: "I happen to agree Mike. I love photography, and admittedly my definition is narrow, and definitely unfair. To my mind it is a human being seeing through a camera (I’m enough of a snob that I prefer the camera to be mechanical.) I do believe this gentleman is creating 'Art' since the intention is to create an emotional object. His marketing approach (i.e., lying about his process) could be his performance approach. I have no hard feelings towards him. Looking at every one of his images it’s obviously heavily processed, and not the look I love, but honestly no different to me than the majority of what we see everywhere now.

"I’m resigned to being a fan of a niche art style now. My love of traditional B&W prints is really no different than some one who appreciates hand-cut stained glass or furniture produced with hand tools. The human, mechanical process and effort matter to me. I’m older and excited to live long enough to see the next generation of artists revive what I love. It’s happening now, as young people rediscover the beauty of a chemical darkroom. Creating new fine prints in silver. Vive l'art!"

Greg Boiarsky: "As someone who obsesses over every detail in their images (to the dismay of my family), I'm conflicted about this pseudo-photographer. He's so vague about the process he uses to create his images that they could be anything from true art to a sort of photographic paint-by-numbers. To be sure, the images look pretty good. But, it appears that he just generates hundreds of images using AI and then picks the best one and massages it in Photoshop. Whatever it is, it is not photography. The closest thing it comes to is hyper-realistic art, and I honestly find that kind of thing to be amazing but boring. It doesn't tell me anything beyond that the artist can depict something that could be mistaken for a photo of a real object. So, for me it also isn't art."

Kenneth Tanaka: "Re 'Photography is moving farther and farther away from the era in which the aim was to accurately report what was in front of the camera...', not really, Mike. It’s true that the goals of photography’s technology and basic craft skills have always been oriented toward greater fidelity—truth, if you will. But photography’s practice and applications have incorporated deception virtually from the first hour. Throughout the summer of 2019 I worked on inspecting and cataloging a large collection of wonderful daguerreotypes for a museum. I was shocked, shocked, at how many had been manipulated pre- or post-capture in some way. The most common post-mod I saw was hand-painting of details, such as gold buttons or flowers. Hand-tinting came next, especially in post-mortem portraits, to make the subjects appear to be sleeping.

"Moving forward, so much of the most admired imagery of the 20th century was heavily manipulated. Skilled darkroom techs could multi-print almost anything into images.

"And, excuse me, but you call black-and-white photography 'truth'? Certainly that not truth in any real terms of healthy human vision.

"Photography as a medium at its best moments has always been a means of expression rather than documentation. Dodging, burning, color-grading, cloning, etc., all devoted to present thoughts and ideas rather than facts.

"Still, I do share your future shock at the apparent widening intrusion of artificially-generated images. It seems like such a brazen lie. But, again, I must point out that this is also not new. A great deal of the product 'photography' that appears to be from a camera is, in fact, from 3D modeling and compositing systems. That includes furniture, clothing, household products, cars, architecture, and even food!

"Re 'Photographs are only beautiful insofar as they are true,' you quoted a terrific line by Peter O’Toole from My Favorite Year, above: 'I’m not an actor, I’m a movie star!' I will similarly offer a movie quote to suggest guidance toward future harmony with photography. In the 1957 film The Bachelor Party, Don Murray’s character picks up Carolyn Jone’s character at a party. When he tries to make a pass at her she stops him and demands, 'Tell me you love me. You don’t have to mean it but I have to hear it.'"

Darlene: "Beauty is always in the eye of the beholder. What is in front of the camera is not always beautiful or 'true' regarding what the photographer decides to frame in or keep out.

"AI will find its place alongside the technology of its day. Some of what we may call 'fake' or created out of thin air and technology will come and go just as innovations do and eventually become normal or expected by the majority.

"One benefit of changing technologies is the admiration for lost crafts. So let's keep the craft of photography alive and become part-time photography Luddites. Today I will run some 4x5 through my pinhole camera, which some photographers may scratch their heads over because the images will be soft due to the pinhole lens (or lack of, however one may look at it). I like soft sometimes. I like sharp sometimes. And I still enjoy shooting film and hand processing.

"I could never be a total photographer Luddite, as commercial photography paved my path to a successful career. I started with Photoshop when it first appeared. The funny thing is, a lot of non-Photoshop users would refer to Photoshop like it was AI, and some still do.

"They say people become old when they start complaining about the changing times in a cynical way. I choose not to be like that. Instead, I reach into my freezer for some film and feel grateful there is always a small stash waiting for me.

"Maybe positive therapy for photographers who may experience depression or anxiety over AI could be to have their favorite 35mm film camera in hand and keep a small stash of B&W film in their freezer, and some Rodinal, or whatever long-lasting developer they choose, in the cupboard. Then, when they feel their inners getting all twisted up, they can open the freezer for some cooling down and rummage into the cupboard to smell the developer while fondling a real camera in their hands.

"Does it matter how an image was created? If a photographer were paid to do a shoot but did not do as the contract specified, that would matter. If a photographer publicly lies about how they created an image, that should matter. But in the practice of creativity, the sky is the limit. How you get where you seek to go is your business."

Thanks to all, whether featured here or not.

[posted by] Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 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 or on the title of this post.)

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Photographs Are Beautiful Because They're True

Regarding that shocking—shocking for now, anyway—article at PetaPixel, "Popular Instagram Photographer Revealed as AI Fraud," I just wanted to recommend once again Greg Milner's 2010 book Perfecting Sound Forever, a history of sound recording. I guess you have to be interested in music and music reproduction to care about it. And I'm not sure everyone reacts to that book the way I did. The first part of the book describes the ever-improving progress of using technology to more fully and richly record real, authentic acoustic events, i.e., musicans playing and singing together into the air, all at once. The later parts of the book describes the increasing use of tricks, fakery, programming, and synthesizing to create sounds that exist only as recordings and have little to do with reality. It describes an upward-climbing graph line of progress and dynamism followed by a decline into decadence and artifice. I found the book very satisfying and gratifying in the early going as technical progress is made in recording, and then increasingly discouraging and dismaying as 'recordings' moved farther way from live performances. "Photography" looks like it's following the same path, or a parallel one.

I reminded me of a great line from an old movie, spoken by Peter O'Toole in the 1982 film My Favorite Year. It starts with a performer in period costume saying that he feels so good he can probably nail it in one take, at which point the TV producer tells him he has to get it right in one take, as he'll be performing live. After a few exchanges in which he professes not to know what "live" means, he cries out, "I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star!" That is, he can't actually act—he's dependent on technology to create the appearance of acting. In the way that some pop stars can't actually sing, and the AI fraud guy didn't even take his own pictures.

It was a line that became pretty famous at the time. As if a pop star had said, "I'm not a musician, I'm a recording artist!" The AI fraud guy, by the way, admitted he was trying to fool people but then tried to pivot, claiming he had to work hard on his AI fakes, making many tries to get a good one, even to the point of Photoshopping them. He thinks he has a right to claim them as "his" original artworks after all. I mean, just ask him.

Photography is moving farther and farther away from the era in which the aim was to accurately report what was in front of the camera, and increasingly occupying territory that was previously the domain of art. Mostly bad art, unfortunately. I've always been of the opinion that if you want to be a painter, you ought to paint. Photographs are only beautiful insofar as they are true. A minority opinion, I guess, these days.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 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 or on the title of this post.)

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The Gym Teacher from the Past and the Hipster from the Future

This is cool. Dale Irby, a gym teacher in Dallas, accidentally wore the same clothes for his picture in the school yearbook two years in a row. He was embarrassed, but his wife liked it—so he kept wearing the same clothes for 38 years after that.

Watch the section of the video on "Curiosity Box," a feature of a YouTube channel called Vsauce. (It starts at about the seven minute mark and lasts for less than three minutes.) The phenomenon, which he dubs "retrospective aging," goes like this: people keep wearing the styles that were popular when they were young; later generations eventually come to associate those styles with old people; so when we look at old pictures of young people wearing those styles, we think they look older than the age they were. But all they're doing is continuing to wear the styles that were associated with youth when they themselves were young.

It's an effect I remember well from when I was young, because people who were young in the '40s and '50s looked so different from young people in the '70s when I grew up. And a lot of those guys were still wearing those same styles in the '70s, which pegged them as part of their earlier generations. I know one guy here in Upstate New York who still rocks a greaser haircut with a ducktail! That look has pretty much died out now. On the other hand, those guys looked silly when they adopted '70s styles. There were few looks more cringeworthy in the mid-to-late '70s than a 40- or 50-year-old guy with disco chains, super-wide lapels, long sideburns, and coiffed, blow-dried hair. (No offense if that describes mid-to-late '70s you.) 1970s styles were silly, and they didn't survive long.

A photograph of my father. In my opinion
his glasses, hairstyle, and expression make him look
older, but he was 17 in this picture, in 1946.

The photograph later in the video segment—the hipster from the future—is interesting too. I thought the whole video was interesting, actually, but as to whether you want to watch it you can of course suit yourself, no pun intended.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 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 or on the title of this post.)

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Art Photographers and the Camera Market

[Ed. note: TOP takes the day off on Saturdays, so I can pretend I'm doing housework and paying the bills. Oh boy.]

-

To conclude the discussions from earlier in the week, in the posts "I Don't Want to Farm" and "The Rest Is History"—if you're an art photographer or fine-art photographer, you really don't have to worry. (Before I go on, "art photographer" is a useful term and not just a snooty claim-staking one, and I don't mind it. If you do, you can substitute expressive photographer or some other unfamiliar phrase, although if you use uncommon terms you run the risk of people not understanding what you mean.)

I suppose professional photographers of various types have always had to concern themselves with an understanding of a broad range of current mainstream tools, and they're the most likely to be heavily invested in one or more solutions, so they have to care about the camera industry to a certain extent. But art photographers don't. We have always been on the fringes, and we have always gone our own way and done our own thing. Finding the right camera is part of the creativity of creative photography, and it can range from a fanatical and involved pursuit of specific needs, all the way to the other end of the scale, namely, not giving a damn. Plenty of art photographers down through the years have used cameras they built themselves, cast-off cameras from earlier eras, common mid-level commodity cameras, toys, the latest fashion, custom or luxury offerings, or whatever they started out with and got used to. They might switch between formats with abandon like Mary Ellen Mark or use the same camera for decades like Henry Wessel, use a cheap plastic Diana like Nancy Rexroth or oversized 8x20-inch "panoramic" view cameras like Michael A. Smith. Alfred Stieglitz used a shabby old view camera on which the bellows sagged so much he had to hold the middle of it up with a loop of string during the exposure. Joel Meyerowitz might still be using his 8x10 Deardorff that was manufactured the year he was born. On the other hand, Alfred Eisenstadt was ceremonially presented with a custom Leica by the company, and the glamour and pinup photographer Peter Gowland invented and built his own cameras. Then there's the woman whose name I don't recall, who sent me a marvelous portfolio at the magazine I worked for. When I asked her what kind of camera she used, she replied, "I don't really know. Do you want me to go look?"*

With the advent of Internet communication, a lot of people got interested in learning about the camera market, and a lot of today's enthusiasts are deeply into "what's coming next" and the fate of specific companies from a business standpoint. But art photographers have always been a minuscule percentage of the camera-owning population, and we've never been much at the mercy of the direction the mass market is going. When the market switched from rangefinders to SLRs in a big way, a lot of us followed—and some of us didn't. Burt Keppler of Modern Photography said SLRs felt to him like coming home, and he happily made the switch. Were all of us suddenly doomed when point-and-shoots took over the market in the 1980s? Not at all, but Daido Moriyama adopted point-and-shoots and made art with them. Was it a disaster when digital came along? Not at all. Most of us just kept shooting film until we felt like making the switch—a switch that even Charlie Cramer, an expert dye transfer printer, eventually made. But John Paul Caponigro dove into digital right from the very earliest days. And a huge number of people were enabled by digital who hadn't been photographers before. Yet you can still outfit and run a B&W darkroom today, even one based around sheet film and a view camera, if you're one of the few who choose to.

Michael A. Smith with his 8x20-inch view camera.
Photo by Hans Bol.

We go our own way and do our own thing. While occasionally there is a photographer who abandons the work because of some shift in the technical winds, like Frederick Evans did when commercial platinum/palladium paper went out of production because of WWI, and you can't say we're not affected by the camera market at all, we've never been particularly attached to it. And certainly never at its mercy. Nowadays we have all sorts of choices: old film cameras of all types, old digital cameras, a broad range of new digital cameras in a broad range of sensor sizes, phones and other "devices," drones, on and on. If you can't find something to use to get yourself to where you want to be, you'll create some other possibility. Creative people find what they need.

Wherever the industry goes, it won't affect us. It doesn't matter if one company disappears or another does something revolutionary. Right now there are great photographers nobody's heard of quietly building bodies of work made with smartphone cameras; others are doing the same with aging 35mm film cameras. If someone builds a new 35mm camera, a few people will do good work with that. But it won't have much if any effect on the market as a whole. Part of the reason all this doesn't matter is that there will always be choices for those who are alert to them, and there will always be creative people willing to explore what they can do with whatever tools happen to interest them. If they can't do one thing they'll think of another. Their choices will be quirky and idiosyncratic, inventive, adaptive, and innovative. Because they always have been.

So while change might not go our way, it never really has. Is it anything to mourn, or moan, or worry about? Nah.

Mike

*Sadly, I never got to publish that portfolio, and I don't recall now what the reason was.

Original contents copyright 2023 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 or on the title of this post.)

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Bassman: "Artists use the technology that’s available to create the art they want. The manufacturers are often behind the curve on the possibilities offered by their offerings, sometimes way off the mark. An example from the guitar world: when electric guitars were first being used widely during the 1950s and 1960s, most manufacturers were trying to make the electric instruments sound like the acoustic guitars they were replacing. After all, the whole point of electrifying them was to allow them to be louder. That the electric guitars didn’t sound like acoustic instruments was seen as a flaw to overcome. Artists, on the other hand, embraced the electric sound and the distortion the amplifiers exhibited to create the sound of rock and roll. They didn’t care about sounding like the older technology; they saw infinite possibilities with the new technology."

JH: "Bravo to Bassman, driving what he enjoys. People like him were the typical Porsche drivers until the mid-1980s when the new President of Porsche—who came from a US tractor company—started treating it like a brand to be milked for the highest profits. After I retired from racing in 2002 and did a couple of years teaching at track days for car clubs, I refused to take Porsche drivers as students. BMW owners were almost as bad. You could not instruct many of them—they knew it all....

"In several years of instructing, I only had one Corvette owner. After five laps with me driving at California Speedway, he got out of the car looking as white as a ghost and refused to drive the track himself...he'd had enough already. I quit instructing after a couple of years when I decided the majority of my students were trying to kill me. I live in a town full of posers here in California. The new big thing for posers is the 'urban rednecks' driving tarted-up giant pickup trucks. You can always tell a poser: they have pricey wheels and a cover over the bed of the truck to make sure it says perfectly clean."

Pieter Krigee: "On the picture Michael is not using an 8x10inch camera. Probably it is an 11x14inch camera or maybe even a larger one, a 30x50cm!"

Mike replies: It's an 8x20, and sorry. That was a typo. My brain thinks 8x20 and my fingers type 8x10 because that's what they most often do. It's like having a built-in malapropist spellchecker. Fixed now.

Bill Tyler: "I absolutely loved the story about the woman who didn't even know what camera she had, but was producing excellent work. Clearly, she had her priorities straight."

Chrome Hat

Chrome Hat

It occurred to me that actually the current situation is much simpler than maybe I'm taking it to be. Phones have simply replaced digicams, that's all—what were originally called digital point-and-shoots.

The biggest differences are a.) connectivity, and b.) penetration of the devices in the population. Just over a year ago, in April of '21, the Pew Research Center said, "The vast majority of Americans—97%—now own a cellphone of some kind. The share of Americans that own a smartphone is now 85%, up from just 35% in Pew Research Center’s first survey of smartphone ownership conducted in 2011." (I presume they're talking about adults. census.gov says that 6.4% of the US population is age five and under, and I doubt that half of that demographic own cellphones.) I haven't been able to find a seemingly-reliable estimate of the number of people who owned digital point-and-shoots at the peak of that device's popularity, but I doubt it was 35% of the population, much less 85%.

And this is a good thing for photography; it dramatically fulfills photography's historical promise as a visual medium for everyone. What it's possibly a bad thing for is photo culture, because it essentially blasts it away. No longer is there any sense of coherent trends, standout practitioners, or shared experience of the medium's accomplishments. Far from shared experience, there is no chance that any human has seen more than an infinitesimally small fraction of all the photos now being made.

However, it's possible that the photo culture that's becoming less relevant—as embodied in museum and gallery shows; photography in newspapers, periodicals, and books; critical appraisal; and well-known names whose work is familiar to some significant subset of the volitional audience, etc.—was never much more than an illusion anyway, as it could only pretend to comprehensiveness in the best of times. There was always a sort of constructed, willed feel to photography's culture—that is, that it was not so much something that was as something we wanted. I felt it even in my youth. Case in point: the willful assertion that there were "schools" and traceable threads of influence like there are in painting. At best, the verdict on that was "sort of." The Düsseldorf School, okay, although I always got a sense that it got a lot of the attention it got simply because it was defensibly a "school," to the relief of art critics; but the so-called New York School, for example, was at best a back-formation.

Maybe someday I'll try to claim that there's a "Camera-Pointing School" that encompasses all the totally meaningless test-shot-type digital images of absolutely nothing that the web is awash with. As a sly joke. (By the way, camera-pointing is not my term, but I don't think the guy I heard it from wants to be associated with it.) Not that parked motorcycles are such exalted subjects. And of course most photographers' work didn't sort itself into neat groupings like that. More like the opposite. I'm just thinking out loud here.

One thing's for sure, there's no Smartphone School of Photography. Although consider this: there is probably a huge body of the greatest work ever created in photography that's out there somewhere, if it could only be found and collected—but it can't be and never can be. 

I always feel like I want to see everything. But of course I don't, do I?

Mike

Book o' the Week:

The Mindful Photographer by Sophie Howarth. I only know of Sophie Howarth from her time as a curator at the Tate Modern in London, but my impression then was positive. Her brand new book (it only came out a few days ago) is about slowing down as a means of enjoying photographing more. It's said to contain a curated collection of photographs along with anecdotes and explanation.

The book link is your portal to Amazon from TOP, should you wish to support this site.

Here's our link to B&H Photo

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:

David Dyer-Bennet: "Science fiction fandom is experiencing something that seems similar to me; it used to be 'a proud and lonely thing' to be a fan, but now the majority of block-buster movies are in the science-fiction / fantasy genre; you can't get more mainstream than that. Which means the movies, and a lot of books too, are being made for mass-market tastes rather than the much more knowledgeable tastes of people already deeply into SF (as cameras or phone cameras are), and people aren't finding fandom as 'their home culture' so much any more (they find people who like SF everywhere). We can't seem to figure out anything to do about it either."

Speed: "Mike wrote, 'One thing's for sure, there's no Smartphone School of Photography.' But this being 2022 there is, of course, an iPhone Photography School. Online only of course."

TC: "The contrarian in me insists on noting, now that everyone is posting on social media every day, couldn't you say the same of writing? 'No longer is there any sense of coherent trends, standout practitioners, or shared experience of the medium's accomplishments. Far from shared experience, there is no chance that any human has seen more than an infinitesimally small fraction of all the words now being written.' Why would I want to buy a book or read an article when anyone can make a Facebook post?"

Mike replies: If you could see all the care that goes into a New Yorker article, that's all you'd want to read. Whew. It's awesome, and I use that word advisedly.

Dave Jenkins (partial comment): "I wrote about this in my blog two years ago. 'The subject of photography is not the subject of photography. At its basic level, photography is about pictures, not the tools and processes involved. (Although I'm a photographer, so I do love those tools and processes.) But in a way, those hordes taking pictures with their cell phone cameras have it right. They care nothing about the tools and techniques of photography; They’re only interested in getting a reasonably clear picture they can send to friends or family. They care about who or what they are photographing, not the act of photography itself. In other words, they are the direct descendants of all those who heard George Eastman's slogan "You push the button and we do the rest" and lined up to buy his pre-loaded, ready-to-shoot cameras.'

"Read more if you're interested at 'Cell Phone Cameras' and 'So, Why Not Just Shoot With Your Cell Phone?'"

Antony Shepherd: "Something I've often seen noted is that while on the one hand there are more photographs being taken than at any other time in human history, the vast majority are purely ephemeral files which exist so long as the server(s) they occupy exist. When the service closes down and the servers are destroyed their content will vanish with them. No chance of someone in the future coming across a hard drive of photos in a charity shop and being able to access them, the way people often make finds of old glass plates."

Zyni: "You say 'there is no chance that any human has seen more than an infinitesimally small fraction of all the photos now being made.' Well, this is why numeracy is important, though increasing rare. Let us say that there are 300 million Americans, but it is 1955 and they make one photograph per year, each. So if a person does nothing at all but look at photographs and they work 12 hours a day, every day, with no holidays or weekends, they would need to look at 300,000,000/(365 x 12 x 60 x 60) photographs per second to see all these. Which is about 20. Every second, 12 hours a day, every day. It is a very long time since any individual looked at more than a tiny fraction of the photographs being made. This is not an artifact of digital photography any more than counting the atoms in the Earth (about 10^50) is easier for a human than counting the atoms in the observable universe (about 10^80, so about 10^30 Earth's worth). Or even atoms in a grain of sand (perhaps 10^18). Or indeed the entire universe (we currently assume infinite). Beyond a certain point the limits of human capacity become so minute compared to things that it does not any more matter."

Mike replies: Hi Zyni. The population of the US was only 171 million in 1955, but I take your point. I still think it was quantifiably different, because in 1955 not everyone had a camera, not everyone who had a camera had a good camera, many people who had good cameras didn't really make pictures to speak of, and there was a more marked distinction between people who worked with thoughtfulness and intention and those who only made snapshots, because the practice and the craft made such a heavy demand in terms of time and dedication. There was a very high bar to be a serious photographer then—many photographers literally had to dedicate their lives to it, and very few people were willing to do that. And it was somewhat easier for those looking and appraising to believe that they were seeing or at least hearing about a meaningful subset of all those who were working persistently, meaning, over years. And it was difficult to accomplish anything if you didn't. A problem with your formulation, for instance, is that no one can make meaningful work taking one photograph a year, so only those people dedicating themselves to it really needed to be looked at at all. Instead of considering 300 million people and one photo each, we are starting with a subset of those who are willing to sacrifice a great part of their time and labor to the effort. It must have been a much, much smaller group.

Plus, there were far fewer ways for pictures to be public. Most of the images in your model would have been private then. Most of mine still are; but the public availability of formerly private pictures has certainly exploded in this century.

If a critic or curator thought he or she was aware of 5% or even 2% of the people in the country working as dedicated artists, they could be excused for thinking they had a finger on the pulse. But you help make my point that that was probably an illusion even then: the assumptions made by, for example, histories of photography, which listed major trends and major figures, and traced influences from one to to the next, were probably a bit too comfy and not truly justified.

But now no one even tries, I don't think. It's too obvious that it's hopeless.

I'm not an expert on this particular aspect of the subject, I will admit. And as for innumeracy: emphatically guilty!

OCOLOYs

An OCOLOY or OC/OL/OY (one camera, one lens, one year) is a learning-and-engagement exercise I proposed in 2014.

To provide links, after which I'll get on with this:

The original article was called "The Leica as Teacher," May 28, 2009, further clarified the following day in "Why It Has To Be a Leica," May 29th, 2009.

I honestly didn't think anyone would do this, because it involved shooting B&W film in an old camera and doing darkroom work, but a number of people around the world (more than a hundred that I heard from) actually carried it out.

Nevertheless, I followed it up with "The Digital Variant: One Camera, One Lens, One Year" on November 11th, 2014. I prefaced this with a note about prescriptiveness called "You Must Do This" on the same date.

I don't know how I can possibly qualify my comments any further than that, but please: these were suggestions, and it was assumed that you would take it or leave it based on your own free choice. If you have a canned rant about your OCOLOY hatred, put that can opener down. It's not for everyone and it doesn't have to be for you. It was just a suggestion. Take it if you want it, leave it if you don't. It's all good.

Anyway, the reason for this post today is that one more person—Patrick Medd—has actually done the "Leica as Teacher" year that I never thought anyone would do. And he has written an article about his experience, at 35mmc. Patrick also answers readers' questions in the comments. Here's the link. Patrick used an M3 and a 50mm lens.

My new editor is also doing an OCOLOY, with a Q2, which is a perfect camera for it—you can't change lenses even if you want to.

Finally, Bruce Haley, whose book is the "Book of Interest" right now, also did those books as an OCOLOY—of sorts. It's a little complicated, so I'll let Bruce explain it:

The first volume contains 70 photographs, all shot in 2014 with the Sony RX1 that I wrote about for TOP those many years ago. The second volume contains 120 photographs, with images from seven different years (2014–20). The RX1 from Volume I was used for the Volume II images from 2014, 2015 and part of 2016; by Autumn 2016 I had upgraded to a Sony RX1RII, so the remainder of the images were taken with that camera.

So technically it is not exactly seven years of OCOL (removing the OY for the sake of accuracy)—but close to it. It is basically the same fixed-lens camera model, and of course the same Zeiss 35mm lens. One could also say that there is more than a year of OCOLOY with each one of the two cameras.

Bruce is sending along the two volumes so I can see. I've also purchased two of the recent "Books of Interest" and "Books of the Week," so a group book review is in our future.

The RX1RII is just as good as the Q2 for an OCOLOY. And of course you can decide what you would use.

I did do a "Leica Year" a long time ago—hence the 2009 articles—and I'd like to do an OCOLOY again. But then people do super-kind things like send me Leica M10 Reporters to try, and who can stick with just one camera with a camera like that sitting on the kitchen table? Ah, temptations. "Do what I say, not what I do"?

Mike

UPDATE Patrick Medd adds: "Thank you for the mention and link to my article Mike, and thank you for suggesting the idea in the first place. I really enjoyed the project. Writing the article now, nearly two years after I finished doing it, has helped me reflect on it from a distance. I am hugely indecisive and spend far too much time over-agonising about which option to pursue. The nicest thing about the year was having the choice of what gear to use taken away from me and just focusing on making pictures."

Book of Interest this Week

Home Fires Volume II: The Present. There is of course a Volume I: The Past.  TOP reader Bruce Haley has produced documentary work relating to conflict, humanitarian crises and environmental/industrial/land use issues for 30 years. He received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of the ethnic civil war in Burma.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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:

James: "Many people have done a OCOLOY. It is whatever lens came on their phones. But ah, now, they have multiple lenses. So what are the rules about phone cameras? Does anyone dare do a OCOLOY with their phone cameras disabled?"

Mike replies: Very good question. I don't have an answer. I'm still struggling with the issue of the phone replacing the "carry-camera" even when I intend otherwise.

robert e: "Here's a theory: Once you do one OCOLOY, you don't need another whole OY to get the same benefit from the next OCOL. It's like how you don't need to go back to kindergarten to switch careers, or don't have to relearn design to learn a new painting medium. The first experience made you a better beginner, so you'll get more out of the next one more quickly. How much more quickly? Well, I think that depends on the person, and how different the second OC or OL is. I bet some people could totally grok a new OCOL in OM, whereas I might need TY (two years). The key, though, is to be a beginner, not a macho know-it-all. But that shouldn't be problem, because one thing the first OCOLOY teaches is humility."

Stan B.: "I did extended OCOLOYs in my youth from 50mm to 20mm, mostly out of economic necessity—I'd have to sell one lens to help finance the next as the focal lengths got progressively shorter, and more expensive. Best teaching experience in my book since being forced to deal with each lens strengths and limitations in every situation under everyday conditions serves as an invaluable resource to help previsualize your image for the rest of your life.

"And Home Fires Vol. 1 is one of my favorite photo books of the last several years!"

Steve: "I basically use one old film camera and one lens (50mm), unless the camera is in for a CLA, in which case I use an older camera with one very old lens (50mm). I have a nice Voigtländer 35mm lens, but I haven’t used it since probably 2013 or so. Given my compulsive tendencies, the less thinking involved, the better off I am. It's truly liberating, not restrictive."

JG: "I have both volumes of Home Fires and recommend them without reservation. They're great examples of documentary photography that doubles as fine-art photography. Apropos of today's OC/OL/OY topic, they're also great examples of how one lens can be used to great effect, as I'll bet few readers would've noticed Bruce used a fixed-lens camera to photograph them if Mike hadn't mentioned it."

Andy F: "I did my own OCOLOY a few years ago and it really helped me get past my dislike of the 50mm-e view, to the extent that it’s now one of my favourites. I even got a one-off book made of the project, of which I’m still really proud. Since then a lot has happened, including the birth of my daughter, and given how I’ve been rather lax with my photography of late, I think now’s a good time to try another OCOLOY, this time with something different, my Ricoh GRIII. 28mm-e is another view I’ve never been comfortable with, so I’m curious to see what sort of pictures I get from it by the end. As a bonus, the camera is tiny, so taking it everywhere is easy. I’m really grateful to you, Mike, for the inspiration your words have provided over the years, thanks!"

Sherry Snyder: "I am a 70-year-old amateur who loves B&W, and has been converting from color for years. In November 2020, I saw the specs for the Leica Q2 Monochrome and ordered one sight unseen. I had never held a Leica, looked through a monochrome-only viewfinder, or shot with a 28mm lens. After it arrived the learning curve was huge. I shot with it exclusively for months before my brain finally engaged. Now it is my favorite tool and I am making the best, most creative images I have ever done. What a gift I gave myself."

The Journey of the Swatzells

It's one of the stories you often hear in the aftermath of tornadoes, which are more terrifying the closer they come to you. "Paper debris rides winds, sometimes reaching heights of 30,000 to 40,000 feet above the ground," before the air currents calm and the debris settles back to earth.

After the recent tragic carnage in Kentucky, a nearly 80-year-old photograph of Gertie Swatzell and a baby J.D. Swatzell, taken in 1942, traveled more than 120 miles on the swirling winds of the atmosphere. Katie Posten, of Albany, Indiana, found it on her windshield. Posten took to social media, seems to have located the family of those who lost the picture, and plans to see that it is returned. Here's the story, from NBC News.

There's nothing heartwarming about a maelstrom that can tear your cossetted possessions right out of your home, but when strangers trouble themselves to see that lost items are returned, it can function as a gesture of solidarity and sympathy.

Mike
(Thanks to Kenneth Tanaka)

Book o' the Week

This is the book that sold 1,100 copies through our links back when it first came out in 2007. It's essentially a catalogue raisonné of the work of the iconic American landscapist. I suppose it won't sell any more, since everyone already has a copy, but the link can be a portal to Amazon for your holiday shopping. Thank you kindly for helping support The Online Photographer!

The following logo is also a link if you click on it:

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:

Albert Smith: "I've been watching the coverage of the tornadoes and saw that story about the photo that traveled that distance. There are going to be thousands of personal artifacts over multiple states. I guess they'll have websites established to try to reunite these irreplaceable effects with the owners. As I look at the rubble of completely flat houses on the TV, I then look around my multiple rooms with boxes of documents, photos, and well, just 'stuff' and I can't imagine if everything goes airborne and dispersed to the horizons. Those poor people."

'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.

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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.

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

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

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.

Thanks to all our Patreon contributors!

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

Please help support TOP through Patreon

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