The Online Photographer

Look Up

On Sunday I posted all of your comments to Friday's Teaching in Real Time post, which contained many good "how-to" book recommendations. This morning I heard from the reader who sent me the original question, Peter F., who says "thank you all for these suggestions. The generosity of TOP's brain trust/readership is a special thing."

A couple of thoughts about a comment or two. First, Frank Petronio recommended a book by Arthur Elgort. Arthur Elgort is a very experienced and highly accomplished NYC-based fashion photographer who got his big break from Mademoiselle magazine and became known for his work for Vogue. He was an important figure in the shift from classical fashion photography to a looser, more free, more "snapshot"-influenced style in the 1970s and '80s.

We give short shrift to model photography around here—for some unknown reason, despite my deliberate attempt to explore photography by trying out a wide variety of styles and ways of shooting over the years, I've never photographed a model. Anyway, Frank does shoot models, and he recommended Arthur's book Models Manual. He quipped, "Models Manual is probably the one fashion photography book that grumpy old bearded men should own. It's great!" I haven't seen it, but if you're interested in fashion and beauty photography you might want to see if you can find one. Amazon has a few, and if they're out you could check eBay or the online consortium of used booksellers, Abebooks.com.

If anyone has a recommendation of a how-to book about shooting models and fashion that's in print currently, let me know.

Things we take for granted
Second, Michael Matthew said something I think deserves underlining. Commenting on the "Weekend Reading: G. Steidl" post, he wrote, "Wonderful sky shot. Too few people look up."

You would think that among photographers this might go without saying, yet it's probably one of those assumptions that ought to be voiced every so often. When I was 13, I went to Summer camp in Montana. We spent three weeks in camp and went on three week-long camping trips, and during all six weeks we went on numerous hikes in the mountains. The counselors taught us that when walking in the woods we should look down only every third step—or, on rocky trails where the footing was treacherous, look up every third step. They said it was how woodland Indians walked in the woods, which was probably bullsh*t. They would even correct us when they caught us walking along staring at our feet or the path in front of us. I got scolded several times for looking down, got into the habit of looking up, and have remembered the advice and followed the practice ever since.

It takes an effort to look up; it takes an effort to look around. You have to move your head. You have to get used to lifting your eyes. Seeing does involve looking, and while we assume that looking around is something that comes naturally, it isn't. We assume everyone does it, but that's not so. Most of the time people are looking only at what they need to see or not even paying attention.

Thanks to Michael for mentioning it. It's a good thing to remember.

Mike
(Thanks to Frank and Michael)

Original contents copyright 2017 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.

Look here
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Dennis Mook: "Ask any police officer or deputy where he or she is looking while patrolling. The answer should be 'everywhere.' As a police chief, I was never hard on my officers when they would have minor vehicle accidents, as I expected them to look, not only where they were driving, but everywhere else as well, including up. If they weren't, they weren't doing their job.

"When I was a young patrol officer 43 years ago, there was only you and the two-way radio in the vehicle. Then they started putting in AM-FM radios. Then came officers wearing pagers. Then came mobile phones. All distractions from paying attention to 'everywhere.' Distractions. Funny thing about being taught to look everywhere. It has translated nicely in to keen observation for my photography as well. Often, when walking or traveling with others, I see many things they never see. Old habits die hard."

Brian Taylor: "No, no, no. At least not if you've got dodgy feet/knees/hips and live in an area with steep hillsides, occasional sheer drops, uneven paths, boggy areas, random holes, and slippery mud. Nowadays my health and safety protocol stipulates that I never look up while walking along, and always stop before looking up, or around—with or without a camera."

Mike replies: The late Alan Watts had a fake Latinism he used in footnotes: "mod. auct.," which he claimed meant something like "modus auctorus" (perhaps a Latin scholar can correct that)—anyway, according to him it meant "modified by author." Always seemed to me like a good general rule for, um, well, rules—modify 'em to suit yourself. I'm sure you know best!

Richard Parkin: "Looking up is also rewarding in cities."

hugh crawford: "Looking up and down is good advice, but if you don't turn around and look back you are missing half of your surroundings. Also, if you are walking in NYC, remember that NYC pedestrian traffic is somewhat reminiscent of NASCAR and avoid sudden changes in velocity or direction. Locals will give anyone holding a camera a wide berth but tourists will crash right into you."

The Kid in the Picture

You remember the famous Diane Arbus photograph I posted the other day under the "Random Excellence" rubric. (That just means something I encountered randomly, that's all—in this case it was in an auction listing, as I mentioned.) Well, turns out one of our readers, Benjamin Marks, knows the guy in the picture! His name is Colin Wood and he's an insurance salesman in California, married with two kids.

I'll turn it over to Ben:

"I started taking pictures and developing my own film in college back in the mid-1980s. Think: Pentax K1000 and a 50mm ƒ/1.7 lens, Tri-X and the Sprint chemistry that was a staple of college darkrooms in those days. One of my friends was an older student, Colin Wood, who was completing college later than most of us. At some point after our paths crossed, he asked me whether I knew the Diane Arbus photograph of the kid holding the hand grenade. I said I did, and he said, 'Well, that's me.' He and I 'collaborated' on a bunch of projects...mostly what I call now 'college kids messing around with cameras.' Over the years, we talked about the Arbus picture and he said that he had been in contact with Doon, the executor of Arbus' estate, and had generally been met with hostility or indifference when he asserted his identity as the kid in the picture. Nevertheless, I believe Colin's story. For what it is worth, it was covered in an SFGate article in 2003.

Colin Wood by Benjamin Marks, 1980s

"I spoke to Colin yesterday and explained that I wanted to send a picture or two of him from the 1980s to you and he said he was fine with it. Colin is a colorful, interesting, and thoughtful guy. Here are a couple of pictures of Colin when he was in his late twenties. I can see the resemblance to the grenade-kid photographs. He looks more or less the same today, except with grey hair and kids of his own.

Photo by Benjamin Marks

"These photos did take a little digging in my 'archives' (scare quotes to denote a glancing relationship only with the level of organization that the word 'archives' implies). Along the way, I looked at a number of contact sheets that I haven't inspected in years. There ought to be an adjective specific to the kind of memory-immersion that review of old contact sheets causes. I suspect German has a sixteen-syllable compound word for it. This, in turn led to setting up a film scanner for the first time since I bought my current computer and scanning pictures of friends to whom I haven't spoken in years. That is a separate set of tangents, though.

"Another thing that struck me was how many separate subjects I crammed into one 36-exposure roll, and how few photographs I devoted to each subject.  Often two pictures that I remember as significant at the time are of totally different subjects on the same roll of film."

Ben also said, "My sense is that Arbus didn't go in for model releases in the 1960s when the picture was taken and that the legal landscape has changed significantly, particularly with the rights to children and the sale prices of Arbus' work, although I have no direct evidence of this." Actually, she wouldn't have needed a model release, then or now—art photographs, like news and editorial pictures, don't require model releases, even if the resulting artworks are traded for lots of money. I don't know much more about this than Ben does, but my sense is that Diane Arbus was actually very good about giving prints to her subjects, if she knew who they were and where to find them, and if she had given a print to Colin it would have been worth quite a lot now—with that kind of provenance, most likely comfortably in excess of a million dollars. I hope that that knowledge doesn't grate on Colin!

As far as Doon Arbus is concerned, again I know nothing specific, but I'll just hazard a guess that she's probably fielded quite a few calls over the years from people asserting some claim or another over various photographs of her mother's. It's just a guess, but I'll bet many of those people were not, shall we say, well-grounded individuals.  :-)  So perhaps her attitude should be forgiven until we know more about her feelings about it.

Ben concluded, "I hope this is an interesting data point about a famous-mostly-to-photographers picture. I have ambivalent feelings about Arbus—I find her work deeply affecting, and there is no doubt that she had a great eye (I think the contact print you posted, which is also in the SFGate article, demonstrates this), but her attraction to the marginal (and then my attraction to the marginal) never sits entirely comfortably with me. That is part of her value, I think, as a photographer—to make the viewer confront his own discomfort. I put Sally Mann in the same box for the purposes of my own moral compass."

I don't think it's a picture that's famous only to photographers. The book is, after all, one of the great photographic bestsellers in the whole history of American photography, and that photograph is among her most recognized. The ambivalence Ben mentions is part of her work and part of her genius. Sally Mann once told me she likes to "tweak peoples' tails," which she certainly did. The difference is that various commentators have felt that Diane had some psychological issues that were being worked out in her pictures—that's the subject of endless speculation now, sometimes even at book length. Diane's psyche belongs to the ages now, of course. Like her photographs.

We've talked about the subject of two others before, Anderson Cooper as a baby and the famous twins immortalized in the movie "The Shining." How interesting to hear about the subject of another of them. Many thanks to Ben and, indirectly, to Colin.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 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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Dave Kee: "I just read New York Magazine's 2016 article 'Was Diane Arbus the Most Radical Photographer of the 20th Century?' All I can say is: wow."

James Rhem: "I could go on and on and on about the Arbus estate. It's not surprising Colin was met with hostility. Ask any scholar who's tried to write on Arbus what the estate is like."

The End of 'Popular Photography'

E-publishing pioneer Bonnier Corp. announced in an email to employees that the March/April 2017 paper issue of Popular Photography magazine will be the last, and that the websites for Pop Photo—and for American Photo, which went digital-only in 2015—will no longer be updated.

American Photo is the descendant of American Photographer, and Popular Photography is the descendant of both the original Popular Photography and Modern Photography magazines, once the twin juggernauts of the mainstream photo titles in English. I wish someone who knows the whole Modern-Pop drama would set it down for the historical record, but what I heard back in the day was that Modern acquired Pop, and that most of the Pop staff was let go and replaced by Modern staffers, but that the name Popular Photography was retained because it was better known. I can't put a date on that merger now. Many of the people who could tell the story in detail are gone now.

I also heard that for a while after the subscriber bases were merged, the combined circulation of the two magazines, and hence of the single combined survivor, exceeded one million—the only case of a photography magazine in North America ever hitting that magic number.

I always identify Popular Photography with Herbert (Burt) Keppler and Jason Schneider, longtime editorial director (and lead columnist) and editor-in-chief, respectively, of the post-merger magazine. Burt died in 2008; maybe Jason will put on his reporter's hat and set down the history for posterity. Or maybe Jim Hughes knows.

The magazine's bread-and-butter were the dozens of pages of ads from discounters and mail-order retailers in the back of the magazine. Modern Photography and Popular Photography—again, I can't untangle the threads—gradually made such enterprises respectable, by setting out strict ethical guidelines for any company that wanted to advertise, ending many of the sleazier practices of early mail-order joints and eventually helping to inspire the growth of the twin behemoths of today, B&H Photo and Adorama. Many photographers back in the last century subscribed to Shutterbug for the classified ads and used equipment sales listings, and Pop for the ad pages of new discount equipment.

Of course the Internet has displaced much of the demand for both the editorial and the advertising content of the old magazines. Sic transit, etc.

By the bye, when I was editor of Photo Techniques I had lunch with the daughter of the photographer who took the picture of the bathing beauty on Pop's very first cover. She brought along a copy of the issue and her father's notes about his lighting setup for the picture. Shame on me, I don't recall either of their names now.

All told, Popular Photography, which first published in May 1937, had a continuous run of just short of 80 years. That's quite a remarkable accomplishment in the magazine business, any way you look at it.

No word that I've heard on the circulation number of the magazine at the end.

Mike

P.S. There's an excellent compilation volume of the best 80 or so articles from the magazine's first 42 years that you can still find used. It contains, among many other tasty morsels, the best account I've read of the invention and history of Kodachrome.

Original contents copyright 2017 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.

TOP: in year 11 of 80
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Michael Perini: "Inevitable, but still sad. I got quite an education reading Keppler, Schneider, and Arthur Kramer. Alas, I'm part of the problem as I haven't subscribed in many years."

Mike replies: I suspect many of us are in that same boat.

Geoff Wittig: "Popular Photography unfortunately seems to have responded to the challenges and possibilities of the Internet age exactly like most big city newspapers. They progressively slashed content, reduced staff, shrank the scope of their reporting, and ended up with a pale shadow of what the magazine once was. I do understand the reality of the collapse of print advertising and the irresistible mandate to cut costs. But working ever harder to create compelling content that keeps readers coming back obviously offers more of a path forward than amputating limbs until none are left."

Dave Jenkins: "Mike, I am saddened to hear of Popular Photography's passing. It was born the same year as I, and I think maybe even the same month. Modern Photography was also born in 1937, by the way.

"I doubt that I would be a photographer today, and a professional at that, if not for the influence of  photo magazines over the years.

"In 1968 I was a teacher in a private high school in Miami, Florida.  We had a new baby, and of course I wanted to take pictures.  So I got a camera, just a basic 126 Instamatic. Then a few days later, I bought a photo magazine, the August, 1968 issue of Popular Photography. Soon there were more photo magazines and a better camera. And then a still better camera. And more photo magazines. A year later I had a Nikon F and a couple of lenses and was taking pictures of school activities and selling prints to the students.  That was the beginning. Over a career of nearly 50 years, photography magazines have instructed, inspired, and encouraged me. I even wrote an article about photo magazines some years ago, which I think I may have shared with you at the time. Here's an excerpt:

Any discussion of this kind has to begin with Popular Photography, because it's the basic photo magazine. And the most important thing to understand about Popular Photography is that it doesn't exist anymore. The most important thing to understand about Modern Photography, the officially dead rival of Popular Photography, is that it is alive and well and living in Pop Photo's editorial offices.  I once read a story by H.P. Lovecraft about a malevolent being which, in the guise of a woman, married a man. This being then swapped bodies with the man (without said man's permission), killed off its old body with the man's soul inside, and went its way. That's pretty much what happened when Popular Photography was taken over by almost the entire editorial staff of Modern. Then, as a new staff was about to make Modern a pretty good magazine, it was ruthlessly killed off.

The old Pop Photo was a broad-based, general interest photography magazine with good columnists, good discussion of issues, technical articles which delved into the why of photography as well as the how, and frequently a really good, in-depth profile of some outstanding photographer. The old Modern Photography had great, easy-to-understand lens tests, but it was always primarily a nuts-and-bolts magazine, and still is in its guise as Popular Photography. If you doubt what I'm saying, get some copies of both magazines from the late '70s or early '80s and make your own comparison. Which magazine is the present Pop Photo more like?  This is not to say there isn't good stuff in it from time to time.  But to me, the old Popular Photography was a far better, more well-rounded magazine and we are poorer for its loss.

"I still have two or three copies of the July, 1989 final issue of Modern Photography. I should get and keep a copy of the final issue of Pop Photo as well. Although in a real sense, the final issue of Popular Photography was the last one before the crew from Modern took over."

ashok: "Hi, I remember both Modern Photography and Popular Photography. they had a big following in India. I recall the only place I could see the latest and back issues was the U.S. Embassy library in Chennai, India. those issues were thick and loaded with mouth-watering adverts for cameras and lenses. I am talking mid-1980s back when I was in college and could not afford any of the goodies in the magazines. As you mentioned, I still remember the articles by Keppler after so many years."

christer almqvist: "One of the first photos I ever got published was in Pop Photo June 1957. I was 18 at the time and had just finished college in Sweden. The picture was lousy but the cheque for US$5.00 was much admired by my friends."

Tom R. Halfhill: "Sad news. My photography education came mainly from reading Popular Photography as a teenager. In our barn, I found a huge pile of old issues going back to the 1940s. (My father was a longtime subscriber.) After reading them from the 1940s to the 1970s, I became a subscriber myself—and still am.

"Reading those old magazines not only taught me about photography but also much about the history of photography. Although I think Pop Photo peaked in the 1960s to 1980s, I still found it worthwhile for the low subscription price.

"In the 1980s and 1990s, I was fortunate to make friends with Larry White, a technical editor who moved from Modern Photography to Popular Photography. On one of my business trips to NYC, he gave me a tour of the offices and introduced me to some of the staff, which was exciting for me. He showed me the computer-controlled lens- and camera-testing equipment he designed, which was impressive. (I think he had a technical degree from RIT.) Larry was very knowledgeable and a good friend, and I was heartbroken when he died before his time several years ago.

"Coming soon after the closing of our two biggest camera shops in the San Francisco Bay Area, the demise of Pop Photo is yet another sign that times have changed. Not always for the better, in my opinion."

Lorenzo: "I was a contributing editor to Pop Photo for seven years. There was every attempt to do the right/best/profitable thing for both the magazine and the readers of the magazine. We knew our subscriber base, we knew our business model, and we knew the peril long, long, long before this day arrived. I now spend all day in front of monitors (and I love my job, ironically enough). So when I go home I prefer...dead trees. (Gee, these photo books are something, aren't they?) Too bad the monthlies are no longer. Popular Photography and American Photo served their audiences well. Many of us will miss them. Thanks to both for their contribution (and thanks to both for allowing me to be a part of their story/pictures/history)."

TOP Classic: 'The Trough of No Value'

I find this a particularly poignant picture. It's preserved in the George Grantham Bain Collection at the Library of Congress; I found it on page five of Michael L. Carlebach's excellent American Photojournalism Comes of Age (one of my favorite books about photography, by the way).

It shows the photography staff of the newspaper The New York World in 1909. Or at least we can assume the man on the left and the man on the stairs are photographers, since they're shown with cameras. I direct your attention, as Michael Carlebach does, to the wall at the back of the room that also displays the clock. Know what those are? They're negatives—the newspaper's photographic archive. The hundreds of cases you see there in neatly-shelved rows contained thousands of negatives of newsworthy events, people, and places, collected at considerable expense by the paper and with great labor and sometimes risk by the men in the picture and their cohorts.

When the newspaper folded, all those negatives were thrown away.

Value fluctuates
People sometimes ask me what the best method of preserving their pictures is, and my somewhat flip but I believe trenchant answer is, "be famous." One of the problems of historical preservation is that people only tend to preserve things that are valuable. And the problem with that is that value fluctuates over time.

Most of you are computer users. Ever thrown away a perfectly good computer simply because it was old and worth nothing? Early computers are beginning to be collectible even now, but what do you think a pristine, mint-condition, working Apple 128k Macintosh, vintage 1984, will be worth in, say, 2109, or 2209? It doesn't take a great leap of imagination to think of such a thing being worth the equivalent of tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. But I threw one away once.

The problem is that many kinds of objects go through a period in their potential lifespans when they don't "pencil out"—they're not worth keeping or preserving because they're not worth any money. Here's an approximate graph of the typical value of many types of objects. The x-axis is time and the y-axis is value; the horizontal line is $0.

For some objects, what pertains would more accurately be called a trough of low value, not no value—remaindered photo books and certain old cameras come to mind—because they never actually quite reach zero value. But other objects might accurately be graphed considerably below the $0 line—those would be things that are worth nothing but that require maintenance, expense, or storage space to keep and preserve. My great-grandfather's sailboat, for instance—a gorgeous 29-foot sloop made of cedar and mahogany that was originally built for Civil War General Lew Wallace, the author of Ben-Hur. It's currently being stored at considerable annual expense by a cousin who's into historic preservation, but it's worth no money in its present unrestored condition. Graphed, I imagine it would fall well below the $0 line.

My favorite example of the Trough of No Value comes from a former acquaintance whose back room had a high, narrow shelf running all the way around it, about a foot below the ceiling. Arrayed on the shelf were dozens of kids' lunchboxes from the 1950s and '60s. He told me that not only are such lunchboxes collectible now, but that they're actually fairly hard to find. Time was, of course, when most every schoolkid had a little metal lunchbox (poor kids "brown-bagged it"). But the kids grew up, the school lunch program got started, and who wanted to keep old lunchboxes around? They weren't useful any more. They weren't worth anything. And, since they were almost all used for their intended purpose, many were damaged or worn by use (I vaguely remember owning one that was rusty and had a dent). People naturally threw them away. The "trough of no value" for lunchboxes was long and harsh. That's why they're not so common today as you might guess—because not that many made it through the trough. (By the way, the inset photo is a corner of Allen Woodall's Lunchbox Museum in Columbus, Georgia.)

Even great treasures can go through a trough of no value, too. Consider that Vincent Van Gogh used to trade finished paintings for new tubes of paint—and the art supplies merchant was doing him a favor because he took pity on him. The paintings were worthless at the time.

Craftsmanship is a preservation method
That's why "being famous" is a great way to preserve your work—because value is the #1 preservative for old objects. But want to know another? Craftsmanship. One of the great hazards of survival through time is the lack of a market and a lack of trade value, but another is simply shoddiness. (I have to chuckle whenever I read yet another description of American frontier log cabins as having been well crafted or sturdily or beautifully built. The much more likely truth is that 99.9% of frontier log cabins were horribly built—it's just that all of those fell down. The few that have survived intact were the ones that were well made. That doesn't mean all of them were.) It's not just that things that are poorly made deteriorate more readily, it's also that they signal their own worthlessness. Or, in the case of an archive of photos, they might actually hide their own worth. I have in mind making a book of my best 35mm black-and-white pictures, for instance, and I have it in my head which pictures would be included. But if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, nobody else will ever be able to extract that book out of the great mass of my hither-and-yon mess of negatives.

Sometimes, even when something has no monetary value, people will keep it just because it seems like it's too beautiful to waste. The expression people use is one I'm sure will sound familiar to you: "it seems a shame to throw it away." Well, why should it seem a shame? It's because people also value what other people value, and if something is beautifully made and carefully encased—honored, you might say—then it projects or advertises its own value: it will be obvious to people who come across it that someone—at least the person who made it!—valued it at one time, so maybe they should value it, too. Book dealers are very familiar with this, because of the frequency with which members of the public bring in beautifully bound but worthless books. (The corollary must also be true, that very valuable books are thoughtlessly discarded all the time because they don't look valuable. But that doesn't bear thinking about.)

If your work is beautifully printed and matted and housed in a clamshell box or a custom album, I think it's more likely to project value, less likely to be discarded, and more likely to make it to the far side of the dreaded Trough of No Value. Something to think about, huh?

Mike
(Graph by James Bishop)

[Ed. Note: This post was originally published eight years and a few days ago.

If you're interested in the subject of how objects survive, I can recommend a quirky but highly imaginative little book called The Same Ax, Twice by Howard Mansfield. The title came from an old farmer Howard met who boasted that he had used the same ax his whole life. Howard asked him if he hadn't ever had to replace the handle, and the farmer answered yes, the handle had been replaced three times, and the head had been replaced twice, but it was the same old ax.

The book is rather a wild ride, with a very expansive interpretation of the concept of "restoration," but it's also quite memorable.]

Original contents copyright 2009 and 2017 by Michael C. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Gary: "When I'm not taking photographs I make and restore furniture. The antique furniture market is currently struggling in a 'double trough.' After peaking in the 1990s it has been steadily falling in value for nearly twenty years. Those very few pieces of antique furniture that can genuinely be described as 'museum quality' continue to set record auction prices, but the vast majority just grinds down in value year after year.

"Some pundits are starting to think the unthinkable, that antique furniture prices may NEVER recover. They point to the fact that in the West we're living in smaller urban spaces that struggle to accommodate the larger scale of many antiques. And they suggest that 'hygiene' factors are also at work, in a world of BMW and iPhone perfection we won't now tolerate the wonky legs, sticking drawers, and general mustiness that characterises antiques.

"Whatever the reasons, here in the UK I regularly see mid-market antique furniture that is now so cheap it is being broken up and the mahogany, walnut, and rosewood components sold to hobbyist furniture makers and luthiers."

Mike replies: That's odd and sad. I have five antique pieces of furniture, three of them family hand-me-downs, and I know the approximate provenance of four of them. And about "iPhone/BMW perfectionism," the two things I bought most recently were both reclaimed...one a table made from an old cast-iron industrial stand (original purpose unknown), and one a stool/end-table that is basically a giant oblong chunk of barn beam, refinished. It came from Montana. Perfect, it is not! And yet for what I wanted where I have it it's...well, perfect.

William Tyler: "The trough of low value is essential to the later high value. If all those old lunchboxes had been saved, none would be worth much today. The trough creates scarcity, an important component of value. The scarcity principle is also the reason for limited editions."

The World's Best Photography Magazine

Who were these people? A snapshot from an old album
left out for the trash collector

Last week almost all the posts here were about equipment—"gear"—and a fair number of people complained. Two readers stomped off in a huff over it, one telling me that I was just a "click baiter" and the other opining that the heyday of blogs is over.

Heh. Like I ever cared about blogs. I like photography; blogging is just how I happen to be talking about it now. First it was being a student, then it was being a teacher, then it was writing magazine articles, then it was writing multiple columns for a variety of outlets; for a short time it was the PDML and the LUG and other forums; now it's TOP. Some of those outlets worked better than others, but it's all the same. You need a window to the World. Photography's mine.

If you want more about photography...
I keep saying this, and I say it jokingly, but I'm serious: the New York Times is "the World's Best Photography Magazine." It's very much worth subscribing to it just for the photographic content, and I mean it. Its photography content across many different categories and sections is (small-"c") catholic and encompassing, cultural and historical, richly visual. It covers news and obituaries, profiles photographers, reviews museum shows and galleries and books, presents a wide range of portfolios, and regularly takes a deep look at a very wide range of cultural stories related to photography or inspired by it.

You do have to poke around to find it all, though. The Lens Blog is the main place for portfolios, but photography content is here and there in the newspaper and website and magazine. Pops up in all kinds of ways in all kinds of places.

The Internet is awash in gear sites, where we happily natter on about shot noise and the forensics of the lens image and whether the X-trans sensor is or is not free of moiré. As a counterbalance—because its content is not similarly mirrored far and wide—the Times is as valuable as any random ten of these.

Case in point: the recent article "Love and Black Lives, in Pictures Found on a Brooklyn Street." (Copy that and Google it.) A reporter in Brooklyn finds an old photo album set out for the trash collectors. She takes it home, and gets curious about the people in it and their lives. The editors give her the go-ahead and let her have a researcher and a photographer. And gradually, she uncovers the story—along the way, honoring the lives of the deceased people in the photo album and, by extension, others, not pictured, like them. It's a lovely article that I thoroughly enjoyed, and you really shouldn't miss it. Illumines brilliantly (and compassionately, and nostalgically, and in proper historical context) one of the most important of photography's many prismatic facets. You can't get that from some overlong YouTube video of an Asian teenager wandering city streets taking random snapshots with a very expensive camera. You can't get it from me, either.

'Little England': Romford Market, in Havering, in operation since A.D. 1247.
Photo by Andrew Tesla for the New York Times.

And of course there is original photojournalism, too, which is getting as rare as endangered tigers. For example—and this really is just a random example, it happens be to be what I was reading just now, over my coffee—Andrew Testa's pictures for the article "In a Pro-'Brexit' Corner of Britain, Impatience to Be Done With It." Nothing particularly distinguished about these in particular, but they are characteristic, which is to say excellent, and it's good to leaven a diet heavy in found pictures and demotic amateurishness with some conscious photojournalism once in a while—one seasoned photographer doing his best to illustrate a particular story with deliberately honest photographs.

People complain when I link to content at the Times, because they don't subscribe and they sometimes can't get to the link. So then subscribe. It's worth it. It's something you should do. You should do it.

It's the World's Best Photography Magazine. I don't know a better way to say it.

And there's very little about gear.

Back to TOP
Back here at home again, a word about click "baiting": actually, what helps in blogging is not necessarily links, but traffic. Talking about gear improves traffic. Last week, with the gear posts, traffic was up an average of 2,000 page views a day over the week before, and one post drew 248 comments (if you include the "Featured" ones). If I talk about photographs all this week, traffic will go down. That's the way it is. The more traffic, the more your 'umble blogger will earn. It's not the links per se. It's the numbers.

And I've never been a hound for traffic, either. If I were only interested in traffic—or click-throughs, or SEO, or viral attention, or whatever (right now, YouTube is the hot way of making money anyway)—I could do a much better job optimizing it.

But for me those aren't the most important things. I like photography. It's fantastic that I can make a living talking about it, but I made a living as a magazine editor too, and a teacher before that, and I'm sure there are more efficient ways to get wealthy than doing this. It's thinking about and talking about photography that I enjoy. You have to engage with something in your life—something to really get into and think about. Something to get to grips with. Photography is one of the things I picked.

In any event, I don't mind gear posts. I like cameras.  :-)

Mike
(Thanks to Ken Tanaka)

Original contents copyright 2017 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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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Dalen Muster: "Word."

Pak Ming Wan: "Hear, hear. I was one of the few who probably turned off last week from your site when you went into gear mode...I especially enjoy the photo side of this site."

Chas: "I would like to see (slightly) more gear-oriented posts. Not the tech detail stuff...more the user opinion...what is it like to own and use; does it feel good in the hand, how is the viewfinder in daylight, is focus, colour rendition, contrast, noise suppression etc...'good enough' for it's purpose, how do the files print...again, not the tech details but real world opinion from a person with experience!"

David Babsky: "Thank you. I subscribed."

Nick Cutler (partial comment): "Agree wholeheartedly about the NYT. In England our equivalent is The Guardian newspaper, with excellent, long, in-depth articles and photography. The print edition carries a full-sized center spread photograph every day; some of them are simply stunning."

John Gillooly: "I came across that NYT story over the weekend and shared it with a few folks I knew would be interested. Really is a great all-around story based on the photography. It is also a reminder of how important it is to provide information on your prints. With no information and context, the people become ghosts. Knowing something about who these people were, what they did and why, gives the photos life." 

Robin Harrison: "Well...that was most peculiar, unnerving even. I've been reading TOP since day one, but I never expected to see a photo of Romford Market. That Uppercut is where my father used to take me to have my hair cut. My mother still lives half a mile away from where this was shot. What interest could The New York Times possibly have in this place? Just goes to show how easy it is to ignore the significance and photographic potential of what is under one's nose."

Robin Dreyer: "Mike, I've been reading TOP since the beginning and for a while I thought your characterization of the Times was meant in a joking way. Then I really started paying attention to the photographic content and I realized that you were not joking and, furthermore, that you are probably right in this assessment. I have always eked out what I can from the Times without paying for it, but recent events have caused me to remember how incredibly important journalism is to our society, and I decided I needed to do a little more to support it. The Times hires a lot of good journalists so I finally subscribed. And now, along with everything else, I love having unfettered access to all of their photographic content."

Brian Taylor: "Its a remarkable tribute to TOP's format that those 248 comments were fun to read! I can't remember ever reading that many comments elsewhere! On other sources, NYT may be good but I've had to cut down on subs, and am in the U.K, so would like to put in another word for the Guardian, whose previous editor Allen Rusbridger was a photography enthusiast. They still have very good coverage. Today's feature, for example, is Richard Page on 'Going to the Dogs, the Face of Modern Spain.'"

Engage

When last we were talking about books, RubyT mentioned that she used to read 300 books a year. That's well into outlier territory, it seems to me. While phenoms, speed readers, invalids or the truly obsessed might log more than that, I would guess 300 books is quite a few more books than most people read.

So then posit a 70-year adult reading life, again verging into outlier territory.

That's 21,000 books.

Total. In a lifetime.

Sounds like a lot.

Except:

There are ~300,000 new and revised titles published in the United States and another ~180,000 in the United Kingdom, not to mention ~28,000 in Australia, every year. That's just the three leading English-speaking countries. Worldwide the estimate is 2,200,000 titles annually. Most of the non-English titles never make it to translation. Even if you assume that only 5% of all those titles in English reach any level of worthiness (there's a lot of cynical bookstore fodder, specialty titles, children's books, lowest-common-denominator entertainment, and just plain junk that gets published), that's still more titles published in the three leading English-speaking countries every year than our hypothetical heavy reader will be able to read in a lifetime.

Next, add in even just the very best of all the books published in the 542 years since Caxton published Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, the first book printed in English using moveable metal type, in 1475. How many is that? I have no idea, but it's more than a heap.

Further, I have no idea how many foreign-language books are translated into English every year. But if we were to assume that 1% of books published in other languages make it into English, that's another 16,000+ books every year for you to miss most of.

Even if you read 300 books a year—I hit about 65 in a good year, and 2016 was not a good reading year for me—you can't begin to survey more than tiny smattering of all the worthy books that exist.

What to do?

The bull-by-the-horns, brute-force solution might seem appealing: Work at it harder! Devote more time! Read more books!

But that's like buying more lottery tickets. In terms of consuming what's available to read, it increases your exposure to the set of "all books in English" so infinitesimally that it's hardly worth the effort. If you want to read more because you enjoy it or want to learn more, great, but you're still only dipping a toe into the ocean.

I'd like to suggest an alternative: do the exact opposite. Read fewer books, but engage with reading more.

(Credit where credit is due: I got this idea from my friend Jim Schley, one day when the two of use were wandering the musty corridors of a vast used bookstore.)

Jim in the poetry section of the bookstore where we talked about this idea

Read fewer books, but pick them more carefully and read them more carefully; "read around" them, by reading related books, by the same author or different authors or literary critics; own multiple editions, with different introductions and apparatus; learn about the genre, the tradition, the author's influences and ideas; and so forth. Whatever makes the experience of the book richer and fuller for you.

Don't consume more, in other words; consume better.

Naturally I'm not saying you should do this with every book you read, or every author, of course. But if you really engage with one or two authors, two or three books a year, they "become yours" in a way books don't tend to do if you just rush through one to get to the next. The ones you engage with act as stand-ins for all those books you'll never read, all those authors you'll never sample, all those experiences you'll never have. If you can't experience every book, at least you can fully enjoy a few of the books you do experience.

Yikes
Well, I started out meaning to relate this idea to experiencing photography and dealing with the unending digital tsunami—everything above this paragraph was just the introduction—but I see this is already too long to be a blog post and I haven't even gotten there yet. Hmm, maybe writing books, "writing long," is not such a good idea for me after all! At any rate, as part of the audience for photography and photographers, we can't possibly see more than a tiny, tiny smattering of all the photographs that are available for us to see. Engagement is the best strategy, I think, to make our experience of the photography we do get to see richer and more satisfying. But how we would go about that is going to have to be a topic for another day.

I'm sure you have probably already figured out your favorite ways of engaging with work you like—maybe you could tell me!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 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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David Miller: "Whew!"

mike plews: "Lots of books on becoming a better writer but not many on becoming a better reader. This one is great, highly recommended."

Ernie Van Veen: "To be fair, most of those 2.2 million would be cookbooks. No, really."

Mike replies: Made me laugh. My ex-girlfriend Sara loved cookbooks, had lots of them, and often read recipes in bed before turning in. She was a fine cook, I thought. But I'd say only half the 2.2 million are cookbooks—the other half would be diet books.  :-)

rusty: "Engaging with work (photos and photographers) I like comes through the filter of this and a few other worthy blogs: Lenscratch, Don't Take Pictures, LuLa and some others found through the above."

Marvin G. Van Drunen: "Does listening to audio books count as reading? My commute from home to office and back takes about 80 minutes per day five days a week, 50 weeks per year. I think that works out to 333.3 hours per year. I started, several years ago, to use that time to listen to books, mostly history and biography. The last three titles I have listened to are: Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream by Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Fall of Berlin, 1945, by Anthony Beever, and The Romanovs by Simon Sebag Montefiore. I'm currently listening to Benjamin Franklin, An American Life by Walter Isaacson. I really have learned a great deal over these years and I think that I am using my commuting time wisely. I actually look forward to the time spent. So, I'm not sure if this counts as reading, but I do love the experience."

Mike replies: Not sure if you're asking me, but I'd say heck yeah, that's reading. And it sounds wonderful, too. Sounds like you have a great commute. And by the way, a bookseller I respected once told me that the Walter Isaacson book you're listening to now was the best book he'd ever read.

Tom Hassler: "'Don't consume more, consume better'—excellent words to live by in all facets of life!"

Dennis: "Life is too short to drink bad wine. Actually, I gave up on the idea of being anything remotely like a wine connoisseur. I read a bunch about wines, started learning about regions, visited specialty shops, but the vast amount of wine out there coupled with the fact that I really don't drink much wine (I just enjoy it when I do drink it) made me realize I'm never going to try enough of it to develop a sophisticated appreciation. I know of people who discover they really like a particular wine enough to buy a couple cases of it. I might go through a case or two a year (and that's sharing with company). I joined a wine club, but quit after three months when I'd stockpiled enough for the next year. So I ask for recommendations. I can tell someone at the shop what I'm looking for and get a pretty good bottle.

"With photography, it's less a pull method than a push method—I'm not looking for recommendations, but there are people providing them. And it's quick and cheap to sample someone's work before committing to buying a photo book."

Jaap: "The book 'problem' multiplies when you are multilingual."

RubyT: "After I got over being startled to see my name in the first sentence, I realized this was the perfect opening to thank you for recommending Blue Highways, which I am now reading. I bought through your links and the seller never even mentioned the book had been signed by the author. I have a special box for inscribed books—important things are in the basement because we get windstorms here. It's one of many books you have recommended that I have enjoyed. I have a 'fast processor' (I'm sure this is not what they would have called it when I was a child), something I did not know existed until my children were in school and were tested. Two of them have it, two of them do not. It's a tremendous advantage in terms of being able to read quickly and still comprehend well. Perhaps less of an advantage in that it leads to poor study habits if you can finish all the homework in school and spend all your free time reading. I feel lucky to have been an introverted child whose parents wouldn't pay for cable TV. Back then I had so much free time, and I spent most of it reading. I also agree with your point today. Now that I have responsibilities in life I am much more selective. I used to obsessively finish every book, even if I didn't like it. I won't do that now, I don't want to sacrifice time for something that doesn't fully capture me."

David Dyer-Bennet: "I certainly read a lot, but it's mostly re-reads. When I have the energy to engage with something new, I usually end up using it to make something (well, either that, or go lie down until the feeling passes). I logged a bit under 100 new books for 2016—but that doesn't include re-reads a lot of the time, so the total number is five or six times that. At any given moment I have a book or two going on paper and a book going on my phone (my primary electronic reading device)." 

Paul: "The flip side of too many books appearing in print is the problem of really good books being out of print or being simply hard to find. There are a few authors whose books I relish and I feel fortunate in having found them early enough to get copies of everything they wrote, but I think it's a shame that others either can't find them (certainly not in bookstores) or just aren't aware of them. I've long wished that I could find a resource where people share their favorite authors, so that we could identify others with overlapping tastes, and then sample their other favorites. That might help address the frustration I have that there are books I'd love to read but just don't know about them."

Mike replies: There's always NYRB Classics. That's tip o' the iceberg, of course, and doesn't contradict what you say.

The TIME Magazine Cover Controversy

Speaking of the States of America, as I was in the "Blog Notes" post below, did TIME magazine subtly either a.) give Trump devil's horns using the "M" in its name or b.) make a sly visual reference to an historical cover of Adolf Hitler on purpose?

Both, I'd wager; creative work is usually more intentional than casual observers give it credit for being. Alex Cooke, who wrote a commentary on the issue at Fstoppers, says the Internet is very split over this. "I spoke to several industry associates," Alex writes, "and surprisingly, no one was lukewarm; they either saw the resemblance in the extreme or saw nothing at all."

Mike
(Thanks to Aaron Greenman)

Original contents copyright 2016 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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Barbara Haig: "Hi Mike—here's an interesting take on the photo: 'Why Time's Trump Cover Is a Subversive Work of Political Art,' at Forward."

Get the Heck Out!

The "Photography and Procrastination" post the other day was popular and got a lot of attention. I was elaborating on Jay Maisel's idea of "shoot it now."

But there's a parallel or complementary idea that goes along with this, and it's this: get out there, and good things will happen. When you get equipped for going out photographing, and go put yourself in one of the situations that tend to make you happy when you've got a camera in your hand, you'll get something.

Even if you don't know what it's going to be.

You don't necessarily need a plan. Your don't need an idea. Just get out.

There's an idea afoot recently that creativity benefits from being treated like work. I have a couple of quotes taped to my computer: "A man may write at any time if he will set himself doggedly to it," which is Dr. Johnson quoted by Boswell; and the characteristically more pithy "Do your work," which is a quote from David Vestal. Sometimes, just slogging along and grinding it out will lead to creativity and positive accomplishment. The only essay that I ever read that was worth a damn as guidance for writers is a thing called "The Getaway Car" in the book This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett. In it, she points out that if you want to be a writer, the very first thing you need to be able to do, the essential requirement, is to sit down and write for an hour a day for thirty days straight. If you can't do that, you're not going to get there. No matter how much you study and prepare.

These things translate to: get going. Get out there even when you don't feel like it.

Do your work.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Ralph Gibson for Camera and Darkroom many years ago, in Manhattan. Ralph might need an introduction to younger photographers, but probably not to older ones. He's a fine (I mean outstanding) art photographer with a distinctive high-contrast B&W 35mm style ("I like a negative that fights back," he told me), so identified with Leica that Leica put out a special-edition camera as a tribute to him. In his darkroom he printed with an old Leitz enlarger that happened to be the very same enlarger on which Robert Frank, a mentor and friend of Ralph's, printed the original repro prints for the book The Americans.

Photographer unknown—self portrait, maybe?—Ralph Gibson
in his younger years

Later we went out, and I accompanied him to lunch. Ralph took along a Leica M6 that had a braided leather lanyard as a strap, and only a 90mm Elmarit. As we ate lunch—baskets of steamed vegetables at a café called the NoHo Star—can you tell this visit made an impression on me?—I asked Ralph what he was planning to shoot.

Alas, I cannot remember exact quotes; my mind doesn't work that way and I never trained it to, more's the pity. But he said something like, "I've been doing this long enough that I know that whenever I get out and start looking around, I'll get something. I don't know what, but I'll come back with some good pictures."

(Sorry to paraphrase. That was the gist.)

By the way, I made no impression on Ralph. The next time I ran into him, he didn't remember me.

Anyway, I used to say that photography was like jogging. There's no such thing as "quality time" with jogging. It's more like just...time. Get out and put in the miles and it'll give back. You'll get benefit back out of it. (The trouble with the analogy is that it provokes runners to start arguing the fine points of training, and believe me, it's better to not go there.)

Photographing is like that, though. Get out of the house with a camera. Be playful; be open-minded; look around; try stuff. You'll find something.

Always a caveat
I suppose I ought to add that you still have to be perceptive about what situations work for you. I like to photograph people and animals best—something happening—and I'm happiest doing portraits. I'm always aware that when I just go for a walk and photograph found scenes that it gives me a sort of nagging dissatisfaction. It's because I'm not shooting what I really want to shoot. I'm only shooting what's available to me. To me, lots of photographs of landscapes and streetscapes feel like settings—that is, they're like a stage with no actors on it. I yearn to see people there somehow. I have a friend who feels the opposite. He likes arrangements of objects and static scenes, and the presence of humans "ruins" pictures for him. I'll wait for a person to appear in a shot; he'll wait for the people to leave.

We're all different, and respond differently to different shooting opportunities. Nobody will tell you what you respond to and what makes you happy when you're photographing. You have to figure that out for yourself. Get out of the house, yes, but you do have to be smart, too, and put yourself in situations that are amenable to your vision. Target-rich environments, in the jargon of the Gulf War.

We can't always do that. But in general the rule holds—the more you get out there, the more likely you are to find good photographs. So get the heck out there!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 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:

Stan B.: "It really is like fishing, you go out where you hope they're biting with no guarantee whatsoever. And often, you just end up buying a burger on your way home (i.e., you sit yourself down and peruse someone else's work to fill the void of coming home empty-handed). Fate doesn't care how well prepared you are, how well studied, well equipped, or sincere you are—sometimes the moment comes on your way to get a coffee on the corner during break. Did you get it? Or did you think it would happen only when you deemed it to? Sometimes the stars align, everything checks and you get your prize; it's an intermittent gambler's high, the most addictive there is."

Ed Kirkpatrick: "I am like your friend; I wait for the scene to revert to its natural state with no human sign. I am uncomfortable photographing people for some reason. I would like to do it more but it just doesn't come naturally to me. Landscapes, those I see by the dozens every day. As I travel around the country in my RV I get a chance to shoot most days. I don't even think about it any more, it just happens. I have learned that the best shots happen when you left your camera home so I always have mine with me. It's true, get out and do it."

Mike replies: As a coda to today's post, today I walked my two miles along my lakefront road—it is a wild, blustery Fall day, with roiling clouds and gusting winds and kaleidoscopic shafts of sunlight. Of course I saw an absolutely wonderful picture...created just for a few minutes by the shifting light on the far side of the lake. Not only did I not have a camera with me, but I don't even own a lens of the right focal length (about 135mm-e, I would estimate) to have shot it. Serves me right for not taking my own advice? I stood there and stared for as long as it lasted.

Jim Richardson: "Certainly there is much virtue in trusting to serendipity, which is also a kind of deeper faith, that the world has wonders waiting for you if you just go looking for them. (And that you will never know they exist if you don't go.) But there is danger there, too, that you'll be contented to just take whatever comes along, either in the way of the subjects that present themselves or (more perilously) in your willingness to settle for your first impressions. Too many of the stories photographers tell me about their pictures are shaggy-dog tales of lucky moments with a camera or curious twists of photographic fate.

"In the end I find myself more drawn to photographers who treat their craft like a great string quartet treats a work by Mozart, going back to it over and over again until the first flush of virtuosity gives way (perhaps after many years) to deep insight. It is not a relaxing way to work; it is fraught with anxiety. I don't recommend it to anyone who want their photography to be relaxing. But if you seek the satisfaction of building a body of work over decades, then I think you have to consider it."

James Weekes: "A friend of mine, when he was young, was assigned jobs around the house by his father. One day he complained, as young boys do, about the onerous tasks and how hard they were. His father answered, 'Just do it until you get used to it.' That quote is up in my office and reminds me to go photograph."

Struan: "If I go for a walk with the main aim of taking photographs I usually end up reinforcing my worst bad habits. My photographs, especially those more creative, break-a-mental-block photographs, benefit more from an open, empirical bent and an emphasis on the walk itself rather than how it may or may not be a productive investment. Forcing myself to take photographs is the worst way I know of getting out of a photographic rut. Art galleries, books, conversation, or going for a walk without a camera are usually better ways of reminding myself why I take photographs and why it is worth persevering even when things don't look promising."

Mike replies: Point taken, but I'm not necessarily advocating just taking a walk. If you have a plan, you still have to work it ("plan your work and work your plan"). Whatever it is you do, whatever your plan is, you still have to get out there and get to it. Your suggestions are good too, but I believe if you're stuck, the best way to oil the gears and unstick the machinery is to go work. Whatever that means for each of us.

Stephen Scharf: "While I wholeheartedly agree with the 'Get the heck out' sensibility, I don't agree with not needing a plan. All my best work resulted when I got the heck with a plan."

Gary Nylander: "As a daily newspaper photographer, I am often tasked with finding a picture or two for the next day's paper, sometimes for the front page. I call them enterprise photos. I don't have a real plan, but I have found the best pictures come from walking around somewhere, street, park or whatever. With my personal work, sometimes I just get out of the house and get in may car and drive and go and photograph what I can see. Usually I have a place in mind which I often return to time after time, seeing it under different lighting and seasonal conditions."

Wesley Liebenberg-Walker: "I have been using (or trying to use) those words—'Get Out There'—as a sort of mantra lately. I apply them to the act of shooting something, but also to the act of being outside, in the real world, rather than inside, on the couch, in the virtual one. It works, mostly. Now if only I could get off the computer...."

Joe Holmes: "My favorite quote along these lines is from Chuck Close: 'Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.'

"The full context: 'I always thought that inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. You sign onto a process and see where it takes you. You don't have to invent the wheel every day. Today you'll do what you did yesterday and tomorrow you'll do what you did today. Eventually you'll get somewhere. Every great idea I ever had grew out of work itself. If you’re going to wait a around for the clouds to open up and lightning to strike you in the brain you’re not going to make an awful lot of work.'"

Jumble-aya

Look what I opened the shades to see this morning!

Mouse over the image to see my reaction.

I also woke to find: 1.) a couple of great new comments on the "Camera Industry Peaked" post (check out the latest Featured Comments, especially the one from Steve Jacob followed by a serendipitous counterpoint from Barry Reid); 2.) that the Cubbies won Game 2 (Chicago, dry a tear, you rock and all is not yet lost); 3.) that there are two days of Nikon rebates happening on Nikon's three most desirable DSLRs, the D500, D750, and D810 ($500 off on the latter); and 4.) that Steve McCurry is vowing to do anything he can to help Sharbat Gula after her recent arrest in Pakistan.

I'm not saying I know what to think about any of this. The leaves aren't even off the trees yet, and I still need more autumn; we did sound a bit too much like a bunch of old GBGs (grumpy beardy guys) when waxing pessimistic about the state of photography; and the Cubs can't win the World Series, as it's a known Sign of the Apocalypse, not that there haven't been plenty of those recently. I rented a Nikon not long ago, the D7200, and a) was extremely impressed by it and b) decisively concluded I would most likely never again buy a DSLR. (That's just me, of course—your mileage may well vary.)

Finally, the whole notion of the fate of the subjects of famous pictures just vexes me. I have no idea what to think. As a person, Sharbat Gula of course deserves our concern. At the same time, allowing the subjects of famous pictures to become political symbols is at best arbitrary. We don't own our own image, and in some cases our image doesn't really stand for us. What are we to make of the fact that Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother became an overweight middle-class grandmother allegedly annoyed by the fact that she had never been paid for her famous picture? You can't argue that Lange was being exploitative, either, because Dorothea was working for the government and wasn't allowed to keep the rights to her own work—by law, work-for-hire for the U.S. government belongs to the American people. She never earned anything from Migrant Mother either, except indirectly. The "original print," insofar as there is one, is (or was—perhaps it's been removed for safekeeping and to prevent theft) in a bank of filing cabinets in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.

At the same time, the subjects of many photographs not only have a past, they have a future, too, and the future constantly changes the past. Meaning is never completely fixed or stable.

Sharbat Gula in her role as the Afghan Girl.
Her new role is to highlight Pakistan's stern stance toward its refugees.

I'm reminded of a commercial photographer I once worked for. One of his signature images, prominently displayed at the local lab, was of a goldfish in boldly-lit  blue-colored water with a vivid swirl of green. But when I went to work for him, I learned that the green swirl was colored oil and that the shoot had killed the poor fish—the disused aquarium sat neglected in a corner of the studio, the water half-evaporated, its glass sides caked with a goo of oil, algae, and mold. So is the picture a celebration of the vitality and beauty of the fish? What is our relationship to the subjects of our pictures? What about our duty?

Every photograph of life contains a little death, and every shining moment portends an indeterminate, inscrutable future. The meaning of that is chaotic and uncategorizable, a jumble and a mystery.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 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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Terry Letton: "Sharbat is not alone in her fate. She is but one of many refugees who are in the same predicament. They have no way of capturing the world's attention, unlike her. We can only hope that whatever response comes from this is not only to help her, but also the rest."

'That's Me In the Picture'

I can't believe I didn't know about this fantastic feature at the British newspaper/web news site The Guardian until Chris Grover mentioned it the other day. I haven't read them all yet, but the few I've seen are fabulous.

The feature is called "That's me in the picture" and it features accounts and background of what was going on in widely known photographs. Chris mentioned the article featuring Tony (AJ) Barratt's photograph of Leonard Cohen holding a toddler upside down, written by the toddler, Nikki Spencer (Tony Barratt's daughter). I love that photograph, by the way.

For an even better sample, check out this one, which I believe I featured on TOP after it went viral. It's really fascinating to hear the story from the people in the picture, and calibrate our immediate reactions with what was really happening (you can't guess from the picture, for example, that Scott Jones was kissing his girlfriend Alexandra Homas because she was hysterical and he was trying to calm her down, although you might guess that "When Alex first saw it, she was immediately worried people could see her bottom").

Here's the main index page. You might not have seen every picture if you're not British, but the stories can be outstanding even so. What a marvelous feature—big kudos and much appreciation to The Guardian! I do hope this will be a book one day. And thanks again to Chris.

Mike

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Here's Why I Don't Like Dylan Getting the Nobel

I'm back in the saddle! Thanks for tolerating my absence last week. I went back to Milwaukee to see my doctor (three times) and my dentist, as well as about a dozen friends along the way. It turned out to be an absolutely lovely trip. Everything went right.

About that thing with Bob Everest...er, Dylan...
So here's why I'm uncomfortable with the Nobel Committee's decision to award the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan. No, not that Dylan Thomas, whose first name Dylan borrowed as his last, never got one. No, not because I don't like Dylan's music, even though I've never been a big fan—he wrote the transcendent "Like a Rolling Stone" and a dozen other truly great songs, and made a handful of great albums. I even own a couple. No, not because lyrics aren't poetry, an incredibly tiresome argument I've been getting roped into since college. And finally—although this is admittedly kind of a big one—no, it's not even because Dylan appropriates/plagiarizes others—including copying other peoples' photographs just as if he thinks there was zero creativity on the part of the photographers.

My reason is very organic with me, and I've been very consistent about it over many years. I just don't like it when celebrity in one field (or subfield) trumps or marginalizes honest, hardworking accomplishment in another.

A few examples. I once reviewed a group show of unknown and emerging photographers at a major museum in Washington that was curated by one friend and included another. One of the photographers whose work was shown was a top fashion photographer then at the apogee of his fame. In my published review, I objected. I just felt he was out of place in an art photography show at an art museum, included because be was famous and "cool" within his own world, which is very different from the art world. It's not that it's wrong to consider fashion photography as art—a few practitioners have straddled the fairly large divide—it's that the rest of the photographers in the show were struggling artists who had sacrificed a lot in their lives to do their work, and a glamorpuss famous for his astronomical day rate was just pushing aside another up-and-comer who could have really used the exposure. The inclusion of the fashion photographer was, on the part of the curator, a cynical sop to popularity, meant to help with publicity; on the part of the fashion photographer it was just to burnish his cred as an artist for marketing purposes. Bah, on both counts.

Another show on which I trained both barrels in a published review was one curated by a major name in the photography field at the time. Some corporate donors had lavished a small fortune in grants to sponsor a landscape show, I think of a specific patch of wild land that had something to do with the corporation—I forget the particulars. Instead of using the opportunity to reward actual landscape photographers—you know, people who worked authentically in that genre, had done something with it, and knew something about it—the curator instead dumped the money on the heads of the usual suspects—anyone who was then hot and famous, talked about in the right cirlces, big name brands in the fine-art world—many of whom had never even turned their hands to landscape before at all. Because, you know, it's so edgy and hip to see what a guy known for photographing naked models will do with mere land. Yeah, right. When I heard about the show, I snarkily wondered (in print) how one particular high-society photographer was going to manage to photograph landscapes without getting her no doubt exquisitely fashionable boots soiled with real-life dirt. When the actual show was unveiled, some time later, I discovered to my great amusement that she (okay, it was Annie, and yes, I know I'm too hard on Annie) had hired a helicopter and photographed from the air...that is, she actually did find a way to be a "landscape photographer" without getting her shoes dirty. Funny, I admit—but, one more time, with feeling: bah!

So anyway, all the earnest dopes I used to argue with in college  just won the argument, decisively. I lose, retroactively. I get that.

But here's the thing, the reason I don't like it when celebrity gets the palm and hogs the plum: it shuts out all the people who really do work in that field—in this case, actual writers who labor and toil and yes, manage to create real accomplishments in the field of literature. And who could really use the exposure, the money, and the acclaim, rather than just adding a bit more of all three to an existing pile. Giving the literature prize to a songwriter was supposed to be edgy and hip (concepts which, incidentally, are woeful clichés and diametrically opposed to anything edgy or hip) but it's also akin to saying that no real writer deserves it.

That's what I object to. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of passionate, dedicated landscape photographers out there, all but a handful of whom get too little recognition and are chronically short of support. There's nothing wrong with Annie Leibovitz snapping a few forgettable aerials from a chopper and calling it "landscape photography," except that it shunts aside some more deserving photographer who cares about that kind of work and has spent a lifetime devoted to it—someone who can fairly stand for many others who are similarly devoted, and, similarly, are too often ignored. I don't fault Annie for taking the money, but I do fault the curator of that long-ago show for giving it to her. And about the show where the hotshot fashion photographer took up a space despite not needing it, well, maybe I identified too closely with whoever might have gotten that slot but got shut out.

Whoever is most famous, wins
I don't feel strident about this—I can understand people who have the opposite opinion and are delighted about Dylan getting the honor. I'll bet they don't read much, though. (They might even go all the way the other way and feel, along with Leonard Cohen, that giving the Nobel Prize to Bob Dylan is "like pinning a medal on Everest.")  I'm just explaining how I feel, not saying anyone else needs to agree. So I'll look forward to Jennifer Lawrence getting the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, because, you know, she has such good chemistry onscreen, and Dr. Oz or Barry Sears getting the Nobel Prize for Medicine, and so on.

In reality, it's not like literature is so threadbare that it has to cast around to other fields to find someone worth feting. Alex Shephard, the News Editor at The New Republic, wrote a speculative article a week and a half ago called "Who Will Win the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature?" in which he named seventy-six potential recipients. You can argue about the names, but most of them have at least spent lifetimes working as writers. (And writing is hard work, by the way.) The 76 names did indeed include Dylan. But—and again, I do appreciate the humor—the article was subtitled "Not Bob Dylan, that's for sure," and in the body of the article he wrote, "Bob Dylan 100 percent is not going to win. Stop saying Bob Dylan should win the Nobel Prize."

I'm sure Alex is a bit embarrassed now by his prediction. But he can take solace in this: he should have been right.

Mike

Counterpoint: I have a friend who is very well qualified to speak to this subject from both sides. Jim Schley (full bio here) is a poet and a longtime lover of, facilitator of, and educator about poetry and literature, and he's been involved in publishing literary authors for decades. He has been an editor for several different publishers, is a former Director of the Frost Place in New Hampshire, and is currently Managing Editor at Tupelo Press where he helps oversee their poetry publishing program. He's also putting the finishing touches on a new book of his own, co-written. And he's a longtime Dylan fan. I invited Jim to comment and here's his reply:

"Mike, I really appreciate your thoughtful post and the analogy of fashion photographers. Though I don’t agree. He didn’t win the Nobel as a page-poet, specifically—he won as a maker of some of the most complex songs of our time. And I feel like his albums of the '00s are fantastically good.

"The most ardent academic scholar of Dylan’s work is Christopher Ricks, and I also appreciate his response to the news.

"I also like this piece from a younger poet, and a formalist.

"I wish I had time to write you a more ample response to your good words, but I don’t have time to pounce. I’ll just say that last year’s choice was almost equally unorthodox, and also very welcome: Svetlana Alexeivich is another sui generis genius."

(Thanks to Jim.)

 

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Mike's hit song: "Like a Moss-Covered Rock"
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Nigel: "Leibovitz's brief dabble in landscape photography is analogous to Dylan's 50-year engagement with the lyric form? Whatever you might think of him, or it, that is not much of an argument. A decent case in favour. The most deserving name on Alex Shephard's list is probably Ursula Le Guin—who'd probably get dismissed for similar 'genre' reasons."

Mike replies: "Dylan's 50-year engagement with the lyric form" is not analogous to Leibovitz's 46-year engagement with editorial celebrity portraiture, which she all but established as an accepted art form? A form in which she created several acknowledged masterpieces and of which she is one of the most well-known practitioners? Why ever not? Has Dylan ever published a standalone book of poems that are not also song lyrics? (I can't find one.) If he has, how would that not be analogous to Annie "brief dabble" in a genre she's not known for?

Yvonne: "I'm a Dylan fan, drawn in actually by his later stuff ('Time Out of Mind,' etc.) in which there are many songs about aging: 'Don't even hear the murmur of a prayer/It's not dark yet, but it's getting there.' I was shocked when Dylan won the Nobel for literature, and I'll bet Dylan was as shocked as anyone."

Stephen Scharf: "Sorry, tl;dr."

Mike replies: You're just mad at me for ditching Fuji and buying an A6500.  :-)

Jim Meeks: "NPR last week replayed an interview with Dylan from the early 2000s in which he stated he think awards and accolades for him just get in the way of his music. I've heard the same thing from successful, established artists who stated being given awards was great, but it was the up and coming crowd that needed the money and acclaim."

Geoff Wittig: "I could not agree more, Mike. I can remember feeling more than a little annoyed by all the media attention accorded celebrity/photographers (including in glossy photography magazines) like Bryan Adams and Kenny Rogers, when their main gifts appeared to be access to other celebrities and armies of sycophants. As you note, it crowds out genuinely good work by folks actually devoted to the field. I see it as a corollary to the pernicious trend in literature, whereby very attractive writers are given a huge leg up by the machinations of publishing firms' publicity campaigns. Just look at the author's photo on the jacket of most novels these days. Brilliant authors who happen not to be physically beautiful don't stand much of a chance."

Peter Wright: "When someone already famous in another field is awarded a Nobel prize, (like Obama getting the Peace prize some time back—and I like him a lot, by the way) perhaps the committee is really just 'recognizing' themselves? Simply trying to boost their own image by their somewhat controversial, selection of a person everyone knows, and most respect, so they can bask in the reflected limelight? Seems to have worked in this case."

Gordon Lewis: "A contrarian point of view, which I mention only to acknowledge and not necessarily to endorse, is that awards and exhibitions that are consistently given to obscure artists run the risk that the awards themselves will become obscure. Famous people often decline awards for this very reason: They have little interest in awards from obscure organizations and institutions. Obscure artists are happy to take what they can get—but if they share billing with people who are more famous and glamorous at least some of the light of that fame gets reflected onto them. Again, I'm not saying your position is wrong, I'm just saying there's more than one way to look at it."

kirk tuck: "I'll disagree on Dylan but not on your general premise. In my estimation Dylan was the lyricist equivalent of Robert Frank (in the context of Frank's work in The Americans) and deserves the recognition for making poetry the way Frank made photographs. It's rough and edgy but honest and ultimately accessible. He encapsulated the era with his genre in a unique way and connected with a disaffected generation. But then I also like Billy Collins so...."

Mike replies: Speaking of whom—Robert Frank, I mean, not Billy Collins—have you seen his Steidl book Paris? I missed it when it came out (in '08) but man, I really love it.

Debatable

Sign o' the times: Hillary Clinton making an appearance before a crowd. The picture was posted to Twitter yesterday by Hillary For
America Design Lead Victor Ng.

The Presidential debates begin tonight in the U.S., and I imagine it will be one more of those occasions when I will be either sad or glad that I don't have a television. For those of you who are interested onlookers from other countries, this backgrounder article at The Atlantic is long but good. It's by James Fallows, who for many years has been a consistently interesting writer about politics and culture here. (Just passing along the link. No political comments if you don't mind. But how 'bout that photo?!?)

Mike
(Thanks to Jeffrey Schimberg)

CORRECTION: The photo above is by Barbara Kinney (left). Sorry about repeating the mis-attribution, although you'll notice that my caption as written isn't incorrect. Here's another nice selfie-related shot by Barbara. Thanks to David A and Manuel for the correction. —Ed.

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David Dyer-Bennet: "That photo is priceless! Actually took me a moment to figure out what was going on."

Matt: "This is an excellent example of how photos can be deceptive even without any sort of manipulation. The important context that's missing from most of the (predictable) discussion about the image is that the picture was taken immediately after HRC said 'everyone take a selfie,' after one audience member asked her if it would be OK."

Mike replies: Thanks Matt! That actually makes it even more interesting as a cultural comment...as I always say, most photographs need captions, meaning, context.

Photography Isn't About Photography

In the previous post, I mentioned that Tom Passin pointed me to a book review on a blog called Slate Star Codex. That blog is written by "Scott Alexander," which the writer describes as "almost but not quite my real name." I just thought it was interesting, in light of the complaints I get about not writing about photography exclusively enough, to hear how "Scott" describes his blog: "I really want to be one of those people with the neat one-subject blogs who can introduce themselves as 'the guy with the blog about X,' but the universe is way too interesting for that to remotely work."

Well, as you know, I'm the guy with the blog about photography...and it "remotely" works.  :-)

But probably the reason why it works is that photography is never actually really about photography. Photography is almost always about something else.

As for what kinds of something elses, well, that's a very big tent. It can be about information, ideas, exploration, personal expression; objects, passions, the documenting of activities, style or mannerism, or decoration. And on and on.

This next notion probably puts me on thin ice, but I might even go so far as to say that the least successful photographers are just interested in photography. And what might that look like? Well, imagine someone who reduces photographs to common genres and then tries to "collect" examples of each genre. Such a hobbyist might have his night shots, his macro shots, his landscapes, his travel photos; his portraits, his boudoir pictures, his underwater shots, and so forth. (The amusing thing is, I can actually conceive of that being an interesting project if the photographer could walk the knife's edge between conformity and inventiveness without falling off.) Or imagine a photographer who did the same thing, but with technical categories and types of equipment as the organizing principle.

Doesn't really sound like it would work, does it? It isn't until the photographer's mind migrates to her real interests that she stands a chance of really being a photographer.

The medium is peculiar that way. You can really only be a photographer when your passion for taking pictures somehow transcends photography, and engages or meshes with other concerns, interests, and passions. Being "just" a photographer is a way to keep yourself from being a photographer, you might say.

Mike

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Thomas Rink: "My favourite sujet are the 'edgelands' (i.e. unkempt places, disused for industrial or urban development) in the area where I live. I feel attracted by the untamed chaos and visual complexity of those places, and started my first project on such a place three years ago. It led to a body of work which I like a lot, and I am currently working on subsequent projects. Now back on topic: This brought up a couple of questions, namely 'How to present this to the viewer?' or, more generally, 'Why would anybody want to look at this?' and, finally, 'What caused me to take these pictures in the first place?' These might be startling questions—you know, someone who takes pictures of Yosemite takes it for granted that everybody finds this beautiful—but a disused coal mining area?? I started to dig into definitions of the Beautiful, into the theory of aesthetics and the arts, looked for analogies in music and poetry—and I find all this highly interesting.

"Now, I don't know if I'm a 'photographer' at all, or if my work is any good—but the journey is exciting for sure."

Jim R: "'Tis true. Photography is one of my great hobbies/passions, but recently I've been a mere gearswapper and snapshooter, not at all a photographer. I've also been a caregiver, so all of my hobbies are paused for a greater cause. My spouse's health is improving, so I'm settling down on gear and anticipating more free resources (time and a bit of cash). Soon I plan to relax, look around, learn the full abilities of the K-3II, and add my own abilities to create images worthy of the passion that comes from what I see."

Mike replies: Sounds exciting!

Matt: "In even fewer words, I believe photography is about sensitivity, awareness, perception, aesthetics, impression (more so than expression, as you can't express what you don't perceive)...."

Markers of Depression

This is interesting. One of the themes, or leitmotifs, of post-transition photography seems to be the use of photographs as data. I'm not really capable of evaluating the rigor of the methodology of "How an Algorithm Learned to Identify Depressed Individuals by Studying Their Instagram Photos," but the source, MIT Technology Review, is prestigious.

Bottom line? Researchers have trained a machine to diagnose depression based on the photos you post on Instagram.

An interesting idea. I've heard of discussions about how slow, sad music seems richer and more meaningful to depressed people, and that depressed teenagers tend to listen to music more than their non-depressed peers. In the old movie Three Days of the Condor, Robert Redford's character diagnoses the lonliness of Faye Dunaway's character, ostensibly a photographer, from her pictures on her wall. (The article says that pictures without people in them might be "sad selfies" of the photographer's mental state, but concedes that this "hypothesis is untested.")

I also don't know how the machine could separate authentic sad photos from poseur sad photos. But maybe there's a way.

The article concludes by saying that such algorithms "provide hope that mental illness can be accurately detected earlier, allowing for more effective intervention," which seems dubious. How's that supposed to work—you get an email from someone saying that their robot has detected that you're depressed, based on pictures you've posted online?

Seems to me if you were depressed, you might just find that...depressing.

But as I say, I'm not really qualified to evaluate.

Mike
(Thanks to Ned Bunnell, whose photos on Instagram make him seem like a happily retired businessman)

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[A different] Mike: "As someone who has suffered with depression since childhood I can attest that it is a very real phenomena. It's a constant battle to keep moving forward through life, and when things happen that make people who are not depressed sad, it can devastate a depressed person.

"Depression is a complex disease that comes in many forms, and there are no simple answers as each person is unique. Some people can overcome depression, while others can only cope with it as best they can.

"People who don't have depression cannot possibly have a clue as to what it's all about. The glib comments from ignorant people can be offensive, but it's so commonplace, I just do my best to let it go.

"Yes, my depression comes through in my personal work. It's there that I find a voice for how I feel about what I see. I'm highly attuned to noticing things that most people don't see. Body language and facial expressions say more than one can imagine. And when I see someone that is expressing something that I can relate to, I make the photograph. Depression is the filter through which I see the world. I can't help that; it is what it is.

"Making photographs that express how I feel is very much a form of therapy for me. When I'm out shooting for myself I'm in the zone and everything else fades away. It's the most peaceful place I can be when I'm making photographs, there's no past or future, only the now.

"I keep my depression at bay in my professional work, and even find many expressions of exuberance and happiness to photograph for my employer and other clients. It does bring me a bit of happiness to find and photograph those moments, and it reminds me that there is much joy in the world.

"And, it's not that I'm morose all the time or lack a sense of humor. I tell the best/worst damn Dad jokes ever. I can interact with regular people and not seem any different from them. But I see how they are in the world, and I know that I'm different. In the end, I'm comfortable with who I am."

Tim (partial comment): "I seem to make some of my best photos when the mood is non-average, either a bit depressed or a bit sunny."

Technophasia

[Mike is on semi-vacation this week so TOP is on half-speed till Wednesday the 24th.]

I'm sure all of us have had the experience of coming across an article that mentions photographic technical details where it's immediately obvious that the writer doesn't know what he's talking about, sometimes making for a bit of unintentional absurdity. Carl happened across this the other day (I don't want to embarrass the writer of this by identifying the source):

[The photographer's] early use of Kodachrome colour film presented major challenges. The film was hi-res and lifelike, offering brilliant colours with broad tonal range. But it was also expensive to print, since the process involved sending the film to Kodak. Since [the photographer] couldn’t afford that, he had slides made, which more or less denied him access to galleries.

Heh. Carl's wry comment was, "Why did I never think to have my Kodachrome made into slides?"

I should sympathize...I know very well what it's like to not have time to check all the facts in an article.

Reminds me of another little story. I remember in the 1980s offering to correct the English in a now-out-of-business Japanese camera company's literature, which contained many mistakes. The company's reply thanked me, but noted that the brochure writer had received perfect grades in his English classes in school and was therefore just as good at writing English as a native English speaker. :-)

Mike
(Thanks to Carl Weese)

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Bahi (partial comment): "Amusing and understandable. I think it's true to say that when a publication—even a top-tier name—commissions a good writer on a subject that readers know extremely well, it's easy to spot the misunderstandings in the resulting piece. The New Yorker and its famous fact checkers might be the exception."

Mike replies: I don't know. I've found some things to object to in some of The New Yorker's sorties into photo-tech.

GKFroehlich (partial comment): "Back when I was in college, I bought a cheap, light-weight, made-in-China tent for backpacking. It was a bear to assemble—many sections of poles, all of differing lengths and curvatures. So I consulted the instructions, and found the section on 'How to Achieve Erection.' Finally stopped laughing long enough to get that bugger ready for use. (By the way, that tent was finally destroyed during a December-to-January camping trip where we were subjected to high winds, thunderstorms, lightning, and even falling trees! 1980-1981: the winter of our discount tent!)" 

Frank Hamsher: "I worked for a time as a contract proof-reader for English versions of Japanese software manuals that had been translated as per your quote. As a test of my abilities before working my boss sent me a two paragraph snippet to correct. I sent him back my version and he told me that I had done too good a job. His reasoning? My version would cause the original translator to lose face. He told me that I must strive to make as few corrections as possible otherwise the company would stop sending him work.

"Makes one consider how much cultural differences can an unconscious effect on attempts to communicate. It's never just the words—even in written exchanges!" 

It Can't Be Coincidence...

...That the National Geographic magazine just out on newstands this month (July 2016) features on its first pages an editorial by Editor in Chief Susan Goldberg. Under the rubric "Images and Ethics," the editorial in the magazine is called "How We Check What You See."

It's online under an alternate title, "How We Spot Altered Pictures." Same text, though. Although very brief, it purports to "explain how we strive to keep covertly manipulated images out of our publications."

Photo by Gordon Gahan

The infamous "they moved the pyramids" cover from February 1982, which greatly harmed the magazine's vaunted reputation (and obviously still haunts them). Note that this would have been completely permissible for many uses, for instance a travel agency poster or an advertisement.

Of the pyramid cover mistake, Goldberg admits, "we deserved the firestorm that ensued."

But that's all in the past. "We learned our lesson. At National Geographic, it's never OK to alter a photo. We've made it part of our mission to ensure our photos are real."

No mention of he-who-cannot-be-named, of course, but the timing of the editorial is most likely no coincidence.

Mike
(Thanks to the reader who first told me about this, whose name I can't find)

P.S. Appearing even in advance of the editorial in the same issue is a two-page advertisement for the Huawei P9 smartphone, "Co-engineered with Leica," featuring a picture taken in "Monochrome/Pro Mode." The tagline is "Reinvent smartphone photography." It set me to wondering if that's the first time I've encountered the all-purpose sales word "pro" (roughly, a synonym for "good" in our field) associated with a cellphone.

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john gillooly: "This sentence can't be a coincidence: 'At National Geographic, where visual storytelling is part of our DNA, making sure you see real images is just as important as making sure you read true words.' Didn't Steve McCurry refer to himself now as a 'visual storyteller' as a defense against photo manipulation, implying that while this manipulation is not allowed in photojournalism, it is allowed in visual storytelling?"

'Photoart'

Now, I know full well that I don't get to dictate terminology. Nobody asked me and nobody cares what I think. And I'm fully aware that I don't have the power to change anyone else's usage of language—don't worry, I'm not laboring under any delusions.

And I am not worked up about this, so those whose knee-jerk response is derision can kindly keep that to themselves, please. I am copacetic, chilled, laid-back (with my mind on my money and my money on my mind...sorry, Snoop Dogg lyric).

But still, I think I'm going to start using a new term. When a picture is captured all at once in one exposure and the representation of it essentially respects the lens image (with color and tonal correction, or B&W conversion, or slight cleanup allowed), I'm going to call it a photograph; and if it's a combination of different exposures, or has special effects applied, or corrections applied to excess to make them prominent or stylish or decorative, and especially if there are changes made to the lens image in terms of adding, subtracting, or changing elements, then I'm going to call it photoart.

...With no prejudice. That is, one ain't better than the other. Just a different way of looking is all, a different way of seeing, different way of creating.

Where exactly the line is will always be debatable, and that's okay. Not everything is cut-and-dried, black-and-white, a binary this-and-not-that or that-and-not-this. Being a B&W photographer with a passion for midtones, I am comfortable with gray areas!

And I am not a mindless ideologue: I like some photoartists and not others, just as I like some photographers and not others.

Conceptually...well, that's a much longer discussion. Thou hast been forewarned.  :-)

Oh, and by the way: anyone who says such things don't matter is fighting progress and the evolution of culture. Because of course, in time, needed distinctions will enter the language because it will make sense for them to do so. Eventually, if it lasts long enough, culture will sort out and make sense of digital imaging and its nature and properties, and linguistic distinctions will follow. All I'm doing is taking one little step in that direction on my own.

So Steve McCurry, Julie Blackmon, and Jerry Uelsmann might be photographers, but what they are known for creating is photoart.

No one has to go along with any of this. I'm aware that I'm kinda eccentric.  :-)

Mike

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Speed: "Photograph >>>>>>>>>> Photoart.

"It's a continuum and our view depends on where we sit. I get it."

Tom Halfhill: "some newspapers are using similar terminology already. For example, the San Francisco Chronicle uses the term 'photo illustration' to describe manipulated photographs. The term appears in the mouse-type photo byline, such as 'Photo illustration by John Doe,' etc."

Dennis (partial comment): "What do you say about someone who produces photographs much of the time and photoart some of the time ? (Therein lies the controversy; McCurry's lack of forthrightness means you can't trust whether or not a given photograph is straight). But, gray areas aside, it seems fine to label each work as one thing or the other, but if the person produces both, it's unfair/inaccurate to label him or her."

Mike replies: Very fair point, and one I didn't think of. I modified the post to take your objection into account.

Howard Brunner: "Photoart is fine by me. Under the terms of your definition, 96% of my creative output would qualify. Photoart also happens to be the name of my website."

Mike replies: If you say so, Howard, but a lot of your work looks pretty straight to me.

Ctein (partial comment): "So, are you going to say that my stitched panoramas or entirely realistic HDR photographs are 'photoart?' How about if I take a bit of a power line out of the corner of a landscape photo, because I couldn't levitate three feet to get exactly the right composition (yup, I've done that). Or that distant airplane or tiny bird that flew into the scene that I didn't notice when I was pressing the shutter, that I erased (instead of bleaching it out in a print) because not only not-wanted but the tiny damn thing looks like a data flaw in the file or dirt on the sensor, yet it sure grabs the eye. Done that, too."

Mike replies: This is a controversy, defined as a dispute that is ongoing and that doesn't admit of simple solution. But look, I'm only describing, or trying to describe, the broad differences that interest me, not defining or dictating them. People are consistently picking technical nits as if it matters. Of course it doesn't. The camera doesn't make the statement or determine the aims of the image. You do. That is, the artist/creator/operator does. The basic thing I think people should think about is what kind of statement they're making with their image. (You defined this perfectly well to me a couple of weeks ago, but I can't find it now.) How was it made weighed against how it is likely to be received. Is it naturalistic, or invented? Is is a "straight" report of the scene, or your personal interpretation? Does it reveal more about the visible world, or more about your imagination, how you wish the world looked?

I don't care about how anyone wants to define it because that doesn't matter. I'm not being legalistic. Just trying to get my meaning across.

And people consistently mistake technical parameters as being definitive. They're not. What you're talking about are just solutions to technical problems, like color correction or tonal corrections such as gradient or software HDR (either of which can be used to make a particular image more or less accurate—the creator's choice). If you stitch a panorama, the important thing is not that it's not a single exposure. The important thing is, what problem does it solve, and does it say anything about the intentions of its creator? You've printed a stitched panorama of mine that is a perfectly straightforward, naturalistic photograph—it was only stitched from separate exposures because that's the only way I could include that much arc of the compass. But a reader posted a link to a photoartist (again, can't find it now) who uses dozens or hundreds of exposures to represent all the times of a 24-hour cycle in one image. That's not a straightforward, naturalistic photograph of a scene, in the sense that someone else who was at the scene might have witnessed it at any given time. It's an artistic interpretation of something that didn't exist. An impression. Photoart. If you don't like that term or any other, then just say how the photo was made...if it's not obvious.

As for the bit of powerline—you're the author, you decide. If you think it's a pointless distraction and removing it doesn't affect the integrity of the image, then fine. What do I have to do with that? We all make our own decisions about things like that and we always will. Nobody else gets to say.

My motives here are entirely compassionate from both angles. First, I sympathize with the viewer, who would like to know what she is looking at. Is it a report of something real? Can it be taken as evidence so far as it goes? If you're going to be adding things that didn't exist in the world and subtracting things that did, such that your image doesn't represent anything real, then at least some viewers would like to know. Otherwise they might justifiably feel deceived.

From the other direction, a creator (you'll notice I'm avoiding the words, "photoartist," "artist," "photographer" etc., which are loaded in the context of the present discussion) might find it useful to be able to indicate that a picture that might appear to be one thing is in fact another, without the possibility of being accused of deceptiveness or dishonesty. Take the controversy over Robert Doisneau's "Le baiser de l'hotel de ville." Doisneau hired two people to model for him and wandered around the city with them taking different pictures of them in various situations. The result was a wonderful photograph that has been widely admired. He didn't consider that he had done anything wrong. But when it was discovered (from court testimony, in 1993) what he had done, he came under widespread condemnation...just this very month, A.D. Coleman said the discovery affected Doisneau's credibility, saying that by  "allowing its frequent republication as a perceptive cultural insider’s documentation of spontaneous public behavior, that forced confession calls into question not just this one image but all of Doisneau’s purportedly sociological observation of French life. (Certainly it forever changed the way I experience that photograph, converting it instantly and irrevocably from reportage into theater.)" Doisneau was upset and troubled by the effect it was having on his reputation up until his death the next year.

Wouldn't it have been better if there had been an easy and conventional way for Doisneau to indicate that it was not a naturalistic, "found," candid documentary photograph right from the start? By, perhaps, using some label for it like photoart? Then no one would have been surprised to learn that it had been staged.

As I said in this post, I don't get to determine terminology, and no one cares what I think. But the fact remains, I do think it would be handy if we had an easy, widely accepted way to distinguish broadly how camera-creations are operating, in the absence of more precise information and when they fall outside of specific genres with accepted norms. What should the terms be? I don't know. I'm not good at coining words. Photograph/photoart; straight/created; naturalistic/inventive; accurate/modified; whatever. Whatever they might be, I wish such conventional terms existed and that they would become widely accepted.

Latest on Steve McCurry, and Julie Blackmon Steals and Quotes

The latest on the McCurry Kerfuffle (there, I've just named it as John M. Flores named it) is "Eyes of the Afghan Girl" by Kshitij Nagar (with "vital inputs" from Rakesh Nagar), at Writing Through Light.

According to the article, in this 1984 picture from a page from National Geographic, the suitcases were empty, and the woman is the sister-in-law of a Indian photographer friend of Steve's who was called out to model.

No matter how loose your standards, that just ain't photojournalism by any stretch. That's staging, and it's more like the way a studio advertising photographer would work, or a cinematographer.

And as for whether Steve claims to be a photojournalist or not, take it from him—there's this TEDx Talk from only last year.

Stealing and quoting
We got a great comment this morning on the first Julie Blackmon post from chris b. (note that I always write commenters' names just as they do). He wrote about seeing a gallery exhibit in Vancouver years ago that consisted of paintings that were enlarged but otherwise exact copies of Ruth Berhard photographs—all from the same book, even. Yet "the artist" claimed the paintings were inspired by dreams!!

"...The gallery guy came over and began to gush about how marvelous these were, and how the best part was that the artist painted them all from dreams, and when I said, hold on, you mean [the artist dreams] about Bernhard's photographs? The confusion deepened, and he brought me over to read the 'artist's statement,' which was detailed and quite remarkable, emphasizing the almost miraculous dream inspirations and supplying context and meanings for the various poses, and nowhere mentioning Bernhard or photos of any kind."

Now that's stealing! (And chutzpah, another nice word from Yiddish.)

The Internet* is not good for chasing down real quotes. A couple of times in the comments to the Julie Blackmon post people brought up the aphorism "good artists borrow, great artists steal," which is a fake quotation that can be found in innumerable variations attributed to a variety of sources. Most are debased Bowdlerizations out of context of a quote by T.S. Eliot, the American-born British poet who was one of the great literary artists of the 20th century and arguably the last poet who was a household name.

The real quotation is, in fact, helpful when considering Julie Blackmon's influences. It occurs in Eliot's 1920 book of essays Sacred Wood, in his essay on the English dramatist Philip Massinger (1583–1640). Here's the full essay, and here's the relevant passage:

"...the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne. The two great followers of Shakespeare, Webster and Tourneur, in their mature work do not borrow from him; he is too close to them to be of use to them in this way. Massinger, as Mr. Cruickshank shows, borrows from Shakespeare a good deal."

Although the fake quotation is almost always used to justify theft, Eliot's essay if anything is a defense of transformative re-use, which is not only allowed under copyright law but is sanctioned by long practice and artistic convention (even if the borderline cases have often been uncomfortable). The specific elements in Julie Blackmon's pictures that are "lifted" from the Balthus paintings are, in fact, stolen elements, but she is not appropriating his ideas. Rather, she's deliberately "quoting" him, as a jazz musician is said to "quote" a different song by inserting a few bars of it into a different composition or jam, and as a modern electronic musician (I know it's quaint to call them that, but I don't want to call out a single genre) uses samples. The intent is not to "lean on" the antecedent as a crutch, using it to supply any deficiency in her own inventiveness, but to delight those who are familiar with the original...she's playing off it, as it were. Adding another dimension to her work. The readers who called it "riffing" got it right, I think.

For me she stands Eliot's "surest of tests." Does she weld her theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn? I'd say so. Does she borrow from authors remote in time (check), or alien in language (check—painting to photoart), or diverse in interest (well, both Balthus and Blackmon are interested in children—but in divergent ways one would hope. I don't detect prurience in Blackmon but everyone sure does in Balthus). Mostly, does she "make it into something better, or...different"? Surely she does—her pictures aren't copies. It's up to you to decide about "better," but they're unquestionably very "different."

'Scorned as Timber'
Before we leave this general area I want to quote another wonderful comment, about the idea of "influence" in, perhaps, its corrupt or base form. John Denniston shared a post from his own blog:

"January 22nd, 2009—Last year as I was walking through a clear cut on Vancouver Island I stopped to take a picture of two solitary trees left standing. Somehow I thought against my better judgment they made a picture but they certainly didn’t fit into any current project I was working on. When the film was developed I was sure it was just another wasted sheet of film and never printed the image. The picture didn’t work for me. Today as I walked through a show of landscape paintings at the Vancouver Art Gallery I came across Emily Carr’s 'Scorned as Timber' and right away realized the reason for thinking my two trees looked like a picture, [was] because Emily Carr had made a similar scene into a picture, and I unconsciously remembered it and duplicated it. All photographers do this, go out looking for pictures, and, finding pictures that have been taken before, duplicate them. There’s little original seeing in the world of photography (painting too I suspect but know too little to comment) and few photographers admit it."

That's an outstanding brief explanation, wonderfully well illustrated, of something that I did so much when I first got into photography that it almost drove me to distraction. I noticed again and again that I was talking pictures that looked like they were taken by any one of a variety of famous photographers whose work I had internalized. Like I was "channeling" them, as the expression is.

Like John I'm convinced that we all do this to some extent—beginners especially. We "learn what photographs look like" and then we go out and take those photographs. (Although, unlike John, I don't believe it means there's "little original seeing in the world of photography.") The impetus is simple—we recognize pictures as pictures from having seen them as pictures.

Garry Winogrand also talks eloquently about this in a talk that's now on YouTube. ("We know too much about what photographs are supposed to look like...." I'd have my assistant look up the link—we've featured it here on TOP—but he's disorganized, and it would take him forever. [UPDATE: Stephen Gilbert found it.]) How many of us start out "wanting to be" someone? Wanting to be Ansel Adams or Henri Cartier-Bresson, or Rui Palha or Valerie Jardin? Many great photographers start out wanting to be someone else, inspired by that person, and then gradually become themselves.

I'm not sure what John Denniston writes about is exactly "influence," though...it might more properly be called "unconscious imitation" or "semi-conscious imitation." Note that he rejected his imitated "two trees" photograph. I often rejected my semi-conscious imitations too, even when I didn't quite know why. I just knew it wasn't quite...well, me. Do you know that feeling? When you've taken a picture you feel sure other people will like but it's not really "you"? Personally I took "a Callahan," "a Weston," "a Friedlander"...on and on. I had to work through that phase to get it out of my system.

...Enough for now, but I've certainly enjoyed the comments in the past few days. These issues always interest me (although if I don't stop writing long posts like this I won't have any readers left!).

Thanks to all.

Mike

*I've gone back to capitalizing "Internet," thanks to Kevin Purcell and Hugh Crawford.

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Michael G.: "It's refreshing that we can have so much commentary about the importance of artistic convictions and journalistic integrity in photography. It's like there's a rally to preserve something sacred, even though no one agrees what that sacred part is. The running commentary here is exciting to read. I hope you keep coming back to this topic. It's got legs to run in Peoria and Albuquerque, a movie hack might say.

"My own opinion is that we're all somewhat afraid of being accused of fraud. This is why Hitchcock made so many movies with Cary Grant about an innocent man on the run, trying to prove he's not guilty. He knew people love a story they can project themselves into easily, where they can watch themselves out-smart their nightmares. And when they got tired of that, he made stories about horrible criminals being brought to some sort of just ending.

"And this story has a bit of both."

hans berkhout:

"Here is another deja vu: Artist Joanna Moen: Stairwell, acrylic, 1992, purchased from the artist by Collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Accession Number: 1992.168.003 in 1993."

Mike replies: The inspiration probably came to her in a dream.

[Ed. note: Google "Kertesz Mondrian Studio" if you don't recognize this.]

Doug Thacker: "I mentioned in an earlier comment that I was in Australia in the year 2000. Australia was actually my first stop in a planned, year-long, independent photo tour through south-southeast Asia, most of it in India. I was sitting in a bookstore in Sydney when they put out McCurry's newly-released book, South Southeast. The images in this book, many of them, were evocative and striking, particularly those taken in various parts of Rajasthan. I couldn't believe my luck, since I was headed through some of the very same territory, and would have the chance to try my own hand at it.

"Rajasthan turned out to be a revelation for a lot of reasons. Not the least of them was that it wasn't the same place pictured in McCurry's book. The photos in South Southeast are of figures isolated in a serene, clutter-free environment, seemingly oblivious to the photographer. The reality I encountered there was that a Westerner with an SLR stood out like a giant neon billboard. It was impossible to disappear in a crowd, and many people expected you were going to pay them as soon as they saw the camera. Rajasthan was pretty much off the Western tourist map at the time, which made expectation of payment seem particularly odd. And with all the people about, and their awareness of you and your camera, you could stand in one spot for eight minutes or eight days and not get the kind of shots I'd seen in McCurry's book. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that these photos of his would have had to be staged.

"It's been mentioned on this blog before that National Geographic photography was something of a joke in art circles. This is due in part, I think, to its somewhat straitlaced character—derided by some as 'corporatist' or 'colonialist.' There was no doubt, though, that it was highly competent, and often evocative; so, in my efforts to improve my own shooting, I looked into their process. Your readers who are or were National Geographic photographers might want to weigh in on this, but my understanding is that once flown in to their assignment, photographers were expected to shoot a minimum of four hundred eighty shots a day. Pull out your calculator and you'll find this comes to one shot a minute for eight hours straight. These shots couldn't be random, of course, but had to be actually working towards something. For longer assignments, the photographer would travel back to Washington halfway through, where he or she would confer with the editors to see if the photographer was on track with expectations. Then, it was back to finish the assignment.

"When you think about that kind of pressure, it becomes perhaps understandable that a photographer would, say, use speedlights and gels to simulate light from a campfire, or have his fixer arrange locals with props into a scene the photographer sees with his mind's eye. Which makes me think McCurry couldn't have been the only National Geographic photographer taking a few creative liberties.

"When I returned from my trip, I started a thread on a website popular at the time, where I contended that many of Steve McCurry's photos were staged. We had a vigorous discussion about it. I recently did a Google search, looking for this thread, but it would seem it's been deleted. Anyway, it was nice to have my contention finally confirmed by the Kshitij Nagar piece. What's really vexing about this affair is not so much the staging and the Photoshopping, but that so many people don't get it, don't get why it's a problem. The whole point of photojournalistic photography, as typified by Winogrand, Frank, and H.C.-B., is to capture a slice or frame from reality without your intercession. If you can't do that, or don't want to do it, just say so. Anything less is lying, pure and simple. The only good thing about lies is that they're eventually found out. Lies are funny that way."

The Nice Thing About Twitter (Tennis gods)

One nice thing about Twitter is that it gives the world a window into what would formerly have been semi-private pictures. Not personal, perhaps, but not things ordinary citizens would ever get to see.

This was posted by Judy Murray, mother of Andy. She titled it "Mums. Grannies. Friends. Me and Djana Djokovic. Toasting our sons." Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic vied for the French Open title in tennis yesterday.

Judy Murray's son hasn't lacked for surpassing accomplishments—first Briton (he's Scottish) to win a grand slam tournament since 1977, first male Briton to win Wimbledon in 77 years (in 2013; Fred Perry did it in 1936*), akin at the time to the Red Sox winning the World Series; and he's the current Olympic Gold Medalist, won for the glory of Britannia when London hosted the 2012 games.

But Djana Djokovic's son set himself apart yesterday. Grand Slams in either golf or tennis are the among the most difficult achievements in all of sports—more rare than Triple Crowns in horse racing or repeat championships in pro team sports. For many tennis players, the French, which is played on clay and usually won by clay-court specialists or people with a particular talent for it, has eluded many otherwise dominant players. The list of players who won all the majors except the French is a long one. By winning yesterday, Novak Djokovic becomes only the eighth male tennis player ever to win all four majors in a career (Fred Perry, mentioned above, was the first to do it), and just the third man ever to hold all four major titles concurrently (something Tiger Woods achieved in golf)—Rod Laver, second and so far last player to win the Grand Slam, was the last man of whom that could be said, at the very dawn of the open (i.e., mixed amateur and professional) era in tennis, in 1969.

It's something I have long thought was no longer achievable.

Even so, Djokovic has two more steps to the ultimate: the so-called "calendar" or true Grand Slam, which consists of winning all four majors in the same year; and the "Golden Slam," a term that had to be invented when the incomparable German player Steffi Graf won all four majors and the Olympic Gold Medal in 1988.

I played tennis throughout my younger years (though not well) and used to follow it closely. I would just dearly love to see Novak Djokovic win the Grand Slam; it's honestly something I never thought I could see in my lifetime. Only two men have ever accomplished the feat, American Don Budge and Australian Rod Laver (who did it twice, once in the amateur era and once in the Open era). I think, in my armchair in front of the computer screen with my ignorant sportsfan opinionation, that Novak should skip the Olympics if the possibility of a Grand Slam is alive. He, however, has vowed to play for Serbia and will be making his task even harder by playing in the Olympics.

He's got the best chance of any man ever to do it, but it's a very, very tall order. If he manages it he will truly belong on Mount Olympus, with the contending lower-case gods of sport.

Mike

*Interestingly, Fred Perry for many decades had an uneasy relationship with his native country, to the extent that he emigrated to the U.S. In the amateur era, out of snobbery that we now feel was misplaced, "professional" was such a dirty word that even the amateur accomplishments of players who later turned pro were stigmatized and minimized.

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Steve McCurry Defends Himself, Sort Of

You probably remember the discussion about famed photojournalist editorial photographer visual storyteller Steve McCurry's overuse of Photoshop cloning, which provoked heated debate here and elsewhere. Steve McCurry today addressed his critics—well, sort of—in an exclusive article published this morning at TIME magazine's website. 

It's a strange, unsatisfying little article. McCurry vaguely claims it's all a category error: "I’ve always let my pictures do the talking, but now I understand that people want me to describe the category into which I would put myself, and so I would say that today I am a visual storyteller."

Alternated with his comments are comments by National Geographic’s director of photography, Sarah Leen. She first explains how great he is, then says sternly that his manipulations would never be tolerated by National Geographic. He then tells the story of how a National Geographic cover photo of his was doctored, and she says yeah but that was a long time ago and "it would never happen now."

Who's on whose side here?

The article concludes with McCurry saying that he can do anything he wants to do but that "going forward, I am committed to only using the program in a minimal way."

The original PetaPixel story has been shared over 25,000 times, according to Sharkey James's PetaPixel Photography Podcast episode 76, titled "Is Steve McCurry’s Legacy Imploding?" An update to the second of PetaPixel's articles notes that McCurry's entire blog was taken down after a number of manipulated images were discovered on it.

Meanwhile, McCurry himself appears to be hiding—more than one outlet reports that they can't get an answer to repeated emails and requests for comment.

In the podcast, James compares McCurry's fall from grace to Bill Cosby's, given the high stature and wide admiration his work once enjoyed and the dismay and disillusion these revelations have caused. Which seems a bit over the top, unless you concede that the scandal is having wider repercussions across the whole profession. Perhaps most damning, though, are these harsh words from a long article published by the NPPA (National Press Photographers Association), in an article called "ETHICS MATTERS: A commentary from NPPA’s Ethics Committee regarding the photographs of Steve McCurry," written by Steve Raymer, professor emeritus of the Media School at Indiana University and a former NPPA Magazine Photographer of the Year:

NPPA Ethics Committee chairman Sean D. Elliot says that no matter what McCurry calls himself today, “He bears the responsibility to uphold the ethical standards of his peers and the public, who see him as a photojournalist. [...] Any alteration of the journalistic truth of his images, any manipulation of the facts, regardless of how relevant he or others might feel they are to the deeper ‘truth,’ constitutes an ethical lapse.” Elliot also called McCurry’s attempt to blame an assistant “disingenuous” and questions the professional standards of a studio in which a lab assistant “feels they have the authority to radically alter the work of Steve McCurry.”

So was it our fault, for thinking he was a photojournalist and editorial photographer and was following the very clearly delineated and universally accepted rules of ethical practice of those professions? Guess so. In this morning's TIME article he says, "Reflecting on the situation…even though I felt that I could do what I wanted to my own pictures in an aesthetic and compositional sense, I now understand how confusing it must be for people who think I’m still a photojournalist."

Doesn't sound like much of a mea culpa.

The moral of this mess seems to be, if you want to claim you're only tellin' stories, best do it up front.

Mike
(Thanks to Pak WAN)

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Steve Jacob: "Tellin' tales? Sounds about right...."

John Camp (partial comment): "This Sean Elliot quote really annoyed me: 'He bears the responsibility to uphold the ethical standards of his peers and the public, who see him as a photojournalist.' Oh, really? It's now the viewers who determine what the photographer can do? Maybe it's just me, but I haven't really thought of McCurry as a straight-up photojournalist for a while now...years, anyway."

glenn brown: "I do corporate headshots for blue chip companies and now people are asking for no Photoshop instead of lots.

"I also collect photographs, mostly B/W and pre-1980, but I did have a colour McCurry photo in pride of place in the entrance hall of my home. After a week I moved it to bathroom in the rear of my house. Just did not want it to hang with other images by Towell, Bailey and Newman. I feel better now."

Mark: "Let it be known that, while I am a photographer, I am not now, nor have I ever been, nor do I ever plan to be, a photojournalist. Now, back to my Photoshopping. did i get the commas right?"

Mike the Ed. replies: You did. But not the capitals in your final sentence.  :-)

Rich Reusser: "...A more apt comparison than Cosby might be Lance Armstrong. Seems like Lance and Steve both blame the uneducated layman's expectations for their 'rule breaking' or simply doing what needed to be done as they'd have you believe."

Mike replies: The exact same thought occurred to me earlier. Cosby is better known, fell from far higher, meant more to more people, and did real harm.

Andrew Molitor: "It's just another nail in the coffin, another small step toward a world in which everyone assumes everything is 'Shopped.

"We've reached a world in which anyone who's paying attention knows that anything which looks like a photo could be 'Shopped. Anything that looks too good to be true should be viewed with suspicion.

"McCurry, with his venal 'Shopping of trivialities, is showing us that even if it doesn't look too good to be true, even if it looks perfectly possible, even mundane, it still could be 'Shopped, still should be viewed with suspicion.

"On the one hand, it was inevitable. That Pandora's box was opened a while ago, and it was only a matter of time before that particular creature escaped. On the other hand, way to go McCurry (heavy sarcasm)."

Ted: "Back around 15–20 years ago I considered trying to be a photojournalist/travel photographer. I had a lots of encouragement from friends and such and I had traveled extensively taking many photos. However I was always frustrated and discouraged by how my photos would somehow have so many more distracting elements and somehow just did not have the punch and pure style a guy like McCurry had, one of my absolute idols. I was a good photographer, very good, and still am. For a variety of reason I'm glad I did not pursue that direction (not that I would have succeeded but let's just say I found a way to make way more money and still very much enjoy my hobby), now seeing all this it all makes so much more sense now why so much of his work was so 'perfect.' It was a 'created/false perfection.' My impression of him and my awe of his work has shriveled considerably. Frankly I'm very depressed about it."