The Online Photographer

Open Mike: Are They Ruining the Internet?

"Conservative" gospel holds that the marketplace is a perfect engine, that whatever people most want, capitalism will provide, and that whatever that may be is inevitably the most desirable consequence or outcome out of all possible consequences or outcomes.

I hold the exact opposite view, which is that commercialism and unregulated capitalism inevitably ruins everything.

But, vague heretical generalities aside: is the Internet being ruined? My email inbox, once a pristine parade of original personal messages from real people, is now glutted with a revolting stew of fundraising come-ons, commercial advertisements, spam, cunning or clumsy attempts to cheat or defraud me, robo-drek, PR and other dispiriting species of junk. And more and more, whenever I go try to simply read a page of text on the Internet, the visual prospect I'm met with is an appalling minefield of interruptions and obfuscations, little turd-bombs of crap all over everywhere that I don't want to see or pay attention to...but must contend with anyway.

I open a page. Takes longer than it should because the text waits to load until the ad servers get the ads in place. I start to read. The text suddenly grays out and a central box pops up that says, Hey, you're on our site, let us capture your name and email so we can bombard you with all the sh*t we want to, anytime! Dismiss that, resume reading. But the text keeps jumping up and down because the ads in the header are changing and the text adjusts. Suddenly, thumping music and inane blathering start up out of nowhere—it's an ad video I've innocently triggered by inadvertently moving my mouse to the wrong spot. Get that turned off, resume reading. Off to the side, next to the text column, a distracting video is flashing frantically at a rate of several cuts per second. It's like a silent infection of low-level anxiety. But I can't make it go away. I have to try to ignore it. Read on. The frantic video moves down with me as I scroll. Then, every two or three paragraphs, the column of text I'm still trying to read is interrupted with a bright link to a different article on the same site, in line with the article I'm trying to read. It takes a split-second to register that these links are not relevant to the text I'm reading. But then the text jitters again because the ad at the top of the page, now out of sight, is replaced with a new one. 

I make it three-quarters of the way through the article, feeling like George Bergeron with the Handicapper-General's transmitter in his ear, when another blast of superficial music-product and frenetic ad-copy chatter comes through the speakers. This time I can't figure out where it's coming from, so I close the tab to make it stop.

I'm left there idly thinking, gee, I would have liked to have read that article to the end...but oh well, never mind, I guess it wasn't that important anyway. I'm already distracted by a page full of click-bait links that my browser shows me in place of the home page I tried to program it to show.

Advertising, having thoroughly ruined television long ago, is now making a concerted assault on the Internet. Where will we all go next, to simply communicate and attempt to form some semblance of a community?

Mike

["Open Mike" is the Editorial Page of The Online Photographer, where we let Editor Mike J. stray off the reservation even more than usual. It appears, when the stars align, on Wednesdays.]

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Some silent, non-flashing, video-free, uninsistent,
unobtrusive, purely volitional ads:

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Curt Gerston: "As I read your description, I could picture every one of the distractions and interruptions you mentioned, and I realized how inured to the whole thing I've become, how much I've accepted it as part of life on the Internet; I've become like the proverbial frog in the pan of warming water. Not sure what to do about it. I don't think I can just quit the Internet. Sigh...Ribbit."

Stan B.: "Watching 'The Gilded Age' on American Experience last night, I was taken aback to see that even J. P. Morgan realized the limits of capitalism when he pushed to consolidate the railroads."

Mike replies: Even Adam Smith believed that a necessary condition of capitalism was that it be counterbalanced by Christian morality.

Dennis (partial comment): "I don't get it. You blog for a living. You post content, but wouldn't spend so much time doing so if you couldn't monetize it. Now you're complaining about advertisements while reading content that someone else has provided. The question is: what content would there be if nobody made money on it?"

Mike replies: I'm complaining about advertisements actively interfering with my ability to access the content, by annoying, irritating, and frustrating me.

For my site, I have a simple standard. The ads shouldn't annoy visitors, intrude upon the text, or be distracting. In 2009, the ad agency of a major camera manufacturer contacted me wanting to buy a large ad on TOP for a lot of money. I sorely needed the money. But they insisted it be a flashing .GIF administered by them. I said sorry, no flashing ads—link ads with static images only. They stopped returning my emails and I've never heard from them again.

A few people still complain sometimes that my site is too commercial.

Dave Reidel: "So how much would you (or I or anyone) be willing to pay to eliminate all that clutter so you just get the stuff you want to see?"

Mike replies: It might not help. I pay a stiff price for XM radio in the car, but lately commercials have been proliferating on all the popular channels anyway.

Colin Work: "There is an assumption by some that the 'net has to generate money to survive.' Yet the 'net—and the web—evolved in the research/academic environment. Content was freely given, with no thought of reward. Indeed, Wikipedia demonstrates that this willingness to give information for free still lives on. Commercialization of the 'net came through the (surprisingly slow) realisation that there were lots of eyes out there which could be turned into revenue, not from a need to generate revenue. Can the worms be put back in the can? I very much doubt it. But we can individually boycott those sites which cause most offence. Does this work? To some extent yes. Look at some very early web pages through the Wayback Machine, and you'll find endless examples of irritation—flashing text, psychedelic backgrounds—that you seldom see anymore, because people stopped visiting irritating pages. Maybe there is room for a commercial-free domain on the 'net (a kind of PBS or BBC)."

Michael: "There is an app called Pocket which allows you to save a webpage for reading later (in their app or a browser). It completely strips out all advertising and shows just the article text and pictures within the text. It is excellent and available on all platforms. Highly recommended."

Mark Porter: "I couldn't agree more. And it's gotten noticeably worse the last few years, as far as I can tell. You expect it from Perez Hilton, but not The Atlantic. It's unfathomable."

psu: "The Internet has been in the process of being ruined ever since the very first days of its existence. Here is a thing I wrote more than 10 years ago about how it had been ruined. A lot of people look at the current state of 'the net' through a misty-eyed nostalgia for a system that was allegedly built with a purpose higher than pure commerce in mind (it wasn't)...and like to opine that maybe that was so when it was a purely academic project (not really). The truth is that the Internet is the people who use it. And when you get enough people together the majority effect is usually terrible (see twitter). So it will always be in the process of being ruined, but within that huge mountain of sh*t will always be little bits of beauty. It takes a lot of work to find it and to maintain it, but it's there. Philosophical debates about whether it's better or worse than it should be feel irrelevant to me. It is what it is, it is what we made it. Oh. And I use ad blockers. Except at sites that can prove to me that they are not using ads that track me. I prefer to give money to people directly, no through surveillance."

Will: "I always know when my wife is experiencing this 'drek,' by the loud salty language. I can't block that."

Frank Figlozzi: "I felt my blood pressure rising while I read your post. You have described my experience exactly. My email inbox is filled with marketplace debris every day: messages that I immediately delete, because I never asked for them in the first place. Every one of these messages acts as if the entity behind it is worthy of occupying my entire life. I have nothing else to do with my time but focus on its needs, whims and desires. You touched a tender spot in my psyche."

Ben: "Use an ad blocker, and whitelist sites (like TOP) that use unobtrusive advertising. I use https://www.ghostery.com. Not affiliated, just a happy user. There are plenty of options for iOS now, too. I don't know if there's a better way to act on our collective frustration with what you are right to point out is a degenerating situation.

"Anyway, I thought trolls already ruined the Internet, and we're just surfing through some post-apocalyptic dystopia?"

Death of Photography? Much Exaggerated

TOP reader "poagao," AKA T.C. Lin, has written a nice article at Burn My Eye today called "Photography Never Died." I'll have to think about this some more, but I think I agree with his premise:

...The 'death of photography'...is actually the loss of the veneer of popularity photography momentarily enjoyed when it was caught up in the perfect storm of technological progress and social media. The three were conflated so closely for a time that most people assumed that, when the latter two moved on, photography would be rendered meaningless. But that is a false narrative; the essence of photography hasn’t changed; it has always been, at its core, a small, largely ignored niche.

For instance, when I first got into photography in 1980, a dedicated cadre of art photographers had just rediscovered (in the '70s) making 8x10 contact prints using castoff Deardorff 8x10s you could pick up for cheap. The connection of "real" photography—the hardcore people—to the mass market has always been tenuous at best, the two trendlines swooping in close at times but mostly with some distance between them. Poagao's right—we've always been a small group, going our own way.

Good article, and one I couldn't have written. You can read it, it's not too long!

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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Baker's Dozen: Sheet Film (Call for Work)

This Toyo-Field 45AII is currently for sale on eBay.
Seventy-one people are "watching" the auction!

Do you, or does anyone you know, still shoot 4x5" or larger sheet film and make contact prints the old-fashioned way?

If so, send me a JPEG or a digital snapshot of a recent print, or of yourself holding a print, and I'll post a sampling of them at the end of next week. Please mention your name, age, and location when you send it, as well as the size of your negative. My email address is m c j o h n s t o n a t m a c d o t c o m. (I don't know why I bother to disguise that, as I'm so awash in spam email already I can barely use email for its intended purpose. But I guess every precaution helps.)

Interested in seeing what people are up to!

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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Idle Thoughts About Photo Culture

I'm wondering what you think about the state of photo culture today. The other day in the context of the recent all-male Nikon ad, we talked, implicity or explicitly, about whether women feel sufficiently welcomed, included, rewarded or encouraged in photography today. But in a more global sense, I wonder about how welcomed, included, rewarded or encouraged all people feel in this field today.

Essential for success
One necessary condition of human accomplishment is that the conditions for it have to be favorable. Michael Jordan wouldn't have been a great basketball player if he had been born in 1763 instead of 1963, for example—for the simple reason that basketball hadn't been invented yet. Would he have been outstanding at something? Possibly. But he wouldn't have been, as his website says, "By acclamation...the greatest basketball player of all time."

Malcolm Gladwell points out in his book Outliers that Shakespeare emerged at a time when theater was a huge craze, the absolute rage, the number one most popular pursuit in the whole culture in England; but just a few decades later Oliver Cromwell closed down all the theaters. What would have happened if Shakespeare had come to maturity in Cromwell's time rather than the time of Elizabeth I? There would still have been a man named William Shakespeare, of course, but would there have been an "Immortal Bard"? Would we all still be reading MacBeth and Romeo and Juliet down to the present day?

The Beatles didn't have to come along in 1963–70, but they couldn't have had the same impact in the same way in, say, the era of sheet music sales prior to the advent of recordings. (Or now, for that matter.) Mick Jagger has said that in the history of recordings, there were only about fifteen years when it was possible for musicians to make a lot of money selling records. Almost all of the best-selling albums "of all time" don't come from this decade or the last one—Adele's "21" is the highest-ranking album from this decade so far, and it comes in at #11 on the all-time list.

One of my old colleagues at Model Railroader magazine once confided to me in a conspiratorial whisper that the heyday of the railroads lasted only from about 1870 to 1910. It was downhill after that. Shhh! The hobbyists might hear you. (Me, I'd tag the decline to the time cabooses disappeared from trains, a sad, sad state of affairs. Proper trains need cabooses.) The most popular bike path in England is a former railroad right-of-way between Bath and Bristol—and, according to Michael B. Clifford's movie Bicycle, more people ride bikes on the trail now than the trains that ran the same route used to carry!

How about photographers?
In one sense, photography has always been a difficult field and it has never been very easy to carve out a career, or a living, or a reputation, or a significant body of work. And sometimes when people managed one of those tricks they didn't manage one or more of the others (Vivian Maier did the last, for example, but not the other three.) And in another sense, all of the paths that photographers ever had for success are still open today, and more—there are still photojournalists working for newspapers and magazines, still artists selling pictures sprinkled with ironic detachment* for large sums in galleries and publishing exquisitely designed books, still professionals making a living shooting on commission for companies for good pay—and you can publish your own work on the Web today, make single photobooks, find a following on social media, and so forth.

But I don't think anyone would be tempted to argue that nothing has changed. I think it's become much harder to make any sort of dent these days than it was when I got into photography in 1980. How welcomed and encouraged by the culture at large are ambitious, gifted photographers today? Do they feel rewarded and included? Do newcomers feel there are possibilities in the field? How about room for them personally—is it easier or more difficult now to carve out a career, a living, a reputation, or a significant body of work that influences others?

In short, are conditions in the culture favorable for photography right now?

How about for individual photographers?

Food for idle cogitation. I've been letting these questions rattle around in my brain lately. (I've got the perspective of 37 years in the field now, and I hope to leverage that fact to learn something!)

Mike

*Hat tip to Blake Andrews

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.

Seldom idle
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Thomas Rink: "I'm an amateur and took up photography in 1982. Back then in Germany it was difficult for a 16-year-old to obtain photography-related literature and photo books. In order to see photographic work I went to the local Art museum (the Folkwang in Essen); their book store also had some interesting books. The big change was the advent of the World Wide Web. There is now an abundance of work to look at. Books in all major languages are easily obtainable. Lots of online tutorials ranging from mastering Lightroom to, say, bookbinding are at one's disposal. For me, the challenge is to make the best of all this without getting lost."

John Krumm: "In the spirit of the Internet, let me first acknowledge that I don't know, and then proceed to answer anyway.

"I think times are tough for all serious artists these days, not just photographers. Yet at the same time there appears to be a lot of good work going on. I just went to an opening at a local museum (The Tweed) featuring selections from their permanent collection (many big names) alongside some impressive contemporary regional photographers. It was a fun show, and the locals held their own.

"Ultimately the artistic life seems like a somewhat lonely pursuit, but at different periods in our history there are bursts of output and involvement which does allow for some of these individuals a little more contact and camaraderie with like-minded folks. I don't think we are in one of those periods, but I suspect we will see one over the next twenty years, in concert with some strong political change. That's what I hope."

Ken Tanaka: "'Photography' encompasses several largely independent cultures, each containing various subcultures. Women's representation in those with which I'm familiar seems mainly a matter of women's choice than men's. For example, the vast majority in the website-centric crowd are hobbyists/enthusiasts, not full-time vocational photographers or committed photographic artists. Women tend not to go in for the gear-headedness so prevalent on the Internet so they may seem underrepresented or maybe even unwelcome.

"But when I see some of photography's other circles—vocational and the arts—women seem very well represented. In fact, it seems that they dominate some of the subcultures there. It's been my impression that women tend to be much more goal-oriented in photography than men of similar ages. They don't care a bit if they're using an older camera model with a slower lens. They care about their images and what they're trying to present. Consequently they seem to be making far deeper and broader headway in photography's arts circles than men today.

"Separately, some day someone will do a study to see how photography changed when its medium shifted from chemical to digital. Photography has, as you've noted, been an activity open to everyone throughout most of its history. Business people, store clerks, accountants, plumbers...all had access to photography. But the conversion to digital initially attracted an influx of people (mainly males) who were comfortable with computers—mainly those who worked as computer programmers or technicians. That massive specific influx must have had various lasting impacts on photography, separately from the tech changes, no? I wonder what history might eventually tell us about this."

John Camp (partial comment): "I think the concept of photography as a 'field' may be breaking down. It's now available to anyone, and we regularly see cellphone shots on national news programs...and a lot of those shots are pretty good. In other art forms, you still generally have to know something, or be able to do something—dance, act, write, design buildings, mix paint, sculpt, play an instrument or sing. That's no longer true of photography in the widest sense.

"So here's a question: if we were to have a nationwide contest for the best photograph taken each day, how many would have been taken by professionals or advanced amateurs, and how many would have been taken by totally uninterested amateurs who happened to push the button at the right time? My money would be on the latter. That would not be the case with any of the other arts."

Mike replies: Good point, but I can think of exceptions. For instance, isn't it true that Kanye West can neither play any traditional instruments nor sing? And Jeff Koons has apprentices actually make his sculptures. He's the 'sculptural director' you might say. And you might remember the late bestselling author Leon Uris, who could not write, in a sentence-by-sentence sense, despite being a compelling storyteller who had something to say. (He failed high school English three times and never graduated from high school. Read any three paragraphs at random from any of his books and you'll see why.) Of course, some people who write sentences exquisitely either lack the ability to tell stories or have nothing to say, so that cuts both ways.

But exceptions don't negate your point.

David Comdico: "A few thoughts: There is nothing new about amateurs taking better photos than professionals. The history of photography includes the history of vernacular photography and the boundaries between the two are so vague that even talking in this manner is misleading. See Vivian Maier or Atget. Photography has had several fistfights with Art and they highlight something important: Photography is not Art. This is a lesson photography keeps teaching us. The Art that is created with it is hardly out of steam and won't be for as long as photographs continue to be central to our culture. Lastly, photography is itself a product of history. We are all much more the product of historical contingency then we'd like to admit. As such, the language that the early adopters and creators develop have a large influence on future practitioners, even when it's not conscious. This is the Anxiety of Influence where we belated souls resent the luck of those privileged few. Interestingly this creates its own momentum."

Laughing and Crying

This made me laugh...

I guess this is a cousin of the practice of selling used items on eBay for more than they go for new, apparently trading on the perception that everything on eBay or Craigslist has to be a bargain. Actual value of this enlarger: a little less than nothing, in that it would be a fairly difficult task to find someone willing to take it for free.

On the other hand, if I ever do build my Visitor Center, I would happily display a Leitz Focomat IIc, an enlarger which actually might be worth this price.

...And this made me cry...

Really? Really? It's not bad enough that Bentley and Porsche both make SUVs? The choice between driving this or killing myself would be a very near thing.

No further comment!

Mike
(Thanks to JG)

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.

Really, no further comment. I would just get myself into trouble.
Give Mike a “Like” or Buy yourself something nice

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Featured Comments from:

Edd Fuller: "To whoever buys that enlarger, you're going to need some way to develop your film. I have a vintage stainless steel tank and reel in excellent condition that I would be willing to let go for $1,200."

Brian in Alberta: "M-B is one of the largest truck manufacturers in the world. Just saying."

Mike replies: Okay, but this one is manufactured by Nissan.

Jeff replies to Mike: "Not wholly manufactured by Nissan. It's built on a Nissan frame, jointly built with Daimler, and sold through the Mercedes Van Division (yes, they do that, too). May not come to the U.S.; targeted for Europe, where midsize pickups are more common. U.S. customers like full-size trucks."

Mani Sitaraman (partial comment): "I saw a genuinely mint, unused autofocus Focomat IIC for sale in a specialist Leica shop in Tokyo for $5,000 around the turn of the century. The shop owner said he expected it to sell within a day. It was gone the next day. Gorgeous piece of kit, though Kienzle made an identical version, the A69S, down to the individual bolts."

Open Mike: Cultural Disruption

It occurred to me that the "The Frame TV" post on Tuesday (and my romantic musing about a virtual gallery) actually highlights a certain disruption problem in the culture of photography. We're all well aware of how digital disrupted photography when it comes to the manufacture of equipment and materials, and we're often alerted to specific changes and speculations about changes in habits, norms, and trends. But we haven't really sorted out yet the ways in which the culture of photography has changed—some aspects of it gone forever, other aspects new and as yet essentially unexplored...some of these merely predicted, not even existing yet.

Here is one (among many possible) comparisons between old and new paradigms of thinking:

The picture in the picture above (you're well aware you're looking at a record snap of it, not the real thing) is our most recent print-sale print. It is entirely a digital picture, but it was very carefully made by a very experienced artist, using the top-level camera and a carefully selected vintage lens. It was then printed with great care and deliberateness, with contemplation of a variety of subtleties. I then had it framed specifically for this spot in this house. It's meant as publicly-accessible art—it's already been seen by hundreds, if not thousands, of people (at least our print sale, times all the people who have seen each buyer's print) and will be seen by many more in the future (everyone who comes into my living room and cares to look around at the art on the walls, for example).

And unless you also bought this print, then you still haven't seen it. (If you ever swing by TOP Rural HQ in the Finger Lakes to shake my paw, you can see it then.)

This picture, on the other hand, was one quick snap taken with a smartphone, of something I happened to see when I parked at a restaurant last night. It was literally taken to share with only two people—two of my dog-loving friends. I sent it to them immediately, and both of them enjoyed it. End of story, if I hadn't used it as an illustration for this post. It never will be a print—that is, an object—and it was never intended to be. It's mere communication, like a text, and ephemeral from the get-go.

It seems to me that people have three baseline responses to changes in culture: a.) some tend to embrace the new on principle and might wish to sweep aside the out-of-date; b.) others try to hang on to what was best about the old ways and might scorn the coming thing; and c.) Eeyores who throw up their hands and say there's nothing they can do about it either way, so what's the use caring?

Without going into the larger questions here, I'll say I think a device like "The Frame TV" actually does highlight some of the questions we have. There's a certain demotic free-for-all that has evolved that we're aware of—millions of people take billions of digital photographs and throw them online, and you can theoretically go look at them there. But there's often very little editing by the maker, certainly very little winnowing or curating by any intelligent third party, and what you're seeing when you look at work that way is an uncontrolled approximation of what the maker intended, if in fact they even had intentions in the first place. It's like looking at postcards of Rembrandt paintings in the museum gift shop and then thinking you know what the paintings look like. And there's way too much work to look at anyway—no one can meaningfully "see" even a tiny fraction of it. Heck, I look at pictures for a living and I see just the merest wisp of wind-drift from the tip of the tip of the iceberg.

Inherent in my idea of virtual photography galleries scattered throughout the land is the idea that the auteur photographer could have some control over the way his or her pictures look. All of the screens would be the same make and size and all calibrated, all of the viewing conditions similar, so that what a digital image looked like on one screen it would look like on all the rest. It would preserve, to a much greater degree than the Internet does, the photographer's intentions for the way the work is seen. Presumably the images shown wouldn't be a random motley, but could be intensively worked on, selected, edited and curated like museum shows are today. But they'd be digital images shown digitally—because, really, how much longer can we go on pretending that things haven't changed, and that silver gelatin prints made from large-format negatives (for example—that just happens to describe the most recent museum show I saw) is in any way representative of what contemporary photographers are doing now?

So I suppose some could see the idea of a high-quality digital picture frame as being sort of quaint and pitiable, a rearguard action by fuddy-duddies who pine for the old days of fine prints on the wall. But I don't really think it is. I see it more as a tentative baby step toward whatever new culture is going to arise for valuing and sharing deliberately-made artwork created by dedicated, thoughtful practitioners.

Because we still need that, too, along with the billions of phone snaps shared between one or two friends.

Mike

"Open Mike," meant to be the editorial page of TOP, is supposed to appear on Wednesdays. But darn it, I just ran out of steam yesterday.

P.S. I should also mention that I think a reader named Thomas has the best handle on how "The Frame TV" might best be used. His comment came in this morning. He wrote:

It's interesting to hear many people frame this product (eugh) as a replacement for a fine print collection, instead of in addition to a collection. I cannot stand big black television sets amongst my furnishings. They dominate a room. Thus I currently don't have one [I don't either —Ed.]. This would happily sit on a wall with other work and would blend in, so the appeal is enormous for me. I miss watching movies on a larger screen. It in no way would replace good prints but I like the offer to have my cake and eat it (no noticeable TV set and watch movies). It would be good above a low sideboard with a discrete set of speakers that would otherwise run from a hifi. A vertical print next to it on one side could look cool.

That's how it's probably most useful. One frame among many, but showing a slow rotation (I'd probably change daily) of suitably-formatted digital images.

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/Yale Spring Photo Book Offer
(Ends June 30th or when supplies run out)

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robert e: "What I still don't understand is the need to see 'Frame TV' as a dual-purpose screen—as both art display and TV. I submit that this is another form of clinging to familiar cultural norms. In fact, I can't think of a situation where I wouldn't be compromising either my preferences for placing art or preferences for placing a TV screen in order to have one device serve both purposes. So why compromise? If I were to really embrace this idea, I'd get screen/frames that were 1) suitably sized for art and 2) hang them in suitable places, rotated to suitable orientations. On the other hand, when I want to watch a movie, I'd go to the suitable place and seat, lower (or raise) the appropriately sized and placed projection screen, and turn on the projector—wouldn't matter what's hanging on the wall.

"Regarding the digital gallery idea: These frames are both baby steps and quaint throwbacks, and will be short-lived because pretty soon we won't need to hang anything because entire walls or wall sections will be able to display any number and size of images at these resolutions, virtually matted and framed (or hang a real frame around your virtual matted art). Heck, people would be able to display a section of a wall at the Louvre or the Hermitage and replace the masterpieces with their happy snaps."

Mike replies: I agree that the dual-purpose nature of this product touted by the marketing strategy is probably "another form of clinging to familiar cultural norms," it's probably dual-purpose mainly because most people wouldn't consider spending $2,000 on a digital frame. Don't you think?

It might also help with marketing, appealing both to people who don't like the look of a big ugly TV in their living rooms as well as for people who would like to get more value out of their TV when they're not watching TV.

JG: "The issue I have with displaying art this way—my art, specifically, but also other people's art—is that unlike with a print, which I will have made and signed-off on (literally!), there is no way that I can control what other people will ultimately see.

"I would cringe when I saw my very carefully crafted photos via the web on the cheap, non-calibrated, 8-bit monitors used in the office where I worked. (I actually went so far as to bring my own monitor and a graphics card from home, because my work-issued monitor looked so awful and could not be calibrated nor profiled!) Or when a coworker would print one of those web-only JPEGs on a color laser printer (instead of paying me the measly $5 I asked for a proper print, to cover my paper-and-ink costs)...yikes! ('My eyes, my eyes!')

"But as bad as it is to see my own photos displayed haphazardly, it would be even worse to see a photo that I had paid real money for displayed that way. Until technology advances to the point where the photographer is able to remotely control the final appearance of a displayed photo or prepare it in advance for display in a defined environment, then so far as I'm concerned, it is a hearty 'No, thanks!' from me when it comes to using televisions as frames!"

Darlene (partial comment): "I see this as a new take on the slide show. And how popular were they while visiting your friends and relatives? I am bored already."

John Brandrick: "Two thoughts came to mind while reading Thomas' post. Regarding his distaste for the black blob in the room; we mounted the TV on a wall painted with a very dark, rich plum colour called Plum Martini. Visitors have walked past it several times before asking if that TV was always there. As well when viewed with the lights down low the image pops off the wall. Secondly, I agree to his assertion that this is in addition to the gallery show; something to do with the impermanence of an image on a screen. I think there is something in us that has us look at prints differently than when we look at them on a screen. For instance it seems common to miss details until the image is in print form. I've had to go back to cleanup specs that weren't seen while pouring over the image at 1 to 1 on the monitor. Maybe the permanence of the print slows us down in our viewing."

Mike replies: Now you and Darlene have me remembering my encounters with movies and rotating selections of images on screens when they're part of museum shows—hyped with the words "interactive" or "multimedia" or other trendy labels. I've never cared for those bits or been comfortable with them. Somehow it's something that's being done to me rather than something I can approach and investigate freely on my own terms.

Thomas (partial comment): "There are several remarkable video-image artists whose work I have seen recently at the NGV (Melbourne, Australia), and the medium is inherently for display on screen. The works are no less authentic or real, and didn't leave a lessor impression on me for it. We also had David Hockney and Ai Wei Wei showing in the last 24 months, and both had significant proportion of digitally displayed work. Both video and stills. I certainly don't deny the significance of printed photographs in editions or books—I love them deeply—but I think there is a knee-jerk reaction to non-printed work that is frequently encountered among photographers particularly."

Jim: "My equivalent is the screen-saver on my 27" iMac. I have almost 500 digital pictures—mostly abstracts—that it cycles through on two screens. It amuses me enough that I often get distracted when on the phone, and visitors too!"

Brian Taylor: "There's a contemporary photography gallery in a city not far from here that, I'm sorry to say, I've mostly found underwhelming. I'm not the only one to have found its ambience aloof and unwelcoming. With a couple of exceptions the exhibitions I've seen there have been forgettable. They seem to favour work that is abstruse and bleak, accompanied by pretentious text inferring privileged insight on the part of the artist. Work that, to my mind, fails both as art and social or cultural critique. I don't suppose you were proposing that 'deliberately-made artwork created by dedicated, thoughtful practitioners' is intrinsically better than work produced by the hoi-polloi, but I just wanted to put any such assumption in question. I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling that family snaps, especially if taken long enough ago to be of interest to the social historian, or if memorialising moments of intimacy, can be 'better' and more valuable than much of the stuff that curators see fit to hang on gallery walls. Rant over.  :-) "

Ed Buziak: "I heard about this a few months ago and know that Samsung approached MOMA, Tate Modern and Saatchi Art (possibly other galleries) for a selection of 'panoramic' 16:9 images for Samsung to license for this new TV idea. One of my abstract paintings was selected by Saatchi Art, and if Samsung choose it, and if purchasers of the TV select my image for their off-TV pleasure, I will receive royalties. So I'm hoping they sell a million+ of these!"

Mike replies: Couldn't happen to a nicer guy, brother Ed. (For those who don't know, Ed is the former publisher and founding editor of the UK's Darkroom User magazine. I used to write for him under a pseudonym.)

iPhone Magazine Cover

The British magazine Black & White Photography, for which I wrote some 80 columns back in the 'aughts, has published an issue with an iPhone photo on the cover. The photo was taken by Tim Clinch, who posted it on Instagram with his comments.

Mike G told us about it, in a comment for the "Smallening and Lightening" post: "Pro photographer Tim Clinch, who writes a monthly column about smartphone photography for Black & White Photography magazine, recently did a shoot in Mexico and used only iPhones. I think he took his Fuji gear as backup. He also scored a magazine cover, which I believe is the first time the magazine used a smartphone shot for a cover."

More of that handwriting on the wall I was talking about two days ago, in the "Scary Future" post?

For counterpoint on that, consider part of a comment that came in from cgrab yesterday morning: "Cell phones, as strange as this sounds, might be more at risk from the next step in technological development: 'Siri/Cortana/Bixby/whatever, virtualize environment from implant readings and transmit to x.'"

Anything's possible!

Here's the B&WP subscription page, if you're interested in subscribing.

Mike
(Thanks to Mike G and cgrab)

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/Yale Spring Photo Book Offer
(Ends June 30th or when supplies run out)

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mike plews: "I carry an iPhone at work [Mike is a TV news cameraman —Ed.] and one of its functions is to take quick shots at news stories to send back to the TV station where I work as place holders on the web until a more complete story can be produced.

"At first I didn't think much of the camera but that is no longer the case. If you take if for what it is and work around its limitations, iPhone cameras are actually rather nice devices. Poor low light performance and limited resolution are offset by terrific mixed light performance and almost uncanny auto exposure. A fixed lens can be kind of liberating. It never bothered me when I was shooting a Rollei so why should a phone be different? In the end the iPhone has replaced my Canon S95 as the camera I carry all the time. Unlike the Canon I actually do carry the iPhone everywhere. When my phone filled up I got into the habit of dumping its contents onto a folder on my computer. I also use it to save gas receipts so I didn't want to lose anything. A few months ago I took a minute to look through the 2,000 or so images that had accumulated there and was pleasantly surprised at how much I liked some of them. The little camera is making me a better photographer through daily practice. That's cool."

Dept. of Oddities

There's a new movie called "Bokeh." Listed under "Trivia" at IMDB, it says, "The title is a photography term for the aesthetic quality of the blur produced in out-of-focus parts of an image." Which is at least a succinct and correct definition of bokeh!

Mike
(Thanks to Robert Roaldi)

P.S. The bokeh movies for me are still the old Kubrick film Barry Lyndon, parts of which were shot by candlelight, no small trick in the film era, and Pixar's Ratatouille, for which friend-o'-TOP and protean street photographer (and ace Pixar animator) Juan Buhler helped introduce many animated lens effects into the visuals, including bokeh.

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/Yale Spring Photo Book Offer
(Ends June 30th or when supplies run out)

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Barry: "Having watched the movie Bokeh I can say there is some marvelous cinematography in the movie. It was shot entirely on location in Iceland. Sadly the story is lacking. A long journey with little reward."

Gavin Mclelland: "Over here in the UK there is also a Bokeh bike. Not sure how that relates to out-of-focus areas in a photograph."

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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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

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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.