The Online Photographer

The Very Very Very Best Backup...

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

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

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

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

(That's his whole comment.) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Everything must fade away

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

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

"So yeah, prints."

Felicities of the Smartphone (Guest Post)

Words and pictures by Mark Power

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

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

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

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

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

Mike and his correspondent Dennis say:

Dennis: I know plenty of people who have turned away from entry level cameras (ILC or fixed lens) in favor of their phones, but I think that's due to the ease of sharing photos taken with a phone.

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

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

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

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

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

Mark

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

Original contents copyright 2019 by Mark Power. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to TOP affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smartphone Sunday

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

It's smartphone Sunday, apparently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike
(Lead photo by Kārlis Dambrāns from Latvia)

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

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

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

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

One Good Book: Guest Counterpoint [REVISED]

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

 

Written by Moose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elliott Erwitt, Venice, 1965

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'd suggest books such as:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moose

Original contents copyright 2019 by Moose. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Changin' Times

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

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

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

Debbie Fleming Caffery, The Spirit and the Flesh book cover

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

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

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

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Want to help?

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

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

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

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

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

Open Mike: Kirk Tuck Takes a Break

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

Kirk

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

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

Sad to hear him say that.

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

Imagine, mourning for email.

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

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

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

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

Wishing Kirk the best.

Mike
(Thanks to John Camp and several other readers)

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

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

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Here’s the situation

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Featured Comments from:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now It's a Verb?!

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

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

Mike
(Thanks to Bahi Para and several other readers)

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Here’s the situation

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

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

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

Vivian Maier, The Color Work

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

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

From Vivian Maier: Self-Portraits

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

Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soul Red

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hugh with the Huemobile

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

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

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

People News IV: Bob Gruen

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

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

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

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

Mike

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The Answer to the Nikon Question

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

Quoth he:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike
(Thanks to E.H.)

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

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

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

How Do You Say "Nikon"?

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

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

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

Like this.

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

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

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

Mike
(Thanks to Oren Grad)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And the negative:

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

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

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

"Negative:

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

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

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

Connectedness

You surf, sometimes you hit flotsam and jetsam.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Become a Successful Fine Art* Photographer

Guest post by Gordon Lewis

SA**

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

Have an exotic-sounding name.

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

Be provocative.

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

Embrace conceptual, not representational, art.

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

Print extra-large.

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

Print extra-small.

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

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

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

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

 Gordon

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

**Satire Alert

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

©2018 by Gordon Lewis, all rights reserved

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

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

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

Mike adds: Shhh! He might hear you.

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

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

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

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

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

'Edward Hopper and Marshall's House' by Bob Burnett

Edward Hopper and Marshall's House from Bob Burnett on Vimeo.

This morning, the first public unveiling of my friend Bob Burnett's new short film, "Edward Hopper & Marshall's House." Bob undertook this as a personal project after encountering the subject of one of Edward Hopper's most famous watercolors several years ago, an experience he wrote about on TOP.

"From 1930 until 1967, Edward and Josephine Hopper spent summer seasons in South Truro, Massachusetts, painting the local landscape and taking advantage of the unique Cape Cod light. The neighbors, the Marshall family, have owned their home since 1913—spanning five generations. It still looks remarkably similar to when Edward Hopper painted it more than 80 years ago. This film presents how the concept of family and an artist’s work can reach beyond the confines of a period in time."

Directed and filmed by Bob, edited by Jay Salbert, with sound design by Alan F. Jones. The photographs used, in addition to some Hopper family snapshot images that are part of the Whitney Museum collection, include portraits by Hans Namuth and Arnold Newman, and a Corbis Historical portrait by Oscar White.

In addition to being an independent filmmaker, Bob creates documentary and media productions for a wide range of foundations and public policy organizations. For example, a few years ago he created the videos that introduced the MacArthur Fellows to the world. He has received more than 150 film festival and industry awards for his work. His previous film, "The Art of Richard Thompson," was screened at film festivals worldwide.

"Edward Hopper & Marshall's House" reminded me of my beloved childhood art teacher, Gerald Landt, who loved Hopper's work, and it put me in mind of the similarities between Hopper and Winslow Homer, from an earlier generation, and Andrew Wyeth, from a later one, engaging deeply with the spirit of a particular place, its land, and its light. I found Bob's new film enjoyable and moving and I hope you enjoy it too! Big thanks to Bob for picking TOP's audience—you—for today's reveal.

Mike

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

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James McKearney: "Big thanks to Bob Burnett for this beautiful film and to TOP for making it available here. I am very pleased that Marshall's House still retains the peaceful and pleasant look it had when Hopper painted it. Seeing some of the inside of the house is a great bonus. In the second edition of her book entitled Hopper's Places, Gail Levin presents some present-day photos of the places that Hopper painted on Cape Cod and many other locations. Years ago while driving on back roads in Truro and Wellfleet on the Cape, I had the feeling that I saw what appeared to be the site where Hopper painted 'The Forked Road' (1934). After some research using old railroad maps of the area, I was convinced that I was correct. Seeing some of the places that Hopper painted is always rewarding, especially so to discover another on one's own."

Adam Carlberg: "It amazes me how I can sit through a two-hour feature film and not be half as entertained or enlightened as I was when watching this seven-and-a-half minute gem. Well done, Mr. Burnett."

Dennis Whitehead: "Well done Bob! As someone posted, you've packed a big beautiful story into a perfectly crafted small space. Great work!"

Paul Richardson: "I was in Truro last summer, on vacation, and decided to look for Marshall's House, thinking it would be simple to find. It wasn't. I used Google maps, and kept getting wrong directions and driving in circles, and so I went to the public library, figuring that getting directions there would be a snap, as they'd probably dealt with this request a thousand times. Well, again I was wrong. Nobody there seemed to know what I was talking about, and while they tried to be helpful, I didn't get anywhere. I finally found the right road (I think) but still couldn't find the house. Finally I simply gave up. But this summer, I'm going to try again. I'm more determined than ever after this post. I know it's there somewhere."

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

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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

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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

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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.
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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."