June 2009
42 posts
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Why Are Street Photographers Losers?
Mason Resnick 2007.
Street photography requires the least amount of work. The street is there, waiting, accessible. A web designer is hardly going to go into a war zone like Nachtwey to do conflict photography (an equally meaningless and cliched form).
The person feels like they ‘know it.’ All these romantic types, ‘seeing, no really seeing.’ They are so sensitive to the beauty all around them....
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Classroom Memories of Garry Winogrand (pdf) →
Garry Winogrand from The Animals
Everyone got an A in the class.
No technique, but how to see.
He made the student come to the conclusion. That there is a story. Pointed the way but in the wrong discussion. Raised the right question but gave the wrong answer. How do you get someone thinking along the right path without telling them what’s at the end of it? They will eventually get to...
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Shooting Notes - 29 June 2009
A complex work day today, both emotionally and technically. I’d made the mistake of looking at the state of the photo ‘industry’. From all that I’ve read the traditional places that paid for photography are in the process of sinking. Long term photographers have scattered, and the hoards of new students are languishing on the piers with no work. The very usefulness of still photography seems to...
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lens culture: Roger Ballen Interview →
Roger Ballen Interview (partial notes)
During other work he found the objects and archetype people that he’d come to work extensively with. A gradual building up of and continuity of content.
I guess you choose the photographs that have the most heightened essence, the most integrated essence, the most piercing essence, the most tense essence. That’s the picture you look for.
These pictures...
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On Assignment: Hard Lessons in Somalia - Lens Blog →
Kamber lists out some practicalities.
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Shooting Notes 1
My method has evolved a lot since I left Sydney.
One of the things I was embarrassed about was that I’d hide my camera, shoot like a coward from my chest, or down near my thigh. That didn’t necessarily have to be the case, but it was what I felt. Yes, I was getting closer and closer to people with the advantage that they were never threatened and they didn’t ‘act’,...
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George Rodger to his 8 Year Old Son (from Magnum...
Here’s a letter George Rodger (photos) sent to his 8 year old son in the 1950s which I think captures brilliantly a lot of the right things one needs to do.
My Dear Jonathan, I have just received your very interesting letter and I thank you for sending me copies of your first pictures. I liked especially the one you took at Stonehenge when you photographed the shadows on the ground rather...
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http://tedbarron.com/BWF-June-2009/23-Henri-Cartier... →
Henri Cartier Bresson Speaks Notes
A balance between the world inside us and the world outside us.
The inseparability of form and content.
A question of chance, but you have to pick the the moment, a decisive moment.
You have to work always for yourself, the magazines put you in contact with events, and you have the chance to speak to a large audience.
The first impression has to be very...
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Milton Glaser: Ten Things I've Learned →
You can only work for people that you like
If you have a choice never have a job. With a quote from John Cage: ‘You know, I do know how to prepare for old age’ he said. ‘Never have a job, because if you have a job someday someone will take it away from you and then you will be unprepared for your old age.’
Some people are toxic avoid them.
Professionalism is not enough OR the good is the...
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Magnum Search results for: Telex Iran →
The hype over Gilles Presess’s Telex Iran is justified. These are works of striking individuality, and deep humane insight. It also helps that none of the ‘news’ is shown. There is another way.
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“Well, naively, of course. When I first went to war, I went to war because I...”
– Croqui De Luz - Don McCullin Interview (audio)
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““I didn’t have an easy time doing war. I remember being in Beirut...”
– Croqui Del Luz - Don McCullin
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““But the power of self-tracking is even more profound. It’s not just...”
– The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the Power of Personal Metrics
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““ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And you’ve written that you used to think of...”
– Online NewsHour: Conversation with James Nachtwey- May 16, 2000
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Aphorisms 5
1
Look very closely at what the others are doing, and then make absolutely sure that you do something different. Preferably something that will make them laugh at you.
2
Talking about yourself is really quite like pissing on yourself. In the end, you’re going to have to clean up.
3
If someone asks you what camera you use, ask them what hammer they use.
4
The act itself is it. There really...
WatchSome rare photos (on the web in any case) from Nachtwey of the start of the Iraq War.
It’s startling how inarticulate the others are in comparison to Nachtwey. How seemingly self concerned they come across. Of course it could be the format of the show, but this is another example that it is best not to talk about oneself much and to keep the focus on what matters, the things that...
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WatchDiane Arbus - Masters of Photography Part 3
“I didn’t want to be told that I was terrific. I had a sense that if I was so terrific at it, it wasn’t worth doing.”
“I like to put things up around my bed all the time. Pictures of mine that I like, and other things. And I change it every month or so. There’s some funny subliminal thing that happens. It isn’t just looking at it, it’s looking at it...
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WatchRobert Frank - Part 1
“I have no regrets. I don’t think I’ve ever gone far enough. I would like to reveal more in the films that I make. To push further. To show it with, you know, more knowledge of what I photograph. To get people to trust me more in the way I photograph them or film them.”
“I was looking at the landscape, I knew I was in America. What am I doing here I asked myself. There was...
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Why?
To see the range of life
To show what I’ve seen
To be excited, be part of an adventure
Because I love the act
Because I love the problems of photography
Because photos are beautiful
To make a name for myself
To meet others like me, and unlike me
To not have to do a normal job
To earn enough money to live on
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Nachtwey: Acceptance through respect
“In a war the normal codes of civilised behaviour are suspended. It would be unthinkable in so called normal life to go into someone’s home where the family is grieving over the death of a loved one spend long moments photographing them. It simply wouldn’t be done. Those pictures could not have been made unless I was accepted by the people I’m photographing. It’s simply impossible to...
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Nachtwey: On fear
“Fear is not what’s important. It’s how you deal with it. It would be like asking a marathon runner if they feel pain. It’s not a matter of whether you feel it. It’s how you manage it.
It could happen to any of us at any time. We all know that it is a distinct possibility, every time we go out, everyday it’s what we face, it comes with the territory, it’s part of the job, we go in knowing...
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Nachtwey: Method
“That’s very important, to stay centred within yourself. Because you have to make a lot of very important decisions very quickly. You have to stay calm and you can’t get too excited and panicked about things. I mean these are all very basic things that I should probably not even mentions.
I just try and focus, pre-visualise situations that I might get in and run them through my mind. I think...
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Nachtwey: Danger, excitement, adventure
“It was a time of high emotion and great excitement. I really felt that I was witnessing history. And witnessing history not from an academic point of view, not from a distance, but really what happens to people, ordinary people in the course of history. And this was to me the most exciting, the most worthwhile experience, and exactly the kind of experience why I became a photographer....
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Nachtwey: On becoming a war photographer
“And it took me a long time before I was able to feel confident in myself that I could do this job. Before I could convince other people I had to first convince myself. And in 1980 I woke up one night with the very clear idea that now I’ve learned everything that I could learn and now it was time to go to New York and try to become a magazine photographer, a war photographer. I really felt that I...
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Deliberate Practice: Statisticity
One of the key mistakes made in art is the disregard for measuring things. The reason is obvious: the ultimate judgement of art is qualitative rather than quantitative. But research around expertise and the concepts of deliberate practice has shown us that the actual processes and methods and practice of art can and should be measured and tracked so that we can see where we stand, set goals, and...
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Deliberate Practice: remembering things
A key part of deliberate practice is building strong, expansive mental models of your domain space, and to do that experts are very effective at using their long term memories. Here are some tips on how this can be done (from helpguide.org) with some comments on how I currently go about things:
Pay attention. It’s pretty amazing how little attention you pay to things you come across...
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Deliberate Practice: Colvin in Fortune
Geoff Colvin, author of a book on deliberate practice, has written a well known article on deliberate practice in Fortune. He is very good on explaining the basics:
“It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.
For...
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Deliberate Practice: the beginning
What we now know is that people learn to become very good at something by intense deliberate practice of relevant tasks consistently over a long period of time; two sessions of an hour and half, everyday, for at least ten years (main paper by Ericsson et al (pdf), softer read in the HBR). Deliberate practice is quite different to other domain tasks such as an actual performance, research, play,...
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Meyerowitz: Jazzy riffs vs. classical tempo
“While working on the streets of New York with the Leica I began to see that the slowness of color film and therefore the depth of space it rendered, was forcing me to slow down and make photographs from further back than I had before. This slight adjustment of space and time produced a new kind of image for me, one that emptied the center of the frame of its nominal subject, “the hook” that...
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Winogrand's cop out
“… spreading Szarkowski’s view that Winogrand is the ‘central photographer of his generation.’ That claim can still make some people wince. To anyone conditioned to want every figure bolted into an ironclad composition, Winogrand’s images can look limp, slapdash — shots taken at the indecisive moment. They seem to lack a prevailing mood, leaving the eye to...
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Sebastião Salgado in Kuwait
“I was in Kuwait in 1991. The first Gulf war had just finished, but the oil wells were still burning. To get into the country, I had to go to Saudi Arabia and hire a four-wheel drive the colour of the sand - because that was the colour of the US army vehicles. Then, to cross the border, someone told me to find a card in the same sort of colours as a US army ID card and wave it upside-down. Nobody...
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Watch“It’s the closest I come to not existing.”
His method is very jittery. It’s as if he is pretending not be taking photos at all. Like he is playing around with the camera, but it doesn’t look very convincing to me. Of course people on the streets are involved in their own thoughts and a lot can be done without notice. He actually shoots just as he brings it to his...
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Meyerowitz's Method
“I found myself slowing down, making more use of the street corner. I could look up and down the street in both directions, and there would be a space in the middle where people came together. I usually picked a hard, sunny corner, with something in the frame that appealed to me - like this particular building. It’s an office building, probably 30 storeys tall, with a plastic gold...
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Watch“Do you work everyday?”
“Yeah, sure.”
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WatchThe camera is at his face for the shortest period of time possible. The camera is very small, and very quiet. He is always smiling, always non-threatening. People do stop and turn around but that could be video camera that’s with him. He’s only a little sleazy.
“What’s happening?”
“I’m surviving.”
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How to be happy in everything
There is an excellent Venn diagram that is flittering across the web at the moment that is ostensibly about how to be sustainably happy with a business:
But replace the WE with YOU and you have a succinct description of how to be happy as a photographer.