I come from a photographic background. I have always looked down at ‘staged’ photography as being a lower form of the art, as it evades the central challenge of the medium: to make intuitive, spontaneous sense of the symbolic chaos of visual life and to realise new knowledge out of this which can’t be grasped at by other mediums like writing. But now as I’m foraging in the unfamiliar forest of film-making I’m struck by how pre-determined you have to be about the image in film. With the inclusion of time, and the movement that is possible only in time, the task of visual configuration has to become infinitely more determined, but as I’m finding out, it is no less authentic.

I’m having to learn now how to stage, how to ‘say’ instead of ‘find’. It’s funny because I had to try so hard to learn to find (actually, I never really got there). But perhaps this belief that film is to be staged is a limitation of my imaturity. Some of the film-makers that I really like eventually made films in a far more plastic, unmodelled way. They would turn up with minimal scripts, scenes written the day before or in the drunken haze of the morning and play around with the actors and the set when shooting. Antonioni, Wong Kar Wai, Coppola all did so.

This feels like a very esoteric, premature discussion though. It can’t be denied that drama films are more staged. That the process of the capturing the image is slower, that the time slice is longer. Of course great beauty can come from that. It isn’t quite Winogrand’s project of ‘discovering’ new knowledge about the world through instinctive photography but something more designed. In fact, this is why I wanted to try film in the first place, here I have more room to ‘say’. Whether or not it’s what fits me is hard to say, the good thing is that I’m giving it a go.

• film
• method

Posted 2 years ago

Shooting on the streets is a blood sport. It’s an orchestral piece with highs and lows, of stillness, silence, then intense, sub-second movements. Often you’re stalking the streets, your prey, ready to catch it, aggressive. Or else you are dancing, languid, flowing in and out of the crowd, lightly, oily. Snapping without an eye on you. You feel the throb, the flow, the shifts in the heaving crowd. You sense where there’ll be an opening, where the interesting face is, where the fight is about to erupt. You don’t need to look. Your mind calculates how to get close, your body shifts the subject into the right light. You take the photo. You take another. You’re gone. The person is left wondering what happened. Or most often, they didn’t feel a thing, they’re wrapped up in some personal dream, some hidden, secret anguish, or some public drama.

But most of the time, it’s a slow, teeth-gritting grind. Moments, events, actions appear, happen and disappear. You’re watching a river of human activity, bubbling up from the the bottom, or rippling across the surface. You’re noticing. You’re predicting. What will come around that corner? Who’s behind you right now? Turn, snap. You’re constantly checking your settings. Adjusting as the light shifts, clouds, shade, colour, time, distance. You are constantly being. You’re choosing. Is that important. Is that the right configuration of reality. Can I frame that? Is that interesting enough. Should I wait? Should I go? It is a constant, unbending focus. You don’t stop. You try to but you can’t. You are a reactive machine, something happens, and you ask yourself how to react. You don’t. You react.

There is a permanent, overwhelming inquisitiveness. I wonder what’s down this alley? What’s behind this door? Is it unlocked? Who’s that? What’s she doing? A constant interrogation of your environment. You’re greedy. You want something interesting, a story, something visual. Most of the time it is just emotion, or intuition, you can’t name it. You react to a light, or a colour, or a face, or a girl, or a man in spiralling distress. You react because it’s you. Someone might not have chosen that exact thing to look at, inquire about. You find out about yourself every time you’re out there. You forcibly shut down your analytics, and let your eyes and muscles react. It works.

You’re not a bystander. You get pushed, prodded, picked on. What are you doing here, who are you, why do you want from me? Often they just ask with their eyes. You don’t have time to answer. You don’t have the answers. You’ve got to keep moving. You move. You get physical. You shoot mid-step. You shoot falling back. You shove yourself in between flying fists and take what you need. You need more room, and you swing over the railing to get it. Be quick, be decisive. Noticing someone falling over you start running, you have to be there for that. You have a camera, it’s important. You ask yourself if it really is important.

You forget who you are and what you want. It’s the happiest moment of your life. You shoot, you move on. Your eyes are relaxed, scanning, your finger tense. The camera is always there, it never says a thing. It knows you.

• essay
• method

Posted 2 years ago

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Even now, after the diarrhetic flow of images that all of us see all of the time, there are still pictures that shock us, that make us look without recognition. But it isn’t a really a matter of ‘even now’, but of ‘especially now’. The tropes for the mainstream stopped flowing and solidified a long time ago. And like solids, there is still some flow, some change, but it is slow, imperceptible. It is this sameness of images that makes it, for the few who are still interested, possible to rebel. Even necessary to rebel.

One image trope is the format that landscapes are taken in. It’s called ‘landscape’ format. Wow. We aren’t usually this obvious. There is a natural tendency to reflect landscapes in a way that is wider than taller.  But this doesn’t have to be. There is much merit in the anti-landscape.

A classic landscape photo stretches horizontally. It dissociates the picture viewer and demands, ‘look at all this beauty.’ It flattens the image  and orders everything at a static distance so that we can gaze clearly, with shifts in perspective.

The anti-landscape is taken in a portrait format, it is taller than it is wider. It highlights the distance from us to the scene that we are supposed to be looking at. It shows us how far we are physically from nature but it also hints at how far we are mentally. How much our abstractness and ambiguity differentiate us. It tells us that to get from here to there is hard, and suggests that life, looking after this body, moving it, feeding it, caring for it is a constant effort. It stretches out the sky, and the ground and shows us the world’s immensity, and mocks how small we are. It makes us focus, it eliminates the vista in preference of a hard slice of mental attention.

It does something new, and different, and so it makes us anxious.

• essay
• method
• theory

Posted 2 years ago

As a photographer you are haunted by the past. By what has been done very well before you. It seems unfair that those who came before, through no effort of their own, but due to the silly capriciousness of birth, should have an easier time at saying something new. Of course, this isn’t how it happened. They in turn had their demons from the past. Winogrand had Frank, Evans had Brady et al, Adams had Adams, etc. etc. There’s no use whining.

What you have to do is know what has come before, what is being done now that is good, what the world is all about, who you are and what you want to say, and how your tools work. These things should all hint at what should come next. Simple.

When I think of the very close-in street photography that I’ve been doing, in colour, I realise now why I can’t find many precursors. Shooting this way was technically very difficult, if not impossible, only 10 years earlier, let alone 40 or 50. Film was just not fast enough, and didn’t have the detail or range required in colour to do this work. I guess you could get close but you’d need to put a lot more effort in than you have to now (and it’s a lot of effort now!). From the video that I posted the other day you can see Mark Cohen, who is the closest that I’ve found to what I’ve been doing, using a flash to get enough light to get a clear, high shutter speed exposure. This is a different look to the more natural one that I’ve been getting.

And now with this new ‘dark’ direction, I think I’m going somewhere that was technically unfeasible in the past. Brassai couldn’t freeze someone running at night at 1/500s. The machines we have now allow us to look far more clearly, far more deeply than possible in the past. Movement can now be caught on film which the photographer could previously see but could do nothing about capturing. There is a whole expanse of night action that is opening up now. I don’t want to overplay my hand, it is still more difficult at night than in the day, the laws of light haven’t been upturned, but they’ve been pretty seriously messed up.

• essay
• method

Posted 2 years ago

What do I look for? I look for something that no one has seen before. Since this is impossible, I look for something that I’ve never seen before. This is possible.

I look for something that means something. Since this is impossible, I look for something that may mean something to me, that may hint at something in my psyche. This is very possible.

I look for unadulterated, raw emotion. Since this isn’t always possible, I look for humans being human beings.

I try to get close so that I can see what I’m looking at. I’m short sighted. I also try to get close so that I can smell, touch, taste, and hear what’s going on. It helps me to understand.

I don’t like to make moral judgements. Not because I’m saintly, but because I find ethics, positions, and values (even the lack of values) boring. Also being definite is very bad for a work. It is the best way I know to making something mediocre. Better to be ambiguous, maybe even enigmatic. Best to be entertaining. On this, I take instruction from the methods of astrology.

In a way what you are fighting is what is obvious. Is how most people will think of a situation. What is obvious isn’t interesting, or, it’s interesting to those who aren’t interesting. You must ask in any given situation, what is the expected reaction to this. Ok, that done, how else can this be seen? What other ways can this be understood and explained.  As an example, if you are to shoot a lodge for rich people in an alpine setting. The expectation amongst people who look at photography is that you’ll take photos of the ostentation, or the banality of rich people, or concentrate on insentient objects as a representation of what you want to say. It may be best however, to not show any of that. To instead show rich people just being like us, being more normal than you and I, but with these very abnormal things being around them. It would be great to get a photo of a gentleman tripping as he gets off the helicopter. But it mustn’t be us laughing at him, the photo should make us understand that it is easy to trip in that situation, that we could have done it ourselves considering how far you have to jump, and we want to maybe care that he doesn’t get his head chopped off. Also, if he does get his head chopped off, you may want to get a picture of that.

As I was beginning I was worried that I wasn’t a ‘concerned’ photographer. I now know that that shouldn’t be a concern. I’m interested in something else and that’s more than all right.

It’s good to look for something that you rarely find. Because once you find something you stop looking for it.

• method
• writing

Posted 2 years ago

Mark Cohen Photographer Video

This is by far the funniest shooting style I’ve seen. It’s like he walked out of a Pink Panther film. Sneaking up and scaring the guy next to the ladder, the camp walk away from the old guy near the wall, talking a photo of the ladies leg. Sheer hilarity.

The key take away is the audacity. He does seem to choose more powerless subjects. Women, old people. I guess that’s the dirty secret of close street photographers. He’s very similar to the work of Bruce Gilden but I like his non-grotesque aesthetics better.

He moves fast, unlike Winogrand. This is such great, important stuff to see.

He seems to rarely look through the finder. But perhaps the range finder viewfinder is so much larger that you can be a little further away.

I envy black and white photographers being able to work in a far wider range of light. And obviously with the flash he increases the possibilities even further.

• mark cohen
• video
• method
• street

Posted 2 years ago

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It’s a strict no no for a criminal to go back to the scene of the crime. But for a photographer it’s often very revealing to have a couple of goes at configuring the reality of a situation. Since every millimetre of movement creates a new view, it’s worth exploring whether there is a thing in itself, an unchanging essence to an object, to a face, to a person, or if the perspective does change things dramatically.

Above are three pass-bys I did today on a woman begging at a bus stop. I went by twice, on the second pass I got two photos from just above chest height. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea, rarely do you get all pictures in a series all in focus like this, I’m shooting a fixed manual focus (of around 0.5 meters) and one or two will be blurry because I’m too close, or too far away. Also, only 1 out of 10 subjects will get the royal multiple shots treatment. An interesting question is if you had to print one, which one would you print? I’d probably go three.

• photo note
• method

Posted 2 years ago

One way I look at my work is to think of it like sculpture.

As the moulding of a material in three dimensions. I want to indicate the shape of the thing (often someone’s head), the depth of it, and how far objects are from each other and where in space they are relatively. I like to use a short lens so that I can create receding planes and suggestive perspectives.

I also want the person in the photograph to seem like they’ve been standing like that forever. Gesturing like that for eternity. Often I don’t want any hint of movement  or blur.

I also try very hard to get the main plane of the face in perfect focus so that the detail of the face, the pores, the creases, the marks are hyper-real. Perhaps not even like the face of a real person, but of intricately fabricated plastics (like Madame Taussauds maybe, but not so kitch).

I also like to isolate subjects from their surroundings by limiting what is behind them and I try to make the background illegible if I can. I want to immortalise these people (but not make them heros, often they are anything but).

I also want expressions which are at the height of an emotion. That emotion doesn’t have to be extreme, but the viewer should be able to relate to it and say, oh, they’re sad, or longing, or withdrawn, or anxious, or lost, or whatever.

Reading Szarkowski on Walker Evans led me to think of the link to sculpture.

“…that high art and serious craft profitably influenced each other not through the mechanism of copying but by the absorption of organizing principles. Evans made it clear that he found in commercial postcards, in newsreels, in the work of real estate and insurance photographers, clues pointing toward a style that would serve his interests better than the lush textures and elegant patterns of the high art photographers.”

This is the 100th post on this blog. And although it is really just a private scratch pad for me, I’m glad that it’s grown the way it has. It’s also nice to have friends who like to follow what I’ve been up. Thanks for reading.

• method
• theory
• sculpture

Posted 2 years ago

WIlliam Klein [part 1]

• “You read [negatives] left to right like a text. It’s the diary of the photographer. You see what he sees through the viewfinder, his hesitations, his hits, his misses.”
• “250, that’s a large body of work. The life of a photographer, even of a great photographer, is 2 seconds.”
• “An accident makes the picture. A few steps away, almost a picture.”
• “But there’s a limit. Both for me, and for them. The surprise the joke wears thin. ‘Hey, what’s this for anyhow? Enough already, this guys is out of his mind.’ ”
• “Tokyo, 1961. A troup of modern dancers that I bring into the traffic of Ginza. They come towards me, twisting convulsively. My Leica becomes a movie camera. Shot after shot as fast as I can. … I walk backwards, they advance, spastic, and impenetrable, like Japanese should be. … We provoke each other.”
• “Then he starts to ham it up. Too much. Not as good.”
• “He makes his report, I make mine.”
• “On the right, someone watches me, suspicious. I walk away. A few steps and we’re in Chekov. … Not a photograph, more a reflex at detail. A second later, she’s still there, but everything has changed, everything has come together. The light, the staircase, the actors, the pretty girl looking at the camera, this is a photograph.”
• “And as usual someone watching me. And then another picture, the man’s gone, it’s over.”
• “Only one photo and that’s it. Not so bad though. One’s enough.”

• william klein
• video
• editing
• method

Posted 2 years ago

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