What is new about me as a street photographer is that I am getting closer to another human being on the streets than anyone ever has with a camera. There are some reasons why I’m doing that.

One is because by getting closer you feel more. Your senses perceive more from being closer. And feeling is a key part of understanding. Two, is that by using a short lens and using depth of field as a hint, I can show heads which look three dimensional. Like something real instead of something flat (flatness being the essence of a photo that I wish to resist in this case). A third reason, is less idealistic. I want to do something that will be hard for anyone else to do. A white person, with the visual sophistication required, couldn’t get as close to Bangladeshis as I’m able to with the colour of my skin. And a Bengali (with some notable exceptions) doesn’t have the visual sophistication. In Bangladesh the photo training is woeful, but worse, there are no books and resources here, and even worse, there isn’t a culture of intellectual visual innovation (mirroring the rote learning taught in schools). So, the third reason is competition.

But in the Architecture of the Human Face, a fourth very simple reason is the most important, detail. Looking at a close-in of the first photo allows the stories of this man’s face to flourish. You notice the number of times he has fixed his glasses with his pins. How did he break them? How poor is he that he has to do this to such a cheap pair of glasses. Looking at the glass, how can he see through such cloudiness? Was he blind? And there are aesthetic stories. Looking at the colour of the frame, at the patterns etched on the glass. And then larger issues develop out of the detail. Looking at his nose and the chunks that have been taken out of it through age. Is that what will happen to me? There are more stories. Both in number but also in extrapolation and in the differences between the people who will be looking at the photos. Perhaps for someone this picture reminds them of their father. Or the gasping mouth a reference to the moment of death. I don’t know. What I do know is that I have to show as much of the detail as clearly as I can so that people can start telling stories from the pictures.

There is yet another advantage to the detail. It’s attractive. It’s interesting in an aesthetic sense. The first job of art is to make you look at it. Seeing these faces like this, lit like this, coloured like this should draw you in. When printed larger and with care it will be even more attractive. All of the deeper meaning will only be accepted if you can attract (or at least interest) the audience.

So, detail is important to me for various reasons; so that I can feel more and understand, so that I can hint at three dimensions, so that my art is new and hard for others to replicate, and lastly and most importantly to create a density of narrative, to have enough detail to tell the vast stories of age and difference and destruction, and emotions that I want to tell.

• essay
• work
• set
• theory

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

I wrote a letter to a friend a couple of weeks back when I was going through a particularly difficult time in Dhaka. I’ve found some arguments against some of the doubts I raise, but I think I’ll be dealing with them for the rest of my life. The quote below continues on after I’ve listed out the ways that I’ve improved my technique and work over the month before:

I wanted to list these out because I want some context around what I’m actually feeling and what I’m about to tell you. I feel lost. I don’t know what I’m trying to say with my photos. I have two thousand five hundred photos on the streets of Dhaka but no clear story. I suspect that there is a deep flaw in me: I don’t care about other people. I find it hard to emphatise.  This is very bad. I’m really afraid. I look at other photographers, journalists, activists, grant givers who are so concerned about the powerless, the oppressed. All I see there is boredom. It’s all so repetitive, so obviously unsophisticated to do what they do. I’ve read about what is happening in the bad places around the world happen a hundred times before in history. And sure, we have to be constantly reminded of it, because humanity is forgetful, but what a boring, gruntful task. Seeing some videos of how most photojournalists work (not Nachtwey, or say Peress) is so disheartening. They are so mindless, such inane droids. They just repeat glib one liners that they have learnt they better say, ‘the world needs to know about this’, ‘we are giving a voice to the powerless’, it’s all so boring!

Of course I feel awful about this. There must be something really wrong with me. Sometimes I can feel authentically. I took some photos of this guy today who was in a screaming match with someone else, the other guy ran off and this guy had to expel his rage, and so he ran over to a younger boy  watching innocently from the side and slapped him hard on the face, on the street. The aggressor shouted: “what’re you looking at!” I’ve attached an image of the attacker. I was absolutely in the moment, I thought that I was going to cry. The way the boy took the slap, just accepted his powerlessness and walked away. I wondered what he thought of this indignity, how he coped with his honour being hurt like that. I wanted to take more photos but it happened too quickly.

I know I can feel but seeing how the industry works is fucking depressing. And more than that, it may not be worth anything. There are exceptions, that’s what gives me hope. A lot of the Magnum photographers don’t shoot like everyone else, but recount personal recollections. They don’t tell stories, but are receptive to what is happening, to the people, to the environment rather than fulfilling either their own simple ideology and expectations, or the mass market’s level of basic understanding of these complex, conflicting issues. Killing can be fun, it can be exciting, it can give meaning to someone’s life. I know that’s horrible but it is one of the truths about war and about human beings. No one may care to hear it but that’s something that needs to be shown. Not just starving Africans. I’m not interested in that, it’s been done. The point is obvious. I do not want to be obvious. The problem is I can’t see a path to doing the kind of work that I want to do. It all seems so far off. I can’t see anyone letting me do that work. I hate the world for making it so tough for me. Fuck em! Fuck em! Fuck them. But really, maybe I’m just not confident that I know what I want to do, what to say. I think it’s because I don’t know who I am.

As you can see I have some ego problems. This is what L [a close friend] meant when he said intelligence, or technique would not be my what hindered me, but my challenge would be me. Unless I lose this arrogance, unless I can open my heart to people and situations and be receptive, I won’t do great work. I won’t really understand the situations I’m in. But I don’t know how to go about changing myself. I walked around today trying to be open to the people I was photographing. It was laughable, I didn’t know what I was doing. I can stop and try talking to them, but that would just result in simple portraits. Or would it? Maybe over time they would trust me, and drop their masks and I would see more than I could ever have, more than if I was taking the photo without their knowledge, and certainly more than when they know I’m there but they see me as a stranger. Am I interested enough to put the effort in?

I have more photos now, and a slightly better idea of what’s going on.

• motivation
• theory
• life

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

“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 I had previously built my photographs on, and instead opened the frame to multiple, more fragmentary, simultaneous events. This gave me a new sense of the street as a place where everything was important; the buildings near and far; the movement of people; the basic street furnishings of light poles, phone booths, hydrants, trees, signs, store  windows, all of it cohering in a way that broke open the form of my earlier work.  I called these new, non-hierarchical pictures, “field photographs,” because everything in the frame was now in play, and the more complex and open-ended I could make the image the more interesting it became to me.  I felt I was testing the descriptive limits of the photograph by asking; how much dissonance can a photograph contain and still be readable?  Can interesting pictures be made without depending on a central event to hold it together? What does color mean in a photograph?

…

Within the first two years of working with the view camera I developed four bodies of work; Cape Light, St. Louis and the Arch, the Empire State Building and the Florida pools at dusk series. Each of these inquiries helped teach me how to bring the spontaneous, jazzy riffs of street photography closer to the more contemplative, classical tempo of the large format camera. Previously, photographs held themselves to intimate dimensions: little mirrors of the world, but large format color film offered a grain-less expansiveness which allowed tiny details far away to be clearly seen. With that discovery came a certain risk, I began to see differently, little things mattered more; the way light defined a space, the wind brushing the surface of the water, the way a persons clothes fit, relationships between places and people. … I began to see that people were interesting.  I found I could ask to make a photograph of someone, and then, in effect, was granted a license to stare at another human being. Skin, hair, scars, beauty marks, the way clothing looked and what it said about the people who wore it became a new fascination.” (interview in toomuchchocolate)

• joel
• method
• meyerowitz
• style
• theory

Posted 2 years ago

“… 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 make its way among faces with canceled expressions or bodies deposited around the frame in eccentric ways. Rather than place his main figures in the foreground of a tautly arranged setting, Winogrand was content to see them sliced by the edges of the frame, or surrounded by acres of unexceptional space, or perched in the middle distance while some quizzical extra hogged center stage.” (in Time)

This was his strength and his weakness. By lessening the authorial intent, by arguing that the surface is all there is, he took away his own role. Ultimately he failed to move on from his brilliant start. And contradicting what is said above, his best pictures and sets are insanely authored. I wonder how many of his street shots were really worth something? It’s the work at the parties, the rodeo, the zoo, the picture of the house at the edge of oblivion that people remember.

One must be saying something. But not the same thing for too long. You start boring yourself and lose interest as I think happened to him.

• garry
• theory
• winogrand
• master

Posted 2 years ago

As with any other work, photography is a series of difficulties. You become a photographer because you like working at and overcoming these difficulties. A constant challenge has been working in colour. The key challenge of colour is one of consistency. Colours change dramatically throughout the day. Colours are unruly and clash dramatically within a frame. Colours mean too much, and they shout too loudly. To shoot colour is to be a wrangler.

Having battled with colour for months now, I’ve realised that the real reason I haven’t come to a solution is because I don’t know what success looks like. I don’t know what I want my colours to look like. Initially, envious of black and white, I tried to desaturate the colours in a bid to control them. But I’ve come to realise that that may be a stylised dead end. It goes against the spirit of colour. I need to first find a model to emulate, and check my photos against that. I’ll start with Luc Delahaye.

• colour
• theory
• method
• delahaye

Posted 2 years ago

1

Often what is only half seen, darkly, is clearer and more transparent to the heart than a ‘better’ photo. I’m thinking again of Winogrand’s picture from a car in Utah, 1964. The trick is that you aren’t making photos, you are making emotions in someone else’s chest and the photo is a tool (the camera is even further removed). The apocalyptic death of a beast under fractured light with a gathering darkness would have been destroyed by a better picture. Who cares about technique? What happened to the beast?

2

Why have so many photographers wanted to see in black and white? Is it hubris? Is it the need for power? Tradition? Romanticism? Or did they just forget the settings? Cameras can be very confusing.

3

Who was the greatest? Surely it’s Winogrand. I want every picture of his to be my picture. When he succeeded, he was infallible, we was unnatural. And even as he failed at the end, Sophoclean, he failed with a magic Dionysian dignity. The thing to admire most was his graphic sense.

4

They will always think it’s easy. It’s just operating a machine. And such an easy machine. Just one button really. Make sure you thank them, they’ve just handed you your freedom.

5

What separates you from everyone else on Flickr? Nothing. Stop caring.

6

I can’t think when I’m shooting. This can be distilled to: stop seeing psychoanalysts and forget yourself.

7

Fuck light.

8

Photography is the constant breaking of the fourth wall. As if one of the audience had run on stage. The actors take it in stride, the show cannot help but go on.

• theory
• writing
• aphorisms

Posted 2 years ago

1

As a photographer I’m not interested in what people say about themselves. There are better arts for capturing that kind of thing. I want to collect the things people don’t say about themselves, can’t say, or didn’t know they wanted to say.

2

Photography at heart is about angles. Looking at a scene from 10 meters to the right often changes it entirely. The light is now elegiac, instead of exuberant. The composition plainer. The contrast grayer. The people hidden rather than revealed. Everything changes according to your positioning in space. Meaning is created by your positioning. So move about! Dance!

3

One cares for his subjects by creating a real picture, not by respecting their wishes, not by making them comfortable, nor by leaving them alone. Be prepared to get punched in the face, just make sure you turn the camera away.

This may be distilled to: Your face is less important than your camera.

4

I wanted to not change anything about my photos. For good reason: so that I could shoot even faster, even more. But I’m learning from Kertesz that cropping is a guilty pleasure. But, for god-sake, don’t tell anyone that you are doing it.

5

When shooting someone in the street, treat them like a cobra. Transfix them with your eyes and flute, or ignore them completely. Either way, hope they don’t see the machine in your hand.

6

Hold it still, still, still! Figure out how to freeze your hand although the rest of your body is moving. Socrates would stop in the middle of a stride for hours to think things through. You think through your camera. Also, shoot high speed. So what you get some noise? Noise is real. Keep the shutter speed above 200.

7

You can’t slow down, really look, and respect each individual image, until you figure out that nearly all of your pictures are shit. Cherish the good ones though, otherwise you may think that you are shit. And that’s the end.

8

Look at great photos to see how you should select, not to figure out how to shoot. How could you ever replicate all of the shooting conditions, including the photographer’s heart?

9

Beware of woman. They can drain out all of your sadness to the point where you have nothing to say about the world.

• theory
• writing
• aphorisms

Posted 2 years ago

1

Photography is important because love is important. A photographer mustn’t ask what am I going to photograph, but rather, what is it that I love and what loves me?

2

Your camera must be the least interesting thing about you.

3

If you aren’t rejecting 1 out of every 100 photos, then you aren’t doing your job. It could be three things: You’re not being brave, or you haven’t thought about who are, or you haven’t studied others enough.

4

A photographer captures his own reflection. But not in a mirror. He sees himself in clouds, buildings, cars, other faces, streets, carts, women, etc. Sometimes he sees himself in an angle, or a colour, but mostly he sees himself in light.

5

Photography is essentially walking. Good shoes are a must. I like Volleys (watch out, intensely bad music) because they don’t stand out, have well cushioned, comfortable soles, dry quickly, are cheap, and simple.

6

If you must photograph pretty women, do it. Fight for non-objectification elsewhere.

• theory
• writing
• aphorisms

Posted 2 years ago