Toronto Contact Photo 2008

Spent most of the day running back and forth through the rain to see as much of Contact Photo as the rain would allow, and last night chasing around the Lanch Event. Tomorrow I'll hit the MOCCA portion before returning home. Fell asleep -- coffee in hand -- just as the early-evening weather outside my hotel room was surging past the drizzly form shown here into a real driving storm.

I also had the pleasure during the morning of driving across town to visit the Bob Carnie & Kevin Viner at Elevator Digital, where I got to see their big print line including their digital fiber-print mural-scale line, which they believe was the world's first. These are large-format images, printed on black & white traditional darkroom paper -- a good deal bgger than what the well-known Devere digital enlarger can produce.

I also got a glimpse at the results from the Canon imagePROGRAF iPF9100 60" printer, which delivered gorgeous B&W results straight our of the bx -- that is, on the supplied Canon profiles without tweaking.

To my surprise, when I awoke two hours after dozing away, the view was dazzlingly different: the towers lit by an orange sunset and framed by a deep blue sky. Surprising what a couple of hours can do if you'll just willing to stay put (sleeping helps).

What about the photographs? I'll write more about them in the next entry.

Fortune & Farewell

In the morning I'm off to Japan. I stopped at Kinokuniya in San Jose today, to see if there were any interesting recent Japanese art books I could buy here and thus not have to carry around while I'm wandering -- guided by my earlier acquisition of their entire collection of Rinko Kawauchi books.

To my delight, I found a brand-new copy of Farewell Photography, selling for un-marked-up retail. Yatta-w00t!

I'll be back the first week of October, just in time to see Kawauchi in person at SFAI.

Soundslides

Click to play

I've finally started to mess around with SoundSlides -- I've had a link set to it for some time, ever since seeing a quick guide on Martin Fuchs blog almost a year ago (ouch).

The link above is my first crude attempt with the demo, a little recap of Isaac's summer hockey season -- after ten minutes of using the program I promptly sent Joe Weiss a nice PayPal delivery (and ordered myself a new audio recorder (sorry Griffin, my iTalk is cute and tiny but not a general-purpose tool) and some replacements for my main mics, which have seen better days long ago)(more stuff to carry when shooting -- hoorah). I'll replace the prezo some time soon when I get my proper SoundSlides reg code and also re-record the audio with Isaac playing it (or something similar).

Obviously I've got an learning curve ahead of me but I'm excited -- SoundSlides is just far easier and more direct to use for these sort of presentations than anything I've see so far using regular Flash, or Flex, or even Premiere. All good programs, but SoundSlides is directed -- it does one thing and does it well. No wonder it's so popular for news shooters and wedding folks.

Correspondances Japonaises

I've been squinting through the details of Things As They Are: Photojournalism in Context Since 1955, another of those books I've been procrastinating at cracking. While uncredited to him, in a way this book was one of the last to fall under the shadow of John Szarkowski, who challenged the editors: "I share your hope... that your exhibition and book will be more than one more fat compendium of the pictures that editors expect photographers to make." I think they've had some really admirable success in this book.

While there are plenty of very notable exceptions, such as Raul Corrales, Peter Magubane, and even Gene Smith, I was struck by the fact that so many times strong vision comes from people who are non-natives to what they see -- whether it be Raymond Depardon, Robert Frank, or William Albert Allard. I was having a conversation recently with a friend who was raised in one culture, educated in multiple others, and who lives a quiet life here in the Bay Area today. It's speculation on my part, but we discussed the value of not speaking the language, of not having a set of shared and pre-coded expectations and assumptions. One may be inherently inclined to see only what's there, what's visible -- not to recognize the supposed identity and accepted meanings. It's induced childhood, ignorance that opens your eyes.

Here's hoping, anyway. In three weeks I will be back in Japan, hopefully not getting entirely bogged-down by visits to the bookstore.

An hour after posting this, I ran into this most unlikely newspaper photography.

What I Learned on My Summer Vacation

• There is nothing to deter you from making lots of photographs with your full heavy kit bag like an intense peeling sunburn across your shoulders and back.
• Spending time with your son being hurled down the "Pacific Spin" at the water park while being seriously sunburned across your shoulders and back is 100% worth the trouble.
• I thought I knew a lot about the California landscape, having driven through it and flown over it at varying altitudes countless times. Then I took the train from San Jose to San Diego.
• At night, it is better to fly.
• In Los Angeles, yes there really are people dumb enough to drive their boyfriend's new car in between the rail-crossing barriers, panic when they see the 9:20 commuter coming toward them, decide to drive away in the opposite direction on the railroad tracks at high speed while calling said boyfriend on the celphone -- until the damage to the auto suspension halts the car between streets, paralyzing all north/south rail traffic for an hour or two until an offroad-capable truck can come to haul away the car and an inspector ensure that she didn't do any serious damage, which the police and boyfriend search for her since she fled the scene, in a less-than-optimal neighborhood, on foot.
• Buildings are strongly directional, even ones I wouldn't have expected. They all face the street. None of them face the tracks (even train stations).
• My beard grows much faster than I realized.
• The Chevy HHR has the worst driver visibility I've ever experienced. How do they get DOT approval on this thing?
• Just as it's difficult to go photographing on the street while in the company of someone who wants to hold hands, it's difficult to actually see museums while in the company of people who think museums are (a) phenomenal wastes of skateboarding time or (b) great places to meet guys.
• Just the same, seeing the Harry Callahan show at MOPA for the second time was worthwhile. Like so many, he was clearly caught up in how things look when photographed.
• The people who probably created most of the Dead Sea Scrolls were seriously-deranged paranoid religious nutjobs living in a tiny isolated community. In other words, a lot like tiny isolated paranoid religious nutjob communities today, everywhere from Waco to the West Bank.
• When the computer graphics in a brand-new IMAX film are less compelling than those in some games, even the the general audience notices, and are vocal about it in the lobby after the film.
• Deliberately traveling without a computer (the only available choice up until the last decade) makes you paranoid about filling CF cards but otherwise is no big deal and the reduction in travel weight is a real blessing. No real escape from email (the Treo kept that from happening), and a handheld GPS did a good job of filling-in for Google Maps. No online games, no endless web browsing, no blogging, no RSS. And no withdrawl symptoms, as far as I can tell.
• Rebecca couldn't deal. She brought her macBook. I stayed away from it. She sat in a hotel room while we had fun.
• I wish we had a pool.
• There are some really good and unsung artists working at Legoland. I did not expect this at all. Every diorama is packed full of little stories, classic examples of what Ben Lifson (and Hayao Miyazaki) talk about as "specific" character -- and this made from the uniform little pieces of Lego figures.
• Zac Ephron and little kids in cute Einstein outfits are bigger news than Karl Rove.
• It was too long.
• It was too short.

Recursive Travels

Side trip within a side trip within a holiday.... New York in Lego

The Price is Right

In my blog draining from yesterday: Kristopher Stallworth of Bakersfield found a poster of Gursky's "99 Cent Store" hanging in -- where else? -- a 99 Cent Store, and Conscientious has the shot.

When Gursky was here at SFMOMA a couple of years back, he commented that he had met the CEO of K-Mart, who also had a (probably "real" and pricey) print of "99 Cent Store" in his office. It was left ambiguous as to whether the exec felt that the photo criticized or glorified its subject... a little less ambiguous in Stallworth's discovery?

I reminds me too of the days of ancient Pixar, before Toy Story, when advertisers would repeatedly approach the studio with what they considered their Big Idea: they had seen Luxo Jr. Their quick-reacting repitilian brains had smelled food and would Pixar please do another spot just like the one that Pixar had done for the Luxo company, only for product XYZ? They simply couldn't imagine that the film had been made for any reason other than to sell more lamps.

(I actually have no idea if it had any actual effect on the sales of real-world Luxo lamps, but that was not remotely the film's intent -- the only intent was to entertain, using Pixar's then-new pre-RenderMan renderer)

This idea of wrongly-perceived purpose opens a narrow window on a problem that seems inherent with any sort of mass media -- its existence automatically valorizes any subject, even when the intent of the maker may be to condemn (a situation not inherent in Gursky -- he is usually rather deliberate in his neutrality, at least when speaking about his images). Thus "anti-gangster" films like Scarface are idolized by gangsta wanna-be's, proliferating celphone videos of misogynist "honor killings" promote more of the same, books of war photos become promoted to politely-fascinating coffee-table items, or used as images not to prevent war but to foment and celebrate it. One man's horror made into another's grand circus.

Always the old twisting knot of intent and effect. Natchwey has said he feels compelled to make the very best photos he can, with every aesthetic tool he can muster, out of respect for the people he photographs and their situations. Salgado does the same thing and gets criticized for "aesthetic anaesthesia," that somehow presenting his subjects in a compelling way wraps them up in Too Much Art. How much is too much? Does less reduce the value to the subject? The more you wriggle, the tighter the knot gets. Andreas? Ed? Henri?

Timeless

I have been picking, one by one, through the many many MANY unread blog posts that have been steadily accruing in my bloglines feeds. The numbers have been intimidating. Alec Soth, 65 posts. Ed Kashi, 28 posts. Joerg Colberg, 158 posts.... even a long backlog of What the Duck. And that's just the "Shoot Me" folder. It goes on and on. I haven't even dared to get started on the flickr feeds.

These things creep up on me because I want to read in detail and my circumstances so rarely give me time and focus for anything more than a glance. And then the lists grow and keep growing while I'm trying to make time for it.

The experience pricks at a notion I've been having about just how much really, really great imagery there is in the world today. There are ways of coping, like trusting in editorial vision, at least hoping that it will be grand. You can try to be your own editor, which was the point of the Bloglines feeds. But I worry that perhaps even the greatest work just really becomes a blur -- that even at the highest levels there gets to be so much great imagery that the human capacity for distinguishing great from greater is overwhelmed & the only thing left to distinguish anything is the depth and volume of its promotional machinery.

It's been likewise apparent to me that at many of the sites with the busiest posters, there are also many busy commenters, who often seem to be in a bum's-rush against one another to comment often and early. It leaves me curious about the dynamic of the whole enterprise, and the huge impatience of it seems so antithetical to the charters of photography and art-making in general. I have to wonder, for sites like, oh, Conscientious or Mrs Deane (or non-art sites like Corante), just how steep is the dropoff in readership over the first few hours? If today's post gets a hundred hits today, how many does yesterday's post get today? Two? And what about the post from the day before?

A lot of the posts Ive been reading tonight, from the last couple of months, are cross-links and opinions and reprints of obituaries of John Szarkowski. By coincidence, this morning while visiting my office I found a shrink-wrapped copy of his book The Photographer's Eye, a copy I had purchased months ago from Amazon and that had gotten buried under paperwork on my desk. The book hammers home to me the largely-unchanging and well-determined nature of photography itself, and makes me wonder what all the hurry is about. In his introduction, Szarkowski digs out a passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables on making Daguerreotype portraits: "We give [heaven's broad and simple sunshine] credit only for depicting the merest surface, but it actually brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon, even if he could detect it... the remarkable point is that the original wears, to the world's eye... an exceedingly pleasant countenance, indicative of benevolence, openness of heart, sunny good humour, and other praiseworthy qualities of that cast. The sun, as you see, tells quite another story, and will not be coaxed out of it, after half a dozen patient attempts on my part. Here we have a man, sly, subtle, hard, imperious, and withal, cold as ice."

Compare a century later: "Everybody has this thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe... Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way, but there's a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can't help people knowing about you. And that has to do with what I've always called the gap between intention and effect." -- Dianne Arbus

I will be returning to San Diego on Monday, to see the Dead Sea Scrolls, Legoland, to re-visit the Callahan exhibit in Balboa Park and to have some fun with the family. Drop a line if you're around...

Child Portraitists

While this post has been lingering half-written for months, I was reminded of it this morning, as I came across this post from Suzanne Revy, and prodded with the notion that in fact this little rant has been curdling in my mind for my, much longer.

Suzanne is one of an undeclared informal group, the APUG B&W Child Portrait Society, a club that includes photographers like Cheryl Jacobs in the U.S., Nicole Boenig-McGrade in Australia, & Heli Huhtala in Finland.

In all these cases we see similar sorts of classic iconography being used to similar means: to reveal, or seem to reveal, a private world in which children are fully involved and which adults can only glimpse. Even then, the contents of that private world remains hidden -- only its existence is shown, and the rest is hidden through deep shadows and restrictive or soft focus (or even, as in Cheryl's current title-webpage image, both shadows and soft focus combined with a wire mesh screen between the child and the photographer).

As Jeff Curto describes well in his Podcast Lecture on Women in Photographic History (you can find his associated presentation slides here), these veins have been serving-up images of value almost since the dawn of photography. As Curto also mentions, they have been especially well-represented by women photographers, with few men making such leaps -- a bit like his parallel observation that there are almost no woman landscape photographers of note. The iconic photographers with similar visual flavor are certainly women: Sally Mann, Chansonetta Stanely Emmons, Nancy Rexroth, and of course Gertrude Kasebier, whom I've often felt was the first prominent photographer of this sort whose work was acclaimed to a degree because she delivered what was expected, following in the far larger footsteps of Julia Margaret Cameron (caveat: both made images approriate for their time, and I acknowledge that my reading is based on a potentially ignorance-inducing gap of over a century).

There are a handful of exceptions, particularly moderns like Keith Carter (is Ralph Gibson an adult alternative?), or stray iconic images like Elliot Erwitt's nursing mother or W. Eugene Smith's postcard perennial Walk Through Paradise Garden, pictures that are notable for not being the work for which those photographers are acclaimed, regardless of whatever commercial success those individual pictures have found (Erwitt has commented that his snap, made of his wife & baby daughter, essentially paid for that daughter's college education).

There are a few men approaching but skirting past this dream landscape. An obvious example and another APUG wanderer might be Napa's Michael McBlane, whose black and whites similarly revel in the beauty of children's clear faces in soft light but like most male portraitists seems a bit more formal, more distanced, more willing to work in the studio... dare I say a more results-oriented approach?

It's not hard to think similarly of Nicholas Nixon's family photography, which reveals its emotional core only through a formal approach and his relentlessly demanding mastery of large-format technique.

What then might be a typical male approach? Surely father love their children as dearly as mothers do. Is there a "typical" stance? And if so, what role does the gender of the photographer play, where are its strengths, its soft spots? I ask myself this while looking at pictures like the above, pictures I made when my children were small and when, as a newly-single dad, perhaps (perhaps) I had no choice but to me Mr Mom in practice and in spirit. Have my pictures changed since then, in a way that reflects more than just the greater age (and diminished patience) of these two beautiful subjects?

One of the more interesting dad photographers is one I actually know: Todd Deutsch, who manages to find his own view with a lightweight fluid camera in photos like this one.

Conclusions? None. Then again, I prefer photos that are questions.

Schmaprd

...as if on cue, I received a letter from Schmap saying that they are planning to use one of my photographs in their (allegedly non-commercial but obviously ad-revenue-driven) travel guides.

Not particularly surprising to me, the photo was not marked with a Creative Commons tag, but rather as "© All Rights Reserved." Maybe they don't realize that I habitually send CDs of thumbnails to the Copyright Office to actually register my pix?

Ooops.

Flickd Off

As a followup to the earlier post on skepticism about "Creative Commons," it's been sadly amusing to watch the recent flaps declaring flickr (a) as censors but (b) not censorious enough. What seems common to both situations is a failure of common sense, a failure rendered raw with typically abrasive flourish by EPUK's "Sqweegee" in his article on the Schmap smokeup:

Flickr is a mashup of hobbyists who merely want to share snaps of kittens and sunsets and rather a lot of more serious photographers who covertly dream of dumping the day job and becoming pros someday. For now, all are content to share for free, but the expectation is that enough exposure and recognition should eventually lead to fees, fame and stardom if you are good enough.

This is of course romantic rubbish : there really are no clear demarcation lines between pros and amateurs anymore except an insistence on being paid that is being rendered untenable by oversupply. "Pro" means "makes a living." Every aspirant pro who gives away their work "for exposure" undercuts their own future by demonstrating to clients that they need not pay for work they consider good enough to use. So they never will.

Now we all know: that Creative Commons licenses are not meant to cause harm, or so their proponents remind us. They are meant as a shining pathway to an ideal Republic of pure creativity and form based on freedom and love where everyone with a laptop and a wifi connect can be their very own personalized Philosopher King. And get rich.

No, the concept can't be flawed, it makes perfect sense to create copyrights where there's no control over the copying rights. Instead, there must be some conspiracy, some very bad people who have been using it without having their hearts pre-aligned according to our approved rules. So no, let's not look at the fundamentally pig-dumb notions of Creative Commons: let's make a right turn and find a new set of different problems that won't make us look bad.

Is the potential for corruption in government and enterprise a deep one, and one that causes plenty of real problems for people every day? Yes. And it's one that I too care deeply about. But... what? This will get fixed by the wiki/CC crowd? It's their very ignorance (or deliberate glossing-over) of the ability of people to be guided by their own self-interest (particularly in this case, the self-interest of people who realize that it's cheaper to steal images and ideas than it is to create them) that has made Creative Commons such a social disaster. And now the same people claim that they're out to somehow fix the general problem of corruption?

Just give them ten years before requiring any further statements. Yeah, that's the idea. Should land all the CC culprits right into tenured retirement without having to have any further pesky demands for a "pre-baked" "revolution."

As the Schmap folks wrote in response to outrage at their broad appropriation of images and further use of them as a means for advertising Schmap's products right back at and through the hoodwinked flickrites: "We'll do our best to stay the right side of the line throughout all this."

Which line is that? I suspect the bottom one.

The Block

Today I'm being lazy and rehashing something I posted on the APUG forums, in response to a midlife-crisis photographer's "Photographers' Block."

I have recently come to the conclusion that I am suffering from a photographer's block. I used to find inspiration in the places I was in or in the people I was with. Just lately I keep drawing a blank.

Does anyone else suffer with this problem or is it just me? Does anyone have any suggestions for getting through it? Do I just need to drink more beer?

Regards
N

N, don't worry about repeating past successes. The most satisfying photographs you can make are those you haven't yet made.

Such moments of "blockage" give you an excuse to re-assess (without getting mired in nostalgia or frustration), and most importantly, give you a little breather to try different sorts of things, to look at those Paths Not Taken. Imagine yourself as what you might have been — now imagine that alternative you, imagining the you that you actually are — and consider: what is the real core YOU that is shared by both versions? And what sorts of photos and ideas are central to THAT guy?

With that in mind, consider that whatever your work has been in the past, it has come about as the product of your entire person at that time — your surroundings, the people, your schedule, and how you felt about them at that time (and only peripherally, your level of photo-technical expertise).

In what ways have they changed, in what ways have your attitudes changed simply due to age, to fatigue, to arrivals and departures, or simply to outgrowing your previous levels of understanding? Which direction interests you today, in your life? Ignoring the camera, what sorts of pictures might you imagine making? What sorts of things interest you, your eye, your heart?

Okay, now pick up the camera again and remember that it is an explorer's tool, just like a compass, or a pickaxe. Like a pickaxe it can give you purchase on jagged circumstances, and can reveal things that were hidden, bringing light to the surface. Like a compass it can let you align both the world and yourself.

Let us know how it goes.

Is Photography Inherently Humanizing? (III)

I've been in Seattle for the past couple of days, attending and speaking at the Online Games Developer Conference.

(This post is part of a series which can be found through these links: Part I and Part II.)

Yesterday morning, I found in the New York Times an editorial by Nick Kristof which has been widely copied to other locations such as this one — the article, "Save the Darfur Puppy," tries to grasp at some of the issues revealed by psychological research and "the implication of a series of studies by psychologists trying to understand why people — good, conscientious people — aren't moved by genocide or famines."

The research found that people were more likely to want to help individuals, rather than groups — even groups as small as two. By coincidence I was about to write a little on this topic here myself, as something of a followup to the previous posts, in large part spurred by a recent post by Jim Johnson entitled "Photographic Conventions & Their Vicissitudes: The Irony of 'Vividness'," in which Johnson challenges the convention, common among photojournalists and other documentary-styled photographers (and TV) that mass-scale social issues are best shown by revealing the stories of individual persons (often the suffering of those people: think Salgado, think Abu Ghraib, think Smith's Spanish Village). In that post's comments, another reader mentioned a recent Situationist article, "Too Many to Care," which likewise cites the same research referenced by Kristof.

Personally, I think that such research validates the usefulness of these photographic conventions: that a direct appeal to people's emotions comes from proximity (perhaps by engaging the "mirror neuron" regions?) and that emotion is far more important in driving action than is reason. Is this something of a bitter pill, does it reveal something in human nature that we'd wish were not true? Yes. Does it mean that there can't be better approaches? No, and Johnson's to be lauded for proposing alternative photographic solutions, approaches that photographers could make to large-scale social issues that convey both emotional power and yet a sense of larger scales and stories.

My inclination is to think that humans, who evolved over most of their history in very small bands, have a hard time feeling direct-affect compassion towards groups larger than their own atomic families. We can reason that a compassionate stance is a good one, but that reasoning is less immediate. So far we have had some bits of luck in our large social systems. After all, isn't democracy itself a large-scale form of "love thy neighbor"?

As humans, we are not perfect animals. Our inability to grasp at large-scale problems on an emotional level is, as Paul Slovic writes, a "deeply unsettling insight into human nature." What's positive is the notion that it is an insight, and that we do find it unsettling. It means that we know we can do better. And if we know it, we can seek better-informed ways to act on that knowledge.

May Days

Only 2-1/2 weeks until 17 mai (or just four days until Norway Day in San Francisco, the blond alternative to a city awash in tequila for Cinco de Mayo).

Wakeup Call

I have to admit that I slept through a lot of my CalArts "History of Photography" class. I was waist-deep in my own second-semester projects and the class was in a comfortable, air-conditioned and darkened theatre with deep cushioned seats. Sometimes I'd wake up and my friends would have drawn on me, with the approval (if not participation?) of the teacher.

One time I woke up to see this photo, twelve feet tall.

At the time I'd never heard of Garry Winogrand. The photos came from a planet past my comprehension, though I could not look away. At that moment I got the impression that the desperation I saw in those photos was a desperation in Garry himself. It's an impression I've never lost -- the belief that it must have been painful to be Garry Winogrand, that there's a sort of weary melacholy in him even when smiling.

I wish I could say that seeing this made me rush right outdoors with my Nikon, but I was too caught up in filmmaking and theatre at the time. The camera stayed mostly on the sideline. Later on, when my shooting rose from its own slumber, this image and a thousand more like it were waiting just below the surface of my consciousness.