When William A. Ewing, the author of the the photobook “Love and Desire” (Chronicle Books / Thames and Hudson 1999, and a number of editions in various languages) asked me if he could use one of my house parties pictures, he wanted to know, did I perhaps have more photographs that could be grouped under this heading. O, sure, was my instantaneous reaction. Come to think of it, in fact most of my photography is about love and desire; especially when you think of it in the widest sense, apart from the purely physical or erotic connotations. Photography may well be seen as an act of love and desire; the love of life itself in all of its manifestations and sudden beauty, the desire to experience and partake, to observe and understand, to capture and share and maybe even own some of it.
This is what I also realized when I recently looked once again at some books by Garry Winogrand. To me he remains the greatest observer of life’s miracles at street level, but who elevated photography far above the business of making a buck or making an impression. His maniacal search for images of life going on all around him (he left a third of a million pictures at the time of his death) could only be stopped by his untimely passing away, and even his closest friends could only guess what he was striving for in the images that he had taken during his latest years, once they looked in bewilderment at the proofed and printed results from the bagloads of undeveloped films they found at his house. If you could call him an addict, he wasn’t addicted to photography, but to experiencing and getting to grips with life where he discovered it: on the very streets of his own life.
Original prints by well-known photographers have become very expensive. Many collectors have moved to collecting photography books instead, rather than looking for less famous names and photographers whose work is still available and sometimes just as interesting. Martin Parr’s publication The Photobook about what he considers to be the most important photobooks did the rest. Personally I don’t care which photobooks are hot or not, I know what I like and I will buy the occasional book that I love (and if you read my blog or visit my website www.tomstappers.com you won’t be surprised that it’s mostly black and white photography, of which a big part is street photography, and no digital). I prefer the original print, there’s nothing to beat it, and one of my own signed 30/40 silvergelatin prints for instance, is still cheaper than some of these collectable photobooks, so ….
When Winogrand seems a little blunt in his verbal statements and his answers during interviews it appears to me that this is a way of not showing his very sensitive nature. This sensitivity is clear from countless subtle hints in the visual content of his imagery and its psychological depth and implications. The clarity with which he shows us certain painful scenes isn’t cruelty, but respectful compassion, not inhibited by false shame and never shunning confrontation with what might shock us. Such is honesty – never mind the repercussions of the would-be preachers of morality who don’t even dare look at real life. Garry was a brave and passionate observer who doesn’t only show the triumphs of man, but also gives us a glimpse of human despair, failure and seediness. His endless quest for the facts (in his words “what things look like”) of his and our lives is as heroic as that of all the great artists of all times and places. It’s time people learned to see….
Cartier-Bresson showed us life as a graceful ballet, Winogrand gave us the backstage as well…
I have come across photographer’s sites where every photograph is accompanied by a price tag and a shopping cart symbol. Obviously the author of those images wants to make it very easy for a possible buyer and/or wants to give the impression that it is a commonplace thing to buy a print. This, however, is not my experience at all. I don’t have a shopping cart on my site (neither do I want to appear to be an image pedlar, it doesn’t even actually pay off…). Safe payment systems like PayPal and others make it easy to buy for (aspiring) collectors, but they seem to prefer to buy through galleries (and pay the extra amount). Being a collector myself as well as a photographer I am willing to go the extra mile if I want something. Fortunately my work is in demand with certain international museums, and you can see for yourself on my site that it does have quality. If I did not get the occasional collector visiting me too, like happened today – I might start to doubt whether any other collector reading this, after enjoying my site, would ever contact me for wanting to own some of my work. So if you do, let me know…
…Personally I was struck [by the image of]…young people showing a great sense of self-awareness of their own beauty. Christian Perring Ph.D., Metapsychology Online Review
…very striking and powerful… Susan Krane, University of Colorado
…lively documentation of the club scene in Holland. […] The heat is almost palpable. Gordon Baldwin, The J.Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
…There are so many that I like (or should I say: that appeal to me)… Georges Vercheval, Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi (Belgium)
Whereas other photographers […] seem to be mainly fascinated by the extreme and the bizarre […] Stappers has consciously attempted to catch the deeper meaning of his observations […] giving shape to a subjective experience… Joost Meesters, Het Belang van Limburg, Hasselt (Belgium)
I have been asked why my site is called Tom Stappers|Photographer instead of Tom Stappers|Fotograaf (in Dutch) and why the blog “Words to Images” is in English only. The answer is simple: I want to reach everybody who’s interested and my orientation is international anyway. What needs to be excused maybe, is that I have blocked any comments on my blog. This is part of the concept of the site, which incorporates the blog as the only textual content, making it possible to concentrate completely on the images that fill the frame (being “liquid”), and that you could even zoom into (your software allowing) as if you were looking from extremely close distance. Besides, I was happy to avoid comments of the type “Well done, lol !” or long academic -or otherwise boring- discussions. Deep-linking is also avoided on the blog and neither does the website have a links section. To those it concerns thanks for your understanding.
In the world of archives large scale digitizing of black and white photographic negatives is going on at the moment. Specialized companies are explaining to the experienced and unexperienced public alike that this is urgent business, because these photographic negatives would be deteriorating. (Question: doesn’t digital material deteriorate, and at what rate do both methods compare?). Moreover, they point out, “the negatives are often hidden in badly accessible archives, and the digitalized files are easier to handle for non-technical staff”. This being true or not true, the big problem is that much valuable and irreplaceable material has already been destroyed and this is ongoing…. No film photographer will want to throw away his negatives, and will be shocked to hear that others do. Only today a friend told me that she had thrown away a large group of old family negatives that supposedly were “no good anymore”, and the children had prints of most photographs anyway. Maybe people think it is, or soon will be impossible to have b&w negatives printed anymore. Another piece of history gone.
“Narrative” implies the passing of time, because change, a certain development, is taking place. Narrative photography would therefore look something like a photo novel (phantasy) or at least a flashburst sequence of a few seconds, capturing a movement (reality). You can guess “what is happening” in a photograph, but you can never be really sure, things may look like they do for that one single moment only (and never before or after). The suggestion may be a perfect lie, if we consider reality to be the truth.