Stop this Flickr nightmare, all the hundreds of thousands of unwanted, unnecessary extras that come free with the few undisputed good ones on all of the massive photosites – whatever their names -, where everybody’s an artist and volume is a virtue! Show us only your very best work – select, select, SELECT ! And don’t be so normal. Mediocrity is the norm.
I know by now what kind of images I want to make. Your eyes should dance with excitement exploring all the visual elements and points of interest that make up the image: light and dark, suggestions of closeness and distance, movements frozen into beauty of shape, possible symbols. Those are facts, is there a meaning? Discovering what’s inside the frame should be an adventure, not a checklist. There’s so little to go by, o.k., there’s the definition and the details – we feel assured by that – there’s the placement, the suggestions and hints. But there are no sounds, smells, colors or movement for me to include, yet I must create a little cosmos of interconnections, of possibilities and realities within or (suggested) without the frame! This is all done improvising like a jazz musician, instantly and “onstage”, no second thoughts or withdrawals. This is it and this is exactly what you get. Don’t expect me to connect the dots for you (I may even throw in some extra dots); I can only do so much for making the picture alive, and relevant to your experience.
When house parties were still considered a new and exciting phenomenon by the museum world in the Netherlands (the famous “low culture”!), I heard that the Kunsthal in Rotterdam was planning an exhibition about this subject (doubtlessly with a new, young public in mind). So I made an appointment with the then manager/photography curator, who said he was very interested. I went to Rotterdam, taking a selection of my house parties series. After looking at my series of photographs he seemed a bit puzzled – was it that he wanted this subject in “more contemporary” color I wondered, had he expected a wild kid with speedy eyes and uneasy manners? Or, since this was Rotterdam, a young stoner skinhead photographer from the gabber scene? -. None of that, after a pause gathering his thoughts, came his verdict: interesting photographs but this is not how I imagine a house party looks(!). My slightly irritated reaction, something like – o, I’m happy I seem to have avoided the clichés then… – did not go down so well. He gave me his card, mumbled something about sending an invitation for the opening, blablah. I left, thinking about how people really only want to see confirmation of what they already know, or more likely think they know…. Why? And should it upset me…no, I couldn’t care less.
Why do a lot of photographers mutilate their own images?? The bigger the © sign is watermarked on certain internet photographs, the less likely these often seem to me to be stolen. (Anyway, the copyright comes automatically with the picture and needs no claim, really).
People like to say something is obsolete, for it gives them the illusion they can be cutting-edge.
posted on JMG Galleries “Film is dead. No really!”
What photograph is not a snapshot, still life, document, landscape, etc.? [….] Neither [….] are descriptions of separate photographic aesthetics [….] Still photography is the distinctive term.
Garry Winogrand in “the SNAPSHOT”, ©1974 Aperture, Inc., Vol.19 Number 1.
Once in a while I read the photography blogs (yes, even the digitalist ones, though I’m a non-believer) and I come across some truly amazing stuff. Black Star Rising for instance gives “21 Signs you’re a real photographer now” (!) by Peter Phun – and I declare he hasn’t stolen his name. The one on Epic Edits – “Photoshop Technique: Digital Film Grain” wasn’t about fun at all. To my great surprise it’s a serious “how to” for introducing visible grain to digital pictures! To someone who has always worked with grain (no avoiding it) and pretty much takes it for granted, this post reads like someone telling you how to get rain by putting dust particles in the air so the moisture condenses. It is highly serious though! And I wasn’t even aware of this longing for the classic image, for me it has never gone away… It reads like a recipe to me, the outsider: filling layers, bringing in noise, adding blur, it’s unbelievable how many lies to arrive at a truth of kinds. Then I found PresidiaCreative with “21 Stunning Photographs with a Meaning” which introduces itself as “an inspirational post”. I wasn’t so much stunned (let alone inspired) by the photographs, but after reading the first few captions I was like: don’t even go there… enough already…
…it’s risky business, this effort to breathe life into the world by means of art […] It’s riskier still because it takes Winogrand to visual outposts at the edge of incoherence where eyes accustomed to a tamer, more polite photography might see only wildness an miss the art. It also means that as Winogrand works without preconceived visual restraints, he works without social taboos, staring at everything – failed lives, a failed society in an abundant world – in order to create his own world of possibilities. And this means he has to contend with his own conflicting responses to life as he stirs ours and entertains us.
From an essay by Ben Lifson: “Gary Winogrand’s American Comedy” ©1982, published in Aperture (nr.86)
You don’t have to show people something new; just make them look at it in a new way.
It used to be fashionable for the photo gurus to proclaim that, in order to take “good” photographs, you should “become one with your subject”: to photograph a tree you should become that tree. In an extreme form: you had no “right” to express your opinion about/take a photograph of e.g. poor people if you did not belong to the same social class! No matter what ideological or philosophical thoughts these seemingly “deep” ideas stem from, they have always struck me as plain nonsense. Would an extensive study of all the pharoahs and dynasties of ancient Egypt have resulted in better photographs for my Egypt series….hardly. I did not want knowledge to get in the way of experience. I was going to absorb the country as it presented itself to me during the five weeks of my stay.
Useful as it may be to know at least something about your subject (be it old people’s homes or Latino gangs), it certainly is no guarantee for better photographs. A quick intuitive response is far more important to me than study, meditation or even identification with the subject. Being able to look at things your very own way and thus maintain a certain distance – figuratively speaking! – sometimes helps to avoid being overwhelmed by a subject, or may add to an atmosphere of alienation, when opportune. Having an open mind, not losing yourself, is the key to good observation.
Being an insider, and I’m thinking in years rather than weeks, may get you those special images and a feeling of belonging, and seeing details that stay hidden to the casual eye. In both my “house parties” series and the upcoming “gypsies” series on my site http://www.tomstappers.com you may find this involvement which permeates the best photographs from the many thousands I’ve taken over a long period of time. It is fascination with other people’s lives that drove me, not some supposed “professional attitude” of pursuing “the ultimate picture” that “says it all”, should such a thing exist.