The Walk

When you get sick of your office or studio, sick of the pressure and sick of thinking about things in general, it is time to grab your camera and become a tourist in your own town. If you live in a place like Toronto, you are probably aware that the city is in constant flux; I like to take, at the very least, one afternoon a month just to walk around the downtown area with my camera and see what’s new. So, yesterday I wandered around, shooting everything I saw as if I was seeing it for the first time, until my feet started getting sore and my stomach started grumbling. But I really enjoyed it… And besides, my Leica always gives me some sort of license to photograph whatever I want, because I know that I would be a bit reticent, if not shy at all, about pointing a big honking camera at people’s faces. Range-finder photographers seem so touristy, so amateur-like that they almost scream: “Look at me, I’m a perennial student on a fine art hunt…” and nobody takes them seriously. Therefore, having a little camera is your license to peer into nooks and crannies, accost strangers, shoot silly angles and generally lurch around… But what did a hike around the monuments of Toronto buy me? I suppose it gave me an excuse not to think, a day of shooting without the pressure of having to turn out perfect work and license to really experiment with the tools and the toys. I know I got also some exercise, as I figured my route to be about five miles in all, plus a chance to re-orient my engraved memory about what it’s like downtown, and a good excuse to go off my diet and splurge with a great burger. As I walked through the downtown area I saw dozens of high-rise and luxury condominiums. Some built and occupied some under construction and some breaking ground. No one of the projects was on hold. The streets were filled with people in suits or shirts and ties walking to meetings or early lunches. Not too many “sale” signs in the boutique windows. Most people seemed happy. Pretty content. None of the advocated “doom and gloom” scenario… And then there was my little camera. I’ve long since given up caring what a meter says to me: I learned to set the right exposure at least 25 years ago! Three hours later I’d re-acquainted me with humanity and I called it a day. Less fearful about the economy. Less paranoid about the localized representation of the human condition and happy with my photographs. The 4:3 format suits me well. The lens is great. The finder is good. I can be happy working again. I returned home with 3 exposed rolls of Delta 400 and an unchanged feeling of appreciation for what my camera can do. Now, here’s the rant: We are on the cusp of print advertising capitulating to digital. Possibly, in a few years, traditional magazines of any kind will be consigned to webmag status. As photographers we have to understand that the ability to summon tons of mega pixels will no longer be an effective barrier to entry our field. The now state of the art DSLR cameras will become albatrosses that require learning the intricacies of downsizing. No one will be looking for 50 megabyte tiff files anymore. They’ll be looking for good compression and fast loading. And more will be looking for files that move. As in video. So what does that leave us with, as photographers? It leaves us with the realization that many have already accepted: We are content providers and it’s time to re-orient our understanding of what constitutes content. It will be either this or the choice between fine art film photography and conceptual photojournalism, on film as well… As for me, I have already chosen: Understanding that digital gear will continue to be less important but connections and creative thinking will become primary, I went back to film and became a true minimalist: One camera and one lens, a changing bag, a developing tank and a scanner, together with a laptop for writing and image editing. Film involves me more in the creative process of an image, due to the fact that a roll can only contain a limited number of frames. This eliminates the shooting frenzy of the digital medium, slowing me down and making me think carefully about what subject is worth to be THE subject… Moreover, the whole process of developing and scanning adds to the creation of the image, increasing gratification. And for all of us who have just embraced (or never left) the old ways of making photographs there will be the task to dominate the digital competition. So we will produce better ideas. Instead of surviving as mere “picture takers” we will bring fresh concepts and visions to the table. We will be masters of lighting, at least as far as it serves our purposes in giving us an inimitable style. We will infuse our content with intellectual assets that are unique to our own experiences. We will use our dreams, our nightmares and our loftiest ideals as the fabric for our creations, making art so poignant that it will bring tears to the hardest heart and smiles to the hopeless. And in our brave analog world the walls between writing and photographing will be liquid, pliable and permeable and we’ll master both. We will go back to childhood and see new images through the eyes of a child. Our inner child. Our most basic and undiluted, creative self.

See what a walk around town will do to you?

Alone

In talking to friends who are and have been photographers for many and many years, the undercurrent that permeates conversations these days is the overwhelming sense of isolation many of us feel. While photography has always been a loner’s discipline, the recent social and economic upheavals have played havoc with our sense of being connected to the world. The first erosion of this feeling of belonging came with our embrace of Photoshop. In our haste to control our digital files, we killed off the labs. Moreover, our logic-driven (but totally misguided) demand for the lowest price on everything we bought killed off most of the good camera stores. With the labs and the retailers gone we lost two points of intersection that were part of the fabric of the photographer’s (professional or amateur alike) social life. Unlike our Latin and European counterparts, who have rich history of men socializing over coffee during the day or drinks in the late afternoons, our Calvinistic society demands efficiency and frowns upon time spent unproductively. In order to preserve our sense of well-being I think us photographers must adopt new strategies to reincorporate ourselves into the every day fabric of communal life. We need to leave our dark caves and reconnect.

I have a program and I’m following it as well as I can:

1. Coffee outside the house. Find a coffee shop or diner with a fun crowd and go there for your coffee (yes, I understand the accountant driven “Latte Factor” of economics, but have you priced psychiatric care lately? Believe me, two bucks for a cup of coffee is a bargain…).

2. Have at least one lunch a week with a friend or peer. Complain, celebrate, talk “nerd-talk”. Bond.

3. Have a project to work on. I always try to organize exhibits of my work. It puts me in the public eye and it is a beautiful goal.

4. Find a cause you feel very strongly about and donate your photographic talent. You’ll get practice, exposure and move the game forward for your cause.

5. Help someone else get their project done. You get karma and you learn something new.

Finally,

6. Stop making lists like this and get out into the real world. Life is still swirling around and, if we live it fully, we might make better art, meet nicer people, and feel less alone.

Trash It!

“Pictures are everywhere, you just have to care about what’s around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy. Good photography is not about ‘Zone Printing’ or any other Ansel Adams nonsense; It is simply a function of noticing things and reacting to them, hopefully, without preconception. Nothing more. It’s about seeing. You either see, or you don’t. The rest is academic”.

 

 - Elliott Erwitt -

Now

If the eyes are the windows to the soul, I believe that the camera is its reflection.

Our individual view of the world is illustrated by the images we take, involuntarily capturing expressions of our inner child and alter ego. In always searching for that once in a lifetime shot, the self plays a large role: A photographer must have an ego large enough to believe that he or she is the best one, at that particular time, taking that picture. Even though we deliberately portray a subject, it is our psyche that creates the interpretation. Moreover, it is my convincement that luck has a little to do with whether or not we capture that unrepeatable moment in life, and more often it is our subconsciousness that comes into play. How many times have you left the house forgetting your camera, gone back to get it on a hunch and later that day it paid off? This has happened to me more than once. What is that inspires us to turn off the beaten path and try different compositional schemes, just to obtain that great photograph? The first answer would be knowledge and experience. However, it is our artistic nature or our very soul that takes that knowledge and experience and turns it into a piece of art for all to enjoy. As photographers, it is most important that we have fun taking pictures; if it wasn’t important to us, we probably would do something else. Maintaining self-confidence (while not becoming overly confident) and providing the world with inspirational images that will endure for a lifetime and beyond, is the goal to which we all should aspire.

Cameras are our paint brushes and pencils. It is up to us to create that masterpiece for the other windows of the soul to enjoy and be inspired by.

Abroad

My wife would probably tell you that I spend too much time reading photo forums on the web. However, the most frequent topic that I noticed, recently, is how worried people have become about their gear. I’ve seen ten or fifteen posts in the last week from (mostly) Americans who all wanted to know how to safeguard their equipment in such dangerous places as: Paris, Rome, and even, gasp, Copenhagen! The thing that strikes me as funny is that each of these places has a much lower violent crime rate than just about any major city in the States, and each one is also a pedestrian city where, even in the unlikely event of a crime being perpetrated, you are surrounded by helpful people ready to jump in and help ensure social stability. The idea that your Canon Rebel needs to be locked in a hotel safe or secured to your neck with a special strap containing unbreakable wires (what a good way to be decapitated, should your camera get stuck in a train door…) is laughable. If you are dragging that much paranoia along on your vacation you may need to invest in other things. Therapy comes to mind… The second kind of post that seems to come up with annoying regularity is the idea that, to shoot in the street, you must become a stealthy ninja and your camera should be so small that it becomes invisible at any distance beyond five feet. The idea being, I guess, that a hulking American, complete with baggy cargo shorts, a promotional T-shirt for their favourite NFL team, white athletic socks, and day-glow Nike running shoes (never used for that purpose), topped with a baseball cap, will be able to sneak through a crowd of well dressed Europeans and will be able to position themselves in just the right way to secretly take startling good photographs. Their ideal camera is silent with an incredible zoom lens and a very small foot print. Either that or a gigantic Canon/Nikon/Sony/Olympus coupled with a bag full of lenses, which they are deathly afraid some grandmother from Naples will slit their throat to own. Face it. People will see that you have a camera in your hands anyways. And unless you are doing your tourism in Sudan you’ll also notice, when you look around, that almost everyone else has a camera or a cell-phone with a camera, or a video camera. They’re everywhere. They are ubiquitous. Believe me, people in the European Union also buy and use cameras. Early this year I headed to Cosenza, Italy, for a few weeks of vacation and photography. I brought only one camera, a Leica V-LUX, and I spent most of my time walking along shooting whatever caught my attention. If a person looked interesting, I’d ask them to pose. Sometimes I’d just smile, nod and shoot. Books on travel caution newbies to be constantly aware of their surroundings. Hyper-vigilant, if you will. I discarded all that advice: No one cared. Every once in a while an older gentleman would ask about the camera while younger people ignored it. And this is the way it has gone for me for decades and decades. If someone doesn’t want to be photographed they’ll let you know. If you don’t push it they won’t either. If you are calm, relaxed and see other people as, well, simply other people, you’ll probably do just fine. You might want to practice photographing strangers by becoming a tourist in your own town. I find that a nice weekend of street shooting in Toronto is just the right “warm up” before a trip abroad and a good way to start getting comfortable outside your comfort zone!

No Change

For as long as I can remember I’ve been in love with the process of writing. One of my early heroes was Vladimir Nabokov. He wrote beautiful sentences. He wrote wonderfully visual descriptions. And he wrote with an incredible ear for narrative. Many years ago, after University, I started a career as a copywriter in the advertising industry, then I became a columnist for a weekly magazine, and now I earn my living working as a music critic for a monthly paper. Photography, however, is what I always really enjoyed, what I thought it was my only way of truly creating… But only recently I understood what’s the allure for me. It’s note taking at its most immediate. It’s the stories. I suspect many of us are lured into photography for reasons that have never been clear. Now I see the interconnection between the two crafts; writing and photographing. It’s clearer to me than ever before: It’s all about the storytelling.

Bare

“A photograph is not created by  photographers. What they do is just to open a little window and capture it… The world, then, writes itself on the film. This makes photographing much closer to the act of reading than to the act of writing: Photographers are the readers of the world“.

  -Ferdinando Scianna-

I am

Young photographers are often pressured to search for distinction, for “newness” and “differentness”. Yet the truth of the matter is that a unique style is the by-product of a visual exploration, not its goal, and it only comes from not aiming for it. Style is a natural, inevitable, result of emphasizing subject, not self. If it is perceived to be important that the self should be ultimately revealed, the question arises: What is the nature of this “self”? If it is shallow and inconsequential, so will be the resultant photographs. It seems an extraordinary presumption that every photographer has a depth of character worth to be discovered! Inevitably, many photographers would do the world a big favour by diminishing, not augmenting, the role of self and, as much as possible, emphasizing subject alone. But the emphasis today is on a cult of personality and individualism, and I presume that the majority of young photographers are anxious to assert themselves. Like all noble aims, however, this is not achieved without varying degrees of responsibility and hard work. The young photographer must develop a photographic conscience: If the subject of the photograph is the vehicle for profounder issues, then it is the photographer’s responsibility to think and feel more deeply about those issues. That is achieved by engaging on a quest for self-knowledge which invests the act of living with greater energy and commitment. I am well aware that this sounds very nebulous. You cannot wake up one morning and assert: today I will be aware and more alive. It starts like self-expression, with a concentration of focus on the subject matter. It presumes that the subject deserves not only looking, but also thinking, reading, writing, talking as well as photographing earnestly and energetically. The ultimate aim is an oscillation between self and subject with the image being a physical manifestation of this interface between the spirit and the world. It demands reiteration: this conscience of the photographer is not acquired quickly or without effort. The young photographer, unwilling to develop such a conscience, can always move on to some other activity, without failure or shame, or join the army of hobbyists who derive great pleasure from their images, or employ the medium in its honourable role of documentation without artistic presumption. An earnest and honest appreciation of subject matter is the genesis of a clearer, deeper vision.

The Fallacy Of Form

Photography performs one function supremely well: it shows what something or somebody looked like, under a particular set of conditions, at a definite moment in time. This specificity has been, and remains, photography’s boon as well as its bane. Therefore, ever since the invention of the medium, what a photograph depicts has taken precedence over what a photograph means. The advantage inherent in this notion is that photography has become an increasingly useful tool in our society for the transmission of information about every conceivable aspect of life. The “disadvantage,” is that while a photograph is directing attention to its subject, it is de-emphasizing the role of the individual who portrayed it. Indeed, in the vast majority of photographs, even those of extraordinary impact in our lives, we have no knowledge of, or interest in, the author, who remains unlikely to be rewarded or even noticed by society in general. Moreover, a photographer with artistic aspirations has even a smaller audience, nowadays, one which is increasingly congregating almost exclusively within the faculties at colleges and universities, although great (even artistic) photography is obviously not a function of environment or a prerogative of academia. However, I think that the problem in modern imagery is that what has been photographed is usually considered more important than how. Photographers have become, first and foremost, selector of subjects. They walk through life and their cameras say: “I found this subject to be more interesting or significant than thousands of other ones I could have captured; I want you to appreciate it too”. This immediate emotional response to the subject matter is at the core of contemporary photography. Unfortunately its periphery is represented by the photographer’s manipulation of framing, focus, exposure, lighting, and all the other variables, in order that a bland record is invested with depth through the production of an intriguing image. The real conundrum is that young photographers don’t know anymore in which direction to point the camera. To try to solve this, I would advise to list all those subjects which fascinate us, without regard to photography: What would we be doing if there was no such thing as a camera? After the list is made, we should start cutting it down, eliminating those subjects that are not particularly visual. For instance, existential philosophy can be deleted… Then we should cut out the impractical ones: Patagonia, to us Canadians, is definitely not a subject for available hours and weekends. Also we would want to eliminate those subjects about which we are ignorant, at least until we have conducted a good deal of research into the issue. For example, we are not making any statement about urban poverty simply by wandering the streets and grabbing shots of derelicts: That’s exploitation, not exploration. We should continue similar reductions in our list of interests until two or three subjects remain, all of which a.) Fire our enthusiasm b.) Lend themselves to images or to words, or, better yet, to a combination of both c.) Are continuously accessible. Finally, with some hesitancy, I admit, I would recommend one further elimination process: When we have two or three visually possible and accessible subjects, all of which interest us equally, it is no compromise to select the subject which others are more interested in viewing. The state of being human dictates that some things are visually more interesting than others and I am well aware that it is difficult to transmit information to a disinterested, bored audience. Some subjects are more accessible and interesting to the lay person than others, and it is deliberately perverse to ignore this consideration. There is a very fine line between pandering to popular appeal and a respectful consideration of viewers’ interests, and only the integrity of the photographer will hold the balance. All this talk about emphasizing subject matter might indicate that I am only advocating a strict, straight recording of objects. But this is not so: I have been talking about starting points. I do believe that the narrower and more clearly defined the subject matter, the more scope there is for a continuing evolution of complexity and, hence, the greater the latitude for personal interpretation. An analogy might help to explain my view. The starting point for a living, growing tree is a seed or a sapling. Then by careful nurturing, and a good deal of patience, a tree will grow, often into a form which could not have been foreseen. It must be the same in photography, or else we’ll be just frantically grasping for an instant gratification which merely leads to images of visual pyrotechnics but of dubious depth and resonance.

Contact

The word “photography” comes from Greek roots which together translate as “writing with light”, therefore one would expect a close kinship between writers and photographers. Right? Wrong!

Though writing and photography are the two processes that fill up the majority of the editorial space in publications, few journalists manage to be successful at both, because the two processes are not only fundamentally different but also place different, often conflicting, demands on the practitioner. Can someone be both a writer and a photographer? Given certain considerations, for me the answer has always been yes, although the odds are often against producing both an insightful interview and a beautiful portrait at the same time, for concentration is needed either on the conversation or on looking for the revealing gesture or facial expression. Short of those extremes, however, the possibilities for the writer-photographer remain open and, along the way, I’ve learned that photography and writing are not so different disciplines after all. Photography is about seeing things that exist or could exist, and here the photographer and the writer have more in common than they may realize: In fact, for the successful photographer the picture exists in the mind before it exits in the camera, just as for the writer the words exist in the mind before they exist on paper or on the computer screen. Moreover, photography, for a writer, is one of the coolest methods of note-taking…

Sometimes my pieces appear without illustrations, at other times without words at all, and then there is when they come as a package of text and photos. Which of the above situations has been the most satisfying to me? I guess any one I’ve succeeded in telling my audience something, sharing new information, an insight, or just what it was like to be in a particular place at a particular time. The satisfaction is equal, regardless of whether I share that information through pictures, text, or a combination of the two. So, am I primarily a writer or primarily a photographer? Does it really matter? I prefer to think that I’m simply someone who can communicate in more than one way.