Monthly Archives: July 2005

Expose yourself

Photographers, Photographs

Let’s face it. Your photographs are no good until you have shown them to the world. Whether that means your next door neighbor, an exhibition at the local town hall, a book or the virtual universe, the world is waiting.

One thing you can be sure of is that the world will most certainly not come to you.

So if you don’t screw up your courage and expose your work to the broadest possible audience, you will never know whether it is any good.

I know of what I write. I have had my work published in competitions, put out a book of my pictures and a while back started a Photoblog. I have an extensive web site of my pictures. Be assured, only someone with the ego of Attila the Hun would venture into any of these display avenues without a few butterflies in the old stomach. Why? You know why. You will now be subjected to criticism from all and sundry. The critics will all be strangers. Only friends and relatives will be consistently supportive and nice, even though much of their feedback will be damning with faint praise.

But without criticism, how will you ever know if your work is any good?

Not fair, you say. Like Oscar Wilde’s Lord Darlington, you believe that all critics are, at best, cynics who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Look, even Wilde made a living as a critic before he started earning income from his plays. And you can be consoled by the knowledge that when you do finally expose your work to criticism, you will be dealing with the same, bunch of snobs, ignoramuses, morons, petty idiots, ill educated fools and sundry other losers that plagued Wilde. But without them your work will never be seen or appreciated. Is that not one of the reasons you take photographs – recognition and appreciation by your fellow man?

My experiments with criticism started when I got my first serious camera, the Leica M3 I use to this day, in 1973. As I started making street pictures which I thought had merit I began to submit them to the many photography magazines in the England of my youth, only to be rewarded by much critical feedback. Sadly, most of it was printed in form letters known as rejection slips. Very hurtful. How could everyone else not like my work? Plus, let’s face it, as a poor student whose scholarship money and governmental support could only go so far I needed the money for film and paper. So I kept banging away and as my ability to produce decent prints gradually improved the Honorable Mentions and better started to roll in. I must have been doing something right because the leading photography magazine of the day, a monthly named, originally, ‘Photography’, saw fit to award me The Photographer of the Year award – for one single picture no less! – in the mid-1970s. An award built on rejection slips. Here is that picture, if you must ask, dust spots and all. You did ask, didn’t you?

What a joke. One picture makes you Photographer of the Year. Of course, by that time you had paid your dues with any number of rejection slips, Honorable Mentions, Third Prizes, Second prizes, and so on. So acceptance had to be due any time soon. Like being a frequent poster to a discussion forum at your favorite internet chat board, say. The fact that your content is undiluted tripe, the fact that your claims to fame are never substantiated with a single picture, just having done your time and consistently published your work makes you accepted and lauded.

About the same time Leica Fotografie, the house organ of the camera maker of the same name, published a snap I had taken on Rue Mouffetard in Paris and I thought I had arrived.

So I stopped submitting pictures for publication. I had beaten the system. I had got inside the minds of those lousy critics, the same ones who had sent me all those rejection slips, and beaten them at their own game. It didn’t hurt that I still liked the work I was submitting, but I no longer needed the rewards, economic and psychic, which resulted. I now had a full time job and could take pictures to please me, not the critics.

Well, of course, that was all wrong. For twenty years thereafter I banged away, filling boxes with beautiful 8 x 10” prints which no one ever saw. I was self-satisfied with my work and did not need anyone else to tell me it was good. Or bad.

Yet something was missing. As human beings we all have an ego and not one of us dislikes being told that his work is good. Why, screw up your courage and you will even be prepared to hear that, well, maybe it’s not so good. Find a good critic who will help redirect you, question his input, and maybe you will find new directions and meaning in your photography.

One thing has changed greatly since those days of my youth and it is access to distribution. It has never been easier or cheaper to get your work out there and you no longer need to butter up publishers, attend obligatory cocktail parties or call people ‘darling’ while reminding all and sundry that the editorials of the New York Times and Guardian are your thoughts exactly. One month from reading this there is no reason why you wouldn’t have scanned your hundred best pictures, placed them in a word processed document and submitted your output to a print-on-demand publisher at very modest cost. Why, if you are a digital photographer the most onerous part of the task, the scanning part, does not even exist.

But the chances are you will not do this and that is a shame. Excuses are easy. I don’t have the time. The spouse is ill. It’s too complex for me to learn. No one is interested. And on and on.

All of these excuses say just one thing. You really do not care enough for your photography to do anything with it.

OK, so the book route is not for you. Well, how about a Photoblog? Access is even easier than publishing a book. You go to any one of the providers on the web and set up an account. It can be paid, like the one I use, where the friendly people at Expressions charge me the stunning sum of $3 monthly to host my picture uploads. I use them as they provide a nice point-and-click selection of screens to display your work and have been very nice in helping me design a screen to my own liking which is not available in their canned selections. Plus, I’m not exactly God’s gift to the coding profession.

Or you can try a free service such as the oddly named Flickr and share your work for all to see. Free.

So now tell me, why, within 60 minutes of reading this, you should not have a Photoblog up and running. You want to get paid for doing this?

Frankly, unless you are an equipment collector, in which case why are you even reading this, there is no reason.

Tomorrow I will share my Photoblogging experience with you, by which time your Photoblog will be up and running. Promise?

And closing on another Wilde witticism, when you get rude, uninformed morons trashing your work, “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.” Then delete their droppings.

A sense of purpose

Photographers

I emigrated from the United Kingdom to the United States in 1977 so now more than half of my life has been spent in America, some of that in New York but mostly in California. What so attracted me to the New World was my experience working with Americans in London. The singularly distinguishing attributes of the ‘Yanks’, as xenophobic Englishmen still thought of them back then (now we have the equally unappealing sobriquet ‘Brits’ for my former countrymen), were that they had a lot of fun in doing whatever they did and their driving sense of purpose. They were goal oriented.

What has all that to do with photography? Well, I am convinced that without a sense of purpose your chances of taking good photographs are poor to non-existent. As for profits in business, opportunities for good photography rarely just happen. If you are going to go swanning about, camera in hand, blithely hoping that something good will come alone, well, keep hoping. You have to make it happen.

I believe this to be true regardless of whether your subject is the serendipitous one of street photography or the much more planned variant of the landscape. I happen to enjoy both. Maybe a couple of illustrations will do the trick.

As the proverbial impoverished student in 1977, my last year in London, I mustered what little cash I had and boarded the ferry to Calais, then the chemin de fer to Gare du Nord in the heart of Paris.

I had two very focused goals in mind.

One was to visit the Louvre, the Orangerie and the Jeu de Paume museums and art galleries in the Jardin de Tuileries in the heart of the First Arrondissement. My sole purpose was to gorge on nineteenth century French painting. Corot and Boudin. Cezanne and Manet. Renoir and Monet. Degas and Seurat. Painters modestly represented in the great British museums, but very much on their home ground in the Tuileries Gardens. Fulfilling that goal, with the three galleries a stone’s throw apart, involved nothing so much as a stout pair of shoes and the entrance fee.

The other was to see and photograph the light of Paris, that light which I had studied for so many years and dreamt about experiencing first hand. Paris has the twin distinction of being the most beautiful city of the Western Hemisphere and well as having the most gorgeous light. Or maybe it is so beautiful because of the light? Lacking the lugubrious architecture that typifies much of London and, mercifully, lacking that city’s foul weather, Paris is a city of joy and romance where London is one of industry and commerce. Artists created one, burghers the other. And for all the bad things we, as Americans, may think of the Parisians, casting off those veils of prejudice reveals a magnificent place for the ages. Truly you have not lived until you have been in Paris.

So to finally have the opportunity of taking photographs in Paris was not only immensely exciting, visual and sensory overload threatening at every corner, it was a goal I had long strived for. And Paris did not disappoint.

Jardin de Tuileries, sunrise

Jardin de Tuileries, noon.

Jardin de Tuileries, evening.

And even when you come across something very special, a picture that you will always remember the journey by, luck has nothing to do with it. I waited for two hours at the Holocaust Memorial, that monument to French Guilt, for the juxtaposition of the players to be just so:

Holocaust Museum, Paris.

There are very few lucky accidents in life or in photography. A goal, a sense of purpose, makes luck happen.

Set that goal and only then pick up your camera.

Degas – Photographer

Paintings, Photography

One of the earliest recollections I have of a painting as a child is of Degas’s Bellelli Family.

Looking at the painting over the years it is clear that what attracted me to it is the photographic nature of the composition. Painted in 1860, in the early days of photography (Daguerrotypes first hit the market in 1839), the canvas is remarkable for several things. The informal pose of the paterfamilias on the right contrasts sharply with the stiff formality of the mother and her two daughters, the younger of whom appears to be an amputee! (She was, in reality, sitting on her tucked leg, the way kids do). Degas simply painted it as he saw it.

Now no one had done anything like this before, and Degas was lucky the Bellellis were affluent relatives (the mother in the portrait, Laura, was his aunt) for no one would have commissioned a portrait as strange, by contemporary tastes, as this. David Hockney would imitate his style a hundred years later by which time people were prepared to pay goodly sums to have their portraits painted in like manner.

Degas lived a long life, dying in 1917 at the age of 83, and the realism seen in his oil paintings taught me a great deal about photographic composition and seeing. No single painting does it better than “L’Absinthe”.

Painted sixteen years after The Bellelli Family, his powers of observation and composition are at their greatest in this superb painting. The effect is even greater if you can get to the Musee d’Orsay in Paris where it hangs for all to see – a modest sized canvas some 36″ x 24″in size. Absinthe is distilled from anise (similar to licorice) and wormwood. Poor distillation left behind toxic levels of chemicals, which could cause all sorts of harmful side effects ranging from vomiting to blindness. But none of that troubled the consumer who focused on the alcohol buzz (absinthe is some 60% alcohol) and the hallucinogenic high from the other chemicals present in abundance. Now you get the picture and the painting!

And what a remarkable painting it is. If you think Caravaggio’s ˜Conversion of St. Paul” is the greatest ˜wide-angle™ painting ever, well, “L’Absinthe” runs it a close second. The strong foreground with the knife cheekily signed by Degas leads the viewer, courtesy of those zig zagging diagonals, to the bombed pair in the rear. Except that they are almost out of the picture as if the painter himself had had a couple of shots during the process. The man’s pipe is cut off and he gazes out of the frame. The young woman is nothing less than a portrait of despair itself. The pair cast strong shadows on the wall behind. And you think Brassai invented this kind of thing?

Now I have no facts and figures to back this up, but I would bet that the average photographer rarely looks at a painting, even less thinks about painted art. What a shame for there is so much there to excite the eye and stir the imagination and those are two of the reasons we look at art. The third is to enjoy that sense of aesthetic satisfaction which good art provides. Not a bad definition, come to think of it, as to what exactly constitutes ˜art”. It is that which arouses the aesthetic senses.

Degas took up photography at the tender age of 61 and immediately set to recording that which he wanted to paint, except he did it with the compositional eye of a master.

Enhance your vision and imagination. Add a book of Degas’s paintings to your library.