Expect the unexpected

Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s superb book on probablility theory (don’t glaze; stick with me. Anyone can grasp the humanities. Math and science are far harder, which is why they pay better) is titled The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

Simply stated, Taleb casts uncertainty in the light of the Black Swan. When the world believed all swans were white the first black one was a major shock to the system, the seemingly impossible had happened. Historians rushed to rewrite history and, of course, each one saw the black swan coming.

Each of us has had a major black swan event. Probably many. Take my parents. Until August 31, 1939 their predecessors had climbed the social ladder (probably lucking out on the right Black Swan events) and had nicely reached the status of minor nobility. That took some seven or eight centuries and lands and possessions were among the results. Then, come September 1, suddenly Hans and his SS legions are at the door demanding the keys to the wine cellar after shooting the dogs. No one saw it coming. Financial futures in the markets did not see it. So don’t rewrite history. Churchill may have guessed right (no one listened anyway) but for my parents this was a major Black Swan day. They had succeeded to wealth created over centuries then, BANG!, it was gone in a day. Well, at least they were lucky not to be named Rosenblum, or I wouldn’t be writing this.

The classic Black Swan event economists teach (at least the intellectually honest ones) is the case of the turkey and how history leaves the bird clueless about the future. For a couple of years he gets 3 square meals a day, enjoys Mozart (if he is a California Diestel turkey!) and, why, even on the Tuesday of Thanksgiving week he is as happy as a turkey can be. Then whack, it’s Wednesday and the turkey meets his Black Swan. Exactly the same technique was used by the Germans, of course, in the death camps in my parents’ Poland – “It’s time for a shower now. This way please”. Your victims will line up for execution as long at the previous lot didn’t live to tell about it.

In photography there have been many unpredictable Black Swan events and I have had my share. First was my discovery of the Leica as a teenager. It was a serious Black Swan and changed the way I saw things and how I photographed. I didn’t see it coming.

Later, affordable color was another BS, if you permit the abbreviation. Monochrome quickly ceased to interest me – a dimension was missing and I couldn’t unlearn it any more than I had predicted its effect on my work. I didn’t see it coming.

Next the computer did a BS on the darkroom. When PCs first came along in the early 1980s I was working on Wall Street and our first IBM two floppy PC sat there forlornly for months. Someone would switch it on once in a while and ROM Basic, written by none other than Bill Gates, popped up on the green screen. We wrote a few programs but gave up for the sheer complexity of the thing. Suddenly, one day a box marked Lotus 123 arrived and with it we had a BS event. Within a year every employee had a PC on his desk and another at home. I didn’t see it coming.

Then there was the inkjet printer. Big prints everywhere. No way to predict that. I didn’t see it coming.

Then the Internet. No one saw that BS coming.

And, most recently, digital imaging. That did to film what the German invaders did to my parents. It took a bit longer, but it was the latest photographic BS. And, yes, I didn’t see it coming. Amusingly, sometimes those closest to the Swan don’t see it. They are too invested in, and too blinded by, what they know. Kodak helped develop digital imaging, killed their mainstay and failed to capitalize on their own invention. Their BS whacked them.

And while Taleb’s book is mostly focused on the financial world (where Black Swan events happen about every year – can you say Long Term Capital Management in 1998 or Nasdaq in 2000 or the credit crunch last quarter?) I recommend it to photographers everywhere. Expect the unexpected from this fine book, because you will not see it coming.

America’s strong suit.

As an American resident for some 55% of my life now, I’m permitted to make value judgments about what we do well and not so well. Note the ‘we’. I may still affect an English accent but 20 years of American citizenship and a disproportionate tax burden grudgingly paid over those years very much entitles me to say ‘we’.

So America does lots of things very poorly. Since 1955 our foreign policy has varied from criminally incompetent to disgraceful. It is nothing less than a history of failure. Our secret services probably couldn’t find bin Laden if he had a permanent suite in the Holiday Inn behind the White House, and we continue to think that waging hostile, aggressive foreign wars is the solution to what ails us. We guzzle oil like there’s no tomorrow – not surprising in the absence of an energy policy – and continue our migration to adoption of the worst of the nanny state policies of a dying Europe. Our fiscal and taxation policies make some sub-Saharan dictatorships look the model of common sense and our insane greed translates into bubbles of excess more or less twice each decade. We have a public schooling system that is a criminal conspiracy against our children and one of our main political parties derives its funding from shake down artists – trades unions and class action lawyers.

That’s some pretty bad stuff. But the other side of the coin continues to surprise and delight, for we do so many things right.

Whether by accident or design we are exceptionally welcoming to immigrants, despite all the hatred we engender abroad. We are, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the most generous and open-hearted nation the world has seen. We are, for the most part, supremely powerful and exceptionally benign in wielding that power. We are brilliant scientists and technologists and, most of all, we are the world’s business leaders. We grow more food than an we can consume. We are the leaders in all aspects of art and entertainment. Anyone can get an education for very little and anyone can get a job. We have the finest private schools the world has ever seen.

But, above all, we are a nation of hustlers, nowhere more evidently so than in our infinite skill at marketing. We can sell anyone anything. Whether it’s a fighter jet for the despot of the day in the Middle East or a newer, better car, boy, do we have a deal for you.

I am always reminded of our marketing prowess when I think about my mother, who passed away a few years ago. No way, she would tell you, was any marketer ever going to direct her thinking away from its independent path. But what did my sister and I find in her closet once she had passed away? Some dozen Coach bags and sufficient numbers of pairs of Evan Picone shoes to give even Imelda Marcos a little frisson. So, like the rest of us, the US marketing machine had got to the old girl.

In my fifty or so year life as a photographer I have always been fascinated by the externalities that affected my choice of equipment. Was I choosing based on need, economics or because the Coach-bag guys had got to me? I would like to tell you it was need, that money did not matter and that, like with my mum, no marketer was going to change my mind. Wrong on all three.

Let’s get specific. Of all the gear I have owned over the years which items mean the most to me? Worked best, ‘took’ the best snaps, gave me that warm glow that comes with seamless execution?

As I don’t want this journal entry to stretch to book length any more than you do, I narrowed it down to just five. Five pieces of photographic equipment that changed my direction and interests.

In chronological order, with my ownership period shown:

• Leica M3 – 33 years
• Epson 1270 printer – 6 years
• Rollei 6003 – 7 years
• Apple’s Mac – 8 years
• Canon 5D – 2 years

Actually a very easy list to make, for each of these machines made a big change in how I work.

What made these special, and how did American marketing affect my choice?

The Leica M3 was the result of viral marketing as we would call it today. A relative had an M2 and once I handled it as a teenager, I had to have one. First there was the world’s best viewfinder. Second was the relative silence. But above all, it just felt right. And it so totally meshed with my interest in street photography that Leica’s marketing can rightfully be said to have been undertaken without pay by Cartier-Bresson, Brassai and Kertesz, because it was through their work I knew the rangefinder Leica. Leica’s marketing is, of course, some of the worst on earth. First, they made a device so good and so expensive that most of their market came from resales of used gear. When my last Leica finally saw the insides of the local UPS store last year I couldn’t help reflecting that after all those years of cameras and lenses from Wetzlar only once had I ever bought a new Leica product – the 90mm Apo-Summicron Asph, bought from England when the mighty dollar was …. well, mighty. Leica has got over its attention to detail and quality since those days so now everyone can own one. Which did nothing to improve Leica’s bottom line. Anyway, with that M3 the marketing feed was like that of a fellow painter recommending a brush. Word of mouth or eye, in this case.

By the time the Epson 1270 came around in the mid-90s, not only was I well and truly an American, but computer processing had sounded the death knell of traditional processing methods. And the dyes in Epson’s inks were so well made that great prints were limited solely by your ability to tune your hardware just so. The only reason this machine moved on was that I wanted to make larger prints, something the HP DJ90 readily offered in its 18” x 24” capacity, compared to the more limiting 13” x 19” of the Epson. Unusually for modern technology, the Espon truly is a Ten year digital device. Suddenly my default print size was no longer 8” x 10”. The marketing input here was simple. I used to subscribe to an advertising magazine for photo gear named Shutterbug. It had started as a classified ad rag and then tried to migrate up market with the inclusion of content. The fact that said content reflected some of the worst writing ever put out by flacks dependent on free gear (“Sure you can keep it, if you like it”) was lost on me. They said the Espon was great, I bought it and …. well, I bought it. I was lucky. Their lies were my truth. I lucked out – it really was that good.

In a roundabout way, the Epson reacquainted me with medium format photography. I had long owned a little used Rollei 3.5F TLR but never got on with the reversed waist level image. My brain had become lazy after all those years with Leica’s ne plus ultra viewfinders. But the Epson had opened my eyes to larger prints and, frankly, only rarely was the resolution/grain/whatever of my Leica snaps equal to the occasion. Epson had done Rollei’s marketing and the wonderfully ergonomically correct Rollei 6003 SLR, with a prism viewfinder, made for one very happy camper. Pretty much fully automated, the lenses beyond reproach, it made medium format as easy and as approachable as banging away with that Leica. Too bad it weighed about as much as a Mack truck. Not only was Rollei’s marketing nowhere to be seen – they don’t even bother advertising their medium format gear here – had they done so I would likely have avoided the product. Have you ever studied the sheer ineptitude of German marketing in the US? They just don’t get it. We don’t want things that last forever and get handed down to the next generation (only Patek Philippe gets that one right, and they are Swiss). We want the here and now.

Apple’s Mac was a no brainer and viral marketing was again at work. For the last five years of my life which saw me as other than my own boss, I ran an investment firm. We ran all our technology on Windows NT and had no fewer than six people (out of 50) running IT to make sure the daily failures by Windows would not show their ugly head in the front office. I was shooting the breeze with the head of IT one day and he mentioned he had just bought a roll sheet feeder to go with his Epson 1270. I chance to ask which computer he used at home and the surprise answer was “I use a Mac”. Now this is a fairly limp-wristed admission in the machismo world of Wall Street which regards Mac users to this day as a bunch of artsy-fartsy faggots. Now because my CTO was a very capable person, I paid attention. Add the fact that my home PC ran Windows 98 (want to know how to cure world air traffic problems? Run the Civil Aeronautics Board on Windows and, after the first two mid-air crashes, traffic will disappear) and crashed daily, you can imagine I was more than a bit receptive to some good marketing. Even if it was for a fag product. OS X had just arrived and the machines looked like nothing I had ever seen. I own my original G4 iMac with the screen on a stick to this day, even if it is relegated to back-up duty. The machine worked, it did not lock up, the awful Photoshop ran nicely on it (Aperture was not to become available until years later) and it looked great. As has every Mac since. And while I only work for one asshole now (me) I can still run Gates’s version of organized theft in Parallels, where Windows’s virusphilia is neatly contained in its own little incubated tent. I still need that for stock market applications – hardly Apple’s forte.

By the time I found out about the Canon 5D the Shutterbug subscription had been cancelled. Any number of web sites now published equipment tests and whenever you doubted the independence of the writers you could always jump over to comment boards. Even the smart marketers in camera-land couldn’t pollute all of those with purportedly independent emails extolling their products. Like any rigorous stock analyst I was approaching every piece of gear with the question “Where’s the money?” uppermost in my mind. So the decision to try a 5D was the result of word of mouth, too. People who used it loved it, I was getting increasingly irate with the amount of time wasted on the back-office functions related to film (all that non-creative processing and error correction) and people who splash out $3k on a camera body should, you would like to think, be pretty critical. After all, you could get a couple nice used film Leicas and a few of Wetzlar’s magical lenses for that kind of cash. The 5D made a huge difference to what I did photographically. The street stuff of Leica days-yore no longer interested me, the bulk and weight of medium format displeased me and I had grown to love the outdoors and the landscapes it offered. Plus I now hated, just hated, processing pictures. Just show me which button to press for a huge print, please. The 5D made all that possible – my migration to the front office of photography was complete.

And many thanks to all those anonymous, unpaid marketers who made it possible.