That thing Matt Said...

I wish that I had become a “Concerned Photographer” like some photojournalists. It’s not that I don’t love street photography, but I think most of us would like to make a difference with our work, even though as a street photographer, its almost impossible in the first place. - Matt Weber to Bryan Formhals

When I started taking pictures, documentary was the mode that influenced my approach and that of most of my friends. Our models were the FSA guys, or Atget, every bit as much as Winogrand, Friedlander or Arbus were at that time. Maybe even more, since the newer guys were so hard to emulate without imitating. I've said in other contexts that I'd never heard the term "Street Photography" until I subscribed to Flickr, and that's true. HCB was a brilliant photographer, but he was also, importantly, a photojournalist. Just walking around on the street photographing was interesting and produced the occasional show stopper (and as Bryan says in the interview, it was a place to train your reflexes) but it didn't seem "serious" enough. So I get it when Matt says that thing about Concerned Photography, and if anything it tells me that we both came from the same generation. I was forever inventing projects and trying to pony-up documentary themes - whether they were anthropological, historical, sociological or journalistic. Anything to focus my attention and link me back to reality - to recording what was actually there in front of me.

Church interior. Alabama or Tennessee. Walker Evans, 1936

But of course, that wasn't really what I was doing. What I was really trying to do was get great pictures that looked like reality. And there was never a doubt that, whatever Roy Stryker may have been thinking, getting great images that evoked the aesthetic of Flaubert was what Evans was after (well, he said as much), and that Russell Lee was sure as Hell aware that his flash-lit shots inside of people's houses were the essence of the surreal, and that Ben Shahn was exploring a randomness that foreshadowed Winogrand's later aesthetic far more accurately than anything HCB had done.

Amphitheatre, county fair, central Ohio, 1938. Ben Shahn

The concerned photography thing is about changing the world, but it's rooted in the idea of documenting the world that needs changing. And it turns out that whether you're trying to change the world or just make great pictures, if you bother to include the world in your pictures at all, the documentary thing pretty much takes care of itself.

Children taking bath in their home in community camp. Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 1939. Russell Lee

Fast or Slow?

As I sit here avoiding starting on some work that actually involves some monetary remuneration, I'm thinking about the camera I just bought (well, as a matter of fact, my mother-in-law bought it as a birthday present for me) and why I decided to get it. When given the opportunity to buy a new camera (and one that was under $1500) I was torn between going small and digital, in particular the new Fuji X-100, or larger and film, to a Mamiya 7. I ended up opting for the Mamiya, yet remain sort of torn.

The decision is a perfect manifestation of a kind of yin-yang I've struggled with forever. Be impulsive, quick, reactive, and technically simple; or be slower, more careful, more contemplative, and more visible. I have always been much more the former than the latter, and not just with photography. But I always want to be the latter. I like those kinds of photographs and have frequently been guilty of trying to make them with my Leica. A few years ago a close friend bestowed his Hasselblad 500C on me and though I've gotten fond of it, on many occasions I still feel cramped by the square format, and even more frustrated by the comparatively deliberate shooting style it requires (staring down into the viewfinder, focusing with its little magnifying glass, which still barely helps when I use the fabulous 50mm Distagon lens my friend also put on permanent loan to me). But however clunky and difficult I find it, I've also noticed that it works. That for the amount of film I put through it, there are a surprising number of decent pictures. It forces me into a completely different place as a photographer. I haven't found a way to make a discreet picture with this thing. If people don't acknowledge me pointing the camera at them, it's because they're choosing to ignore me, not because I'm quick or agile. I'm almost never comfortable with the interactions I have with the strangers I photograph (when I use the camera to make photographs with people in them) - I'm really not a touchy-feely person, and I'm acutely aware when photographing outside my socioeconomic stratum that I'm essentially a voyeur.

So the hope is that the Mamiya will bridge a gap. It feels much faster than the Hassy, and has a beautiful, bright viewfinder. It's quiet. We'll see. The lamest of rationalizations I came up with for going medium-format was that in a year, if I decide it was a mistake, the Mamiya will be worth more than a digital camera that holds its value about as long as a Coke stays fizzy.

Getting Past Katrina

As we close in on the sixth anniversary of Katrina, I noticed something today. Something very small, and maybe insignificant, but it struck me nonetheless. For the past three years I have had an automatically generated set on my Flickr stream called "Totally Random". Each day it randomly chooses a set of 12 images from the entire Flickr stream. Every single day of that entire three-year period there has been at least one image of Katrina and its aftermath. Today for the first time, not one of the 12 images shows a flooded street, a boarded-up building, a flooded car, a collapsed building.

The 250th of a Second Coming

Scanning and scanning in the widening gyre, the photographer cannot see the photograph.

I'm always amazed at how much farther away everything actually was. I'm always amazed that I can remember shooting almost every image on a roll of film that I shot months ago. Maybe the memory's wrong, but I still remember taking the picture. But I was standing so far away. How can that be? In my memory I all but smacked them with the camera as I raised it to my eye.

I like film because I have to wait to see the pictures. I always think they'll be better than they are. Something so disheartening about finding out how bad they are right away. Outside today, it's 104 degrees F. I don't think I'll go out shooting.

Scanning images is so tiresome - but when something works, so satisfying. But when it doesn't, so much effort wasted. Boring boring boring boring. People on cell phones. People walking with cell phones. People walking past giant blank walls. People walking and gesturing. People walking people walking and talking people walking. I really need to get out more often.

Thinking of Roethke

To love objects is to love life. The pure shaft of a single granary on the prairie, The small pool of rain in the plank of a railway siding ...

For each act of my life there seems to be a necessary purgatorial period: even the simpler things, like going to the store. What a bourgeois I am.

Who hesitates is Fortune's also-ran. He never leaves who teeters on the sill. Once I was one: I can be one no more.

By light, light; by love, love; by this, this.

from the notebooks of Theodore Roethke, culled from "Straw for the Fire" by David Wagoner, Poetry, Vol. 105, No. 2 (Nov., 1964)

Inclusive vs Exclusive

For most of my life as a photographer, which I think is probably most of my life, I've parroted the concept that more is better: that the more shots you fire off, the higher the probability that something good will get caught. But in practice, I've taken almost exactly the opposite approach. That is until about 1992, when I put the Leica away, concentrated on raising kids, learning how to manage computer systems and helping keep the household together. After that hiatus I started shooting again, and without realizing it began taking many more pictures than I had in the past. I'm still stunningly non-prolific. If I'm to believe what I hear from other photographers, my average annual output of about 4500 frames over the past six years is a joke, but it's a lot for me and I feel as if I've moved into a new era - that I've still got something , and that all of what I've accomplished isn't in the past.


But... In the last couple of weeks I've received requests for the use of some of my pictures in one-off publications (that almost needless to say pay no money to anybody and most likely lose money for the heroic people who publish them). A bunch of these are from my pre-1990 career, which means I have to figure out where the negatives are and rescan them to sufficient quality for print. What's been shocking is the realization of just how little I really was shooting back then. Even during the years when I felt like I was shooting my ass off, I was barely exposing 3000 frames a year. Many years it looks like I was shooting maybe 1500-2000. Something like 30-40 rolls of film. In the past 6 years I've shot more film than I did in the first 20 years I worked. Yet time and again, it's the work from the earlier period that gets the most attention. On my Flickr site, only 176 out 829 pictures pre-date 2004, yet 13 of the top 20 images in terms of "favorites" are from this group. This begs any number of questions for me, but the chief one is whether I've been going about it all wrong for the past several years.

Five Year Marker

Five years ago at this hour I was sitting in our van on I-80 with my family, moving in fits and starts in a 120 mile long traffic jam that extended from New Orleans to well past Baton Rouge. We had a bunch of stuff in the car with us - bedding for sleeping in the back, since we had no motel reservations, a TV that ran on the car current and that was turned on to whatever station we could pick up. Of course, we had our cat and all of her paraphernalia. We wouldn't reach the outskirts of Baton Rouge until after eight that night. I now live in a place where this is ancient history, but this anniversary haunts me every year. It was the beginning of many changes that I am still uncertain were for the best. My rational self says it's good to be out of New Orleans - the city has always been a hair short of a total basket case. Crime, which was always terrible, has gotten worse. The economy, never great, is hopeless. Southerners in general and Louisianans in particular have a congenital antipathy toward good governance, so not having all of that is a good thing. But I had a pleasant, untaxing and well paid job where I was well-liked and liked the people I worked with. We had a fabulous house, and ironically, after Katrina, we developed much closer relationships with friends.

Now both of us have to scramble for our living. I daily confront the depth of my ignorance of  the changes in my profession - which in some ways is a good thing, but not so great for one's confidence. We have new friends and the neighborhood we live in is glorious. But I miss the continuity, the security, the comfort of not having to worry about having a new career at 60. That road trip that we thought would last three days stretched to 3 months and then nothing was ever the same again.