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.

Chateau Montelena

In that utterly surreal year and a half that followed Hurricane Katrina, I was contacted by the first friend I had made after moving to New Orleans. Georges Cardona, a Columbian immigrant who had moved to the US with his family when he was 15 was a co-worker at the giant oil rig fabricator that employed me as a picture librarian in 1984 and 85. (Years later, his nephew would become an employee of mine at the Historic New Orleans Collection, although I didn't know it when I hired him). He was a talented film maker and photographer and despite looks that weren't awe inspiring, a confident and happy Lothario. He and his wife Sheila were among the few locals in New Orleans that welcomed us into their home in our first years in the city and introduced us to others. He was the only person in the city I dared show my photographs to, and whose reactions I cared about.

In 1989 he and Sheila moved to Singapore and I had only seen him a couple of times since, a period in which he fathered a daughter and was later divorced. He ultimately left the company and started a successful business as a photographer and corporate film maker. He moved to Australia in the 90's and became a vintner, catering to the South East Asian market. Although Sheila had moved back to New Orleans and we had seen her several times, I had not seen Georges in over a decade. In the wake of disaster, he made his reappearance, mysterious as always (he was the kind of person who, while always extraordinarily charming and likable, you could never quite trust, ), and I saw him several times in the course of a 3 month period. Each time, he would arrive from Houston, where he had moved, driving a different expensive car (Porsche, Mercedes, BMW) "loaned" by a "friend". He gave me a book of photographs published by Vogue that he had shot in Asia. He showed me a set of pictures on the web that he had shot of mold patterns on the walls of flooded houses. They were beautiful, abstract, brilliant. I can't find them - I don't know if they're still out there.

On his last visit to our home, in late 2006 or 07, I can't remember which, he brought a bottle of wine that he told us had been given to him by a guy whose wine cellar had flooded. The bottle was covered with muck from the flood and the label was totally unreadable. It was a red, and tasted like Cabernet - the best Cab Iris or I had ever tasted - and we talked of our first meeting, laughed, felt sad about his divorce and parted late in the evening. A few months later, he died of heart failure at the age of 55. We understood when the news came that Georges had been wrapping up loose ends - touching base with all of those he had known over the years. We felt privileged to be important enough to Georges that he would seek us out after more than a decade. I think of all of this tonight after watching Bottle Shock, a pleasant, feel-good movie about the coming-of-age of the California wine industry in which the Chateau Montelena winery plays a major role. It was a bottle of Chateau Montelena Cabernet that Georges brought over that night - we figured it out by comparing the logo on the cork to those for Napa Valley wineries (on the web).

The mold covered bottle - it's label unreadable after 4 weeks in tepid flood waters - was both an ending and a beginning for us. Prior to Katrina, our life had been consumed with work and child-raising and home making. A disaster refines your priorities, both personally and community-wide. In some ways, the post-Katrina years in New Orleans were, ironically, the best. We drew closer to friends and re-initiated old acquaintances. In the crunch, human contact trumped material possession without contest. I miss Georges. I can hardly believe it, but I miss those strange, disorienting days, months, years, following the biggest historical event that I was part of.

Here Today...

A recent job working with a museum to design a digital asset management work flow while, at the same time trying to get my own hopeless, inconsistently stored mess of scans and digital captures under control rubbed my nose in the impending digital disaster awaiting me and every other amateur photographer. Institutions - museums, libraries, archives - are beginning to get digital preservation under control, carefully planing the migration of files from format to format, medium to medium. But most non-professionals haven't given it a moment's thought.

Even for those in the know, "beginning" is the key word and planning for the preservation of digital media is by far the exception. It's not only that it takes a lot of planning and investment: it's that the core concept, that digital obsolescence is far more insidious than the gradual degradation of physical materials, is very hard for us to grasp. Our technology is moving way ahead of our awareness of the profound changes that are happening. Nothing that we shoot with our beautiful digital machines will last more than the span of our own lifetimes without eternal vigilance. Somehow, the fact that this has already happened to audio and video recording hasn't changed our blithe indifference to what moving from a visible image to a digital representation means for our grandchildren's ability to see what their parents looked like as kids. The irony of our ability to shoot insanely huge numbers of images is that an even tinier proportion of those will survive into the future than what we shot on film.

While I'm confident that my friends at the National Gallery or the Art Institute of Chicago will manage their archive for many generations to come, I doubt my own digital work will last any longer than the care and attention that I can personally devote to it. Maybe I'm unusual in this regard, but I haven't actually printed more than a tiny handful of photographs in the past 15 years. In the past 5 years I haven't printed a thing. Well over half of what I've shot is on film, and as scary as it is knowing that my negatives are unique and would be irretrievably lost if we had a fire (or would be gone already if I had kept them in my ground-floor darkroom in New Orleans), it seems to me much easier to guard against fire or grab the binders in advance of an impending flood than to remember that I really have to run integrity checks on my DVD's every once in a while and remember to convert all of those early Raw files to dng. I just can't seem to ever feel comfortable with the incorporeal nature of a computer file as the sole representation of an image I really like and am vain enough to think will be liked by others even after I'm gone.

Most families treasure their photographs above all else. Time and again, it's the piles of pictures and the photo albums (and video tapes) that people grab when fleeing a disaster, not the silver or the china. But what's a photo album now? It's not the default archive that physical albums (and for most of us, shoeboxes filled with drugstore photo envelopes) used to be. The original albums were primarily designed to share images, but ultimately took on that archival function. But now we've specialized - we've teased out the sharing function from the photo album and assigned it to Facebook or Flickr, while not noticing that the archival function isn't there. We now trust the most sentimental talismans of our lives to corporations with the life spans of fruit flies. Or optical media that will disintegrate within a decade or become unreadable. I'm sure people still make plenty of prints, but I'll bet anything that the absolute number of photographic prints made will soon begin to diminish, despite the logarithmic increase in the number of pictures actually taken.

Gary has left the building

Is this new? Flickr (my constant obsession) is peppered with tribute groups of various sorts, among them some devoted to the work of famous photographers. These are hard to pin down using Flickr's group search facilities, so those that I've encountered are what I've stumbled into while riding my own particular hobby horses. You can search for individual names and find the groups that mention a specific photographer in their descriptions, but that doesn't necessarily make them "tribute" groups. Still... a little concerted effort by searching on the names of various famous photographers (famous to ME anyway, so maybe we're actually talking about photographers who were famous about a decade ago) pulled up these results, presented in order of apparent popularity with the number of groups in which they are cited:

Cartier Bresson - 104
Ansel Adams - 89
Robert Frank - 80
William Eggleston - 44
Gary Winogrand - 32
Walker Evans - 29
Diane Arbus - 28
Martin Parr - 19
Elliot Erwitt - 10
Lee Friedlander - 8
Sally Mann - 5
Edward Burtynski - 3

In all of these cases the majority of the groups appear to be devoted to some style of which one of these photographers, typically along with a number of others, is an exemplar. But for all the photographers named above there are groups specifically devoted to pictures that are "influenced" by them. While I have my share of pictures in a number of these groups, it's more a matter of seeing something in my work that fits the promoted style. (In other words, I'm spamming them in a pathetic attempt to get people to look at my pictures.) But clearly there are people who walk around trying to take Winogrand or Friedlander or Eggleston pictures, and I'm really both intrigued and put-off by it. From a description for a Sally Mann group:

A tribute to one of the greats who defined not only a style of photography but a mood. Her haunting portraits of children and young people do not feel like photographs, but it is as if you are seeing what is in a child's heart and mind. As if they are looking to you and showing you their angst, love, maturity, and spirit.

and then the kicker:

Color accepted. Black and white preferred. (as, evidently, children prefer to emote in black and white).

In fairness, some of these groups take an interesting pedagogical/critical approach, attempting to deconstruct the style of their namesake in order to make better sense of it. (Didn't I do this kind of thing with my friends in bars back in the 70's? I honestly can't remember whether I tried to emulate Winogrand or just got depressed at the futility of trying.) And at their best, the members of these groups produce fascinating anecdotes, rarely seen images, and mini-essays that can be surprisingly lucid and informative. Of course, at other times they're just parochial (see above vis. color vs. B&W).

In the end, this seems related to a broader cultural phenomenon: the leveling of technological barriers to the appreciation of historical works of art that are, themselves dependent on technology. It's easy to appreciate musical recordings from about 1955 on. Not so easy for music recorded earlier than that. It's easy for younger generations to appreciate films made after the use of color became routine. It's not just that technology like the web makes things more accessible as in Easier to Find, but that at some point, for many media, a threshold was passed where it became unnecessary to make an effort to see or hear past an obtrusive technological barrier -- the rendering became "good enough" to appreciate the work on its own merits and within the context of the culture that produced it, however long ago.

Or did it? Now that everything in "film" is CGI, and anybody with a PC or Mac can multi-track any number of instruments, which themselves can be synthesized pretty convincingly, will REAL film start seeming as alien and imperfect as work produced on the other side of the technical threshold?

Sheesh. What the HELL am I talking about?

Discontented Winter

After going for more than 20 years without really experiencing a full winter season (and my Wisconsin based siblings would argue that Maryland doesn't really qualify as a winter season state)I have a hard time getting used to the days without light and the blustering winds that make walking the street with a camera less enticing than it is even in the sultriest days of summer.

As if I needed reminders, my lack of discipline during the past three months (both in my pursuit of photography and in the occupation that pays at least a few of the bills around here)has made it clear to me in so many ways that I am not a photographer. Five years ago, when I picked up my camera again, it was enough to produce numbers: if I could shoot one roll of film a week, or two, or perhaps three, I would at least have something to choose from. Now roughly 20,000 exposures later (and although that number is laughably tiny for most "serious" photographers, it's considerably higher than my pre-parenthood-hiatus average) I know that I need to concentrate much more on content and technique and I doubt I have the patience, focus and time to do it. So far it has been enough to live with a kind of diaristic narrative approach. But even in this respect, what I do is not even that. For the most part I continue to ape the work of photographers I admire and feel disheartened by the gulf between my work and theirs.

Taking it Easy

There are certain pictures you take that you know will be readily accepted, even applauded. They fall into existing genres or implement tropes that are recognized and appreciated by a large group of people. They vary in sophistication from the banal to the esoteric; from the blandest sunset to a deft channeling of Gary Winogrand. I see these all the time and shoot them and show them with concurrent feelings of guilt and frustration. Guilt, because this was low-hanging fruit that I recognized and knew would appeal to someone who would give me an attaboy. And frustration because I would rather hear good stuff about interesting failures. The best that you can say about the easy shots is that you executed well. As in the above, which I knew would be liked because it's a pretty good silhouetted guy with an umbrella walking picture. I don't know how many of these there are out there, but I feel as if I've seen this image a whole lot of times. I do think I did it well, but it's still only another dog on the pile. I'm not good enough to wander off the trail and come back with fresh meat that often, so when I try it would be nice to find out if it's tasty. This one:

is much more of a mess. I know there's something wrong with it, but even as a failure, it seems far more interesting to me than umbrella man. But posted on Flickr, where some of my contacts are really sharp, it still didn't get a second look. Is it me or is it Clairol?