Quotes

gear and technology

“An authentic selfie”

Quote

However, warns Laurence Allard, a French professor and mobile technology specialist, the very name of the product itself might be self-limiting.

“It’s contradictory,” she says. “The selfie isn’t just a portrait. It has its own codes and rules, and the main one is that a selfie has to have been taken by hand. An authentic selfie should show it was taken with your arm extended—that’s a sort of signature.” And, she explains, the use of a selfie stick removes that particular element from the frame.
— How the Selfie Stick is Killing the Selfie – LightBox

Today in “Are we sure Time hasn’t been replaced with The Onion” news, apparently now we are expected to ponder whether introducing a new layer of technological mediation between the photographer and their camera (i.e., ATTACHING IT TO A GODDAMN STICK) may jeopardize the authenticity of selfies.

This is ridiculous. I understand wanting to push back against the jerks who refuse to shut up about how selfies are ruining photography. But if there is one area where photography does not have to worry about receiving academic validation and legitimation of its “authenticity,” one area where the photograph can proceed free of any anxiety over its seriousness and its intellectual genealogy, surely it’s selfies. COME ON.

Or maybe there is not and never will be space in photography which can be free from demands for legitimation, because if we stop proving photography is an art in every moment we trip a shutter, we’ll all have to give up our Art Cards and admit we just like playing with cameras.

Lewis Hine. Scanned by Roger Bruce.
gear and technology, quotations

Sledgehammer

Quote
Lewis Hine. Scanned by Roger Bruce.
Lewis Hine. Scanned by Roger Bruce.
Lewis Hine. Digital contact print.
Lewis Hine. Digital contact print.

Photoshop need not be a sledgehammer; to give but one of thousands of examples: its computational power may be used to delicately nudge pixels of a certain value so that they cause their neighboring picture elements to be more apparent. If you are a photographer who practiced in decades past, you likely remember the procedure for rendering subtle qualities of tonality and texture: it involved floating a sheet of photosensitive paper in a tray of warm chemical fluid, and from time to time, poking it with a stick. We had control, but not that much control.

—Roger Bruce

This post, and Bruce’s previous post, are an interesting way of looking at Photoshop as offering more subtlety than previous technology. Too much web discourse, still, is spent railing against tools themselves rather than the way they’re used. This is especially prevalent in photojournalismland where what the mere use of Photoshop currently outweighs the ethics of the situation.

So it’s nice to see posts like this focusing on subtlety judicious use of the tools available to us. Photoshop, BAD is not a useful message. How not to be heavy-handed is.

Duane Michals. Empty New York. c1964.
photographers, quotations

Duane Michals

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Duane Michals. Empty New York. c1964.
Duane Michals. Empty New York. c1964.

When I made those pictures, I knew nothing about photography. I found a wonderful book by Eugène Atget. He had photographed empty rooms and empty streets in Paris and I was stunned. So I would get out onto the streets early in the morning and take pictures. I called it my “five-finger exercise.”

All these rooms began to look like stage sets. I saw them as pure theatre. My classic example is the barbershop photo: the jacket hanging, the clock over the chair. I thought, well, this is a mise en scène. The man comes in, he puts on his barber costume, and he does his barber act. I began to see the empty streets or empty shops as theatrical backdrops. “Empty New York” is the beginning of me seeing everything as total theatre.

—Duane Michals

Duane Michals. Rene Magritte.
Duane Michals. Rene Magritte.

I have a new concept. I call it the “prose portrait.” A prose portrait doesn’t necessarily show you what someone looks like; it’s not a line-for-line reproduction of a face. A prose portrait tells you what the nature of the person is about. When I photographed Magritte, the portrait was made in the nature of Magritte. When I photographed Warhol, the portrait was in the character, the mystery—if there is one—of Warhol. You can’t capture someone, per se. How could you? The subject probably doesn’t even know who he (or she) is. So, for me, a prose portrait is about a person, rather than of a person.

—Duane Michals

Really like this interview. Really really like these two points about photos as theatrical backdrops and portraiture about the nature of the person.

The note about photos as theatrical backdrops in particular gives me some additional language to explain how ruin porn (among other photography genres) often fails.

And this is just flat-out good advice for any novice photographer too. If you’re photographing a place, give us a sense of how it’ll be populated, change., etc. If you’re photographing a person, make it about the person, not of the person.

Kip Praslowicz
quotations, thinking about photographs

Dismissal via Snapshot

Quote
Kip Praslowicz. Chester Park. Duluth, MN. November
Kip Praslowicz. Chester Park. Duluth, MN. November

Start with the snapshot. Start with the connection. Figure out why grandma cares about the subject and make that the keystone in a photograph. Then pile on the better gear, experience and technical tricks to make it a better damn photograph than grandma can take.

(via Dismissal Via Snapshot | Kip Praslowicz)

Yes! Yes! Yes!

The irony of dismissal via snapshot is that “snapshots” are almost always the most-posed and edited photos in the album. Seriously. Think about all the photos your parents, relatives, friends’ parents, etc. took of you. “Everybody get together. Smile. Stop screwing around! You too! Okay let me back up and get everyone in. On three. Okay, I think someone blinked, let me take another just to be safe. etc. etc.”

Aspiring to take meaningful and good family photos is all I truly care about in my photography. That this is somehow an inferior practice? Please. Those are the only photos most of us really care about.