I Can See it For You Wholesale

There was a short but provactive post recently on Street Reverb:

“Candid street photography and military aerial reconnaissance may seem to have little in common, but they’re both examples of how the camera has made us more distant from each other and from the world around us, according to Sandra Phillips of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, who is the exhibition’s curator.”

If you’re in London between now and October 3rd be sure to check out Tate Modern’s Exposed – Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera. I’m not sure many street photographers would agree with the quote above. I know many people that would maintain that working on the street brings them closer to the world around them.

via New Scientist: How the camera has made us all voyeurs | Street Reverb Magazine.

I think it would be equally incorrect to say either that photographing on the street brings one closer to the world or distances one from the world.

What the introduction of a camera into any situation does do is to place something between the photographer and the subject. The question is, what is the nature of that something. Is it a wall or a window or a door, or something else entirely?

In some of my work, I have made reference to a line from Simone Weil — “every separation is a connection.” That part of Weil’s theology is to do with how she reconciles her spirituality with the manifest absence of god from the realm of human affairs, and more personally, it is to do with how she understands the physical and psychological suffering she experienced in life. Absence or distance is not simply a negation of presence or immediacy; it establishes a relationship between the separated parties, and that relationship must be considered as such.

While I don’t share Weil’s religious outlook, I think this particular observation is richly applicable to many other contexts, and particularly to relationships between human beings. If we sit down at a table, does the table separate us or bring us together? It has the power to do either, or both simultaneously. A camera has the same power.

Unless the subject flees, the camera does not introduce distance between myself and the subject. What it does is to record the distance that already existed and to infuse that distance with meaning. That meaning is not predefined merely by the fact that it comes by way of the camera; its content depends on the intent with which I wield the camera and also on the way in which the subject and, later, viewers perceive that intent. It may make friends and allies, or it may make enemies and victims, and in many cases it may be a non-trivial task to ascertain which is the case.

So, I finally leveled up with this IR flash mess I’ve been working on. I’ve got actual, honest to goodness results.

Warning: This is going to be very nerdy and tech-y. If IR photography isn’t your thing, just look at the pictures and move on, unless you want a serious soporific. I’ll put up a less geeky post on IR street photography later.

I’m not going to do a whole tutorial write-up thing on how to go about this, because there are already a couple of good ones here and here.

The first one does a great job of explaining how to go about putting a gel on your flash with a bit of space to prevent, you know, melting. However, the filter mentioned there has a non-optimal cutoff for IR film currently in production. The second one (which will be of particular interest to XA shooters) provides a film/filter pairing which is currently available and works great: Ilford SFX gel filters and Rollei IR400 film.

I tried this combination out with my Nikkormat FT-2, 2.8cm f/3.5 Nikkor-H (a great lens for IR work), and a Nikon SB-24.

Shooting wide open with the flash at full power produces usable exposures for subjects in the 8-15′ range, give or take, with some definite (but acceptable) overexposure for subjects close up.

This is reasonably consistent with the flash’s calculations for ISO 12 (which is what I normally rate IR400 at when shooting with an R72 filter), which suggests I may be able to engage auto mode — or, if subjects aren’t too distant, I may even be able to shoot safely at f/5.6, which would be lovely from a DOF standpoint.

With the Nikkormat and 28mm f/3.5, I’m shooting blind, because I’m working with an opaque infrared filter over the lens. (Note: for night photography, this can be omitted. However, since current IR films are sensitive to visible light, using them for flash work without a filter on the lens during the day is likely to be somewhat counterproductive.) However, with a 28mm lens, even wide open, I have enough DOF to scale focus reasonably well, and guessing the composition isn’t too hard.

BTW, if you’re curious about how scale focus works, this may be helpful:

Anyway, after all that technical mumbo-jumbo, what matters is, it works!

I’m even reasonably pleased with that photograph as such — successful test aside.

The one downside to this setup is that it tends to let through a little more visible light than I’d like — the SFX gels are a little loose in that regard. Not so much that I’m blinding people, but it bugs me just a little.

So, I’m also still fiddling around with alternative options. One not-really-successful setup is this:

It’s a thick eBay 89b filter intended for Cokin-type filter holders which I’ve taped to the front of a wonderfully cumbersome and powerful Sunpak 622. This setup works quite well for digital IR flash with my unmod’d D40, and emits very little visible light, but is completely useless with Rollei IR400. However, initial tests on a less powerful flash provided some exposure with Eke IR820. (Which suggests that the eBay filter isn’t a true 89b equivalent.)

I was hopeful that the Sunpak (which I got specifically for this project) would enable me to shoot with this filter/film combination through sheer power. And it does, sort of, but unfortunately the working distance is still too short to be really useful in the majority of situations.

That was shot at f/1.7, and you can see that even just at about 8′ feet or so, it’s already significantly underexposed. So, while this is not a failure, as such, it’s obviously of very limited practical usefulness unless I’m willing to get truly in-your-face. I’ll continue experimenting with different filtration options and see what I can get on this front.

Minor epiphany of the day:

One of the more interesting ideas I came across in Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and 70s was the shift from the sort of photography which produced public documents — in the standard photojournalistic/street photography sense — to a sort of photography which was concerned with producing personal documents.

Straight documentary photography is about creating photographs of things in the world (people, places, moments, situations) to act as records of those things. Typically the motivation of this style of photography is based around the public interest — advocacy, journalism, etc.

The personal documentary style is about creating photographs of things in the world to act as records not of those things but of the photographer himself or herself — people and places function as records of feelings or ideas or experiences. This is basically an extension of Stieglitz’s notion of the photograph as “equivalent,” except that in this case, it is usually other people rather than clouds that are the proxy for the photographer’s inner landscape.

I don’t really feel a strong connection to either of these approaches to street photography. On the one hand, my interest in photography is fundamentally quite selfish. I’m not taking pictures of things to fuel a social revolution or record the truth of some moment in history.

But, on the other hand, I’m not really interested in using photography as a tool for introspection. I don’t entirely understand people who view the camera principally as a device to allow them to crawl deeper into their own brains. The greatest value of the camera, as far as I am concerned, is that it is capable of quite the opposite function — it allows me to pull myself partway out of my head and out into — or at least toward — the world…

I’m not entirely sure where that places me relative to either straight documentary or personal documentary photography…maybe it’s sort of the inverse of the personal document — I am interested in photographs of things which act not as records or representations of parts of myself, but as antidotes or…connections. Would the result be something like a wax impression of myself, or even a photonegative?