Here’s the latest version — still not providing that aforementioned satisfaction, but hopefully a step in the right direction:

The subject is a tree that is growing around a metal sign pole. It fascinates me greatly, and I’m collecting similar subjects — trees growing over or around pieces of human infrastructure, and other such things — for a project that I refer to as “engulf.”

By the way, an anecdote from the “things people ask me while I’m using a view camera” file: While I was working on this photograph, a guy passed by with his wife or girlfriend and their kid in a stroller. The guy was perplexed — to the point of offense — by my activity. He asked what I was doing, and I explained that I was photographing the tree.

He demanded to know why I would want to photograph a tree, using all the gear and effort I was using. I was debating between trying to explain the whole project or telling the guy to fuck off, when he noticed the pole for the first time. It was awesome to see, because a cartoon light bulb practically went off over his head — and then he went on to tell me a story about how, at his job, they’d had to cut down a tree, and found one an old support line for a telephone pole that the tree had grown around and which had been left inside it.

I took this, overall, as a pretty positive sign regarding the project. While I do not underestimate the importance of being able to explain, in words, what one is trying to do with a photograph, it is good when a subject is also able to speak for itself, and elicit intense visual memories from a viewer. (Of course, the fact that the real subject is able to do so does not necessarily mean that my photographs of it will necessarily succeed so well.)

The reason I’m using 4×5 for this is that it allows me to work with perspective. This subject (like many others in the series of which this is the representative) is near ground level and fairly small in scope; as a result, working on them with any of my medium or small-format cameras creates problems in terms of perspective. In fact, this series was the primary reason I bought a 4×5 in the first place — although that is not to say that it will necessarily turn out to be the reason I choose to continue working in 4×5, if I in fact do so.

In this round of attempts, I will (at least some of the time) be bringing artificial lighting to the task. This is contrary to my basic instinct and orientation as a photographer, which is to always keep the manipulations behind the camera, not in front of it. However, I think it is a necessity, here; many of the subjects are persistently in extremely flat light, and the flatness of that light obscures significant aspects of the subjects.

To that end, I’ve somewhat beefed up my “strobist” kit, and am currently trying to find a way to integrate it all with my 4×5 kit while maintaining the level of portability I generally insist on — what I refer to as “commutable,” meaning I can take it with me to work on a daily basis if need be, so that I can use it during my lunch break or on my way home.

I did a quick check yesterday to see how things work; the polaroid above is one of the results — although not necessarily representative of the results I’ll get with the HP5 I shot at the same time, since both depth of field and contrast should less dramatic/gloomy on the film.

Still, I expect I will have to return to this scene I try different approaches. (Cross lighting and working closer in with a shorter focal length being next on the checklist.)

If setup photos are something you care to say, I did snap a few with the GRD:

The test run took quite a long time — maybe a couple of hours in total. (Of course, once the kinks are worked out, I should be able to cut that down substantially.) Most of that time I was kneeling, squatting, or sitting on the ground, as a result of which today the muscles on the front of my thighs are exceedingly unhappy.

In terms of functionality, the gear worked well enough. I’ll need to figure out something in lieu of sandbags for the stands, if I’m going to be using umbrellas in the breeze. Or I could just carry sandbags, but that sounds too masochistic.

My main concern is about power. Even working fairly close, using these umbrellas, I was limited to f/16-f/22 when shooting at ISO 400-800. That may turn out to be enough (we’ll see when I’ve got the HP5 developed), or it may not.

If I need to work at f/32 or f/45, I’m going to need to make a change — maybe opaque umbrellas would be sufficient, but I may need to either use the flashes without them (in which case the light may be problematically hard) or I may need to replace my flash units with something more powerful, which would be a huge PITA, not so much because of the cost and having to go shopping again, as because of size constraints. Going more powerful is likely to mean a physically larger unit, like my big Sunpak, or more units — either of which will seriously compromise my efforts at maintaining a portable kit. If I wind up having to put all this crap in a rolling case, I’m going to be pissed at myself, since a big part of going with a field camera in the first place instead of a more economical, functional monorail camera, was to permit me to carry a full kit on my back.

Still, despite the hiccups and caveats, my thigh muscles, and the slightly emo polaroid that I came away with, I’m still pretty happy with the result. I’m happy with the perspective, and happy with the improved texture and three-dimensionality provided by the lighting. It’s certainly a start.

I’m gearing up to work on a large format project that will require some close-up work. I’ve been out of practice for a while on the Shen Hao, and I’ve never used it all that intensively for close work, so I did a quick test run in the kitchen with a couple sheets of Fuji instant film.

Here’s the scene at normal magnification:

Here’s the scene at 1:1 magnification:

Here’s the same 1:1 photo next to the subject (yay instant):

For those who are used to working with 35mm cameras or crop sensor digital bodies, these results will not feel like 1:1 photographs. They would be looking for something more like this 1:1 photograph of tea leaves made on 35mm film:

In reality, both examples are at 1:1 magnification; the difference is in the format size. The 4×5 positive is the same size as the negative area (of course), but people do not generally view a 35mm or crop sensor 1:1 image at the size of the negative/sensor area, unless they work with contact sheets or slide film.

Doing close-up work on 4×5 is something of a PITA. As you can see, even working at life size, the results don’t “feel” all that close, and to get to life size, you have to have lens extension that is twice the focal length of your lens. My camera is a field camera with 300mm or so of maximum extension, so I can’t achieve 1:1 with my 210mm Schneider, and doing so with my 150mm Nikkor presents problems if I need to apply any movements. My 135mm Nikkor is fine, but I still have to extend the bed almost all the way out, which makes the whole setup less rigid.

Luckily, the project I’m actually gearing up for is unlikely to actually require 1:1 work, or else I’d probably have to start shopping for either extension boards or a new (monorail) camera. : )

Spielberg returned to Shanghai for Empire of the Sun, an eerie sensation for me — even more so were the scenes shot near Shepperton, using extras recruited from among my neighbors, many of whom have part-time jobs at the studios. I can almost believe that I came to Shepperton 30 years ago knowing unconsciously that one day I would write a novel about my wartime experiences in Shanghai, and that it might well be filmed in these studios. Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences. (The Atrocity Exhibition, p. 11)

The mind is in large part bibliographic. (Biography recapitulates bibliography?)

It is not precisely that we are what we read, but there is a nontrivial relationship between what we read (or, more specifically, what we will subsequently be ready to admit having read) and our basic interests, dispositions, methodologies, etc. So, there is a certain correspondence between the sources of our personal bibliographies and the sources of ourselves. Assigned reading is part of one’s intellectual origin story.

I am sometimes surprised or disconcerted when I am recalled to the earlier parts of my own bibliography — not because I read horrible trash (although of course I did) but because sometimes the foreshadowing seems obnoxiously heavy-handed.

One of the more extreme examples is Nancy Frankenberry’s Religion and Radical Empiricism, a book which brings together James and Nagarjuna, among others, not to mention Quine’s “Two Dogmas.” I read it in high school after buying it on a whim because I happened to see it on a local bookstore’s shelf at a time when I was thinking a lot about the word, “empiricism.” (The reason I was thinking about “empiricism” is that I had been embarrassed not long before because I had not known the word’s definition.)

I flipped through it, was briefly turned onto William James as a result, and then subsequently forgot all about it. In subsequent years, I became deeply interested in pragmatism — as an extension of problems in philosophy of education — and in some of the more skeptical variants of Buddhism — as an extension of internal consistency problems in my new-age upbringing. Later, when I once again flipped through a copy of Frankenberry’s book, I felt…horribly presaged, I suppose.

It is impossible, of course, to say what precisely the chain of causality here is. Some of the underlying concerns and approaches are fairly fundamental; it may have been inevitable, given interests and concerns that go back far deeper than my high school years, that I should be drawn later to thinkers like James and Nagarjuna, or the glee with which I took to, especially, Nagarjuna and Quine, may have been a direct result of the subconscious memory of some of those connections I’d seen in Frankenberry’s book.

More likely the truth is somewhere in between, but in any case, I find it acutely unnerving to feel that such interests–which are closely tied to very fundamental aspects of my intellectual process and disposition are in some way fated.

I’m having a similar feeling now as I read through Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition. This is another book that I read when I was of high school age. In this case, it was loaned to me by the only person I had met (up to that point) who was not only better-informed than me about the things I was interested in, but manifestly (and significantly) smarter than me in ways I valued. I read it and enjoyed it, up to a point, but I was (and largely am) too literal-minded to fully appreciate that kind of work. Certainly I did not anticipate that, after setting it largely aside, I would later find it directly useful in approaching an intellectual problem (ruin porn, to be specific) in photography.

In fact, there’s quite a lot of juicy photographic thinking in The Atrocity Exhibition. I just never made the connection before, because when I first read it, I had zero interest whatsoever in photography. This is worrisome, because my photographic origin story is so absurd (it involves my previous hobby of knitting, and my long-undiagnosed poor eyesight, among other factors), that I had pretty much taken for granted that it was entirely discontinuous with my previous intellectual history.

That being said, Ballard’s photographic interests are largely confined to areas of photography that — well, it’s not that I don’t approve of them, or don’t like them, so much that I think of them as someone else’s problem or task. I think no causative element can be found here, just a reminder that…while the world appears to become a more complicated and information-rich place as we mature, it is actually just that we (all too slowly) acquire the ability to perceive and appreciate the complexity that was always there, even in our own experiences, even in those experiences to which we may have given our full attention.

It’s a very rough set, and it contains some very rough work. For almost every image in this set, there is a “better” image which I passed over, and I think most viewers would say that it does not compare favorably to my previous yearly set. All the same, I cannot help feeling satisfied and invigorated as I look at it — although I must admit that I also feel a not-inconsiderable degree of anxiety.

I think the best way to explain these images is by reference to two geometric color metaphors, both of which I’ve mentioned before: black triangles, and Minor White’s “thin red line of uniqueness to the man.”

In case you don’t want to read the original post, “black triangles” refers to achievements which mark meaningful, important technical progress but are not in themselves apparently impressive:

Afterwards, we came to refer to certain types of accomplishments as “black triangles.” These are important accomplishments that take a lot of effort to achieve, but upon completion you don’t have much to show for it – only that more work can now proceed. It takes someone who really knows the guts of what you are doing to appreciate a black triangle

Photography in general is full of black triangles, but more at certain times than others. In my experience, at least, photography tends to go in cycles by which one moves from work in which one is technically fluent to work in which one is not fluent. (I know this is not true for everyone; many photographers have only one way of working, perfect it early on, and spend the remainder of their career putting it to use; that is not me, at least not so far.)

2010 was a year in which I spent most of my photographic time working on black triangles in one sense or another. Much of my output for the year and certainly the vast majority of my work was done with new or difficult techniques, or with new categories of equipment, or both. My 2010 was a year of infrared (about which I have written several times before), of the view camera, and of the Ricoh GRD II.

The last two make for an interesting pair — my two camera purchases of the year, obviously from opposite ends of the camera spectrum, and both requiring major adjustments to my working style.

With the view camera, I had to learn a disconcerting amount of both theoretical and practical stuff from which my rigid cameras have been insulating me all these years. Hell, I had to buy a measuring tape and a wristwatch, and I had to learn math. Math! And I made an enormous array of expensive mistakes just to get to the level of basic familiarity. It still takes me twenty or thirty minutes at best to set up the camera and make an exposure, even of a simple scene.

I still do not know whether, in the long run, view camera photography will prove to be for me. I love it and I hate it, and I do not yet know whether the enhanced powers a view camera offers are powers that are actually vital to the kinds of photography that matter to me. But if I had to make a prediction, it would be that for some kinds of photography, I will find it difficult in the future to take other tools seriously. I mean, why do people wank so hard over 85mm portrait lenses for their SLRs when they could be making portraits with a 4×5 or 8×10 camera?

With the GRD, I was hoping to find a “point and shoot” camera in the older sense of the phrase (pre-set focus, no need to fuss constantly with exposure settings, framing doesn’t matter, camera doesn’t try to do stuff for you that you need to be careful of). In that, I was frustrated. While the GRDII is an excellent street photographer’s camera, it is not a camera which lends itself to the kind of shooting I am used to with, say, my Olympus XA — nor the kind of use to which I would put something like a Rollei 35mm camera, which is really want I wanted a digital equivalent of.

That does not mean that I have been disappointed in the purchase; it is just that I have been surprised at my reasons for being satisfied with it. I have found the sort of photographs I make with the GRD are, often as not, very similar to the sort of photographs I might make, or want to make, with a view camera.

The reason for this is surprisingly straightforward: perspective. My other small-format cameras (Nikkormat, XA, Bessa) are all rigid, eye-level cameras. As such, they (mostly) lock me into the range of perspectives which are available to my eye, typically those I can access while standing or kneeling. The view camera, because it is not rigid, and the Bessa, because it can be held at many heights and angles while still allowing composition via the live view display, allow for vastly more freedom in perspective. A scene that I would photograph with the view camera using rise can also be photographed — at greatly less resolution, admittedly — by simply holding the GRD above my head. The quality of the resulting images is not nearly so good as the quality of a 4×5 negative, but the possibilities for approaching many scenes are not so dissimilar. This has proven surprisingly rewarding for me, at least as a way of training my eye, and it has produced a handful of photographs I am cautiously pleased with.

So, those are my black triangles, or at least the larger ones. The “thin red line” is harder to explain without sounding like a complete douchebag, so I think I’ll just have to embrace the inherent pretentiousness and beg your forgiveness.

The “thin red line” refers to the following Minor White quotation:

People often get tangled in the categories, whether the photo looks like abstractions, Picasso, Rubens, documentary, etc. This is hardly surprising, I have done it a million times. But as a photographer I pass up no image because it happens to resemble another man’s work. I am slowly learning to recognize those images that are in the thin red line of uniqueness to the man. (In Bunnell, The Eye That Shapes, p. 34)

I take this line to refer to that which is the photographer’s characteristic interest or concern or obsession; that which enables them to say, “this is something I need to do.” White said that for him, the thin red line was concerned with metamorphosis.

I am not sure I have a handle on what mine is…in the past, I have said it is to do with phenomenology, which is not untrue, but I think is also not the best way to phrase it. It might be better to say it is to do with attention[1]. “Phenomenology” tends (rightly or wrongly) to connote an inward gaze and perhaps solipsism, and certainly a kind of specialization. But attention is what we all owe and (sometimes) pay to the person-scale events unfolding around day by day. And while I am an inveterate solipsist, my photography — I should say, my successful photography — does not follow that track very closely.

The twelve photos in my yearly set can hardly be said to define a line of any kind, let alone one unique to me. I would be shocked if someone looked at them and saw in them a thin red line related to attention, or to anything else. But in comparison to the year before, I think they come closer, and certainly there are fewer photographs in the 2010 set which feel to me like work striving for some other line than my own. The 2010 set also reflects a higher proportion of photographs I felt I had to make, and a lower proportion of photographs I felt I ought to be able to show.

So, if that is what 2010 looks like that to me, what does 2011 look like? Fucked if I know. But I’ll be interested to see.

Yearly: 2010

[1] cf. Simone Weil: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.” Gravity and Grace, p. 116

Last week, I took part in a group studio shoot. You may have noticed me bitching about it on twitter, if you follow me there.

It’s an interesting experience. As you may know, I am not fond of studio photography. Not that it’s not a legitimate way to do photography, of course — but it breaks a lot of what makes photography important to me, particularly the stuff having to do with the unexpected. The basic ethos of studio photography is control — controlling the light, controlling the appearance of the subject, controlling the photographic outcome.

Because of this, I generally don’t enjoy doing studio work — and while I’m not always incompetent at it, it would be fair to say that the results are generally uninspired.

None of that pertained last Saturday, because the lighting and backdrop were all pre-set by the instructor. And while I could (and occasionally did) give suggestions to the model, I didn’t try to compete with the 15-20 other photographers for her attention. So, I was able to approach the situation more or less as I would street photography — street photography happening in a very confined space with a whole lot of competition, that is.

And it was competition. Not that the photos we produce are going to be compared, and not that anyone is getting paid — just competition for space on which to stand. Even with a substantial backdrop to work with, a cluster of lights, all with modifiers, does not provide a wide range of angles from which it is practical to work — in our case, it was perhaps a 10′ x 4′ area, into which most of the time ten or twelve photographers at least would try to cram themselves.

I worked with an RB67 loaded with TX and Delta 3200 with a 180mm f/4.5 and a D40 with a 105mm f/2.5. I spent a certain amount of time elbowing for space (sometimes with and sometimes without a tripod) and verbally abusing my fellow photographers when they inevitably wandered into my field of view. However, I generally had the best results when I abandoned the carefully lit backdrop and instead framed the subject against the black or gray gobos, or curtains on the other side of the room, or whatever else offered.

I’m not sure whether those compositions were more to my liking because they gave me more breathing room, or because they put me outside the corridor of attention between the subject and the other photographers, or simply because I like blank, untextured backgrounds. For whatever reason, they seemed to work.

(I also found that I almost always preferred the compositions which chopped off hands, arms, elbows, legs, etc. to those which included them. Something about surrounding the model’s body with empty space (whether blank gobo or lit backdrop) simply seemed paradoxically to kill a part of the vitality of the image, in almost every case.)

As for the subject, Kelsey, she was great — as a dancer, she had both excellent physical control and excellent performance instincts. Plus, she was extremely patient with the gaggle of photographers, although whether this is just her personality or something she picked up working extensively with reptiles, I’ve no idea.

Between the forty frames of 6×7 and the perhaps 60 NEFs, I came away with a few photographs that are presentable, and a couple that I genuinely like.

That being said, I still don’t feel a very strong connection to any of them. When I look at them, I am reminded of Minor White’s “thin red line of uniqueness to the man” — mine, if it is anything, must be phenomenological, the photograph as a reflection on experience. And the experience behind these photographs is a sort of microwave dinner version of studio photography — not unenjoyable, and I certainly cannot say that I would rather have done it from scratch, but ultimately not fully satisfying.

I wish in retrospect that I had photographed the other photographers more — they made a rather disconcerting visual, all huddled together, blazing away with DSLRs and 35mm cameras, and most making what I can only describe as “photographer face” — an unflattering, squinting, slack-jawed grimace which, if it occurs in the field as well as in the studio, goes a long way toward explaining why people react with such revulsion to street photographers.

Seriously, that facial expression is perhaps the single greatest argument for working with waist-level finders or the groundglass, as opposed to rangefinders or prism SLRs.

On the technical side, it was interesting to work with D40 NEFs again. They’re certainly much more pleasant than GRDII DNGs, and I have a very good feel for them from quite a lot of past experience. However, there is something deeply frustrating about working with RAW files when I know I have film to develop and scan, so I pretty much rushed through the D40′s output so I could get to the Delta and Tri-X.

I shot the Delta at 3200, because the lights were arranged around the assumption that everyone would be shooting 35mm with ISO 400. I guessed (correctly) Delta 3200 in 6×7 would provide a good tradeoff between grain and DOF, at the expensive of some shadow detail that I probably wouldn’t miss anyway. The Delta results are excellent (or, rather, any errors are mine), and those negatives are surprisingly easy to print.

I also — just for fun — shot a couple rolls of TX at box speed, meaning I was working wide open on the 180mm f/4.5. I made quite a lot of focusing errors on those rolls, and I had a few motion blur problems as well, either from my handholding technique or subject motion or both. The film held up reasonably well, despite the characteristic lack of contrast, and it wasn’t hard to get good scans of those frames where I had everything straight in-camera. I haven’t tried printing them yet; if I’m lucky, I’ll just need to go up a contrast grade or so, and won’t have to fiddle too much.

I also shot a few images with the GRD, primarily reference shots for the lighting, or photos of the room, like the one at the top of this post. Those photos show something I already knew, which is that the GRD is quite lame at high ISOs. (“High” in the old-school sense, i.e., 400 and up.)

I’ve tried quite a few times since then to write a useful post about the subject, with little success; each draft tends to spiral out of control, until I feel like I’ve written myself into the middle of a book-length disquisition on the nature of photography. That’s an easy trap to fall into with Szarkowski, because he’s such a moving target; his writing is so rich with information, allusion, interpretation, and provocation that it is hard to keep attention focused on any one argument or claim.

So, I’m going to give up on trying to write one coherent post on the book tackling everything that really interests me (which would still have only touched on a fraction of everything contained in the brief essay in Mirrors and Windows) and write two or three shorter posts, instead.

Let’s start with this passage:

During the first century of his existence, the professional photographer performed a role similar to that of the ancient scribe, who put in writing such messages and documents as the illiterate commoner and his often semiliterate ruler required. Where literacy became the rule, the scribe disappeared. By 1936, when Moholy-Nagy delcared that photography was the lingua franca of our time, and that the illiterate of the future would be he who could not use a camera, the role of the professional photographer was already greatly diminished from the days in which his craft was considered a skill close to magic. Today it is only in a few esoteric branches of scientific or technical work that a photographer can still claim mysterious secrets. (pp. 14-15)

This interests me because I think it helps me understand a confusion many photographers have regarding the nature of what they do.

Following the metaphor, let us assume that we are living in a time after that in which the scribe had a useful role — a time in which (in developed nations) everyone has the ability to read or write for themselves.

In that context, what do we make of someone apparently performing the functions of a scribe? Examples might include:

• Translators
• Editors, designers, etc.
• Paralegals
• Medical transcriptionists
• Notaries Public
• Calligraphers

These are people who have technical skills which are not required for the normal, everyday reading and writing functions routinely performed by people in both their business and personal lives.

There are photographic equivalents to many of these functions — or, rather, there are photographic professions which have a similar relationship to the photo-literate as these professions do to the word-literate. For example, I doubt one hears the complaint that, “with digital, everyone is a crime scene photographer.” (Note: If there are any forensics people reading and I’m getting that wrong, please let me know.)

However, most types of professional photography currently being done today are not so well sequestered from the realm of everyday, non-professional photography, which is usually (although not quite accurately) classified as “amateur.” But there may still be parallels.

Of these post-scribe forms of technical literacy, the last — calligraphy — is the one that I find to be the most interesting in relation to photography. For our purposes, let calligraphy be defined as the practice of making series of written letters appear aesthetically pleasing; it is (or at least, can be) totally agnostic with regard to the meaning of words represented by those letters. It is about making things pretty, on demand.

I think calligraphy is interesting in relation to what people want from photography. Specifically, to what they want when they first become excited about photography — when they stop regarding it as a routine task requiring no special knowledge or insight and begin to regard it as something they can and should do well. Perhaps even as something which they are called to do well.

When people today feel that way about the written word, virtually none of them say, “I want to be a calligrapher.” They want to be novelists, or poets, or journalists, or what have you. They want to write something in which other people can find meaning, amusement, excitement, solace, escapism, or insight.

But when people feel that way about photography, huge droves of them turn to the photographic equivalents of calligraphy — like wedding photography, commercial portraiture, stock photography, and advertising — disciplines which are, at heart, dedicated to producing prettiness on demand.

Budding photographers are often obsessed with becoming skilled in technical areas related to these disciplines, so that they can be more “pro” — which, amusingly, means that these industries are generally less and less sustainable for those who actually do set up shop in them. (And, as with calligraphy, hand knitting, and similar crafts, this tends to shift the area of commercial viability away from doing the work in question and towards books, supplies, workshops, instructional videos, etc.)

Of course, that does not sum up every budding photographer. There are plenty of photographers who are deeply embedded in the art world (which has largely swallowed up serious photography), and photojournalism is not dead. And I would not suggest that art photography and photojournalism are not worthwhile pursuits.

But is there a photographic equivalent of a novel, at this point, or of a short story? (Equivalent in use I mean, not in structure, like the “literary” photographs of Frank Gohlke.) Is there photography which is produced for and consumed by the general public, for the joy of it?

That is more questionable.

Certainly there are people who are making photography that I would consider to be suitable for this role; there is good photography that exists outside the art niche and apart from the perversely utilitarian industries of prettiness on demand, and also apart from the civic-minded function of photojournalism and documentary photography.

But what is happening to that photography after it is made? Some percentage of it is published in various forms, and some percentage of what is published is bought (if applicable) and viewed, but the extent to which that happens outside the art community or the community of people who identify as photographers is more questionable.

And that — well, that worries me a great deal.

Most of the lecture actually consisted of readings from Thoughts On Landscape, so I won’t attempt to reproduce any of it here. (Especially since I’ve quoted it extensively here, on my tumblr, and on 1/125.) I’ll just say that if you are even slightly interested in photography, and you have read Thoughts On Landscape, you need to get on that, prompt-like.

Afterward, there was a question and answer period, and I did take some notes for that. I tried to be as accurate as possible, but I’m not much of a stenographer, so please forgive me if some of this is imperfectly recorded. I’m also not going to elaborate or provide much in the way of interpretation or response, since I just want to get this posted, for the moment:

On choosing where to go when making a trip, Gohlke said that he always avoids going to places that qualify as “destinations,” saying, “Too much is decided for you in destinations; what can you do but affirm it?”

Describing his feelings about photography after he first turned to it as an alternative to his graduate studies in English, Gohlke said, “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever done. I never want to do anything else. Why didn’t anyone tell me.”

Gohlke also talked about how one can explain what it is to photograph, especially with regard to relating the photographer’s work to the painter’s work, and whether or not one “just takes takes pictures”:

You don’t just take photographs. You live, and you photograph. And the closer those things come to being the same, the better, and the better you’ll work.

He expanded on this by pointing out that much of the work of photography is done without a camera — that it is about everything else the photographer experiences, and digests, and can then bring to the practice of photography.

Maybe my favorite part of the evening was an exchange in which Gohlke said that he makes “literary photographs,” and someone in the audience asked, “Why literary,” to which Gohlke replied, “Because they require reading.”

Gohlke also talked about the importance — both in writing and in photography — of not caring about how people will perceive your work, and how this is something that tends to get easier with age. (Which is heartening.)

The epiphany happened while I was mulling over the subject of video games and their relationship to art. I was listening to the Joystiq Podcast episode in which Ludwig Kietzmann talks about Bulletstorm. I forget his phrasing on the podcast, but here’s what he wrote in his preview:

Writing about games always comes with a peculiar kind of self-defeating dissonance. This morning, I might have grabbed a metaphorical megaphone and shoved it in some ebert’s ear, right before laying out why Shadow of the Colossus is such a magnificent meditation on loss and sacrifice and etc. “Games involve and encourage and inspire!” I’d say. “It’s for grownups, you know.”

And then, just a few hours later, I’ll write about a game that’s awesome because it lets you kick people to death.

This made something click for me: I really like video games — despite not being all that good at them, and despite not playing them all that much. But maybe even more than playing them, I like reading and listening to people share what they think and feel about video games. I like the intellectual culture surrounding gaming.

I also like TV. I like TV a lot. I think about TV a lot, and I talk about it, and good television is quite possibly my favorite sort of media to experience. And I take the idea of good television extremely seriously.

I don’t particularly like movies. I mean, some movies are excellent. But I find that, by and large, I am nowhere near as excited by a good movie as I am by a good television show. Even more so with theater. I feel out of place as a member of those audiences.

And when it comes to fiction writing, I am strongly biased towards genre work.

All this, plus my enjoyment of photography — and, specifically, the aspects of the photographic world which make me uncomfortable — point to a very strong, fundamental bias on my part: I prefer media that have not gained acceptance as art and, in general, legitimation.

I like stuff happening in cultural contexts where the “high” and “low” have not yet differentiated themselves into mutually exclusive markets, where the best and worst work sit side-by-side on the shelves or the walls — and where conversations about quality, taste, and worth cannot be shut down by simply pointing to the segregation of high and low markets. These are contexts which have a more democratic flavor to them, and a more diverse one — and as such, I feel more at home in them.

These are also, significantly, the contexts in which separate scales of value have not yet been created for audiences of different socioeconomic class.

This is perhaps why I’m generally drawn to photography that took place in the time prior to the ’80′s (that is, amusingly, prior to my birth), when the longtime dream of creating legitimacy for photography as an art form was more or less accomplished. And also why I’m uncomfortable with both the world of contemporary art photography and the world of contemporary commercial photography — and the communities of wannabes that orient toward either of those worlds.

I’m not sure whether that should make me optimistic or pessimistic about the future. In general, that gap gets wider as time goes on — look at theater, which is basically either highly rarefied or is Cats, and look at cinema, where it feels like more and more, every movie can be classified either as indy or blockbuster.

However, it seems like the lines in photography are getting somewhat more blurred recently — or, rather, that the contexts which are defined by those lines are overlapping more and more. I don’t think this is necessarily making photography a more democratic and diverse place than it was in the 90′s, say, but I do think it makes the direction of the medium more uncertain, and maybe more open to redirection…which is maybe enough cause for a bit of optimism. God, I certainly hope so…

I was given a small kodak instant camera as a kid. I used it for the single purpose of taking back memories to my parents when I was away from home, to share with them what I had lived. I couldn’t bare the idea of them being absent and not experiencing what I was seeing. I was obsessed with the – “Look what I saw!”

via Featured – Alex Cretey | la pura vida

I find a lot of interviews with photographers and essays by photographers start with something like this — a disclosure of childhood experiences that flowered into photographic obsession.

For photographers, origin stories often start at a very early age.

I don’t have anything of the sort — I had zero interest in photography as a kid, aside from occasionally envying any gadget that had so many controls on it. A good thing, too, since I could never have afforded film for a camera back then. I was — and remained until quite recently — a fundamentally word-based person, with virtually no interest in art of any kid, just the written and the spoken word.

I got my first camera for an entirely pedestrian purpose (I wanted to be able to photograph my knitting). Inevitably, like every other asshole with a camera, I started using it to make flower macros and shit, too, just because I could. Some of that stuff is probably still lingering in my flickr account.

But I think the shift toward thinking of the camera as something more came when I realized that the camera could see things more clearly than I could.

This was not a metaphysical realization, mind you — my eyesight had become pretty bad for distant subjects, and because I don’t drive, it was a long time before I was forced to do something about it and actually get glasses. This was around the same time I started using the camera out in the world, but there was still a window of a few weeks or months in which my clearest view of the world was on the back of a crappy LCD.

When I would see something that — despite its fuzziness — I thought might be interesting, I would photograph it simply for the purpose of being able to inspect the details I could not otherwise perceive.

At that point, the camera was acting for me as a kind of mild prosthetic. It was an extension of my eyes, a tool for seeing. Since then, while I’ve gone much deeper into the medium, I don’t think I’ve strayed too far from that initial, banal relationship with cameras; I still basically see the practice of photography as an act of perception, although as time passes (and I got glasses), that has been more and more in the phenomenological sense and less and less in the optical sense.

This probably has a lot to do with my distrust of “creative” photography and many flavors of conceptually-oriented photography…

Please forgive that horrible photograph. It’s a product of two powerful competing impulses: On the one hand, it seems stupid to write about a product without picturing it, and on the other hand, I’m at a point in my life where I simply refuse to put effort into to stupid gear photos.

Needless to say, there are plenty of reviews online that provide very nice pictures of the camera, as well as (almost) all the technical information you could require.

So, as to the camera, why do I have it, and what do I have to say about it that isn’t just summarizing dpreview?

Well, for starters, I should explain why I bought a new (used) digital camera. As you may know, I started on digital, but switched to film almost completely. I’m a still a hardcore film convert (and as any student of religion knows, converts are the ones who are always most strident), and I have some very nice, very portable film cameras, including the semi-pocketable Olympus XA.

But, a few different factors conspired to make me desire a compact digital camera:

• Sometimes I’m in social situations where a photograph is called for, but I don’t feel like expending precious film
• Sometimes I want a photograph of something for a blog post, but I don’t feel like expending precious film
• Sometimes I want a photograph of something to put online the same day (but don’t feel like busting out a big camera and polaroid back)

In the past, those factors never overcame my hatred for some of the ubiquitous features of digital compacts, like:

• Autofocus
• No usable MF option
• No scale focus option
• Often absurdly impossible UI
• Shitty image quality

In discussions about these problems, folks have often brought up Ricoh’s GR Digital cameras, which I previously ignored, because they’re so damnably expensive. However, I happened to take a look one day at both the focus and exposure options on the GR Digital II and it’s price on the used market, which is comparatively pretty reasonable.

So, after a bit more research and digging, I ordered one.

Now, I won’t go into what it looks like or its specifications, etc., because you can get that information in more detail elsewhere very easily. What I will address is the question that typically most interests me about digital compacts, the question which virtually no reviews of those compacts ever actually addresses:

Can the camera be used for LCD-free, scale focus street shooting, the way I would use a film compact?

Street photography isn’t the only or even necessarily the primary thing I want this camera for, but I strongly feel that this sort of scenario is one in which every small format camera should be able to offer at least acceptable usability. Obviously the camera market as a whole disagrees with me; but is Ricoh the exception?

Yes and no. Or, rather, yes, with some annoying caveats.

On the yes side:

• Yes, you can turn off the LCD and all noises
• Yes, there is what amounts to a hyperfocal setting
• Yes, there is an electronic DOF scale for effective manual prefocusing
• Yes, the camera can be made to record a photograph near-instantaneously
• Yes, it has aperture priority and manual exposure modes
• Yes, there are aperture and shutter speed controls under your finger and thumb where they should be
• Yes, the camera has a hot shoe and can reliably sync a corded flash at (so far as I can tell) speeds up to about 1/1000 or so

On the annoying caveat side:

• The camera does not appear to meter continuously in aperture priority mode; i.e., if you skip straight to a shutter release full press without a half-press first — which you should be able to do when working sans autofocus — you will often get seriously inaccurate exposures
• Also, the camera does not have enough dynamic range to allow you to be sloppy in your exposures
• This makes it impossible to abandon the LCD completely, because one cannot simply trust the camera to accurately expose for you
• While there is a mode which allows you to view settings on the LCD but skip the live view (good), that mode does not display the settings continuously; you have to twiddle a control to make the settings appear.
• It tends to crap out around ISO 400 in the “noise acceptability department.”
• Despite having a fixed lens, it does not have a built-in viewfinder, and while accessory finders are available, they are wickedly expensive. (As are many finders made for film cameras that cover a similar FOV, so I don’t mean to imply that Ricoh is trying to shaft the user on this front; wide angle finders simply aren’t cheap.)

There are also some annoyances that aren’t really design complaints, but which frustrate me nonetheless. The delay in writing RAW files to the card, and the unnecessarily large size of those files, are particularly chafing. You would think that a camera with so many incredibly intelligent design choices targeted at an unusually sensible (in terms of photographic practices) market segment would favor less pixel density.

I’m also finding it difficult going, getting the hang of working with those files. So far, I’ve only managed to get results I like by going black and white, for example. However, hopefully that will improve as I get more practice with the camera.

But, at the end of the day, will I be using it?

The answer is yes, or at least probably. There simply aren’t that many digital cameras that allow me to easily — by simply twitching a preset — go from ideal settings for daylight hyperfocal street shooting to ideal settings for shooting with a handheld flash. Not even my D40 — although that camera’s beautifully simple interface when paired with a non-metering lens remains the envy of most digital cameras, as far as I am concerned.

It’s too bad that I can’t use the GRDII like the digital equivalent of an XA — which, with its extremely reliable metering system and simple operation, is one of the most stress-free cameras imaginable in most situations.

But at the same time, I’m not exactly averse to busting out my handheld meter and getting old school. Doing so gets me the ability to more or less reliably pre-set exposure, and I have an adequate (although not perfect) eye for the 28mm-equivalent field of view. In other words, it’s a workable solution, even if it is not the ideal one.

Of course, if only someone would release a camera like a digital equivalent of the Rollei 35 — with external, top-viewable dials for exposure settings and a built-in VF — I would be a completely happy camper. But since that’s not going to happen, the GRD is probably going to be good enough…