For me, image-making is intuitive and meditative. I may spend an hour waiting for the moment when then light transforms the ordinary into something mystical, surreal and poetic.
Richard Martin
I arrived at Mather Point around thirty minutes prior to the precise moment the sun crept above the horizon. In the twilight of the early dawn the sky changed from a cold blue-gray to a warm yellow-orange. Lighting the canyon was the reflected light from the full moon. Looking into the canyon as the light changed and shadows moved, I waited. Hovering around 5 degrees Fahrenheit on the rim this particular morning and in spite of the many layers of clothing I put on, I couldn’t help but think about the cold that surrounded me, enveloped me as I waited for a precise moment to begin to photograph.
Shot at the moment the sun began illuminating the far buttes while the light rocks of Mather Point already were aflame with the sun’s transformative light, this image of Mather Point at Sunrise was worth the wait, the cold, the stomping of feet and the rubbing of hands, the cursing of Winter. It is worth all that because this is what I do. In order to freeze a moment in time that, perhaps, lasts 1/125th of a second, I put in hours of time, often in otherwise unbearable conditions. I wait so that I can transfer what I see to an image I intend to share with the world. I wait, in short, so that you may see something that resembles what I see, an artifact of personal vision, and, in some small way, the experience of seeing that very artifact enriches your life.
I’m trying to please myself; certainly that’s a big criterion… though in a sense, I don’t take images just for myself. I take images that I think other people will want to see. I don’t take pictures to put in a box and hide them. I want as many people to see them as possible.
Mary Ellen Mark
The dualism, the split personality of the photographer, the one working alone, in fractions of seconds, exposing that which one believes to be compelling at the very instant of capture, something intimate, personal even private yet doing so in order to share that which one’s own vision noted so clearly with the world is the very essence of what inspires one to photograph in the first place. Making the private public is part of the the experience that motivates one to spend countless hours looking at landscapes in order to capture a mere fraction of a second, an exposure that freezes what would always already vanish never to be seen again.
In my role as a photographer, I make images and share them because I have a clear response-ability to share the world I encounter, the world I see, with others. In some sense, I function like an historian, preserving evidence of a time past, a time long gone, to remind people just how things were. I do not wish to idolize that which I photograph, to venerate or lionize that which I photograph. To do so would be to mock the very idea that the illusion of time is more valuable than the trace left by the existential moment. On the other hand, I tend to stand in awe of the natural forces that produce the landscapes I photograph and, to the ingenuity of people who build structures that enhance the land while blending into the landscape. Photography is full of contradictions.
The camera is the instrument that brings the inner passion and the outward event into harmony with one another, this linking, or, rather, this coincidence, is successfully brought about, then we find one of the things that no image-making medium can accomplish to the same degree.
Edward Lucie-Smith
What seems to separate a photograph from other forms of visual art? It seems to me that the difference turns on how one produces the art in the first place. The raw photograph is captured in an instant, a fraction of a second, a mere blink of one’s eye and has the ability to capture all that is present within the frame of the image. Other forms of visual art are produced over time, drawing on the skills and imagination of the artist to interpret while creating. The photographer has this luxury only during after-capture processing while still being limited to the image that was captured at an earlier point in time. Each form has its limitations and strengths. In the final analysis, the photograph is separated by its ability to freeze a moment in time that is always already gone and, in doing so, creates a durable artifact of that which once was.
Photographers work within the constraints of time and the availability of light. This is not to say that other visual artists do not, but for the photographer the connection between time and light is a requirement, a visceral connection tied to the ability to expose an image on film or on a digital sensor. Miss the decisive moment when time and light are in perfect sync and one misses the opportunity to expose a raw image from which one may later refine in after-capture processing. Miss the image and the moment will never be recreated in the same way, it is gone forever. There is no getting around this connection in photography; it is pivotal to making art with a camera as one’s primary tool.
It would be a mistake, however, to become over dependent on one’s equipment. For a photographer, the camera is merely a tool used to capture that which one envisions as a completed photograph. Professionals tend to use professional equipment, not for its ability to take better pictures but for its durability. Professionals, especially those who shoot outside the studio, tend to beat up their equipment through continued use. Having camera bodies that take a beating turns out to be a bonus. I tend to suggest to people that it is more important to invest in better lenses than in fancy camera bodies that have more bells and whistles than one could ever wish to use. But equipment is overrated as a necessity for making powerful images.
What is important in making photographs if one’s equipment is overrated? It seems that one’s vision, one’s ability to see through the constant input of visual cues, one’s ability to gaze at the world around while filtering out that which is unnecessary, is the most important aspect to making consistently good images. Learning how to see is, in fact, learning about how you see the world. Learning how to see is deeply connected to one’s lived experience, cultural connections, gender, race, religion, politics and so on. One’s vision is influenced by but independent of how others recorded their well developed visions; one cannot learn to photograph without looking at the photographs of those who came before, without understanding something of the history of photography and photographic image making. But one’s vision, in the end, is only influenced by others while becoming one’s own. Vision is reflected in one’s style, in the way one presents one’s images for viewing by others.
To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.
Elliott Erwit
Not to make light of Descartes’ dualistic insight I might be tempted to say, “I see therefore I exist!” But that would be disingenuous, so I won’t go there. Learning to see is developing the craft of transforming plain sight into a gaze while exploring the possibilities of creating the image as an artifact of the gaze. This is to say that what one photographs is not what one encounters as a holistic fragment of an experience, rather, it is a well structured re-presentation of that which presented itself to the gaze of the photographer.
This shot was captured while sitting in an outdoor theater in Tombstone, AZ in anticipation of a reenactment of the famous Gunfight at the OK Corral. While sitting in the bleacher seats, I was discussing what made a good image with my grandson. He is eleven and has a wide angle view of the universe. All day long I was demonstrating the idea that getting closer made for a more interesting and, often, more ambiguous, image. I snapped off this shot of two people in the row in front of us without addressing issues of personality or identity. Here were two headless people just waiting for the event to begin. When I had him look at the image in the camera, still in color, he got a look of understanding on his face that words could not match. Here is an example of seeing the ordinary, two people sitting in the bleachers, in an interesting (if not different) way.
On another note: Last March I set myself the personal assignment to post a new image to this blog every day for a year. I have been true to that goal for a year with the exception of days I was away from my computer either because I was away making images or I was unable to do so because of illness. I have posted well over 300 images and written something about each of them. When I began I thought this would be a far easier task than it actually was. To create over 300 images I was willing to post meant that I had to shoot thousands more images, to spend a fair amount of time in after-capture processing, and to find something new to say about each image. The comments posted have several ongoing themes in them from seeing to the meaning of the photographic image itself. I have explored themes in my images that addressed ongoing visual metaphors such as borders, isolation, and empty spaces. In all, this project has been a complete success from my point of view.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am not done posting or writing about photography. From this point forward, however, I will not commit to posting a new image every day rather I will post new images as they naturally occur with a focus on seasonally changing landscapes.
A photograph is usually looked at – seldom looked into.
Ansel Adams
Making photographs, especially those made as self-assignment works, always is a statement of deep commitment to one’s subject. These photographs are made to be interrogated, to be examined, cross-examined, questioned. As a photographer, I ask viewers to look below the surface of the image, that two-dimensional simulacrum of a four-dimensional world, to inquire about what I am really photographing. In the case of my work, I attempt to create artifacts of a time always already past, yet, lingering as a trace of that which was. I seek to preserve a fraction of a second of existence, a blink of one’s eye, for others to view constantly asking what becomes of those places without preservation.
I photograph landscapes because of my concern for the very air I breathe, because I care about the effects of an unnatural warming of the planet earth and what that means to the lives of those that come after me, because I see the world as a place worthy of protection, of cultivation, of synergy. I photograph places that are both familiar and not as a way to pierce the veil of complacency that works against practical solutions for reversal of global warming by raising the other’s awareness of the vast natural beauty of our quite tiny world.
The photograph in this post, Battlefield Trees at The Hermitage, focuses, not only on the notion that nature requires preservation, but, in addition, the notion that human beings are a self-destructive species constantly engaged on a battlefield for the sake of honor. Each tree in this photograph was transplanted from a battlefield upon which Andrew Jackson fought, uprooted from that battlefield and planted on the grounds of his plantation near Nashville, Tennessee. Jackson, it seems, saw these trees as a reminder of the glory of battle, perhaps the luck of his own survival, placed uniformly in a pastoral setting. Perhaps these trees are lined up as soldiers marching to their own doom, each one a target, each one expendable. These trees represent lives lost through the folly, the hubris of leadership, the failure of grown men to reason together. These trees, to me, cry out for sanity, demanding the end to human sacrifice in the name of whichever gods infect us at the moment. These trees remind me that leaders never fight but fighters often turn to political leadership.
I love the medium of photography, for with its unique realism it gives me the power to go beyond conventional ways of seeing and understanding and say, “This is real, too.”
Wynn Bullock
What is it about a photograph that causes people to think of an image as somehow acting in place of the reality of that which has been photographed. The notion that a picture is worth a thousand words somehow generates the feeling that the truth is somehow contained within the four corners of the image and that there is nothing left to see, nothing omitted either purposely or not. In all candor, nothing could be further from the truth. Just ask a photographer.
Taking the image in this photograph, a cyprus tree towering over barren bushes on the grounds of The Hermitage, the home of Andrew Jackson, 7th President of the United States. The image presented to you as a viewer retains little of the origins of the image except, perhaps, the physicality of the scene (even that may be brought into question). There is no color, save the 8% blue tint added to approximate selenium toning, yet the origins of this scene were in full color. The image has been processed to approximate an exposure made on infrared film through an after-capture process of filtering and adding noise to simulate the heavy grain of infrared film. Additionally, I framed the image to ignore many things that would be apparent to one actually in the four dimensions of the scene, things that appear only as questions in this image: What is behind the white fence? Where is the house? and so on.
Yet, this is the vision I had looking through my viewfinder. I intended to render this image as a black and white infrared photograph with an 8% blue tone embedded in the image. I intended to hide some things while exposing others. What I re-present is that which I see, that at which I gaze. And, as Wynn Bullock might argue, this image is as real as it ever gets.
It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary.
David Bailey
Learning to see the ordinary, to not overstate or understate, to select a frame from a wide array of possible frames that re-presents that which was but is no longer retrievable, is the essential foundation of photography. In the end, learning to see the ordinary, the ability to pick something that tells a story from the infinite potential of any and every scene, comes with practice, experimentation, failure, and success all rolled up into what one might call experience.
When I work with young photographers, the hardest thing to teach is how approach this idea of seeing so that what one sees is captured in the camera. Most, if not all, want to include just about everything within the limits of the available frame. They stand too far away so that even the most insignificant detail is made a part of the image. I generally advise them to release the shutter and then take at least two steps forward once they think they have a good image and, without messing with focal length, capture the new image and then print both comparing them to see which one is better.Of course, once they get the idea that one should be closer to one’s subject, the opposite tendency, getting too close so as to lose the most important detail, must be addressed.
I shot this image in the early morning in downtown Franklin Tennessee on my way to get some coffee to warm up on a very brisk morning. The coffee shop is on the corner of the building just to the right of the frame. The sign, bench and trash barrel which I saw from the opposite side of the street made for an interesting composition but there was traffic crossing in front of me coming from both sides. I patiently waited until there were no cars in sight and captured this image. I photographed the image so that after-capture processing could accommodate black and white with a bit of yellow filtration. I also added an 8% blue tone to achieve the effect of selenium toning, a practice that tends to bring out the shadows while having a minimal effect on the highlights, a process I learned from Ansel Adams. The resulting image tells an ordinary story about an ordinary corner in an ordinary town. I would not want to visually say more.
Learning to see is a journey that most anyone can embark upon. The beauty of the digital world is that one is able to remove the cost of film from the equation. In the not so distant past, film was an expensive and often a cruel teacher. That is no longer a deterrent, one simply needs a digital storage card and a computer to learn how to see. Equipment is of little consequence. “Buying a Nikon,” someone once said, “does not make one a photographer. It does, however, make one a Nikon owner.”
Learning to see can, and should, be achieved by using inexpensive cameras. The job of the camera is merely to record what one sees. Any and every camera is fully capable of making the capture. If one’s vision is underdeveloped no camera in the world will make it better. If one’s vision is in place, if one has developed a style, a focused way of looking, then any camera in the world will capture what one saw.
A Ming vase can be well-designed and well-made and is beautiful for that reason alone. I don’t think this can be true for photography. Unless there is something a little incomplete and a little strange, it will simply look like a copy of something pretty. We won’t take an interest in it.
John Loengard
Hanging just above the trees that protect a gift shop near Desert View by the Grand Canyon the nearly full moon sparkled in the sky. I stopped for a second, set up my tripod, framed the image and snapped off three bracketed exposures that would later be combined into an HDR image. Choosing the HDR technique guaranteed that I would capture a full tonal range, providing detail in the shadows of the trees and the craters of the moon. The image, now captured, sat for a while before I decided to look at it in black and white. A bit of blue tone brings out the blacks without impacting on the whites and here is the finished image.
Opportunities to make photographs present themselves all the time. The opportunities are blind to whether I have a camera with me or not. When I have a camera I tend to explore a wide range of possibilities that naturally come with the opportunity presented. When I am without a camera I tend to stop, soak in that which surrounds me and, when I am really lucky, I walk away with a vivid trace of the event. I do not bemoan my bad luck for not having had the foresight to bring a camera. That would be a waste of time. I recall those times when I did have a camera present and revel in them.
Maybe because it’s entirely an artist’s eye, patience and skill that makes an image and not his tools.
Ken Rockwell
There are two great mistakes made by those first entering the field of photography. The first is to overrate the value of one’s equipment while the second is the tendency to be satisfied by a one and done approach to shooting. Both are costly, one in terms of cash money, the other in terms of lost opportunity. The former suggests that the more expensive one’s equipment the better the images produced as the end product while the latter ignores the possibility of exploration of something being photographed from multiple angles and perspectives. Both are fatal to producing quality images.
There are, of course, equipment choices that must be made while photographing. One must choose focal length and lens speed, shutter speed, ISO or film speed. One must decide whether something is better captured as black and white or color. But none of these decisions turn on the quality of one’s equipment. In a digital age one need not even be concerned with megapixels, rather one should concentrate on the dynamic range of the digital sensor, that magical piece of electronics that transfers light and shadow into a visual image. Getting the next new piece of equipment and then treating that piece of equipment as if it were a museum artifact simply does not make one’s images better.
Exploration, the willingness to study a subject, to examine the light from multiple angles, to wait until the light is right and then move around the subject of the image, the willingness to make multiple exposures of the same thing before one moves on is the key to learning how to better see one’s subject and to better capture that which one sees. One and done is great for snapshots, for recording family events but for making an artistic statement, one and done generally fails the patience test.
Shoot with the equipment you have, replace it only when it wears out and costs too much to repair. Make multiple images of that which surrounds you and choose the image that speaks loudest to your vision. That works!
New images surround us everywhere. They are invisible only because of sterile routine convention and fear.
Lisette Model
Images are always there hiding in plain sight. Most are missed, even by those with a strong sense of vision. Sometimes, however, images sometimes seem to jump out demanding to be photographed. The two barrels in this image simply jumped out at me, inviting me to photograph them. It was near the end of our visit to The Hermitage outside of Nashville. I was quite tired and, still recovering from back surgery, my back hurt. All I wanted to do was to get out of there, to get in the car and drive back to our hotel and take a nap. We took a direct line across the grass toward the parking lot to speed our advance to the car. True to form, my head swung back and forth looking for images when the two barrels caught my eye.
Because I make photographs, I could not ignore the image that was now in front of me. In spite of the pain and my desire to sleep, without hesitation, I broke to my right and headed straight toward the two barrels against a wooden fence. My wife, who was with me at the time, asked me where I was going. As she looked in my direction she just smiled and stretched out a knowing “Ohhhh” recognizing that I was headed toward a photograph.
My first instinct was to create a black and white image, allowing the mid-afternoon sunlight to illuminate the image without the distraction of color. The closer I came to the image the more I thought about filtering, about creating an infrared image from the original digital capture. The image you see here re-presents the vision I had as I was capturing the image.
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March 10, 2010 1888 Barry Fitzgerald 1891 Sam Jaffe 1928 James Earl Ray 1934 Sir Thomas Pilkington 1939 Hugh Johnson 1940 Chuck Norris 1947 Lord Paul Condon 1958 Sharon Stone 1964 HRH Prince Edward
