On Photography – Creativity Outside, Inside

Don’t we just love to assign labels to people? We have famous people and those unlucky unfamous people. There are winners and losers. Some are rich, others poor. You have heroes and creeps. Cops and robbers. Good guys, bad guys. Pillars of society and scorchers of earth. Then the whole deal morphs into crime and punishment, Bible versus Koran, Red versus Blue, Cancer versus Hangnails and Canon versus Nikon shooters.

This is the story about the rich and famous, the not quite rich or famous and, most importantly, those not famous at all. It is also a story about art. It touches on some shameful facts but there are good things too. Nothing is black and white only. Something for everyone, I think.

Technology

It has long been a desire of the powerful to classify people into useful categories. Consumer companies such as Procter & Gamble owes considerable debt to market research which divides the World into those using Prell, Tide, Bounce and the infidels that do not. TV evangelists, politicians, NPR and Greenpeace split people into Donors and Parasites.

The Census Bureau classifies us in microscopic detail to the delight of the marketing and advertising gangs. The political districting gurus have a grandiose sand box of devious tactics. Some become crooked enough to drive legislators into neighboring states to avoid being railroaded. Starbucks drill into the data to determine the address of the next overpriced java dump.

I’m happy to learn there are 984 Slovaks and 89 Sioux in the City Of Seattle. Sadly, no Navajos appear to live in my city. 2,447 females require less than five minutes to get to their workplace. Some are my neighbors, no doubt. Of those working at home, 1,271 are not US citizens. 4,767 leave for work between 5 and 5:29 AM, which oddly is about the same number as those leaving between 11 and 11:59 AM. All data is downloadable from the Census Bureau for your entertainment unless, of course, you already have a life.

Then there is something called data mining as practiced illegally by various US government agencies such as NSA in the name of the holy War on Terror, aka the Religious Right War on Muslim. It’s purpose, in the eyes of the George W.’s of an unfortunate world, is to gain insights in as many aspects of your personal life as possible, thereby supposedly proving you are a Muslim and thus a terrorist. Never mind that you may actually be a Slovak, Sioux, Navajo or, worse, a Democrat.

Data mining is largely done by deep diving into the Internet, tapping emails and listening in on phone calls. When it gets more than lukewarm, your phone specifically is tapped, with or, most likely, without court approval. Big Joe demands all your private records from record keepers such as banks, online services and your veterinarian. Naturally, banks, airlines and others such as Yahoo, eBay, Microsoft and Google, have caved in to Big Joe. Joe McCarthy would be green with envy if he were to live in these joyous times. Many wonder why 250 million Americans buy into this horse manure. This is the people fanatically defending their right to bear assault rifles. Over their dead bodies as the saying accurately goes. That line in the sand stand, of course, defends the right to carry an assault rifle to the supermarket, not those Commies’
civil rights.

If you are like most people, data mining is not close to your top priorities. It is a subject almost as boring as Global Warming. No doubt you will ignore both of these issues until 1) your house is permanently under carbonized ocean water and 2) Big Brother decides you are no longer allowed to fly on US of A airlines to visit Grandma in Florida. Your charitable donations are suddenly terrorist money laundering. Your favorite cruise ship vacation is replaced by a prolonged stay in Cuba where no laws are pertinent.

Will data mining stop terrorism? It absolutely, definitely and assuredly will not. Data mining and the War on Terror will fail because George Bush has no idea what or who he is allegedly fighting. Winning means you have to know who and what to beat. It helps if you also know why. Ask any athlete. Tim Duncan does not play against some vague demographic segment. His job is to beat the heck out of Yao Ming and Shaq O’Neal.

Data mining, on the other hand, will generate gigatons of absolutely useless data, not winning a single game. It is pointless to wiretap 250 million Americans to gain insights into the minds of five or so terrorists located in Kazakhstan this week and in Lille, France next week and then possibly in the Sears Tower with a suitcase full of radioactive weapons of mass destruction and a smart looking suicide belt. The CIA will blame FBI who will tear into The Domestic Nuclear Detection Office who sends it off to NSA/CSS after which it is never seen again.

This is all due to the idea people can be classified, pigeonholed and dumped into categories, risk segments, code orange traps and hard drive locations. It is, to be true, all fantasy.

Politics

George Bush splits the World into those with him and those not. Those against him include everyone not with him, that is, Terrorists aka Muslims, Scientists, Environmentalists, anything French or German, Gays, his Dad, Hollywood, the Press, Fancy Food, Alzheimer victims, Math Teachers, ACLU and Anyone making less than a million bucks a day. He also dislikes journalists, doctors, lawyers, actors, his own cabinet and members of previous cabinets as well as any past, current or future members of Congress.

Hitler divided the World into mythical Aryans and those not, such as Jews, Gypsies, Hungarians, Poles, Cabaret performers and Homosexuals. Stalin divided his constituents into evil peasants versus loyal commissars. His Generals split their troops into those shot by Germans and those shot in the back by fellow soldiers for not advancing fast enough. The Generals too usually ended up shot by a jealous Stalin.

None of the three gentlemen above cared or cares at all for “different” people. That is a tragedy led by the powerful and directed at the powerless. People are split into categories resulting in the loss of freedom, rights and heads. The rules of the splits can be pretty much anything. Here are a few examples from the last 8 years or so, sorted by casualties:

Iraqi Wars, Afghan Wars, Ethiopia-Eritrea War, Somali Civil War, The First and Second Chechen Wars, Sudanese Civil War, 9/11, Algerian Civil War, Israel-Lebanon War, Sierra Leone Civil War, Waziristan War, Cote d’Ivoire Civil War, al-Qaeda misc. Murders, Turkey-PKK Conflict, Beslan School Siege, Bali Bombings, Madrid Terrorist Attack, Moscow Theatre Siege, Guatemala Civil War, Bojaya Massacre, Super Ferry 14 Bombing, Iraq Fuel Tanker Bombing, London Terror Attacks, Passover Massacre, USS Cole Bombing, Varanasi Train Bombings, Janupur Train Bombing, Karachi Bus Bombing, Indian Parliament Murders, Podujevo Bus Bombing and the Anthrax Attacks.

Tragedy

There is a different kind of prominent split that most of us like to ignore. That is the split of those that are Disadvantaged or those who are not. This includes the Mentally Ill versus us Sane. The physically disabled versus us fit. The oppressed, discriminated against and persecuted; the homeless, stateless, limbless, jobless or not. Anyone not fitting the orderly picture favored by those claiming to be Normal. Once you had Hippies and Beatniks. Now you have welfare mothers, suicide by police, walled suburbs, security cameras, phone taps, road rage and high school murder. It’s them versus us. Take no prisoners.

Perhaps one way to make the distinction is that the Outsiders are those that frighten the Insiders. The Insiders deep down know that the transition to Outsider is just a breath away. That is not a pleasant thought. You might suddenly and involuntarily join the damned, those fucked over one way or another. Jobs, status and security come and go.

Walk into any nursing home and you will not just find the elderly – you will find plenty of people that by their age and physical condition should be out there laboring away as us normal persons do. These people – traffic accident victims, punched out boxers, short-circuited CEOs, born “that way”, victims of violence or natural disasters – are institutionalized because a) they should be and b) someone or something is paying for their keep which is lucky indeed.

The US VA hospitals are filled with those suddenly Disadvantaged in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam or the dozens of other conflicts deemed worthwhile by brave leaders. Iraqi graves are filled with those permanently Disadvantaged by cluster bombs, religious leaders, Bunker Busters, Precision this or that, lack of milk, neighbors, drugged out Blackwater “security guards” not to mention Syrians, Saudis, Iranians, Egyptians, Kurds, Turks and Jordanians. Perhaps an Israeli or two play their game too.

Cityscapes

I live in downtown Seattle. As in most downtown areas, human misery is close at hand. Screams in the night, mental illness, drugs, pan handling and all the other urban invisibles are all quite visible in my neighborhood. Being on a busy street close to a major fire station, sirens topple the normal noise level at a frightening pace. The major TV stations are close by and their remote units come and go, recording misery somewhere else. Their helicopters constantly head for some disaster or another.

Listening to the nighttime screams, the anger of those stuck out there is very obvious. It is true rage I hear. That rage is rarely specific and usually aimed at “it”. “It” isn’t you or me. But it leads to fear among the shop owners, the Yuppie condo people and the city officials. Rage on one side, fear on the other side. Careful demarcation of boundaries: them versus us, day versus night. It is remarkable how loud voices are at 4 AM when the traffic is gone. Perhaps it is despair I hear rather than anger. It might be both.

I have yet to see the rage of the disadvantaged turn into violence although it certainly happens. It does not, though, approach the violence created by even an average American President. Some of “them” I know by now. Others I recognize. Being an insomniac, I see both sides of the fence. Some of “them” are artists with great talent although the chance of a gig or exhibition is slim indeed.

Art

Here is what I’m driving at. You’d be astonished how much art is created by the Different or those Disadvantaged. Take Hitler’s concentration camps and ghettos. A different post of mine included the harrowing, remarkable art produced by camp inmates. Some of those images are repeated here. Extraordinary music was composed in the camps. Only a small proportion is preserved. Hitler’s envy of real artists sentenced them to extermination. Here are just four of the names: Mendel Grossman – photographer, Leo Haas – painter, Alfred Kantor – painter, Paul Morgan – entertainer.

In recent times, the fenced paradise of Singapore banned, censored and prosecuted local press, local artists, theater performances, international press and magazines, pornography and music of various kinds. Sex and the City was only shown recently after much hand wringing. They call it Social Engineering.

The people of Singapore feel they live in a nice place which might be true in the mind of some. Certainly Singapore is record clean. There are immigrant ghettos in Paris and many other European cities that are not as clean or socially engineered. The various zones, authorities and partitions in the Middle East are in the daily news. The Baghdad disaster, parts of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Toronto. If you live in one such area, Art may not be in the front yard of your life. Yet Art lives on everywhere – even in the Green Zone of Baghdad. I bet.

Many of us saw the glorification of the Soviet Worker’s Paradise: workers rising, workers working, workers marching or worker warring. It did not include workers drunk, workers departing for Siberia or workers suffering from AIDS. Apparatich, KGB and aging leaders were artistically invisible. Artistically, the World became one-dimensional.

The Soviet System demanded conformance to “Soviet Realism” which was neither realistic, nor had much to do with art. Lenin in 1920 denounced “Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism and “other ‘isms’,” as non worthy elitist deviance. Dissidence meant gulags as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Alexander Ginzburg found out. Major artists such as Shostakovich and Prokofiev in music and, in literature, Bulgakov, Pasternak, Platonov, Mandelstam, Trifonov, Babel and Grossman all walked the thin line of becoming “Different” and rebelling against the state line. But check out some of Shostakovich’s works – there are plenty of semi hidden revolts against the dictations. All of which were at the mercy of Stalin and others. “Different” meant living a very miserable life.

In the US of A

Billie Holiday was banned from performing in New York as was Thelonious Monk. Joe McCarthy destroyed some 140 victims – many were artists. Rudy Giuliani unsuccessfully censored the Brooklyn Museum and its “Sensation” art show. Some five years ago, the New York State corrections commissioner announced that he banned the sale of artwork created by prison inmates to reduce the anguish of the victims of said inmates. Considering over two million people in the US enjoy free room and board, it stands to reason there should be a rather lively art scene. Certainly many artists were in jail for some or another offence in their past.

Let’s compile another list: Emily Araki, Asao Handa, Mobu Hashimoto, Taye Jow, Yoshiko Ushida and Richard Kanazawa. All were Artists, different and residents of American concentration camps during WWII. There were many more, all of Japanese origins. Yet the sons fought in Italy and elsewhere. On the American side.

NPR and the National Endowment for the Arts are perpetual Republican targets for extinction. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, To Kill a Mockingbird, All the Pretty Horses, the Harry Potter series, The Catcher in the Rye, Sophie’s Choice, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Inferno (Dante) all share the honor of being banned from schools in, for instance, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida and Texas. The same schools usually favor school prayers, various patriotic pledges and creationism. They tend to agree with Lenin on “Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism and “other ‘isms’,” being dangerous elitist deviance usually leading to pre marriage sex or worse.

Then we have the racial issues. It used to be those were viewed as mostly a shameful American problem. Today it is a global issue that will get worse. Global Warming will force relocation of hundreds of millions of people from tropical areas into developed areas on top of the current labor market flows. Politicians gamble it will not happen on their guard. But Nicolas Sarkozy of France already knows the score as do his riot police.

Racial profiling is yet another example of discrimination practiced by air lines, police and New Jersey Turnpike State Patrol. United Airlines throw Assem Bayaa off a flight claiming that because of national security, they don’t have to obey civil rights protection laws. Racial profiling is blamed for the shooting of Amadou Diallo by the New York City Police Department. London Police killed Jean Charles de Menezes because he looked Middle Eastern. Menezes was Brazilian. US Airways removed six Muslim imams from a flight after fellow passengers expressed fear.

My favorite fascist Ann Coulter jumped in on the US Airways act: “US Airways is my official airline now. Northwest, which eventually flew the Allah-spouting Muslims to their destinations, is off my list. You want to really hurt a U.S. air carrier’s business? Have Muslims announce that it’s their favorite airline.” Would Ms. Coulter like to fly Middle East Airlines on her next trip to Beirut? Maybe she’ll have to connect using Syrian Arab Airlines after crossing the Atlantic on Royal Jordanian out of JFK. No doubt service would be impeccable.

Mortgage lenders, insurance companies and the retail industry have their own version of profiling known as redlining. It means ethnic factors determine the availability of services. Blacks cannot obtain loans or insurance. Retailers refuse to serve certain ethnic neighborhoods. The late 1980s saw the emergence of the phrase Environmental Racism. It covers issues such as urban decay and excessive pollution in minority areas and the unavailable health care for, say, AIDS.

Us

“Us or We” stand for Tide and Dell. iPods, SUVs and cell phone ring tones. A precious few are happy, well adjusted and always productive. Most of us are not. We cherish majestic homes, exercise clubs, personal trainers. Airline miles, first class upgrades, airport club rooms and special floor in hotels. Foie Gras, Beluga Caviar, Kobe Beef, 1945 Mouton-Rothschild, stirred, not shaken martinis on Bombay Sapphire and a spot of BC’s finest. Prozac, Prada, Nike, Viagra.

Illegal gardeners, cooks and nannies. Insider trading, child porn, spousal abuse, congressional pages. Cancer, heart pacers, redone faces, improved waistlines, hairlines and butt lines. The Sundance Cirque Lodge, The Causeway Therapeutic Center or perhaps the Sunset Malibu when things get out of hand? “We” congest the streets, cause global warming, kill thousands of species, make wars, snort cocaine and generally don’t care for one another.

Only the most stupid of us believe in useless stereotyping as shown above. There is not a single individual fitting the portrait. Some may come closer than others but labeling just does not work. Not all enjoy Beluga Caviar. Some prefer ballpark hot dogs and drive a Chevy Aveo. Others like Iranian Caviar better. Personally, I like spaghetti. I’m not much of a Prada guy.

Let’s consider the “Us” camp and some of its members. By most standards, membership includes strange individuals such as Howard Hughes, Michael Jackson, Paris Hilton, Jerry Springer, Kobe Bryant, George W. Bush, Howard Stern, Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, Boris Yeltsin, Ann Coulter, Al Gore, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Fred Flintstone and George Karl. All defy classification. They are different but have one thing in common. These people do not produce Art.

The “Us” segment contains untold numbers of serious, legitimate artists. Writers, painters, composers, topless dancers, photographers and maybe a blogger or two. Occasionally well adjusted, safe and sound, they go about the business of art. Some art may be a bit bland compared to the far corners of expressive power. It truly takes all kinds. Take Smooth Jazz and New Age Flutists – great companions with Prozac. No wonder the true Disadvantaged scream in the night. Their art is rarely bland.

To see the spread from the bland to the somewhat adventurous and, by exception, the truly original, compare, say, Perry Como and Janis Joplin. Doris Day compared to Eve Ensler. Miss Marple and John Barth. Rock Hudson and Sean Penn. Tom Clancy and Kurt Vonnegut. Amy Grant versus Eminem. Norman Rockwell against Pablo Picasso. John Grisham versus Norman Mailer. Burt Bacharach and Arnold Schoenberg. Ebert against Susan Sontag. Ricky Martin versus John Cage. David Sanborn versus John Coltrane. Janet Jackson and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Anita Baker against Anita O’Day. Danielle Steel versus Andrea Barrett.

Perhaps not all of the above are well adjusted. Some are or were addicted to various things. Not all are nice people. Some of the art is truly awful and most is very bland. None of them live on the street or reside in mental institutions. Some may feel at home in rehab centers but that’s not quite the same thing. This essay is not about these guys. This article is about the other ones: “them”.

Them

“They” stand for poverty, rage, illness, irresponsibility, insanity, and screams in the night. They are institutionalized, discarded, feared, deep-6ed, 86ed, banned, ignored, hidden, driven out of town. They look bad and smell bad. They are drunk, high, low, infected with lice, AIDS or TBC. A few are violent. They annoy, panhandle and give us evil eyes. Many are in jail, asylums or various concentration camps around the World. Or they would be if we establishment types could find the time to round them up. Being parasitic, they deserve no care, no breaks and no respect. Politicians safely can ignore them. They carry no political weight, do not lobby much of anything and receive no DC pork.

Mental Creativity

Mental illness, in particular manic-depression and creativity go well together. Famous examples include Ernest Hemingway, Robert Schumann, Virginia Woolf, Michelangelo, Diane Arbus and Lord Byron.

“Outsider Art” refers to the work of self-taught mentally ill or disadvantaged artists such as Delaine La Bas, Adolph Wolfli, Nek Chand, Ferdinand Cheval, Henry Darrger, Madge Gill, Alexander Lobanov, Martin Ramirez, Achilles Rizzoli and Judith Scott. The 1922 book “Artistry of the Mentally Ill” by Hans Prinzhorn identified the Ten Schizophrenic Masters: Karl Brendel, August Klotz, Peter Mogen, August Neter, Johann Knupfer, Victor Orth, Herman Bell, Heinrich Welz, Joseph Sell and Franz Pohl.

The six images close by in this section represent works by Outsider Artists. The top pencil drawing of a woman is by Madge Gill, an English artist guided by a spirit. She did thousands of drawings like the one shown here. The woman in the drawing may be Gill herself or a stillborn daughter.

Martin Ramirez, a Mexican who lived in California, did the Man on a Horse. Ramirez suffered from schizophrenia. After his death, the painting became quite valuable. This is unusual: most of these artists are or were institutionalized with their work neither shown publicly nor sold. Even after death, when often their work first came to light, little is made public.

The drawing of a huge dog with his tiny master is next. No doubt based on an accurate view of the world according to most dogs, the artist is Bill Traylor. He was born a slave in 1856 on a plantation near Benton, Alabama. He remained at the plantation till 1934, described as an illiterate farmer with some English vocabulary. He then worked on road gangs and was essentially homeless. So how come this man is viewed as one of the most important American artists?

From 1939 to 1942, Traylor worked the streets of Montgomery as a street artist. He was 83 when he started this artistic career, eventually producing around 1,800 drawings. Friends brought him drawing materials and others provided small favors such as food and an occasional roof. His first show was held in 1940 – ignored by Traylor who was busy drawing. His next show was held in 1942 at a local high school. By chance, his work caught the attention of the NYC Museum of Modern Art. The Museum attempted to buy some of the works but was angrily rejected. By 1943 Traylor moved north to his children. He died in 1947 and his work fell into the shadows for thirty five years.

In 1982, he was part of a landmark exhibition of Black American art. His work was rediscovered and he is now a regular feature of the art scene. Exhibitions include about some twenty across the South in the last 10 years. He recently was featured in England, Germany and Switzerland.

Adolf Wolfli, Resident Artist, Waldau Mental Asylum, Switzerland 1895-1930

Adolf Wolfli is perhaps the best known of the Outsider Artists. Born in 1864, he was a farmhand, a laborer and a convicted sex offender by the age of 31. At this point he was committed to the Asylum where he remained to his death in 1930. He was violent, subject to hallucinations and diagnosed as a schizophrenic.

He started drawing in 1899, but nothing is preserved till about 1905. Over the next twenty five years, he accumulated a remarkable output of an imaginary 25,000 page autobiography and some 3,000 drawings and collages. Supported by some of the hospital staff, here is his established routine:

• “Every Monday morning Wölfli is given a new pencil and two large sheets of unprinted newsprint. The pencil is used up in two days; then he has to make do with the stubs he has saved or with whatever he can beg off someone else.”
• “He often writes with pieces only five to seven millimeters long and even with the broken-off points of lead, which he handles deftly, holding them between his fingernails. He carefully collects packing paper and any other paper he can get from the guards and patients in his area; otherwise he would run out of paper before the next Sunday night.”
• “At Christmas the house gives him a box of colored pencils, which lasts him two or three weeks at the most.”

He achieved a bit of fame in 1921 when he was the subject of an attention getting publication stating a mentally ill person can be a serious artist. In 1922, he was one of several subjects in Prinzhorn’s book mentioned above. The publicity allowed him to sell some drawings.

Yet that ripple did not last long and it was not till 1972 – forty two years after his death – that he was discovered by the world of art. His work started a remarkable tour through the world that included well over a hundred fifty exhibitions at locations such as the Museums of Fine Arts in Basel and Bern, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Universities of California in Berkeley and Santa Barbara, Musee Picasso, Antibes, American Folk Art Museum, New York, Kunsthalle, Kiel, Scottish Art Council, Edinburgh, Berliner Museum, Berlin, Centre de Cultura Contemporania, Barcelona, Museum of Kyoto, Kyoto, Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo and the Katonah Museum of Art, New York. This is just a sampling;
add many more museums, exhibition halls and galleries.

What about his work? Well, think an enormous collection of newsprint papers completely covered with text, drawings, symbols, poetry and musical annotations. Meticulously organized into volumes: Nine volumes of “From the Cradle to the Grave”, Seven volumes of “Geographic and Algebraic Books”, 3,000 pages of “Saint Adolf-Giant-Creation (allowing his nephew to conquer not only Earth but the entire Cosmos), six books of “St Adolf II” (his alter ego), six books of “Songs ands Dances”, four books on “Dances and Marches” and sixteen books and 8,404 pages on his “Funeral March”. Most of his drawings were part of the volumes but some, called bread art, were single sheet, occasionally sold and the basis of his modest early following.

The drawings are exhausting, epic, complex, grandiose, geometrical, adventurous, labyrinthine, mysterious, startling and based on an incredible imagination. He spent most of his mature life in an isolation cell, yet provided views on far reaching subjects he could not have observed through anything but imagination.

Here is a bit of trivia: Wolfli did his Campbell Soup Can (above) in 1929. Andy Warhol did his Can in 1964. It seems both of them liked the Tomato Soup. Warhol is the pop artist of fame. Wolfli is known for insanity. May the best man or image win.

Also interesting is the inclusion of musical annotations and hints. Recently, these annotations have been interpreted into actual performances. He is said to have inspired a range of musicians and composers. Here are a few words on the musical aspect of his work off his web site:

• “Naturally enough, the question whether Wölfli’s music can be played is asked again and again. The answer is yes, with some difficulty. Parts of the musical manuscripts of 1913 were analyzed in 1976 by Kjell Keller and Peter Streif and were performed. These are dances – as Wölfli indicates – waltzes, mazurkas, and polkas similar in their melody to folk music.”
• “How Wölfli acquired his knowledge of music and its signs and terms is not clear. He heard singing in the village church. Perhaps he himself sang along. There he could see song books from the eighteenth century with six-line staffs (explaining, perhaps, his continuous use of six lines in his musical notations). At festivities he heard dance music, and on military occasions he heard the marches he loved so well.”
• “More important than the concrete evaluation of his music notations is Wölfli’s concept of viewing and designing his whole oeuvre as a big musical composition. The basic element underlying his compositions and his whole oeuvre is rhythm. Rhythm pervades not only his music but his poems and prose, and there is also a distinctive rhythmic flow in his handwriting.”

Another curious aspect is that he apparently incorporated a detailed vocabulary into his work. This vocabulary included graphics such as birds, faces, decorative borders, snakes, musical staves and mandela shapes.

Adolf Wolfli’s creativity is only the beginning of his startling abilities. It is hard to even imagine what must have been going on in that isolated mind that astonishes a world about which he directly knew very little. There is only room here for a few of his drawings (above). Given the uniqueness of his work, I’ve prepared a short multimedia show of samples from his work, accompanied by his own music as interpreted recently. Hit the “Wolfli” button in the next segment and let the show roll.

TOC

The Case of Adolf Wolfli – A Multimedia Show

Sometimes, Outsider Artists are referred to as “Folk Artists”. Other descriptions include “brutish, rural, untrained, intuitive, menial, peasant, marginal, clumsy, naive, primitive, extreme, mental, elaborate and fantasy driven”. Personally, I don’t quite agree with any of these classifications. Considering that Outsider Art has become a commercially viable art form, some recent output might be described as opportunistic, simply bad or exploitative.

However, in the case of Wolfli, his music as interpreted in the show below is decidedly Swiss Folk style. Perhaps not all of us favor that particular music legacy but few among us can claim to simultaneously be writers of autobiographies, adventures, poetry, algebraic and geographic text books and symbolic essays plus be accomplished visual artists, draftsmen and illustrators plus be composers.

Hit the button for a rare glimpse of a long ago Outsider Artist and his quite strange world and who beat Andy Warhol to the Campbell Soup Can:

Wolfli

Finally

There are Outsider Music and Outsider Photography artists. Perhaps we have Outsider Postmen, Outsider Plumbers, Outsider Accountants and Outsider Neurosurgeons. Outsider Bloggers most likely are quite a large group. It depends on how you classify people. I suppose my point is that classifying people is a futile exercise. There are some trivial classifications that are real. If you lost a leg you are a one-legged individual. If you were born in Moscow, Idaho, you are an American citizen. But if you claim such classifications can be extended to your credit rating or artistic ability, then you are on a slippery slope.

On Photography – Those Creative Visionary Things

Visions aren’t the simplest of all things we have to deal with. Commercial visions are Big Business in a confused, surreal sort of way. Conglomerates, corporations, companies, politicians, police chiefs and postal workers seemingly can’t live without those pay-per-view mass market visions. Creating, making, faking, enforcing, stealing, distorting, maintaining and hiding behind visions can be an everyday task.

Visionary consultants enjoy visions of corporate money mountains to be liberated. Visionary self-help authors improve us while cashing our checks. Famous visionary seminar personalities smile at us from the podium, counting heads and the evening’s take. Visionary leaders can send us to war, death and hunger, chanting poll numbers. Other visionaries bore us to death. Visions are not easily shared and not always friendly companions. It’s a good thing there is help available to sort things out. Check out the small list below – if you don’t find the right choice – just keep looking. Someone will knock on your door.

How about getting expert advice by hiring Andre Agassi, Bill Clinton, Bob Costas, Jay Leno, Lance Armstrong, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Michelle Akers, Magic Johnson, Big Bad Voodo Daddy, Alec Baldwin, Dave Barry, Neil Armstrong, Angela Bassett, Ken Riley, Chevy Chase, Bill Cosby, Harry Belafonte, Wolf Blitzer, Paul Reiser, Dr. Phil, Mick Fleetwood, The Zippers, Paula Zahn, Ann-Margret, the B-52’s, Asleep At The Wheel, The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, Dog The Bounty Hunter, Goldie Hawn, Drew Carey, George Foreman, Jerry Seinfeld, Shaquille O’Neal, Tom Jones, Yao Ming, Barbara Walters, Ellen DeGeneres or perhaps Tina Turner. You will end up delighted, motivated, reborn and very broke.

About Visions

Enron had a vision – hit California widows as hard as inhumanly possible. Microsoft had and has a vision of invincibility as did IBM and Saddam Hussein. Harley-Davidson (“HOG”) has a vision of stopping those darn oil leaks. George W. Bush has many visions – none good, legal or comprehensible. Oil companies envision new holes in the Arctic, pumping the heck out of them till nothing is left but pollution, garbage and extinct species. British Prime Minister Chamberlain declared his vision of peace in our time in 1939 after giving away Europe to the evil visions of Adolf. Bill Clinton had and probably has visions that we won’t talk about in this family friendly medium. I’m not sure about Hillary’s vision or those of Monica, Kathleen, Gennifer, Elizabeth, Sally, Dolly or Paula. Etc.

There are religious visions, often referred to as miracles, such as the awakening of the dead – Jimmy Carter being a good example. Sometimes dreams are viewed as visions. Other times they are nightmares – such as the images of Ann Coulter or Geraldo. Some visions are expressed by speaking in tongues – consider Donald Rumsfeld, Robert McNamara or Alan Greenspan. Perhaps it is the mystical experience of seeing the supernatural, such as Elvis still being Big in Las Vegas, or being a supernatural being, such as Michael Jackson or the Alien II monster. It might be a person or thing of extraordinary beauty, such as Howard Stern or Paris Hilton. Some say it is the mark of unusual competence in discernment or
perception; intelligent foresight: a leader of vision, such as Michael Brown of FEMA (or his bosses), Ken Lay or Kim Jong Il.

How about the visions of sub prime mortgage companies of recent fame? Tobacco companies? Alberto Gonzales’ vision of US sponsored torture? IRS visions of you and your returns? The dreams of Iraqi refugee women serving as prostitutes in Syria? Al Gore’s vision of immortality? The Giuliani vision of no jay-walkers, no decadent art and a Disneyland America? The aspirations of Homeland Security. The Visionary Wars on Terror, Muslims, Immigrants, Gays, Science, Pot Smokers and the Teletubbies. There is no end to bad and misguided visions. Just look around you.

The Goodness of Visions

There are other kinds of visions than the bad, the ugly and the many. Those of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, John Steinbeck, Lord Byron, Jimmy Stewart and Norman Mailer (always remembered). Bono envisions an AIDS free Africa, a vision not shared by Drug Companies. Here are some more such suspects: Rubens, Miro, Aristotle, Miles Davis, Gustaf Mahler, Jack London, Fjodor Dostojevski, Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson. There’ll be more about the two last names as we go along, this being a photo blog. These visions are not bought in a parking lot like some already mentioned. Nor are they brought on by grandiosity, greed, confusion, mental deficiencies, crack cocaine or troubled childhoods as some others are.
Some things are different.

Here is one such difference. Visions associated with art tend to survive much longer than the others. Many value related observations of art versus the more mundane visions of toothpaste manufacturers exist. Art does carry a special banner. Art visions, for instance, outlast most cheese burgers, cheese burger consumers and their makers. Art may remain alive for thousands of years. Take that, Letterman, KFC or Rudy G.

About Creativity

Creativity is our second mini subject. As with visions, it is a slightly suspect subject. G.H.W Bush did not favor it and his mighty son does not consider anything as far out as ten letters (or so; 9? 11? duh). The subject of creativity is just not quite as distinguished as “visions”. There are creativity consultants – some bearded and smelling of pot – that usually can’t demand as high fees as the visionary celebrities. Not that they don’t try. But somehow creative thinking or activity ranks way below the vision thing. It doesn’t have quite the ring to it.

In some cases, creativity leads to unorthodox, independent and hence dangerous thinking. Rarely is “different” a good thing. Microsoft Office, for instance, is a given part of almost any organization. That Open Source stuff is not to be trusted except by creative and visionary accountants. Where is the business model? What’s that insane “free” price tag? What if some one expected me to work for free? Damn Commies and Deviants. And how about those crazy blog writers and their silly for-free thoughts. Free is madness. Madness is bad. Obviously, blog writers are mad. A few are creative, making them even badder.

Of course, the above are just some examples of feelings running amok. It can go the other way, too. Just consider the “Creative Writing” classes of many fine institutions that possibly are anything but creative. What about the 281,524 book titles listed on Amazon as “creative”? Bring your reading glasses for treasures such as “Creative Abundance: Keys To Spiritual And Material Prosperity”, “Right-Brain Styles for Conquering Clutter, Mastering Time, and Reaching Your Goals “, “The Tongue: A Creative Force “, “Caffeine for the Creative Mind: 250 Exercises to Wake Up Your Brain”, “Creative Concrete Ornaments for the Garden: Making Pots, Planters, Birdbaths, Sculpture & More”, “Creative Whack Pack”, “Creative Recycling
in Embroidery” and “Creative Interventions for Troubled Children and Youth”. Here are some naturals: “God’s Creative Power Gift Collection; God’s Creative Power Will Work for You; God’s Creative Power for Healing and God’s Creative Power for Finances”. If that doesn’t do it for you, there are 281,510 other titles to enjoy and prosper from.

There are Creative Investments, Labs, Commons, MP3 players and sound cards. Singapore has singapore.creative.com, complementing their vision of a spit and butt free society. How about Creative Advertising, Interactive Media, Multimedia and Creative Linux. Creative Good, Screen writing and Adobe’s Creative Suite. Most are quite creative in taking your money but perhaps not in much more than that.

There’s some evidence madness and creativity go well together. Van Gogh certainly was both. Idi Amin and Bébé Doc Duvalier were both quite nuts but not creative except perhaps in murder. Lennie Bernstein – quite sane as well as very creative. Boris Yeltsin – mad but reasonably good at conducting large orchestras without falling down too often, pulverizing his own Duma and occasionally, creative dancing. By comparison, Putin seems neither-nor everything. Sort of like a pair of empty shoes. Like those of Mitt Romney, Keanu Reeves, Michael Bloomberg, Al Gore, Goofy and Dick Cheney. Anyone home?

We’ll return to the subject of madness in art in a later post.

French chefs create meals worthy of Michelin stars but not your cholesterol count. Cops create an illusion of safety. Insurance companies claim you are in good hands while envisioning saving you 15% in 15 minutes. Reality shows, thieves and politicians demonstrate creativity in lying, cheating, stealing or writing blogs. Democrats are creatively adding taxes for those not giving them money; Republicans are creative in reducing taxes for whoever gives them money.

Creativity and vision have some things in common. One is that the combination can produce great art. Another is that no one knows exactly what either is. There are scores of definitions of both vision, creativity and, let’s throw this one in – innovation. These definitions are all less than adequate. Many are simply self serving.

But most of us recognize creativity and pure vision when we see or otherwise experience it. Such recognition is personal, biased and not always logical. For instance, Leonardo da Vinci is a great example of creativity in just about ever one’s mind. But for what? His airplane thing never flew. He is not the one that invented the Camera Obscura. Already mentioned – Leonard Bernstein certainly was creative but how many of us still sing “Maria” in the shower? How many really admire the creativity in the unusual minds of Mel Gibson, Anderson 360, Martha Stewart, Larry King, Dean Martin, Victoria Beckham, Twiggy or Tom Cruise? Yet we somehow know what creativity is. Just don’t look too closely.

In previous posts, I’ve preached how nothing is what it seems. Light is just a perception, colors don’t exist; cameras lie, eyes and brains fool us, themselves and others. Our familiar three dimensional world isn’t actually three dimensional. Al Gore did not invent the Internet or Global Warming. Hitler was not the first practitioner of genocide. Bush did not create state sanctioned torture all by himself. Elvis is really quite dead. Romance does not lasts forever. O. J. is guilty. Churchill was not a teetotaler. This blog may not exist – you think you read it as I believe I write it. Fool’s Paradise.

Visions, Light, Distortions and Dimensions

Here is the crudest possible perception of a photo: It is a static two dimensional image of a scene as it existed in the briefest moment in time. Those characterizations are not true in the simplest amateur point and shoot cases, much less in any photographic piece of art. The amateur may well successfully capture something of precious value to the intended audience. The fine art photo will probably be viewed by a wider audience, presenting a sophisticated, multidimensional and unique experience.

As part of a series, this essay contemplates what makes a great photo. What does it take to make one? I’m writing as a photographer, not a viewer. Viewers will get something out of it as well. This is not a technical how-to article. Look elsewhere for ideas on f stops, flash settings, rules of thirds, the zone system or Photoshop secrets. Instead, enjoy some rather unconventional ideas that reduce the mysteries of shooting great photos (for you) while preserving the magic (to your audience):

• Understand your very own vision. Explore it. Let it happen. Persist. Ignore the gurus.
• Photography is about distortions and abstractions, not reality. Break the boundaries.
• Light is the basis of all photography. Understand light. Knowing about color helps too.
• Photographs are multi-dimensional. Use that. Think beyond two or three dimensions.

Simple, isn’t it. I’m just kidding. It’s really, really hard to shoot a good photograph. It’s really, really absurd to reduce the magic of art into a few simplistic “rules” as shown above. As you will find out, these simplistic rules are not simple at all. But they are doable and real. Try it.

Understand that Magic

Success in any endeavor depends on self knowledge. In art, self knowledge defines the artist’s work and is reflected in vision statements and the work processes. Some people require formal vision statements, detailed plans, rules and so forth. To others, it’s all an intuitive process. Right or left brain, there is a process. The photographer who understands visions and methodical executions is much more likely to shoot and produce great and lasting photos.

Take wedding photographers, often following a written script: shoot bride; then bride and mother; add brother; add step father, grandmother and former boy friend…. Do Ceremony, Chicken Dinner, First Dance, Wedding Cake, Uncle Ben Ejected, Limo here, Limo there, Collect Fee and Get Out. Not much of a vision but certainly a partial plan.

Another extreme case is the amateur’s random path without a plan but with plenty of heart and soul. Masterpieces are not likely but it may not matter. A fine art photographer may spend years coming up with an original vision, acting accordingly in a consistent manner. The sports photographer follows the script. Portrait makers deep-six the wrinkles. The paparazzi covers the beat, avoiding bodily harm if possible. Guess who has the greatest chance of shooting something worthwhile to a knowledgeable audience. All do, of course – that’s who. Most photographers are quite similar to the monkey hammering away towards the Shakespeare play. That random path without a plan is more common than any admits. So what?

Many of us look for the middle ground as we deal with the “process thing”. Formalize some aspects to keep on track, be flexible in other aspects to encourage new ideas. The process is vital; the form it takes is personal. It pays to be a bit weary of the random path. Expecting no effort is the true loser.

Whether on paper or in one’s head, the creative process depends on a few basics. I’m sure Ansel Adams (who had to write technical books about his processes and thought patterns) and Henri Cartier-Bresson (who neither wrote technical books, nor volunteered to verbalize his processes) both, consciously or not, considered many of the points to be covered in this series.

Artistry

Artistry contains two uniquely personal components beyond that vision thing. The first is creativity. Creativity hangs out with that artistic vision. The second is innovation. Innovation makes creative ideas become real, actual works of art. Most artists create art that is unique and very different from that of the next guy. Yet the basic creative thought patterns tend to be similar. Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson created art with almost nothing in common except cameras were involved. But read some of their thoughts and you will find great similarities, not in everything but in spirit:

Ansel Adams said:

• In my mind’s eye, I visualize how a particular…. sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice.
• All I can do in my writing is to stimulate a certain amount of thought, clarify some technical facts and date my work. But when I preach sharpness, brilliancy, scale, etc., I am just mouthing words, because no words can really describe those terms and qualities it takes the actual print to say, “Here it is.”
• When I’m ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I’m interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.
• Simply look with perceptive eyes at the world about you, and trust to your own reactions and convictions. Ask yourself: “Do these subjects move me to feel, think and dream? Can I visualize a print – my own personal statement of what I feel and want to convey – from the subject before me?
• I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term – meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching – there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.

Henri Cartier-Bresson said:

• They asked me: “‘How do you make your pictures?” I was puzzled and I said, “I don’t know, it’s not important.”
• I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung up and ready to pounce, determined to ‘trap’ life -to preserve life in the act of living. Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.
• This recognition, in real life, of a rhythm of surfaces, lines, and values is for me the essence of photography; composition should be a constant of preoccupation, being a simultaneous coalition – an organic coordination of visual elements.
• If the photographer succeeds in reflecting the exterior as well as interior world, his subjects appear as “in real life.” In order to achieve this, the photographer must respect the mood, become integrated into the environment, avoid all the tricks that destroy human truth, and also make the subject of the photo forget the camera and the person using it. Complicated equipment and lights get in the way of naive, un-posed subjects. What is more fleeting than the expression on a face?
• To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event, as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression. I believe that through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us which can mould us, but which can also be affected by us. A balance must be established between these two worlds- the one inside us and the one outside us. As the result of a constant reciprocal process, both these worlds come to form a single one. And it is this world that we must communicate. But this takes care only of the content of the picture. For me, content cannot be separated from form. By form, I mean the rigorous organization of the interplay of surfaces, lines and values.
  It is in this organization alone that our conceptions and emotions become concrete and communicable. In photography, visual organization can stem only from a developed instinct.

To both photographers, the making of a photograph was a spiritual act, an inner conviction and a desire to abstract essence beyond the material world. Neither of them mentions tools or techniques except to say those are not important. I’d imagine they would not agree on whether a particular photograph is great or not. They had vastly different approaches to just about any lower level photographic technique. But the basic creative thought patterns are quite similar. Let’s consult some other photographers:

Other Photographers Said:

• “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”; “What moves me about…what’s called technique…is that it comes from some mysterious deep place. I mean it can have something to do with the paper and the developer and all that stuff, but it comes mostly from some very deep choices somebody has made that take a long time and keep haunting them.”-Diane Arbus
• The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective. What I mean by objectivity is not the objectivity of a machine, but of a sensible human being with the mystery of personal selection at the heart of it. The second challenge has been to impose order onto the things seen and to supply the visual context and the intellectual framework – that to me is the art of photography. -Berenice Abbott

Here is some more wisdom:

• Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term – selectivity. -Berenice Abbott
• “I discovered that while many photographers think alike when it comes to equipment and chemistry, there are seldom two who agree on anything when it comes to what constitutes a good image.”; “Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.”; “Photography is not about cameras, gadgets and gismos. Photography is about photographers. A camera didn’t make a great picture any more than a typewriter wrote a great novel.” -Peter Adams
• “What is right? Simply put, it is any assignment in which the photographer have significant spiritual stakes… spiritually driven work constitutes the core of a photographer’s contribution to culture.”; “What’s really important is to simplify. The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous. If you strive for simplicity, you are more likely to reach the viewer.”-William Albert Allard

Vastly different personalities, drastically different views of the world and what makes a good photo, the creative thinking remains quite similar. It got to be a point in there, somewhere.

So what’s the fuzz?

What makes art special? Somehow art is more powerful than your average concept, be it Mission Impassable IX, Chicken McSluggets, Senator Hillbilly Clanton or the new Ford Swahili or motivational celebrities. The Ford Swahili is concept tested for years, rolled out on national TV, O% Financed, Traded in, Traded out, then disappearing into a final life as Haitian cabs. Millions may be made and sold, congesting highways, polluting the air and killing some of its owners. Then when it is over – it really is over.

The art of Ansel Adams has a permanent home of sorts in San Francisco. Not many of you have a clue where that is located. Some of his photos hang in museums around the world; others are in private hands. The University of Arizona safeguards the treasure. There are no trade ins, financing campaigns, concept tests, TV ads, marketing budgets or salesmen in smart looking Kmart suits. Occasionally some Adams collection hits the road, visiting Spokane, WA; Saarbrucken, Germany and La Rochelle, France. The local newspapers may cover the event in, say ten sentences filed next to the dog show listings. Most TV reporters never heard of Ansil Adam. Yet the people show up in droves.

Some time ago, I spent a weekend trying to get into a particular Chicago Art Institute exhibition. I never made it – too many lined up in front of me, day after day. It would have been far easier to get into a Bulls, Bears, Whitesox or Cubs game or the Jerry Springer & Winfrey Shows. The Rush Street Clubs or lunching with Richard Daley – much easier, I imagine. Dinner reservations with Charlie Trotter, Rick Tramonto or Grant Achatz – piece of cake by comparison. I’m sure the Art Institute spent some marketing money but that’s not what created the draw. The art created the draw.

Ansel Adams is a name with considerable recognition. Hillbilly Clanton would love his numbers. Now, Adams did most of his famous work in the 1940s and 1950s. Do you remember which was the best selling car in 1954? The top chart song of 1942? The 1938 Senator from Indiana? The dominant fall fashion colors of 1948? The favorite milk shake in 1935? Me neither. Most of us recognize an Ansel Adams picture, though. At least I do.

Adams survived the wear of time together with Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig who died in 1941, Coca Cola (there are always exceptions), Clark Gable, Judy Garland and Winston Churchill. Adams’ 1941 Moonrise, Hernandez, NM photo coincided with the premieres of Citizen Kane, High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon and Dumbo. Bob Hope started his USO shows lasting the next fifty years. 1941 saw Hasselblad opening up a shop in Sweden. The Wehrmacht used plenty of Leica III’s. Joe Louis held on to his title six times. Those are some of the memorable events.

But did you know that Cecil Brown won the 1941 Peabody Award for reporting the news, that Jimmy Dorsey did Green Eyes and Bing Crosby crooned Dolores. Other forgotten songs include “It’s So Peaceful in the Country”, “The Hut-Sut Song”, “Cow-Cow Boogie” and “I, Yi, Yi, Yi, Yi”. Packard Clipper cars sold well as did the Hudson Coupe and Cadillac’s 2-door Convertible. The Cheerios brand was introduced. The radio show Melody Ranch with Gene Audrey, Hopalong Cassidy and the Grand Ole Opry shows all did just fine. The Emerson Phonoradio ($49.95) was enjoyed by many but is long gone. Few of us ponder the Ecuador-Peru Border War considering Pearl Harbor, the Germans just outside Moscow and U-boats sinking everything afloat. So much gone without a trace or regret.

Perhaps it is real simple. Things that deserve to last over time do indeed last. All the junk deserving nothing receive nothing and go away. Surely it’s not that simple. If that was true – would we have to suffer macaroni and cheese, Strauss waltzes, grits, yodeling or Jerry Lewis? I think not.

On Photography: Fame, Shame, Money and Cameras

Digital cameras snap, shoot and process some 15 billion pictures a year. Most likely, only a few hundred of those will survive the lapse of time. The rest will quietly retire to the big photo paradise in the sky. What’s the difference between those long forgotten pictures resting in the sky and those few that live on to tell the story of our times?

Digital cameras sell at a rate of about 100 million a year. Cell phone cameras may sell at 5 times that amount. Say a combined total of 600 million per year. Say the average camera has a life cycle of three-four years, indicating there are maybe 2 billion cameras in use world wide. Say the average owner snaps 5-10 pictures a year. That’s about 15 billion photos created a year, give or take a few billions.

Incidentally, isn’t it nice to know that the suicidal driver next to you on the road may not only have a head wrapped around a cell phone but could also capture the last earthly moments of either of you in panoramic, full color, no red eye high resolution jpegs automatically uploaded to YouTube, MeTube and ThemTube? Admired by millions before you even cool down? Ah well, that would never happen to me but it might happen to you.

Out of those billions of pixs, most won’t stand a chance to make it through history or even the day as your spouse/significant other/what-ever might gleefully point out. They’ll be lucky to survive a 1 second glance (the pictures, not the spouse etc.). Let’s be eternally grateful for that. The great big photo place in the sky is awaiting those hoped-for but not achieved master pieces.

Also disappearing are some $20 billion out of your and my pockets. I don’t know about you but after the first few billions, I hardly notice anymore.

Perhaps a success rate of a few hundred winners out of scores of billions seems pretty miserable, especially considering the enormous cost in $. But the flip side is that these few winners may provide a distant future with understanding and perhaps admiration of today’s world and its terrific photographers. Not a bad thing for a lucky photographer.

So it is good that most everyone in the developed and soon the entire world owns a camera, similar to possessing a phone, TV, dog, iPods, fresh socks or perhaps a card board box for a new roof. Any camera may produce the treasure picture. Some professionals may own several quite expensive cameras with lots of accessories. Others don’t.

Many of us discovered that some like to own the cameras we own. Thus, the rip-off business is very much alive, keeping eBay profitable. No one ever stole my socks but my cameras is a different story. Attach thou self to thy art, not the cameras. In this case, it is good to know it is the artist (owner), not the camera, that makes the great pictures.

The moral is that photography is big business, both to businesses and to individuals. It’s so common that perhaps we do not appreciate the miracle that actually creates a photo from some scattered, distorted and unruly light. Maybe it’s even harder to realize the magic that creates a good photo. This post serves to look at that issue.

Good photography has nothing to do with money spent on equipment. Your social standing, fame or skin color matters little. A $40,000 Hasselblad or the all-plastic #20 Holga both can make art. Democrat, KKK member, Silent Majority, Maoist, Country Singer – who cares – art is for everyone. In many cases, the more money spent, the less the value of the photos – the focus is on the wrong thing.

You can make a great camera out of a shoe box using a little 5c needle. There are many great photos coming out of that shoe string operation. You don’t even need film or digital backs – the image can be viewed at the back of the shoe box as a plain projection. Scaling up, one can view such an image on a wall. No $3,000 F.5 lens required.

Fame and Money

Owning an expensive car does not make anyone a good driver. A big house does not make us better neighbors. Our ever bigger pay check does not produce a better society. Photoshop won’t create Joe Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima photo. Smart bombs do not create peace nor will the $2 trillion cost of the Iraq war. The corner office does not cure divorce, heartache or cancer. Microsoft Word doesn’t make you Shakespeare. The biggest industrial base in the world doesn’t create the biggest land of happiness but the largest source of pollution.

Selling 85 million albums didn’t do Britney Spears much good. Michael Jackson apparently hides in a desert somewhere. Tom Delay, Richard Nixon, Bernard Ebbers and Ken Lay are just examples of the mighty taking hard falls.

W. A. Mozart was never rich – he fought poverty most of his life by spending every schilling he made. So did Rembrandt. Robert Capa mysteriously lost his Leica whenever he was broke which most of the time was the case. Haydn was a poor and humble court servant much of his life. So was Bach. Beethoven didn’t do much better. van Gogh and Monet never reaped to riches their works demand today. Mother Theresa didn’t lunch in Beverly Hills. My art teacher didn’t hop to London on the Concorde. Untold artists never made or make a decent living. Yet they have in common a collection of art unmatched by anything in the world of, say, Karl Rove, Ann Coulter, Bill Clinton, the Bush Clan or Alberto Gonzales.

My main “On Photography essay” mentions the artists belonging to what’s called “Outside Artists (or Art)”. These artists never achieved recognition in their life time. Most spent their lives in mental institutions. Some were homeless. They never had exhibitions reviewed by New York Times. The Art Institute of Chicago did not pay attention. Of course, neither one of these two fine institutions is at fault for this, they claim. Today, several of the Outside Artists are exhibited world wide. “Outsider Art” now is a money machine, catching new interest from dealers and curators.

None of this is new, of course. Artists always were poor, misunderstood and treated unfairly. No doubt that was true of the cave artists of the Chauvet Cave in Southern France 20-35,000 years ago. Yet their art is about all that remains from those very distant Ice Age days. This is precisely the way it is supposed to be! Art has this stubborn, wonderful ability to survive even the harshest challenges such as Ice Ages, the Religious Right, Rudy Guiliano and his various wives, police chiefs and investment buddies.

Let’s poll!!

We have, of course, always been fascinated (envious? disgusted?) with famous persons. Any numbers of businesses know that and exploit it to their little merry, greedy hearts. But what exactly is “fame”. For whom, or what, will it last beyond the next blockbuster of whatever medium?

Here’s the deal: a little poll Choose no more than four of the names, things, events below. Two of the items are your selections of the two least likely to be famous in 100 years. The other two are the ones you believe will at least retain most of their current fame. It’s a simple choice – those without lasting fame, those with lasting fame. For the heck of it, I added extra categories to the names: Foods, Events and Stuff. Select your choices from any category.

In the low tech spirit of this post, here is how: use the comment box at the bottom of this post to submit your vote in any fashion that communicates your choice. Here and below are links to that spot There is another link returning you to the beginning. I’ll do my best to keep up with your busy and eager responses. After all, on normal day, well over a thousand of you deeply honored readers pass through these pages. Bless you all.

Here are the names, in seven favorite groups – Politics, Arts, Entertainment, Misc. and to change the pace a bit Events, Food and Stuff ” – America’s Fastest Growing Poll:

• Politics: George W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Tom DeLay, Jimmy Carter, Hillary Clinton, J. F. Kennedy, Adolf Hitler, Martin Luther King. Nelson Mandela, Che Guevara, Boris Yeltsin, Barney the Scottish Terrier, Bob Packwood, Kim Jong-Il, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan & sister Bay, Sonny & Mary Bono.
• Arts: George Gershwin, Andy Warhol, Louis Armstrong, Lenny Bruce, Leonard Bernstein, John Lennon, Susan Sontag, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Igor Stravinsky, Bill Haley, Norman Mailer, Luciano Paverotti, Frank Lloyd Wright, John Cage, The Beach Boys, Liberace, Woody Allen, Doonesbury.
• Entertainment: Tom Cruise, J. K. Rowling, Oprah Winfrey, Britney Spears, Adam Sandler, Judy Garland, Jimmy Steward, Madonna, Donald Duck, Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, Howard Stern, Snowwhite, Paris Hilton, Laurence Olivier, Conan O’Brien, Batman, Greta Garbo, Bruce Lee, ABBA.
• Misc: Mother Theresa, Bill Gates, King-Kong, Ken Lay, Marie Curie, David Beckham, Albert Einstein, Martha Steward, Muhammad Ali, Princess Diana, Osama bin Laden, Al Gore, Billy Graham, Mike Tyson, Karl Marx, Bill Maher, Groucho Marx, Snoop Dogg, Riverdance, Superman, Marge Simpson, PacMan.
• Events: 9/11 2001, O. J. Simpson Trials, Global Warming, Exxon Valdez, Hurricane Katrina, Bill Clinton Impeachment, The A-Bombing of Hiroshima, The Internet, AIDS, The Moon Landings, Watergate, Tom Cruise@Oprah, iPods Releases, Playboy debut, Janet Jackson@Superbowl XXXVIII, Yahoo birth.
• Food: French Fries, Brains and Eggs, Steak Tartare, Beluga Caviar, Macaroni & Cheese, Big Macs, Surf & Turf, Onion Rings, Caesar Salad, Puffer Fish, Béarnaise Sauce, Lutefisk, Broccoli, Sushi, Snails, Liver & Onions, Veggie Burgers, Smorgasbord, Liverwurst, Fishsticks, Coleslaw, Kobe Beef, Kippers, Herring.
• Stuff: Chevrolet Corvette, YouTube, Cell phone Ring tones, Microsoft Word, GPS-In-Your-Car, TiVo, The American Express Platinum Card, Boeing B52, Alien I, II, III, Soprano Reruns, The Strategic Defense Initiative, aka Reagan’s Star War, NASA, Hum-Ve, Cocaine, i-Anything, e-ThisAndThat, Maze.

Enter your choices by using the comment box at the end of this post. Hit the “Poll” button to get there quickly. Then return here using the “Return” button. And – hey – if you don’t like my choices, make up your own.

Poll

High Tech Anxiety

If being rich and powerful does not guarantee great photos any more then using an expensive lens – what would? Surely the fantastic new wonders in our ultra technology world is an answer. Take groundbreaking technologies such as DIGIT III, USM, FlexiZone, AiAF, iSAPS, SELPHY, VariAngle, TriCod, Elph, CyberShot, Super HAD, EXILIM, Genie, DA C, DNG, IAA, Phocus, GIL, IPTC Core and XMP Plus. These allegedly major advances come from current catalogs of Canon, Sony and Hasselblad. You have no idea what this stuff stands for? Me neither and I’d like to keep it that way. If you think TriCod is the way to go, by all means spend the dough. It’ll match your BetaMax collection and that ABS training system you purchased a while ago.

High Tech creatures as we may be, utter madness is a healthy part of life. We are living in the utopia of intelligent garbage compactors, mood sensitive lighting, paperless (and people less?) offices, secure and safe computing, no-spam email, painless surgery, eHarmonized spouses, nuclear umbrellas, terrorism cured climate controlled eHouses. Well, the truth is – none of these much talked-about technologies are real. All of them have or will join the failures of Microsoft Bob, Ford’s Edsel, Dubya’s War on Terror, Apple’s Pippin, and the Tacoma Bridge, Alberto Gonzales’ war on US Attorneys, the Maginot Line, the Dean Scream, FEMA, the Domino Theory, Homeland Security, New Coke, G. H. W. Bush’s tax policy, Hillary Clinton’s Health Care Plans and just about everything ever touched on by G. W. Bush & Entourage. Or,

• As H. M. Warner, founder of the famous studio put it in 1927: Who the hell wants to hear actors talk? Or as Ajhan Chah mentioned: Looking for peace is like looking for a turtle with a mustache: You won’t be able to find it.
• To deny the reality of things is to miss their reality; to assert the emptiness of things is to miss their reality. The more you talk and think about it, the further astray you wander from the truth. Stop talking and thinking and there is nothing you will not be able to know. Hsin Hsin Ming

Of course not everything is a failure, fake or fraud – it’s just a matter of perspective. Michael Brown did a heck-of-a job in New Orleans. George W. successfully was landed on an aircraft carrier and declared his job was done. Ken Lay never went to prison. Reagan felled the Berlin Wall but never heard of Nicaragua. Record companies successfully dragged grandmothers and underage kids into court. Oil and Tobacco companies survived the adversity of various overeager zealots. Global Warming is kept an obscure, unproven and invisible rumor by George W. and other visionaries – just a part of the George W. Bush War on Science. Genocide here, famine there, nukes spreading like wildfire and Guantanamo’s popping up around the world: all are made subjects unworthy of attentions.

Drug companies enjoy fair and well earned profits from Prozac, Celexa, Zoloft, Lexapro, Esipram, Effexor, Cymbalta, Avanza, Zispin, Remeron, Esronax, Wellbutrin, Zyban, Emsam, Manerix, Tryptan, Buspar, Seroquel, Klonopin, Rivotril, Zyprexa, Risperdal, Adderall, Ritalin, Lithium, Tegretol, Epilim and Lamictal. That’s just to mention a few of the mind altering drugs on the market. It used to be that booze and opium did the job but no more of that.

Meanwhile, there are few drugs available to African AIDS victims. Countries such as the US dispose of their mentally ill by putting them on the streets as police gun practice targets. Polar bears and Arctic seals, krill, cod, lemmings, foxes, reindeer and walruses are obsolete and of no consequence. So are textile workers, aluminum workers, telecom workers, steel workers, cab drivers, sex workers, whaterveryourindustryis workers – depending on where you live and rare fortunes.

So what?

So life is tough. Artists starve. Sickos die. Bad products flop. Fortunes flip. Jobs go elsewhere. High Tech fails. Bears perish. Pills keep you happy. Pills make you sleep. Pills wake you up. Pension funds robbed. Coral reefs bleached. Bush remains President. Spouses fight, kids disappear, dogs panic. On it goes.

Remember the Chauvet Cave artists? Come on – it was just a couple of paragraphs ago. Pay attention. I mentioned them for a reason. Art survives. Almost all that is known about prehistoric human conditions comes from the art of a few cave artists in Southern France. Everything else is dead and long forgotten. We don’t know the ancient status of Gay Rights, Equal Employment Opportunities, Balanced Budgets, Wars on Terror, Evolution, Abortion and so on. We do know just how important animals were to those people. Just look at the art.

Art survives. Species go extinct. Jobs are gone. Gods, no gods, one, several, none. Chemistry here, pollution there. No morals, too much morals. Evolution, yes, no, maybe. Holocaust, starvation, killing fields. Clausewitz, Mao, Sun Tzu, Mickey Mouse. Abortion, yes, no. Bombs – nuclear, smart, dumb, too big, too small, stealth, B-52s, vested, worn, exploded by females, students, kids and Generals. Unfairness, violations, crime, corruption and high fever. Ice Ages come and go as do Global Warmings. Art survives it all. Eventually the rest dies. Art survives. The cave artists are still with us. Their contemporaries are not. Art is about us, by us, for us and will eventually be all that is left.

Cave Drawings are Art. Photography is art. Lenses are not art, neither are brand names, pixels or ISOs, ASAs, DINs and UFOs. Canon, Nikon, Hasselblad, Leica or Kodak do not make art, they make stuff. Art is people, at least in the case of a selected few. Photographers create the art – some to be immortal, others very much mortal. The few, the proud, the artists. The survivors.

Less is More

Now, let’s consider the Leica M3 rangefinder camera. It was introduced in the early 1950s and remained in production till about 1968, succeeded by a few very similar models. No batteries, exposure meters or gadgetry. Three lenses did the job. Possibly a flash but usually not. Today, these cameras catch top dollars. So do the lenses and the few accessories.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Ralph Gibson, Alfred Eisenstadt, André Kertész, Yousuf Karsh, Fred Maroon, Jim Marshall, Joe Marvullo, Sebastiao Saldago and Robert Frank were or are more or less exclusive Leica shooters. These guys produced masterpieces that will be famous as long as there is a human race.

They did it without the help of electricity, buzzwords or mindblowing features such as White Balance: Auto, Preset (Daylight, Cloudy, Tungsten, Fluorescent, Fluorescent H, Underwater), Custom and Scene Modes: Portrait, Landscape, Special Scene (Foliage, Snow, Beach, Fireworks, Night Scene, Aquarium, Underwater, Indoor, ISO 3200), Kids & Pets, Night Snapshot, Stitch Assist (From the specs of Canon’s PowerShot A650).

As far as I know, they did it without the assistance of Prozac or Wellbutrin. I’m not sure about opium and booze but I’ve never heard about anyone needing Zoloft to operate an M3. In photography, less tends to be more.

Light in the Camera

A camera is a pretty simple mechanical object. It consists of a lens, a shutter system and a back end device such as a digital chip or a film. The back end catches the light remaining after passing through the lens and the shutter system. Then the back end stores a representation of the light by chemically altering the loaded film or by writing to file a digital representation of the energy hitting the sensor chip. That’s about it. Of course there are additional elements supporting the three basic ones – light meters, flashes, digital software and much else for the gadget happy photographer. As you might have noticed, my advice is to stick with the basics as we will in this essay.

Expensive Lenses or Not

A lens is just a few pieces of glass or, occasionally, plastic mounted in a tube. It gathers light to be recorded by the back end of the camera. Engineers discovered, over the last 150 years or so, that it is not possible to build an accurate lens. Today’s lenses are incredibly complex in pursuit of the fewest inaccuracies and/or the most pleasing distortions. Even so, a lens does not pass on what it sees but its distorted version of what is in front of it. Each brand with its focal length, f-values, focusing system and even individual lenses of a particular specification/brand have different and, to some extent, measurable characteristics.

Hence, no matter what you pay, lenses are not perfect from a scientific point of view – the light coming through the lens is reduced in intensity and the light beams hitting the back end are distorted due to the optical imperfections of any lens. There is no way around that. Most of these distortions are correctable, either in a darkroom or in Photoshop (or similar software).

Here are just a few of the possible imperfections: pincushion or barrel distortion, image corners out of focus, image corner light falloff, vignetting, ghost images, flares or the curvilinear effect from fisheye lenses. More generally: there are out of focus optical distortions (monochromatic aberration) such as tilt (perspective changes), defocus (sensitivity to focus changes – related to depth of field and focal length), spherical (imperfect refraction resulting in “circular” blurs of light points), coma (off-axis points are rendered wedge-shaped), astigmatism (certain images appear doubled) and field curvature (this stands for barrel and pincushion distortion). Then, there are the optical lens color shifts (chromatic aberrations) that may be axial or lateral. Finally, we have lens stabilizers – a fairly new feature that Robert Capa and everyone else managed without until marketing geniuses decided otherwise..

The wise photographer learns to live with and benefit from the characteristics of a set of favorite lenses. Realizing the full benefits of a lens consists of long and intensive use in typical shooting situations. Some photographers claim the only way to understand the strength and weakness of a lens is to exclusively use it for a year.

Aesthetically, what is pleasing given the distortions to one photographer is deplorable to another. Lens snobs (connoisseurs) often concentrate their attention on the “bokeh” of the lens – how the out of focus parts of the image are rendered. Bokeh is generally not measurable but subjective. In a digital world, bokeh of a lens is easily manipulated in Photoshop.

Adding to the imperfections of the lens are the human errors – using the wrong lens and the wrong settings. Then the problem of low light and handheld shooting often results in handshake blur, in some cases reduced by built in image stabilizers. What about a mind stabilizer?

The Mechanical Wonders of Shutters

Then we have the shutter system. Better yet, we might include the aperture device and call it the light control system. While we are at it, let’s add the light meter present in most cameras. There are endless engineering variations of these systems. All of them share one characteristic. They are inaccurate.

Accuracy is a relative concept. The shutter and the light system may actually be quite accurate except it is not doing what you tell it to do. Say that you set a shutter speed of 1/500 second. The shutter will actually give you 1/400 (say). Typically, every time you set 1/500, you will consistently get 1/400. Shutters will most likely not randomly jump around from 1/250 to 1/700 and everything in between. Likewise, the light system may consistently set you up for 1 stop overexposure. These issues are not fatal as long as you calibrate the camera or at least identify the issues. This is not very hard to do.

Potentially a much worse issue is that of relying on automation – auto exposure, auto focus and in digital cameras, auto white point. Both work efficiently only in trivial shooting situations and actually encourage bad or at least boring compositions. Consider auto focus which requires you to point the camera at the subject and then expose. That composition is not likely to be very exciting. Of course, you can point the camera at the subject, lock the focus and recompose. But if so, why not manually focus which is faster, easier and more accurate?

A few cameras allow you to use off center focus points. My Canon has that ability and that works quite well although even the nine or so focusing points are not enough in my case. How about a continuously adjustable focus point? Is that too much to ask for?

Then, there is auto exposure which works great if you shoot even surfaces of 18% grey. If not, trouble soon pops up. Try this on: grab your camera, go out on a dark night to a nearby well trafficked road, making sure you don’t get run over. Try to take a picture using auto exposure of the oncoming traffic. First, point the camera in the vicinity of the headlight coming towards you and expose. Next, place the headlights off center and expose. The first image will be way underexposed while the second will be overexposed. The correct exposure is somewhere in the middle and only some intelligent guess work will save the night.

To help exposure issues, many cameras can bracket the shots automatically, up and down a few stops. That is quite helpful but won’t work in the roadside example – that variation in exposure far exceeds the typical bracketing settings.

Back ends – Film or Silicon

In a film camera, you load a particular film. That film possess unique features: brand, batch, age, overall sensitivity (ASA or DIN) and the more precise spectral sensitivity over wave lengths all the way down to the individual roll and how it was handled and stored from manufacturing and on. Many photographers overlook the importance of handling and storing film correctly and are punished by color casts and other unexpected issues. High temperatures and any kind of radiation make bad news. Film may be over or underexposed, either by mistake or by purpose, in which case the film is pushed or pulled, which, then, is compensated for in development.

In a digital camera, the back end consists of a chip, onboard memory and software. The chip possesses various unique characteristics ranging from resolution and sensitivity to size. The onboard software takes the raw input from the chip, massages it and converts it into an image file of some standard format, usually JPEG. RAW images may – or not – bypass the onboard software to produce an “accurate” image. Some digital cameras allow you to modify the onboard software for white balance, shooting what the manufacturer considers typical situations (”Hawaiian Sunsets”, “Cathedrals” etc.) and much else. Removing “red eyes” has become quite an industry because most camera manufacturers knowingly put the flash in the wrong place.

Of course, the image produced by the back end – film or digital – is not accurate at all. Consider the journey of light from the sun towards earth, bent and hammered as it flies along. Then the atmosphere with reflections, refractions, collisions and lots more does its trick or treat act. The treacherous lens adds to the wounds, the shutter and light system adds to the insult and the back end lets everyone down. Then add this little element to the pot:

If you are a Photoshop affectionate, you may have played – or even used – some of the fancy plug-ins that attempt to change the characteristics of various back ends. There are plug ins that “compensate” for or “emulate” all kinds of film brands. You can make your digital photo look like it was shot with HP 400 black and white film. Or Velvia color film. Or anything else you may fancy. There are other plug-ins making your film images look like they were digitally shot. Other filters make your image look like it was shot in 1853. Of course, all you do is to add more distortions to your image.

The Ultimate Camera

All we can expect of a camera is for it to give us images we like. Or images we can “improve” using various tools. We must have sufficient control over the shooting session. We can’t get bogged down in technical gadgetry. We can deal with the distortions produced by the camera. Just accept the unavoidable fact that the camera gives you a highly distorted view of the light from the subject you’re shooting. Then keep shooting.

The Ultimate Camera is the one you are happy with and gives you images you like without too much fuss. It may play nasty tricks on you once in a while but that’s life. Do be aware that automations and gimmicks will generally make your life harder. Keep it simple and shoot as much as you can afford. Equipment prices have little to do with this – $20 Holga cameras have quite a following and artistic acceptance because of the extreme amount of distortions produced. They aren’t as great if you want to be a basket ball sports photographer.

This post surfaced a lot of issues about cameras and photography – sources of untold inaccuracies, distortions and fallacies in almost every step on the road. Some may think that digital technology will make all that hassle go away. The answer is no. The reason for that is that most of the issues have nothing to do with photography. The behavior of light and how our brains process color information are items completely outside our control and do not change no matter what the camera is doing or if it is digital or film based.

The few remaining professional film cameras are marvelous technical machines, built from 60-80 years of crucifying development. They survived anything from nuclear blasts to World Wars to landing on the moon. They even survived Uncle Ben and the punch bowl. They have been used to punch out muggers, stop bullets and to drive down nails. They are stolen, fenced and stolen again. They remain faithfully capable of taking great photos as long as there is film to load and a live finger to press that shutter release.

Professional digital cameras build on that tradition but have not quite been through the hazing of their film brothers. Yet they are the result of terrific technology advances that won’t stop for a long time. But no matter how big a sensor or how smart the auto focus, physical laws do not change. Digital technology faces exactly the same issues as does film technology but is nowhere closer to overcome such issues. That is because these issues go beyond cameras. A $40,000 digital Hasselblad system does not reduce pollution in Shanghai. Nor does it correct for ice cave blues. It can’t cure color blindness. Compositions with the Hasselblad are no better than those from my father’s old mechanical monster.

Cameras give us an image frozen in time. You press the shutter button. The shutter fires for a given period of time. The back end records the light received in that period of time. The raw image is done and reflects only that slice in time. This leads us to the next subject and two very different devices – our eyes that record images in an analog manner and our brain that processes those analog images in real time. This is way more complex and sophisticated than that camera. But first: some words from the wise.

Quotes from the Wise

• I like to watch the person viewing my photographs to see if their eyes twinkle or cloud with tears. Does the smile sneak out when they were not expecting it to? Then I know I have captured emotion that can be shared. -Marsha Cairo
• A big shot is a little shot that kept shooting. -Amanda Caldwell; The mystery isn’t in the technique, it’s in each of us. -Harry Callahan; If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough. -Robert Capa; Rules aren’t any good if they don’t work! The only real rules are the laws of physics and optics. -Dean Collins
• Images at their passionate and truthful best are as powerful as words can ever be. If they alone cannot bring change, they can at least provide an understanding mirror of man’s actions, thereby sharpening human awareness and awakening conscience. -Cornell Capa
• (Professional) photographers are like hookers: at first we started doing it because we liked it and it felt good, then we kept doing it but only for our friends, and NOW we’re still doing it but are charging money for doing it! -Dean Collins
• Pictures, regardless of how they are created and recreated, are intended to be looked at. This brings to the forefront not the technology of imaging, which of course is important, but rather what we might call the eyenology (seeing). -Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing. Success depends on the extent of one’s general culture, one’s set of values, one’s clarity of mind and one’s vivacity. The thing to be feared most is the artificially contrived, the contrary to life. -Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Our eye must constantly measure, evaluate. We alter our perspective by a slight bending of the knees; we convey the chance meeting of lines by a simple shifting of our heads a thousandth of an inch…. We compose almost at the same time we press the shutter, and in placing the camera closer or farther from the subject, we shape the details – taming or being tamed by them. -Henri Cartier-Bresson
• ..throughout the history of art it has been art itself – in all its forms – that has inspired art… today’s photographs are so geared to life that one can learn more from them than from life itself. -Van Deren Coke
• The camera is a killing chamber, which speeds up the time it claims to be conserving. Like coffins exhumed and pried open, the photographs put on show what we were and what we will be again. -Peter Conrad
• Photography is like fishing. You go out in the morning with no idea of what the trip will bring. Sometimes luck is on your side and all your crab pots are full of prime Lobsters. Other times you get nothing. -Bob Croxford
• …There are too many people studying it [photography] now who are never going to make it. You can’t give them a formula for making it. You have to have it in you first, you don’t learn it. The seeing eye is the important thing. -Imogen Cunningham.

The Poll – Repeat from Above

Here’s the deal. Choose no more than four of the names/things/events below. Two of the items are your selections of the two least likely to be famous in 100 years. The other two are the ones you believe will at least retain most of their current fame. Simple choice – those without lasting fame, those with lasting fame. For the heck of it, I added extra categories to the names: Foods, Events and Stuff. Select your choices from any category.

In the low tech spirit of this post, here is how: use the comment box at the bottom of this post to submit your vote in any fashion that communicates your choice. Here and below are links to that spot There is another link returning you to the beginning. I’ll do my best to keep up with your busy and eager responses. After all, on normal day, well over a thousand of you deeply honored readers pass these pages. Bless you all.

Here are the names, in seven favorite groups – Politics, Arts, Entertainment, Misc. and to change the pace a bit Events, Food and Stuff ” – America’s Fastest Growing Poll:

• Politics: George W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Tom DeLay, Jimmy Carter, Hillary Clinton, J. F. Kennedy, Adolf Hitler, Martin Luther King. Nelson Mandela, Che Guevara, Boris Yeltsin, Barney the Scottish Terrier, Bob Packwood, Kim Jong-Il, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan & sister Bay, Sonny & Mary Bono.
• Arts: George Gershwin, Andy Warhol, Louis Armstrong, Lenny Bruce, Leonard Bernstein, John Lennon, Susan Sontag, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Igor Stravinsky, Bill Haley, Norman Mailer, Luciano Paverotti, Frank Lloyd Wright, John Cage, The Beach Boys, Liberace, Woody Allen, Doonesbury.
• Entertainment: Tom Cruise, J. K. Rowling, Oprah Winfrey, Britney Spears, Adam Sandler, Judy Garland, Jimmy Steward, Madonna, Donald Duck, Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, Howard Stern, Snowwhite, Paris Hilton, Laurence Olivier, Conan O’Brien, Batman, Greta Garbo, Bruce Lee, ABBA.
• Misc: Mother Theresa, Bill Gates, King-Kong, Ken Lay, Marie Curie, David Beckham, Albert Einstein, Martha Steward, Muhammad Ali, Princess Diana, Osama bin Laden, Al Gore, Billy Graham, Mike Tyson, Karl Marx, Bill Maher, Groucho Marx, Snoop Dogg, Riverdance, Superman, Marge Simpson, PacMan.
• Events: 9/11 2001, O. J. Simpson Trials, Global Warming, Exxon Valdez, Hurricane Katrina, Bill Clinton Impeachment, The A-Bombing of Hiroshima, The Internet, AIDS, The Moon Landings, Watergate, Tom Cruise@Oprah, iPods Releases, Playboy debut, Janet Jackson@Superbowl XXXVIII, Yahoo birth.
• Food: French Fries, Brains and Eggs, Steak Tartare, Beluga Caviar, Macaroni & Cheese, Big Macs, Surf & Turf, Onion Rings, Caesar Salad, Puffer Fish, Bernaise Sauce, Lutefisk, Broccoli, Sushi, Snails, Liver & Onions, Veggie Burgers, Smorgasbord, Liverwurst, Fish sticks, Coleslaw, Kobe Beef, Kippers, Herring.
• Stuff: Chevrolet Corvette, YouTube, Microsoft Word, GPS-In-Your-Car, TiVo, The American Express Platinum Card, Boeing B52, Alien I-III, Soprano Reruns, Cell phone Ring tones, Maze, The Strategic Defense Initiative, aka Reagan’s Star War, Cocaine, i-Anything, e-ThisAndThat, NASA, Hum-Ve.

Enter your choices by using the comment box below. Then return to the top of the post using the “Return” button. And – hey – if you don’t like my choices, enter your own.

Return

On Photography – Trick And Treat of Light

Photography is a dangerously gadget friendly environment. Stocked with hundreds of cool camera bodies, lenses and miscellaneous equipment, camera stores happily sell thousands of accessories. Add chemicals, development materials, printing accessories, computers, memory cards, special monitors and you end up with an empty wallet and far more headaches than you deserve. Or as some partners put it, all those headaches you do deserve. Often stated, boating is a hole in the water into which you throw money. Photography is a hole in the sky into which you throw not only money but perhaps your marriage, career, cat and sanity.

The first camera I used was one I liberated from my father. Equipped with a bellowed fixed lens, zero batteries and no focusing assistance, it sure was a curious little machine. Using medium format film in a body smaller than a Leica rangefinder, it took remarkable photos. Not only that, the absence of any modern convenience resulted in complete freedom from gadgets. In fact, available accessories numbered exactly zero. Those were the days.

The basic idea here is that gadgets don’t make photographs – not bad nor good ones. Photography is made possible by light. Light is preserved and eventually becomes viewable as a photograph. No gadget ever changed this basic notion. Light is about photography and photography is about light.

This post is largely an extract from my big essay on photography “On Reality 6: Mysteries of Photography“. Parts of the discussions update and expand the content of other previous posts, notably On Reality – Part 1 – Elements of Light and On Reality – Part 5 – How Perceptions and Illusions destroy Reality.

Light is not a simple matter. Here are some of the theories dealing with light: Optics, Particles, Waves, Magnetics, Electrics, Relativity, Quantum, Wave-Particle, Electrodynamics, Radiation, Radiation and Light Pressure, Spectral, Ballistics, Photometry, Spectrometry, Lasers and much more. Yet the basic idea isn’t that complex.

Light is energy. This energy is emitted by sources such as the sun. Light energy consists of magnetic and electric waves traveling through space, atmosphere and some other media. The human eyes are sensitive to light waves. Our brains interpret the light energy as representing the world around us. A photograph captures the light present in a particular moment in time.

That Treacherous Light

Nothing is more important to a photographer than light. No light, no photography. As a photographer, you must love light. You better love how light bends, creates color, enters a lens, refracts, reflects, bounces, scatters, disappears, enters eyes for processing in the brain and how it is affected by sun spots, black holes, cosmic rays, global warming, atmosphere, clouds, rain, weather, pollution, dust and much else.

All of the factors above are distortions. The original light source, the sun for most practical purposes emits “pure” light. By the time that light reaches some place on Earth and your camera lens or eyes, it is very different compared to that original “pure” light. Light from space is distorted even before it reaches our atmosphere. Then the atmosphere adds its set of oddities. The camera is a virtual snake pit of distortions. Manmade light adds other distortions – its light is differently colored than the “norm”. Our eyes and brains add more layers of distortions.

Historical Light

In the beginning, people assumed one saw by emitting light beams out of one’s eyes. Pythagoras, 500 BC, assumed light traveled from the eyes and a sensation of seeing followed as the beam hit some object. Plato, 400BC, supported the same theory. Around 300BC, Euclid questioned that eyes were the only source of light and formulated quite a bit of light related mathematics. Still, the view of the eyes beaming light prevailed. The Bible mentioned “And God said, let there be light, and there was light”, associating light versus darkness as a good versus evil issue.

Around 1000AD, al-Haytham of Egypt finally voiced the idea that light entered the eyes rather than the other way around. He concluded the sun was the source of light. He also invented the Camera Obscura although Leonardo da Vinci received some of that credit 500 years later. Unfortunately, our gentleman resided in jail, so his findings were not immediately available. Most of his ideas were based on the sun light coming into his cell through a tiny opening or crack.

It took over 500 years before al-Haytham’s theories reached Europe, inspiring Kepler to formulate some fairly correct theories late in the 1500s. Galileo, Descartes and Newton added tremendously to the understanding of light over the next 100 years. The wave theory came along through Euler in the mid 1700s. Other contributors include Fresnel, Poisson, Faraway, Planck and Maxwell, leading up to the late 1800s and pretty much the way we understand light today.

A Simple Theory of Light

Light is produced by light emitters, reflected by certain objects and consumed by others. Light is radiation energy affected by combinations of photons, atoms, molecules and other low lives. It has characteristics such as wave length, frequency and intensity, all of which vary tremendously with quite spectacular results. Most light originates at the sun and manmade processes. Light may be a single beam or scattered in a collision with some obscure molecules.

Radiation is a form of energy with intensity and wave length, vibrating around us constantly. Low frequency waves represent sound. There are TV and radio waves, visible and invisible light, radar waves, cellular phone radiations and X-ray emissions. Light as we see it and as used by a camera is only a small part of the energy waves around us. In some cases, invisible wave lengths affect film or memory cards in undesirable ways. Don’t X-ray your films. A rather extreme example is the HEMP bomb that can fry all electronics within a large radius; including your camera (unless you use a camera similar to that of my father, but even so, the film is probably a goner).

Light is created in many ways – the sun maintains a controlled nuclear explosion emitting lots of radiation energy, some in the form of light, other in the form of quite deadly variations such as gamma rays. Light bulbs, neon lights and many other manmade devices emit light on demand. Such light is usually created by the combination of energy in an enclosure containing suitable gases. Other light sources include computer, radar and TV screens which operate using cathode rays and energy sensitive coatings or by turning transistors off and on. Nuclear reactions produce lots of radiation, some of which is visible.

Heat generates light; increasingly hot temperatures transform light from the original color to a glow of red, white and eventually blue – think about your stove, fireplace, kerosene lamp or volcanic lava. Military night sights use slight heat variations as emitted in the infrared spectrum to “see” a battle field. Chemical processes generate light in some organisms: fireflies, glow worms, krill and others. Lightning produces a short burst of light based on heat.

When light falls on an object, some waves with a specific length are reflected and others absorbed. Light emitted by an object also have a specific set of wave lengths. We perceive the light of a specific wave length as a color. We thus “see” the object having a color. The reflected light is not a constant since it depends of the wave lengths of the incoming light. Reddish sunset light makes any object look reddish while the same object is bluish at noon.

Photographers and light meter manufacturers make a big deal out of incident and reflected light. Incident light measures incoming light only and then make assumptions about correct exposure. Reflected readings do the same for reflected light. The problem is that different object reflect light very differently – snow, water and any light object reflects much more light than dark soil, a black cat or any dark object. That means that neither incident nor reflected light measures result in a correct exposure. In the case of snow, an incidence measure will overexpose the scene while a reflected metering will underexpose the same scene. The only time you get a good measure is when the scene is a uniform 18% grey – a very rare occurrence.

Auto exposure cameras use only reflected light as does the Zone System. Popularized by Ansel Adams, the Zone System attempts to correct the ambiguity in light measures. In fact, that is the major point of the Zone System.

Meanwhile, the auto exposure camera relies on you to override its automatics to produce a correct reading. Nothing automatic about that, is it?

Most objects are not producing light at all. They are only visible because they reflect light. A chair does not normally emit light. The moon does not produce light – it solely reflects light mostly from the sun. There is a bit of a fallacy here because heat produces light. Heat the chair up and it will produce light. Humans do not produce light but we (and animals) have a body temperature that does cause light emissions in the invisible infrared spectrum. If we actually turned into visible light emitters we are very dead because that implies heat sufficient to make us glow red – blue – white. That would not be healthy. However, it is possible to photograph people in total darkness. All you need is a readily available sensor or film sensitive to infrared light.

Light intensity declines rapidly with distance. Most photographers use a simple formula stating: double the distance from a light source and the intensity is down to a 1/4 of the original intensity. That is an approximation that serves photography well in most circumstances but is actually wildly inaccurate. If you get close to a light source, then light intensity to distance is almost flat regardless of distance. Nor does the rule hold up when the light is focused with some sort of reflector as you may have noticed using a flashlight, driving at night or watching the beam from a lighthouse.

Light never dies. As time goes by and the light travels great distances, the intensity goes down but it never reaches zero. We are surrounded by light originating billions of years ago. Unfortunately, the intensity is way down making it impossible to see for us humans. The Hubble telescope is extremely light sensitive and can pick up very distant light originating a long time ago.

There is no such thing as “seeing” an object; our eyes only receive light emitted and reflected by the object. The light waves reaching our eyes are quite distorted. The eyes introduce more distortions due to various imperfections. The brain then makes up a “view” of the object, introducing additional distortions. The brain is easily fooled into providing false or biased views. What we “see” is not an accurate representation of the object, it merely is one deemed safe by our brain.

Light Traveling Space

The sun is our major source of light. This light is comes from a massive nuclear reaction that has been going on for billions of years. Sun light affects human health and climates. The current Global Warming crisis is caused by sun energy being trapped by CO2 concentrations rather than reflected back into space, which causes temperatures to rise to dangerous levels. Sun light produces Vitamin D and fuels millions of energy requirements. It also causes skin cancers and ultraviolet radiation aging us. The sun will very certainly cause the demise of mankind, possibly through Global Warming but for sure as its energy runs out.

Stars, clusters, galaxies and nebulae provide some light. Polar lights (Aurorae) are clearly visible in high latitude areas and seasons. The moon reflects sun light. Magnetic fields in space bend light, space storms distort light, black holes does who knows what with light and sun flares send out a lot of unpredictable and usually harmful energy.

Cosmic “rays” refer to Earth being bombarded by energy containing particles. These particles originate with the sun but also exploding stars, novae, galaxies, quasars and black holes. These generally low energy (unless you are an astronaut) particles have some limited effect on climate by affecting lightning and cloud formation. Solar cosmic rays can affect electronics on Earth such as communication devices and possibly digital cameras. Then there is the Oh-My-God particle (really) traveling around the Universe at extreme speed and containing enormous energy, given its tiny size. But that is another story.

Photography in space is quite different than on earth. The radiation levels are harmful to film. NASA tests film extensively to reduce fogging and color shifts – they tend to use film specially made for them by Kodak. Today I’m sure they use digital cameras with similar quality considerations.

Light in space is either on or off with photography taking place when light is on. With the light is on, it is very constant – no clouds, haze, rain storms or shadow. There are only two basic shooting scenarios: close or far. Shooting earth from the space station means using one standard exposure (reflected light is quite constant) and the lens set at infinity. Shooting “close ups” such as space walks require a similar standard exposure and some focusing. Photography inside the space vessel is similar to that on earth.

Space light is much bluer than on earth. There is far more ultraviolet radiation which is not visible with eyes but may impact images. Contrast ranges are extreme – consider an astronaut in a white suit against a pitch black background. The seasoned space photographer must also consider speed. Everything moves way faster than earth speed limits. The shuttle moves at 17,500 miles an hour (5 miles per second or 110 feet a typical exposure of 1/240 seconds) so panning is a necessary skill. The Cartier-Bresson Decisive Moment takes on a different meaning. In space, a photograph doesn’t freeze a moment in time. It records a sequence of movement

Atmosphere and Time

The atmosphere greatly impacts light from space. Distortions include seasonality, clouds, storms, humidity, dust, pollution, inversion layers, refractions and reflections. Other factors include time of day effects and temperature distortions.

When light beams reach the atmosphere, they scatter as they collide with atmospheric particles. During the day, this results in a blue sky because the light is coming from a high angle. In the early morning and evening with a low sun, we see a reddish sky because the angle of the incoming beams is low. Without clouds, we experience a mix of sun beams and scattered light. Snow, water and beach sand reflect light more than dark objects. That elevated light level reaches your camera and confuses the light meter. You better reduce the exposure. Ice also reflects light but amplifies the blue wave lengths. Thus, photos of ice bergs usually have a deep bluish tint.

Seasons display unique light effects. Snowy landscapes require special attention to exposure. Fall foil colors can overwhelm a landscape. Some enjoy the Christmas feeling and warm toned nostalgia. Seasonal sports and graduations are popular events. Some regions suffer extreme weather seasons such as the Arctic winter, the hurricane plagued Southeast US coasts, the mid US Tornado Alley and the Asian Monsoon and Cyclone season.

Clouds reflect the direct sun beams and all we see is the scattered light waves – shadows disappear or dilute. The water content of the clouds scatter light in a way that produces no particular color, hence the grayish feel with a complete cloud cover. The thicker the cloud, the less light passes through. Extreme weather can lead to almost total darkness and a general loss in color. The red rose is suddenly grey.

Bounces and Refractions

Refraction of light is the bending effect that happens when light passes through certain media at certain angles. The straw in a glass of water is the classic example. Refraction is, for instance, the cause of rainbows. The atmosphere provides refraction of sun beams: the lower the sun, the more the refraction. At sunset the refraction can be as much as half a degree or about one sun diameter. This explains the “oval” sun at sunset or dawn. Another effect of refraction is the “floating mountains” or “elonged islands or ships” seen on hot days (Fata Morgana). Other special effects include mirages and the common illusion of distant pools of water on hot roads. Refraction also makes it possible to see beyond the natural horizon.

Refraction in a vacuum is exactly 1.0, which means there is no refraction. The atmosphere has a refraction of 1.0003 while ordinary water refracts 1.33, quite a bit more. Acrylic glass has a refraction index of 1.49 and diamonds are at 2.42. Silicon has an index of over 4 although that probably won’t be much of a photography issue.

Refraction also is important because different wave lengths of light have slightly different refractions in different materials. This causes dispersion of the light into colors. Diamonds, for instance, are very high in dispersions causing their extraordinary “fire”. One moment you see blue light reflected from the stone, then perhaps green or pure white. Rainbows are another example of this phenomenon. Reflection, dispersion and refraction are the mechanisms by which many different kinds of prisms work – very important design aspects of your camera’s lenses.

Pollution and Dust

Atmospheric pollution affects light. Compare light in a smogged Los Angeles, Mexico City or Shanghai to that experienced on top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Broadly, there are three kinds of atmospheric pollution agents. Some reflect solar beams back out into space, resulting in less light and cooler temperatures. The sulphur dioxide crisis of the 1960s and early 1970s is a good example. Other pollutants, such as carbon dioxide, do the opposite – they allow the sun energy to pass to the surface of Earth but disallow the required reflection of excess energy back out into space. The result is Global Warming. Yet another pollutant, typically Freon, destroy the ozone layer allowing ultraviolet light through at levels threatening health.

Here are the smoggiest cities: London, New York, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Houston, Toronto, Athens, Beijing and Hong Kong. Smoggy areas include the Ruhr Area and Silicon Valley and many places in China, Southeast Asia and India. Forest slash and burn practices in Indonesia cause severe smog and smoke in much of surrounding countries. The disastrous 1952 smog in London killed 4,000 people in four days, followed by another 8,000 in the next six months. On a happier note, both LA and Mexico City have made substantial advances in controlling smog.

Apart from the health issues, heavy smog can easily make any normal photography impossible.

Dust in the atmosphere typically reflects sun energy back out and thus has a cooling effect as well as a darker sky. Sunsets tend to be tremendous. Volcanoes cause massive emissions of dust, particles and ashes into the atmosphere. The eruptions of Mount St. Helen and Mount Pinatubo spewed out ashes that traveled the world for several years. Dust storms due to drought are another major source. The Oklahoma storms of the 1930s, today’s Sahara storms and those of China affect all of Earth. Global Warming will amplify dust storms due to extreme droughts. Yet another source of particles in the air stems from forest fires due to deforestation in Brazil, Malaysia and, above all, Indonesia. The uncontrolled fires in Indonesia cause severe health problems in not only Indonesia but all of Southwest Asia. The particles circle the
globe.

Manmade Light

Natural light is terrific to photographers. Manmade light is a pain. Hundreds of different devices, lamps, bulbs, processes, materials, gases and energy sources result in the strangest of light spectra. Add that manmade light is generally there because the natural light is not available. You are stuck with the darn thing. True, you can set up your own light version with all kinds of expensive photographic lighting devices. That’s fine but really what you do is to replace one manmade environment with another manmade environment.

K (Kelvin) values and wave spectra are important to photographers. A K value is an average of a light source’s color spectrum. A spectrum provides much more information about the scene than does the K value. For instance, the spectrum may have a high wave length peak and a low peak – a ‘U’ pattern. The K value will fall between the peaks and not really mean a thing. What you need is, perhaps, double filtration to correct for the two peaks.

The K value of sunlight is about 5,800. Typical daylight is either 5,000K or 6,500K depending on if you go for the US standard calibration or that of Europe. Computer monitors are calibrated to between 5,000K (reddish yellow) and 9,300K (bluish). Digital cameras often display white balance settings in terms of Kelvin values. In the spectrum of colors, red is around 1,800K, the average is 5,000K to 6,500K and blue starts around 12,000K continuing up to 16,000K. Examples of low Kelvin light: Match flares, candles and ordinary (tungsten) light bulbs. Here are some high Kelvin items: Xenon light, analog TVs: “the bluish flicker from you neighbor’s window”.

Unless going for abstraction, photographers compensate for the local K value/spectrum to bring the image back to “normal”. For instance, you try to make skin tones similar to those recorded in regular daylight. That may be accomplished through lens filters, white balance adjustments or post production trickery. When you do that, obviously the original scene is distorted – the ugly manmade light was, after all, the real thing.

Most fluorescent and gas discharge lamps have “interrupted spectra”, meaning the spectra are not smooth curves but a series of narrow peaks over the frequency band. Such irregular peaks, often in the yellow to green range, are very hard to filter away. The only real solution is to use alternative lighting such as flash. Gas discharge lamps include neon light and high intensity lights (mercury vapor, metal halide and sodium vapor) as used in light streets, stadiums and factories.

Then there is another issue. Film or sensors react quite differently to odd light situations than do your eyes. Your eyes and brain compensate for strange light to make it more consistent with your built in database on how a face “should” look. A camera has no such database or ability. It records incoming light according to its fixed sensitivity to different wave lengths.

Shadows

Are shadows the opposite of light? Of course not, shadows are light just as is present elsewhere. They are a bit darker, that’s all. Zone system proponents know all about shadows being as important as high lights. The old film saying is: “expose for shadows, develop for high lights”. Or, in the case of digital photography, do the reverse, i.e. shoot for high lights and balance shadow detail in Photoshop.

The dynamic range of light in photography is typically measured in f stops. If the ratio of light intensity in high lights compared to minimum light is, say 1024:1, or 2 raised to the power of 10, then the range is 10 stops. There is a huge difference in the ranges different media are capable of recording or displaying. Your eyes are amazing in that not only can they cover the largest dynamic range, they also are self adjusting in real time. Other devices don’t even come close.

On a cloudy day a scene may display a dynamic range of as little as 3 stops. On a sunny day, the same scene may display a range of 12 stops. That is well within the capabilities of most eyes. Eyes can dynamically adjust to a 24 stop range although a more static range of 10-14 stops is more realistic. Most cameras (film and digital) can handle a range of about 8 stops, a considerable reduction. A typical print covers about 6 stops and a monitor slightly less. Newspapers can only display a range of 3-4 stops.

Several techniques and technologies exist to extend either the original or the displayed range. One recent example is High Dynamic Range Photography. In traditional photography, special development techniques coupled with corresponding exposures can do the trick. Consider the Hubble telescope and its ability to record and then enhance the dimmest of light.

In practical, everyday photography, the biggest factor in getting a decent dynamic range is simply to use correct exposures. Over or under exposure quickly destroys the dynamic range. One stop overexposure loses one stop of range on the high light side. Please note that correct exposure is not the same as pointing your camera at something and letting the built-in light meter (or for that matter an external meter) blurb out some numbers. Light meters are very stupid about measuring light. Practice, practice so you truly understand exposure. Otherwise, your shadows or high lights are off, were off and will stay off, blowing you out of the water every time.

Using Light

Now that you know a little bit about light, how do you use that knowledge? In generic terms, the benefit of this knowledge is that you know more about what to expect. Make that an element in your photographic execution. Photography in big cities usually means polluted air which produces a different light than that on top of Mount Everest. If you shoot in an ice cave, the light is blue, while if you shoot in a sand cave, the light is reddish. Indoor shooting at, say, Christmas, will probably produce warm, reddish photos. Shooting on a lit street may produce very strange color casts.

We do not know all there is to know about light – much remains a mystery. The current knowledge is recent or no more than a hundred years old. Yet we speak of light with deep convictions, especially in photography. An image “captures” the light, a print contains the “full range” of light, the light reflected from a face “accurately” captures the skin tones. Professional critics have a language, of their own but incomprehensible to many of us, classifying and judging light and how a photographer deals with it in his art.

A photographer can use tools to analyze light. The intensity of light falling on a subject or reflected from a subject into the lens is easily measured. He/she can even determine the color of light falling on the subject. Once the picture is taken the image can be analyzed either with software in the case of digital images or by a densitometer in the case of film. That is all fine, but no meters will ever tell the full story and in fact they may even hide the real magic.

The true story about light is not one of analysis. It is about the creative use of light presented at a particular shooting event. To create that vision, you need to realize light is not just one thing. It is a combination of many different kinds of effects and distortions. Once that is clear, here are a few ideas that you might use to figure out your very own creative toolbox. A tool box is an individual treasure chest. What is a trap to some is an opportunity to others. We are all as different as are our visions. So take the following as nonexclusive ideas, not sinister laws.

• History and Theory: The history of our understanding of light is long, colorful and by no means finished. The “seeing” interaction of eyes and brain is only partially, and very recently, understood and no doubt inaccurate. Think about the significance of all those tricky images designed to fool the brain – where straight lines suddenly look bent. Or where stationary images impossibly start to move? In your fooled brain, that is.
• Space: Most natural light comes from space. As light travels through space, it undergoes transformations, most quite subtle. It bends, gets malformed, disappears, reflects, is colored and ends up differently than expected in largely a random, uncontrolled manner. Light in its “cleanest” form is quite variable even if you reside on the International Space Station. The atmosphere is then doing it’s best to make matters even more complex:
• Atmosphere: The atmosphere shields us from a quite harmful space environment. The ozone layer filters out UV radiation. Space is filled with particles harmful to humans that have come close to killing astronauts. These particles luckily do not penetrate the atmosphere. As the atmospheric filters do their work, light from space becomes even more modified. Then local conditions change light again, either by less filtering or more. A photograph taken in Australia or in Antarctica may be subject to a lot more UV light than elsewhere. A picture shot from an airplane at 37,000 feet is subject to more bombardment of essentially radioactive particles than one taken in Times Square, New York.
• Refraction: Light bends as it passes through certain media such as water or a lens. This leads to many special situations and opportunities, whether you appreciate oval suns, mirages, Fata Morgana, rainbows, floating mountains or tilting buildings. You figure it out. Make a list of the special situations created by refraction in your shooting environment.
• Reflections: We all have many so-so shots of tall buildings reflecting wobbly images from their glass walls. And those self portraits using a mirror belong deep in that shoe box in the garage. We realize how reflections from snow and water may be controlled by polarizing filters. Portrait photographers use reflectors to create a pleasing light. Film and TV crews do the same. Daylight may be modified by fill flash to create an illusion of reflections. Reflections, in any type of photography, represent huge and under used opportunities for creativity. Think about it. Create you own sun! Make your own shadows!
• Time of Day: Time of day is an essential tool. Most photographs can only be successfully shot at very specific light conditions, whether it is due to the light intensity or its color balance. Examples: Rarely is noon light the best for nature photography. Long shadows may accentuate the emotional impact of a scene. Some animals are only reachable at certain hours. Downtown traffic is busier at rush hours. Indoors, the uses of ambient light through windows depend not only on time of day but also on the angle to the sun. At noon, light from a south facing window is quite different from a window facing north.
• Seasonal: Many of us associate seasons with specific events. You shoot fall colors as leaves fall. Or delicate spring colors as leaves return. Cherry trees bloom. Whales, salmon and birds migrate. Grizzlies wake up or retire. Frozen lakes thaw. Change your wardrobe. The barbeque is manned. The car gets its annual wash. The first strawberries show up. Taste the Beaujolais Nouveau or fresh halibut. Eat your heart out at Thanksgiving. Do the Christmas shopping. Snowmobiles, motor cycles or power boats roar. Sailboats tack. Dust off the camera after its winter slumber. Wash the windows, cut the lawn. File April tax returns. Harvest the apples, wheat and oranges. Does you vision include such items and more?
• Weather: Nature gives us hurricanes, tornados, cyclones, fog, heavy rain, soft rain, clouds, thunder, lightning, sunshine, snow fall, heat waves or cold spells. The impact on your creative situation and challenge is obvious. Weather not only impacts light, it affects the range of possible or desired subjects. Some like shooting close up pictures of tornados. Most of us prefer to run like hell.
• Pollution and Dust: Imagine grabbing your camera, crawling into your bed and under the covers. Try taking a photograph of your left foot. That’s not real easy, is it? The bloody covers filter out the light. So do pollution and dust, both of which consist of airborne particles (and perhaps gases), covering earth like a blanket. Both reduce light coming through and both modify the color of light. Dramatic pictures from hazy Shanghai are perhaps interesting but not real artistic in most cases. The thing is, not all light effects are desirable in the sense they create creative opportunities. Some are simply bad news to most photographers. Here is another example:
• Manmade Light: Speaking photographically, manmade light is a pest unless specifically created for photographic purposes. Blast that sodium light. Darn that fluorescent office light. Curse those wave length peaks and valleys. Green faces, orange hair. What is fun about lobster red skin? Well, nothing much. Maybe useful in some artistic visions, manmade light is a curse to most photographers.

There you are – you have a shopping list for your magical light tool box and a list of features to think about. This discussion of possible opportunities could go on much longer. It won’t, at this moment. The main idea still is that you are the one to create your own box, preferably by thinking outside the box. Try it on. Now, let’s check out colors which are just one form of light.

On Reality 6 Rev. – Jeff Wall Magic Revisited

Artistry contains two uniquely personal components. The first is creativity. Creativity drives artistic vision. The second is innovation. Innovation makes creative ideas become real, actual works of art. Most artists create art that is unique and very different from that of the next guy. Yet the basic creative thought patterns tend to be similar. Take Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson. They created art with almost nothing in common except that cameras were involved. But their way of describing their art and their inspiration is quite similar – means may differ but art, creativity and innovation are universal concepts.

This is a excerpt from my main Photography essay: “On Reality 6: Mysteries of Photography“. It also updates an earlier preview on Jeff Wall: “On Reality 6 Preview: The Magic of Jeff Wall“.

Jeff Wall is a photographer from Vancouver, BC. His unique art is exhibited and represented worldwide. He will serve us as a deep dive into the far reaches of creativity taken to an extreme. Jeff Wall is not your average photographer in any sense of the word. Moreover, he is quite a radical innovator. His 25 year career produced, so far, only about 130 images, sold in extremely limited editions for around $1 million each.

Jeff Wall is an example of the ultimate in creativity and innovation. He is also an example of Creativity (or Obsession) Gone Wild. To some he is a genius, to others a snap shooter on steroids. He is not included here to resolve that controversy. He is here as an example of what artistry and creativity can be in one person and how far it sometimes has to go. Serious photographers might think about what it would be like to be in Wall’s shoes and the commitment that implies. Perhaps that will foster some new ideas. Here is what he does:

• Jeff Wall uses state-of-the art photographic and computer technology to create images that share the composition, scale and ambitions of the grandest historical paintings. His works often have the formality of documentary photography. He exclusively stages his scenes, sometimes reproducing or interpreting paintings or specific events.
• He does not seek the decisive moment or a picturesque scene. Nor does he create symmetry, lyricism, formal perfection or abstraction. He does not deceive you, hide his intentions or use the work of others except as visual inspiration. He avoids pop culture images and enjoys some irony.
• Each of his images is the result of immensely elaborate creative explorations. He may spend from weeks to years on completing a single image. He never repeats himself and is always unique. He tells the obvious story or none at all.
• The subjects range from very complex to surprisingly simple, even banal “every day” slices of life. He moves from landscape and street photography to still life and genre painting, to Japanese woodblock prints and medical illustration, to Impressionist and Baroque painting.
• He views himself as part painter, part movie director and part photographer, all three being part, in his opinion, of a single pictorial tradition. Some images are shot on location, others in his studio. The process may include paid actors and consultants such as marine biologists, stage builders and Hollywood special effects experts.
• His images are very large even considering his frequent use of large format cameras and medium format Hasselblads – often in the order of 6 feet by 6 feet or 2*2 meters. Some measure 10 feet by 16 feet. The people in the images are often life-size. He can combine hundreds of images into one. The images may be prints (traditional or inkjet) or transparencies mounted in light boxes.

Here is a sample of Jeff Wall’s art – “A View from an Apartment (2004-2005)” – a carefully arranged everyday scene where the harbor in the window contrasts with the indoor tranquility:

The present material partially depends on an outstanding article, dated 2007-02-25 and titled The Luminist, published in New York Times by Arthur Lubow. This original article is outstanding. I hope my summary, additions and reorganization hasn’t completely destroyed the spirit of it.

Images

The Destroyed Room 1978

“The Destroyed Room,” shows a vandalized bedroom. It was made in 1978 as his wife, Jeannette, had left him temporarily for another man. The ransacked room contains a heap of women’s clothing. The violence directed against a woman’s possessions acknowledges feminist art criticism. Wall used his absent wife’s clothing to construct the scene. “I borrowed her clothes because we were still on good terms and she had the good clothes,” he said. You can easily detect the scene is staged in a studio – check the door and the window. There is no deception.

Wall based the image on a 19th-century painting, “The Death of Sardanapalus” by Delacroix. Sardanapalus, an Assyrian king, defeated in war, destroyed his court and harem. The influence is obvious in the diagonal lines and the rich, red palette. Wall wants you to see the reference to the painting:

Despite Delacroix and feminist art criticism, is this about a rejected husband’s anger? Wall sidesteps. “I don’t find my own experiences very interesting. I find my observations interesting. Maybe that’s why I’m a photographer. Maybe an observation is an experience that means more to you than other experiences.”

Picture for Women 1979

“Picture for Women” (1979) interprets Manet’s masterpiece “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” by changing the setting to a photographer’s studio. In Manet’s painting, the central figure, a barmaid with downcast eyes, receives a gaze from the male customer reflected in the upper right corner of the mirror behind her. The customer is located in an impossible perspective that simulates the one occupied by the viewer of the painting. The key features are the male gaze by itself, the relationship towards the female and the viewer as an active, involved onlooker.

When Wall composed his photograph, he set his camera, seen as a mirror reflection, at the center; the woman stands at the left, coolly studying the camera and the photographer beside it. The camera and its operator become the central subject of the picture and the object of feminine scrutiny. Wall mimicked the receding globe lights of the Folies-Bergère bar into the overhead bulbs, deepening the space in the photo as Manet did in his painting.

There are some common elements in the two images. But they are so vastly different it is hard to see a real relationship between the two. The warm intimacy of Manet contrasts too much with Wall’s cold, stark image. Manet shows a servant engaged by a probing Parisian male while the Wall image allure to an antagonistic relationship between the two characters without any joy whatsoever.

Dead Soviet Soldiers in Afghanistan 1992

Wall created an elaborate battle scene based on the Soviet Union’s conflict with Afghanistan in the 1980s. The image is old-fashioned, as if just exhumed from a war museum. Then you notice that this is a macabre vision: the dead Soviet soldiers strewn about are all awake — laughing, crying and fingering their wounds.

Given his propensity for finding guidance in history, here are two possible inspirations, both famous and real but without the laughing part. The left hand image is from the aftermath of the American Civil War Gettysburg Battle. The right hand photo, from the Crimean War 1855 by Roger Fenton, is called “Valley of the Shadow of Death”. Fenton was the first known war photographer. He did not show dead soldiers, as opposed by his slightly later American counterparts. He said of this image: ” …in coming to a ravine called the valley of death, the sight passed all imagination: round shot and shell lay like a stream at the bottom of the hollow all the way down, you could not walk without treading upon them…”.

The two images above are just samples of photos that bear some resemblance to Wall’s War study of the strange and absurd. There are many more similar images. Clearly, photographers have a rather morbid (sordid?) interest in the horrors of war. Moreover, the general public enthusiastically seeks out the most graphic war images possible. I know because my “Artistic Awareness System” tracks such trends using real data. Seeing both the supply and the demand side, I can’t help feeling a bit uneasy. Why are those alive so fascinated with the dead?

A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai) 1993

“A Sudden Gust of Wind” is based on a famous Hokusai print in which several travelers are buffeted by unexpected turbulence that sends the sheets of a manuscript spiraling through the air. He used more than a hundred shots in the painstaking composition of the final 12-foot-long picture.

Here is the Hokusai wood print:

And here is Jeff Wall’s version:

As opposed to the Manet case, the Wall image is great if seen in isolation. You may still ask yourself what is the purpose of mimicking (copying? plagiarizing?) another image? In this case, the two pictures are closely related – both are lovely. Looking at them close together is confusing.

Diagonal Composition 1993

Documentary-style photographs of old, ordinary and neglected spaces and cleaning areas are longstanding parts of Wall’s work. “Diagonal Composition” explore the still-life genre with inspiration from early twentieth-century art, particularly the abstract images of artists such as El Lissitzky, Theo van Doesburg, and Alexander Rodchenko, whose paintings typically comprised grids of horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines.

The image is a modest social statement: time left the surfaces scarred and degraded, symbolizing lives gone by. Wall calls it ‘the un attributed anonymous poetry of the world’. His social and activist statements are generally quite mild and subtle, perhaps in line with being Canadian.

Diagonal Composition No 2 1998

The perspective, composition and staging in this image are as elaborate as any of Wall’s works. It shows the corner of a sink, a rough wooden shelf and a pale green wall. To the right a small stick of plywood lays on top of a white rubber glove. It is placed at an acute angle to the sink. Just left of center, the dark side of the sink produces diagonal lines. The light linoleum above has traces of glue around it, breaking up the straight lines dominated by the molding, the diagonal trend of the work top, the shelf, the linoleum and the little plywood stick.

No doubt a lot of work went into this image. I find the composition lacking in any kind of interest. The perspective is too bland, especially compared to the more daring one in No 1 above.

The Flooded Grave 1998-2000

Certainly complex, the “Flooded Grave” required nearly two years of work. It shows a freshly dug, open grave filled not only with water but also with orange starfish and sea urchins. The image is viewed as hallucinatory, strange, poetic and surrealist. The scene combines images from two sodden Vancouver cemeteries with photographs of a living aquatic system created in his studio.

Wall kept a large custom-built aquarium in his studio for more than six months. Two retained marine biologists caught sea anemones, sea urchins and octopuses from a single offshore spot. “I wanted to make it just like a moment in time undersea, not a compendium or display,” Wall explains. “I wanted to make it as real as I could.”

Wall likes going to extraordinary lengths. “The artistry of doing something is just fascinating,” he says. “If you don’t like artistry, why are you an artist? It’s fun.”

After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue 1999-2000

Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel “Invisible Man” is about a black man who, during a street riot, escapes into a forgotten room in the cellar of a large apartment building in New York and decides to stay there, living in hiding. The novel begins with a description of the man’s home with its ceiling covered with 1,369 illegally connected light bulbs.

The image is an over-the-top re-creation of the light intensive basement dwelling of Ellison’s character. The photomontages are invisible without being truly hidden. The chaotic mass of details is staged to the extreme. Positioning is elaborate, precise and overdone. Its incredibly cluttered and overcrowded nature is claustrophobic: maybe the whole place will cave in. Yet there is some feeling of space because the bottom foreground is somewhat less overcrowded than the absurd ceiling.

Outside a Nightclub 2004-2005

Wall devoted a full year to “In Front of a Nightclub” – a picture of young people standing outside a Vancouver club at night. The shoot took so long because the club Wall found is located on a heavily trafficked thoroughfare. It could not be photographed as he wished. There simply was no place for him to stand with his tripod and large-format camera.

He had the club exterior – the columns and grille, the facade, gum-spotted sidewalk and concrete curb – reconstructed in a studio. One assistant worked for six months constructing the set. “Of course, you can’t see everything he did, but that doesn’t matter,” Wall says. “There is dirt and moss growing in the cracks where the bottom of the building is crumbling, but you can’t see it. The discoloration of the sidewalk is extremely accurate, and it took many layers of application. Wall placed his strobes in the precise locations occupied by the street lamps and other lights that shine opposite the real nightclub.

He and his assistants parked outside the club on several nights and took 300 or 400 snapshots of the kids gathered there. Wall checked the photos for characters and clustering he liked. Then he hired 40 extras from a casting agency. Dividing them into two groups and giving them general directions, he photographed them over the course of a month on alternate nights. “People’s metabolism is different at night, their coloring is different,” he explains. For each group he finished with only one frame that satisfied him. “You only need one,” he points out. He digitally combined the two photos of the crowd with a third one of the building into his final picture.

Men Waiting 2006

On a damp winter morning, 20 well-used men hung at a bleak Vancouver cash corner. Wall stands behind a tripod-mounted camera, patiently waiting for his vision of men waiting at a cash corner to come true. He had hired the laborers at an actual cash corner where the men normally hung out and bused them to the shooting location, a cash corner stand-in. The men waited for Wall to determine that the rain had become too heavy, the light too bright or the prevailing mood too restless for him to obtain the feeling of suspended activity and diffused expectancy that he sought in the picture.

He was prepared to come here, day after day, for several weeks. On any given morning, typically after three hours elapsed, he would adjourn until the next day. The men received their paychecks of 82 Canadian dollars and got back into the bus. “Men Waiting” is a small-scale Wall production in spite of its cast of 20 laborers plus Wall himself, assistants and equipment, its two-week shoot and on-the-street location. The laborers alone ended up costing as much as $35,000.

The risk is that Wall will overly manipulate the hired hands, transforming them into puppets. Asked about the laborers, he said: “My pictures are obviously related to my own life. Why would I be interested in them otherwise? I’m not a sociologist. I must identify with these figures, even though I often don’t like them, I don’t even feel that sympathetic to them. But I must identify with them in some way because they keep coming into pictures that I want to make.” Wall was fascinated by “the physical animal energy that is present on the street and waiting to be disposed of.”

He plans for all contingencies and commands a shoot start to finish. Yet photography is never fully controllable. Unforeseen events will occur. Some events are beneficial, such as the recompose of “Man Waiting”, which, even so, took several days to create:

• In spite of his elaborate planning for “Men Waiting”, he changed the frame of the picture. One of the reasons he liked the location he had selected was a scraggly little tree (in the middle right of the final image) that had shed its leaves for winter. Further down the street was another tree, a giant fir (in the extreme right of the final image). After taking five days to find his camera position, he concluded that he couldn’t eliminate the unasked-for fir from the picture, but by including only part of the trunk, he would minimize it.
• On one of the first days of the shoot, the rain increased, and several of the men huddled beneath the evergreen for shelter. When that happened, Wall realized that the fir had a role to play in the picture after all. He changed the camera setup to encompass the entire trunk, allowing the crowd of men to continue to the edge of the picture and, by implication, beyond. “That tree bothered me all along,” he told me. “If it hadn’t rained hard, I might never have noticed it. Now I’ll just include it. It’s stronger for it.”

Throughout the shoot, he found undirected details — an umbrella stuck in the mud, a hooded head lowered — and choose to keep some. Speaking on a walkie-talkie, he would ask his three assistants to adjust the position and behavior of the waiting men. The final picture was structured by his artistic sense, but did account for the unpredictability of his living subjects. “You can’t make these things up,” he said.

The Storyteller:

What do the horizontal power lines do to the composition? Presumable related to trains of some sort, they break the composition without creating tension. The one or two tiny groups of story listeners fit well but the power lines destroy the picture. That’s my opinion.

Mimic:

This is a picture with a well stated, clear and relevant message. An immigrant “foreigner” worker is mocked racially by a redneck, trashy “citizen”. The worker knows well there is nothing to be done; it’s a battle he cannot win. The redneck knows well what he can get away with.

Techniques

Paintings

He makes photographs that are intended to be experienced the way paintings are. “Most photographs cannot get looked at very often. They get exhausted. Great photographers have done it [their masterpiece] on the fly. It [the on the fly opportunity] doesn’t happen that often. I just wasn’t interested in doing that [the on the fly shooting]. I didn’t want to spend my time running around trying to find an event that could be made into a picture that would be good.”

Insomnia:

The art that he liked best, from the full-length portraits of Velázquez and Manet to the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock and the floor pieces of Carl Andre, engaged the viewer on a lifelike human scale. The paintings could be walked up to (or, in Andre’s case, onto) and moved away from. They held their own, on a wall or in a room. “If painting can be that scale and be effective, then a photograph ought to be effective at that size, too,” Wall concluded.

Jell-O:

In Spain, “I saw the Velázquez, Goya, Titian — I loved it and wanted to be part of it somehow,” he said. “Every time the bus stopped, you were looking out the window, and there was a sign in a light box. I began to think, it’s luminous, Velázquez was luminous and I’ll try it.” When he emerged in 1978 as a mature artist, he presented photographs equal in status with paintings. In sheer size, they were measured in feet, not inches.

Large Size and Staging

He dislikes the way photographs are typically exhibited as small prints. “I don’t like the traditional 8 by 10,” he says. “They were done that size as displays for prints to run in books. It’s too shrunken, too compressed. When you’re making things to go on a wall, as I do, that seems too small.” Many of his images exceed several feet in any direction. Some are over 10 or even 15 feet wide.

An Octopus:

He desires the sharpness of large formats which comes close to what the ever-adjusting and compensating human eye perceives. The size of his images requires the highest possible level of sharpness. Such precision eludes the documentary photographer who shoots split-second moments. We know the grainy, blurry images of Frank, Weegee, Cartier-Bresson and somehow deduct these technical deficits are authentic. Grainy, blurry pictures may convey a desired mood, but they do not reflect authenticity.

Some Beans:

Early on, Wall sidestepped the challenges faces by street photographers: how to impose a technically satisfying formal composition on a subject that has to be captured instantaneously. Rather than hunt for material to photograph, he manufactured all his subject matter in the studio.

Very soon he moved out of the studio to shoot landscapes and street scenes on location. He looks for “the indeterminate American look”, which he says he can find by not looking for anything in particular. “You have to forget about the idea of the spirit of the place,” he says. “It’s one of the big, consoling myths of people who live nowhere.”

Using a large-format camera on a tripod severely constrains street photography. Beginning in 1982, he circumvented the problem by re-creating subjects using that he calls “cinematographic photography.” Typically, he would see something, often a small event with compressed human drama and political overtones. Rather than snap it, he would go home, think about this glimpse of everyday life or popular culture. If he wants to proceed, he hires performers to re-enact the scene.

Stumbling:

Does staging a street scene and then photographing it as if it had “really” occurred betray honesty in photography? “Not necessarily”, Wall says. “What an artist can do with photography isn’t bounded by the documentary impulse”. He points out that in visual arts only photographers and cinematographers are criticized for staging rather than directly recording scenes. Other arts always offer re-creations of the outside world.

Light boxes

By the late 1970s, Wall worked feverishly on the light-box transparencies that still are part of his artistic career. His images of the late 1970s and 1980s were enormous transparencies lit from behind by fluorescent bulbs. The “light box” format is similar to that typically used for advertising. Like a commercial light box, a Wall photograph grabs the viewer with its glowing presence and, unlike an advertisement, hold viewers with its richness of detail and harmony.

His use of a light-box format derived from advertising suggests a possible critical analysis of consumer culture: but no. “I was not especially interested in doing a critique of advertising — it was an accident.” His concern with the physical beauty of his images also set him apart from most of the contemporary avant-garde photographers and closer to the painters he admires.

Cardplayers:

He did his first one-man show in late 1978. He presented his exhibition as an “installation” rather than as a photography show. He put “The Destroyed Room” in the gallery front window, enclosed with a plasterboard wall. You could see it only from outside, where, especially after dark, it resembled an actual vandalized room. Before the show closed, the piece was purchased by the National Gallery of Canada, a great send-off to his career.

Digitalization and Special Effects

Wall no longer restricts himself to light boxes. Over the last decade, he acquired four small buildings in a drug-infested downtown Vancouver district. There, helped by two full-time assistants and others as needed, he develop and print all of his work.

The Vampires’ Picnic:

In his studio he recently staged a vampires’ lawn picnic and, extravagantly, a conversation among resurrected Soviet soldiers slain in Afghanistan. He imported Hollywood special-effects consultants as part of his team. “I used up a lot of blood,” he says. He quickly grew tired of these outlandish subjects, but computer technology remains an important part of his artistic arsenal. By converting his film exposures into digital files, Wall can then superimpose them invisibly and endlessly, often assembling a final image on film from many different shots.

He has begun making large, beautifully gradated black-and-white photographs on paper in the mid-’90s and more recently inkjet color prints. Many recent images, such as “Men waiting”, “Volunteer” and “Citizen” are presented in black and white, breaking his past reliance on color.

Volunteer:

Citizen:

Critique

Jeff Wall has a strong following both from the general art enthusiasts to professional curators and gallery operators. Some say his work revolutionized their view of art. But not everyone loves Jeff Wall’s work. One critical pool finds his obsessive micro management plain out of sight, not to mention a monumental waste of resources. Other critics find that his work lacks in depth and simply consists of elaborate snap-shots. Here is Walter Robinson:

• “The critics love his light boxes, which I think are obnoxious, and say his photos are beautiful, when I think they look like big snapshots — but I guess that’s the point of their being so laboriously constructed.”
• “Many of his images, much reproduced, are less than thrilling. ‘A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)’ is a yawn, as is his illustration of a scene from Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’, a set piece showing a shabby apartment with hundreds of light bulbs on the ceiling. ‘Dead Troops Talk’, a scene of fallen soldiers in Afghanistan, is in poor taste, to say the least.”

Other critics chime in:

Another critic says: he is an intellectually ambitious, morally earnest perfectionist navigating through avant-gardism. A control freak who smothers the life out of his picture, hung up on his process, he is seduced by the elaborateness of his techniques and the gorgeousness of his images. The effort to make viewers think hard in a Modernist way about the gaps and distortions inherent in perception is ignored.

Milk:

Another critic claims: his shift into narrative representation and pop versions of subject matter in the light boxes was a strategy to make conceptual art more communicative. It eventually became so grand and so glamorous, aimed so much at redeeming pictorial traditions, that the original intention was lost. Wall tries to do as a 21st-century photographer what 19th-century painters like Manet and Seurat did in their elaborate depictions of contemporary life which is a historically absurd undertaking. “His claim to be a new history painter is very problematic for me,” a critic says. “The pictures have become very overwhelmingly spectacular objects. There is a kind of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk quality. You have the set and the narrative; all we are waiting for is the sound.”

My View

What do I think? First, to me it is impossible not to admire the immense creativity or at least magnitude of his visions and execution. Second, the dedication of spending weeks or years to find the perfect or near perfect image is a lesson to every photographer. Third, the combination of many expressive means, from large format cameras to digitalization to light boxes and huge prints with the references to other art forms is quite humbling; at least it is to me.

Just about everything he does makes sense – if you are him. His techniques are not for everyone but they should provide food for thought to any photographer. After all, no one imposes any techniques on anyone else. Although his influence on individual photographers is quite substantial, I won’t adopt his ways in my own work except as an inspiration to try new things.

A Fight on the Sidewalk:

My reaction to what counts – his images – is mixed. Admiring what it took to get there is not the same as falling in love with the result. The extreme staging leaves me with a feeling of aloofness and lack of spontaneousness. It is too deliberate and intellectual even if he intended it that way. Some of his subjects leave me wondering if they are worth the attention.

Why do I need to look at “A Fight on the Sidewalk” (above)? Especially if it is staged: the visual impact of the fight is lukewarm at best. To me, it could equally well be called “People Asleep on the Sidewalk”. The Rocky movies are safe in the fight department. Check out this movie scene (below) for more drama (I know – Rocky isn’t art and this scene is as staged as Wall’s is- but what the heck?):

His idea that photography should have equal standing to painting is fine even if it seems a bit defensive. Making photos look like paintings is by no means a new idea. It was very popular with British Victorian photographers in the mid to late 1800s, for instance. I can’t understand why that means the photos need to recreate an actual painting. What do the links to Delacroix, Manet or Robinson contribute to his images? Are the subjects “better” or more interesting because of these links? I doubt it. Speaking of influences:

Overpass:

The Overpass image above reminds me a bit of a Dorothea Lange (California 1934) Depression and Farm Agency photo (below) showing two men, clearly vagrants, walking down a dusty road, next to a huge roadside billboard, being the perfect juxtaposition, saying “Next Time, Try the Train”. That image is powerful indeed. The frustration, inequity and poverty of that piece of history are all perfectly clear. But the “Overpass” (above) does not have that power although it seems clear Lange’s photo is the blueprint. But where is the tension, contradiction or juxtaposition? Where are these guys heading? To the Hilton? To their annual Hawaii vacation? To pick apples in Western Washington? To deportation to Somalia? To a Soviet Gulag? Who knows and who cares.

What exactly does “Men Waiting” tell us? I find the “Picture for Women” to be of little interest, especially when compared to Manet’s picture. “The Flooded Grave” is impressive in its many contradictions – but why? How are sea anemones, sea urchins and octopuses related to a Vancouver graveyard? A few subjects are, to me, utterly banal and uninteresting, such as “Overpass” and “The Storyteller”. Perhaps, so are those of other avant-gardists including, say, Andy Warhol with whom, I think, Wall has more in common than he has with Delacroix.

I do like quite a few images for what they are, not for the elaborate staging or art links: “Outside the Nightclub” is great, as are the “Milk” and “Mimic” images. I enjoy the “Octopus” and “Some Beans” scene and the “Sudden Gust of Wind”. The original “Diagonal Composition” is much more interesting than the later No. 2. “The Vampires Picnic” is intriguing.

I do not believe painting, cinematography and photography are of the same pictorial tradition, not in execution or in vision. Ultimately a photograph is the result of releasing a shutter, freezing a moment. That’s the uniqueness of photography. Combining a bunch of such moments into a new image perhaps resembles the brush strokes of a painting. It still does not change that frozen, unique moment that makes photography a standout.

That concludes the discussion of Jeff Wall’s work.

On Reality 6: Mysteries of Photography

What’s mysterious about photography? The first photos were shot about 180 years ago. The conceptual process never changed: have light, see things, point camera, release shutter, make stored image visible and view results. Today’s tools are different and possibly more convenient. But tools do not make good photographs. The more sophisticated the gadgets, the greater the risk of misuse and disastrous results.

Great art does not depend on tools, technology, costly equipment, techniques, zone systems, rules-of-thirds, chemicals, digital chips, net worked cameras or any of these fabulous ways to divert attention from the real thing. Art does not depend on $30,000 digital backs or $15,000 lenses. Great art is the reflection of a laborious, deep and personal vision as realized by and flawlessly executed by a motivated, creative and original artist.

Art is about art. It’s a state of mind. It is a vision. It is mysterious and magical. It engages and spellbinds. It’s about inner life. It is about honesty and self discovery. It informs and challenges. It exposes, proves and documents. It can be vulgar, ugly, hateful, absurd, beautiful and poetic. That’s art. Let’s explore art.

The Mystery of Photography

The mystery of a great photograph is why and how it touches the photographer and especially an audience. Such a photograph is not just a piece of paper treated with light and chemicals or covered with ink applied using a stream of computer bits. It truly is a piece of magic, as is any real piece of art.

It is often easy to look at a photo and exclaim “this is a great shot”. It’s much harder to say why that is the case. Then it’s even harder to go out and actually shoot a great photo, especially if you don’t know what makes a good photo in the first place.

The mysterious magic of a great photo does not just happen in a random fashion. You don’t suddenly take a walk and come back with a great photo. For one thing, you need to take a camera along, meaning you have some purpose which is a good start. Bringing that camera along may be subject to a deliberate and soul searching artistic vision. Then the probability of returning with some decent shots improves tremendously. Therein lays the subject of this essay.

The Metaphysical Process

To any photographer or artist, a soul searching vision is the life line. Consider Ansel Adams versus Henri Cartier-Bresson, both masters with hugely different, equally creative visions. One was a large format nature photographer and technical guru, the other a Leica street photographer and painter. One was deliberate in approach to the nth degree, the other hoped to encounter the split-second Decisive Moment. One took hours to set up a shot, the other achieved success in fractions of seconds. One spent endless time in the darkroom; the other viewed a simple camera as his only tool, spending no time in darkrooms. Both are legends. Both produced magic. Both approaches are valid.

However different these two approaches might seem, they share features such as: the images present a multi faceted, relevant and unique experience that reflects the artist’s creative vision and flawless execution. Hang on for details on this somewhat bold statement.

Visions, Light, Distortions and Dimensions

Here is the crudest possible perception of a photo: It is a static two dimensional image of a scene as it existed in the briefest moment in time. That characterization is not true in the simplest amateur point and shoot cases, much less in any photographic piece of art. The amateur may well successfully capture something of precious value to an audience. The fine art photo will probably be viewed by a wider audience, presenting a sophisticated, multidimensional and unique experience.

This essay contemplates what makes a great photo and what it takes to make one. I’m writing as a photographer, not a viewer. Hopefully, a viewer will get something out of it as well. This is not a technical how-to article. Look elsewhere for ideas on f stops, flash settings, rules of thirds, the zone system or Photoshop secrets. Instead, enjoy some rather unconventional ideas that reduce the mysteries of shooting great photos (for you) while preserving the magic (to your audience):

• Understand your vision. Explore it. Let it happen. Persist.
• Photography is about distortions, not reality. Use that.
• Light is the basis of all photography. Understand light.
• Photographs are multi-dimensional. Use that.

Simple, isn’t it. I’m just kidding. It’s really, really hard to shoot a good photograph. It’s really, really absurd to reduce the magic of art into a few simplistic “rules” as shown above. As you will find out, these simplistic rules are not simple at all. But they are doable and real.

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About This Essay

The essay is split in two main parts: The Prerequisites and The Toolbox. The Prerequisites part discusses the various steps and thoughts that make creative and innovative photography possible. The Toolbox part reveals some rather unconventional tools that nevertheless are crucial in creative photography. The goal is to understand what the heck I meant above in the introduction:

• The images present a multi faceted, relevant and unique experience that reflects the artist’s creative vision and flawless execution.

This is a very big post, containing the equivalence of almost 90 text pages, not counting the space of the images. Considering it might be hard to get through it all in one sitting, you may want to bookmark this page – in your browser or by using the bookmark button below.

I’ve included a navigation system to make it easier to get to whatever you may be mostly interested in. The Table of Content below is one part of that system. The other part is the many “TOC” buttons you’ll find after each section. Here is a sample:

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Table of Contents

• On Reality 6: Mysteries of Photography
• • About This Essay
  • Images in This Essay
  • Prerequisites – Understand the Magic
  • • Be Artistic
    • • Creativity: Visionary Ideas
      • The Case of Adolf Wolfli – A Multimedia Show
      • The Case of Jeff Wall
      • • Images
        • Techniques
        • Critique
        • My View
      • Innovation: Make It Happen
    • See Start to Finish, Act Accordingly
    • • Who: The Human Angle
      • Why: Rewards for the Industrious
      • Where: Spatial Abstractions
      • When: The Time Factor Where None Exists
      • What: Context Layered on Contexts
    • The Magical Photograph – Quotes by the Wise
  • Execution – Build the Mysterious Toolbox
  • • Distorted Light, Distorted Reality
    • • The Treacherous Light
      • Colors that Aren’t But Light
      • Light in the Camera
      • More Quotes from the Wise
      • Light in Your Head
    • Dimensions and Photography?
    • • Images in This Section
      • What’s a Dimension?
      • Combining Dimensions
      • Rocket Science – Spatial Dimensions
      • Non-Spatial Human Dimensions
      • Dimensions and Art
    • The Magical, Mysterious Toolbox

    Final Words from the Wise

• Next and Previous

Images in This Essay

There are many images in this post. After all, this is a photo blog and I am a professional working photographer. The purposes of the chosen images are two fold: to demonstrate the mysterious magic of photography and to show examples of the various ideas in the essay. Some photographs are my own, others from a broad spectrum of photographers, most famous, some not.

You will notice many of the photos are film based and black and white. That is partly due to my own preference of this medium, but also because for historical reasons – many of the photographers lived in the fantastically creative black and white era. But the discussions make no distinction between film and digital, color or black and white. On the level of this essay, such distinctions are immaterial.

In a couple of places I illustrate the ideas of text using non photographic art – mostly paintings and some sculpture. This is not for convenience but to point out the parallels of various art forms. There are many media but art is art.

This blog, its design, text content (except quotes from others) and my own images and graphs are copyright © Leading Design, Inc 2006-2007. All Rights Reserved. I make absolutely no claims on images or quotes originating in other sources. All image copyrights belong to its owners.

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Prerequisites – Understand the Magic

Success in any endeavor depends on self knowledge. In art, self knowledge often defines the artist’s work and is reflected in vision statements and the work processes. Some people require formal vision statements, detailed plans, rules and so forth. To others, it’s all an intuitive process. Right or left brain, there is a process. The photographer who understands visions and methodical executions is much more likely to shot and produce great and lasting photos.

Take wedding photographers, often following a written script: shoot bride; then bride and mother; add brother; add step father, grandmother and former boy friend…. Do Ceremony, Chicken Dinner, First Dance, Wedding Cake, Uncle Ben Ejected, Limo here, Limo there, Collect Fee and Get Out. Not much of a vision but certainly a partial plan.

Another extreme case is the amateur’s random path without a plan but with plenty of heart. Finally, consider the fine art photographer who spent years coming up with an original vision and who acts accordingly in a consistent manner. Guess who has the greatest chance of shooting something worthwhile to a knowledgeable audience.

Many of us look for the middle ground as we deal with the “process thing”, as the elder Bush might have put it. Formalize some aspects to keep on track, be flexible in other aspects to encourage new ideas. The process is vital; the form it takes is personal.

Whether on paper or in one’s head, the creative process depends on a few basics. I’m sure Ansel Adams (who had to write technical books about his processes and thought patterns) and Henri Cartier-Bresson (who neither wrote technical books, nor volunteered to verbalize his processes) both, consciously or not, considered many of the points to be covered below.

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Be Artistic

Artistry contains two uniquely personal components. The first is creativity. Creativity drives artistic vision. The second is innovation. Innovation makes creative ideas become real, actual works of art. Most artists create art that is unique and very different from that of the next guy. Yet the basic creative thought patterns tend to be similar. Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson created art with almost nothing in common except cameras were involved. But read some of their thoughts and you will find great similarities, not in everything but in spirit:

Ansel Adams said:

• In my mind’s eye, I visualize how a particular…. sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice.
• All I can do in my writing is to stimulate a certain amount of thought, clarify some technical facts and date my work. But when I preach sharpness, brilliancy, scale, etc., I am just mouthing words, because no words can really describe those terms and qualities it takes the actual print to say, “Here it is.”
• When I’m ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I’m interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.
• Simply look with perceptive eyes at the world about you, and trust to your own reactions and convictions. Ask yourself: “Do these subjects move me to feel, think and dream? Can I visualize a print – my own personal statement of what I feel and want to convey – from the subject before me?
• I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term – meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching – there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.

Henri Cartier-Bresson said:

• They asked me: “‘How do you make your pictures?” I was puzzled and I said, “I don’t know, it’s not important.”
• I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung up and ready to pounce, determined to ‘trap’ life -to preserve life in the act of living. Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.
• This recognition, in real life, of a rhythm of surfaces, lines, and values is for me the essence of photography; composition should be a constant of preoccupation, being a simultaneous coalition – an organic coordination of visual elements.
• If the photographer succeeds in reflecting the exterior as well as interior world, his subjects appear as “in real life.” In order to achieve this, the photographer must respect the mood, become integrated into the environment, avoid all the tricks that destroy human truth, and also make the subject of the photo forget the camera and the person using it. Complicated equipment and lights get in the way of naive, un-posed subjects. What is more fleeting than the expression on a face?
• To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event, as well as of a precise organisation of forms which give that event its proper expression. I believe that through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us which can mould us, but which can also be affected by us. A balance must be established between these two worlds- the one inside us and the one outside us. As the result of a constant reciprocal process, both these worlds come to form a single one. And it is this world that we must communicate. But this takes care only of the content of the picture. For me, content cannot be separated from form. By form, I mean the rigorous organisation of the interplay of surfaces, lines and values.
  It is in this organisation alone that our conceptions and emotions become concrete and communicable. In photography, visual organisation can stem only from a developed instinct.

To both photographers, the making of a photograph is a spiritual act, an inner conviction and a desire to abstract essence beyond the material world. Neither of them mentions tools or techniques except to say those are not important. I’d imagine they would not agree on whether a particular photograph is great or not. They had vastly different approaches to just about any lower level photographic technique. But the basic creative thought patterns are quite similar. Let’s consult some other photographers:

Other Photographers Said:

• “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”; “What moves me about…what’s called technique…is that it comes from some mysterious deep place. I mean it can have something to do with the paper and the developer and all that stuff, but it comes mostly from some very deep choices somebody has made that take a long time and keep haunting them.”-Diane Arbus
• The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective. What I mean by objectivity is not the objectivity of a machine, but of a sensible human being with the mystery of personal selection at the heart of it. The second challenge has been to impose order onto the things seen and to supply the visual context and the intellectual framework – that to me is the art of photography. -Berenice Abbott

Here is some more wisdom:

• Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term – selectivity. -Berenice Abbott
• “I discovered that while many photographers think alike when it comes to equipment and chemistry, there are seldom two who agree on anything when it comes to what constitutes a good image.”; “Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.”; “Photography is not about cameras, gadgets and gismos. Photography is about photographers. A camera didn’t make a great picture any more than a typewriter wrote a great novel.” -Peter Adams
• “What is right? Simply put, it is any assignment in which the photographer have significant spiritual stakes… spiritually driven work constitutes the core of a photographer’s contribution to culture.”; “What’s really important is to simplify. The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous. If you strive for simplicity, you are more likely to reach the viewer.”-William Albert Allard

Vastly different personalities, drastically different views of the world and what makes a good photo, the creative thinking remains quite similar. It got to be a point in there, somewhere.

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Creativity: Visionary Ideas

Creativity is an inner engine that makes you discover unique ideas and concepts. Creative forces push you towards identifying new links between existing ideas or concepts. Creativity relies on motivation, divine intervention, cognitive processes, spirituality, social environments, your personality traits and chance. Creativity works with your genius, mental illness and humor. So goes one of many definitions.

No one agrees on a precise, general definition. No one seems able to measure this magical Creativity. Scientifically, no one knows if you are creative or not although intuitively most can tell right off. Someone made up a list of about sixty definitions of creativity. Most research suggests creativity and intelligence have very little in common. You can be a creative fool or an uncreative rocket scientist.

Pseudo-Creative Industries sell creative new age advertising, exotic car designs, unusual forks and self help books about being creative. Other industries want to monetize your creative ideas, inventions and art. Celebrity seminars, photography schools and art classes happily teach you their new, improved view of creativity, against a fee.

Mental Creativity

Mental illness, in particular manic-depression, and creativity seem to go well together. Famous examples include Ernest Hemingway, Robert Schumann, Virginia Woolf, Michelangelo, Diane Arbus and Lord Byron.

“Outsider Art” refers to the work of self-taught mentally ill or disadvantaged artists such as Delaine La Bas, Adolph Wolfli, Nek Chand, Ferdinand Cheval, Henry Darrger, Madge Gill, Alexander Lobanov, Martin Ramirez, Achilles Rizzoli and Judith Scott. The 1922 book “Artistry of the Mentally Ill” by Hans Prinzhorn identified the Ten Schizophrenic Masters: Karl Brendel, August Klotz, Peter Mogen, August Neter, Johann Knupfer, Victor Orth, Herman Bell, Heinrich Welz, Joseph Sell and Franz Pohl.

The six images close by in this section represent works by Outsider Artists. The top pencil drawing of a woman is by Madge Gill, an English artist guided by a spirit. She did thousands of drawings like the one shown here. The woman in the drawing may be Gill herself or a stillborn daughter.

Martin Ramirez, a Mexican who lived in California, did the Man on a Horse. Ramirez suffered from schizophrenia. After his death, the painting became quite valuable. This is unusual: most of these artists are or were institutionalized with their work neither shown publicly nor sold. Even after death, when often their work first came to light, little is made public.

The drawing of a huge dog with his tiny master is next. No doubt based on an accurate view of the world according to most dogs, the artist is Bill Traylor. He was born a slave in 1856 on a plantation near Benton, Alabama. He remained at the plantation till 1934, described as an illiterate farmer with some English vocabulary. He then worked on road gangs and was essentially homeless. So how come this man is viewed as one of the most important American artists?

From 1939 to 1942, Traylor worked the streets of Montgomery as a street artist. He was 83 when he started this artistic career, eventually producing around 1,800 drawings. Friends brought him drawing materials and others provided small favors such as food and an occasional roof. His first show was held in 1940 – ignored by Traylor who was busy drawing. His next show was held in 1942 at a local high school. By chance, his work caught the attention of the NYC Museum of Modern Art. The Museum attempted to buy some of the works but was angrily rejected. By 1943 Traylor moved north to his children. He died in 1947 and his work fell into the shadows for thirty five years.

In 1982, he was part of a landmark exhibition of Black American art. His work was rediscovered and he is now a regular feature of the art scene. Exhibitions include about some twenty across the South in the last 10 years. He recently was featured in England, Germany and Switzerland.

Adolf Wolfli, Resident Artist, Waldau Mental Asylum, Switzerland 1895-1930

Adolf Wolfli is perhaps the best known of the Outsider Artists. Born in 1864, he was a farmhand, a laborer and a convicted sex offender by the age of 31. At this point he was committed to the Asylum where he remained to his death in 1930. He was violent, subject to hallucinations and diagnosed as a schizophrenic.

He started drawing in 1899, but nothing is preserved till about 1905. Over the next twenty five years, he accumulated a remarkable output of an imaginary 25,000 page autobiography and some 3,000 drawings and collages. Supported by some of the hospital staff, here is his established routine:

• “Every Monday morning Wölfli is given a new pencil and two large sheets of unprinted newsprint. The pencil is used up in two days; then he has to make do with the stubs he has saved or with whatever he can beg off someone else.”
• “He often writes with pieces only five to seven millimeters long and even with the broken-off points of lead, which he handles deftly, holding them between his fingernails. He carefully collects packing paper and any other paper he can get from the guards and patients in his area; otherwise he would run out of paper before the next Sunday night.”
• “At Christmas the house gives him a box of colored pencils, which lasts him two or three weeks at the most.”

He achieved a bit of fame in 1921 when he was the subject of an attention getting publication stating a mentally ill person can be a serious artist. In 1922, he was one of several subjects in Prinzhorn’s book mentioned above. The publicity allowed him to sell some drawings.

Yet that ripple did not last long and it was not till 1972 – forty two years after his death – that he was discovered by the world of art. His work started a remarkable tour through the world that included well over a hundred fifty exhibitions at locations such as the Museums of Fine Arts in Basel and Bern, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Universities of California in Berkeley and Santa Barbara, Musee Picasso, Antibes, American Folk Art Museum, New York, Kunsthalle, Kiel, Scottish Art Council, Edinburgh, Berliner Museum, Berlin, Centre de Cultura Contemporania, Barcelona, Museum of Kyoto, Kyoto, Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo and the Katonah Museum of Art, New York. This is just a sampling;
add many more museums, exhibition halls and galleries.

What about his work? Well, think an enormous collection of newsprint papers completely covered with text, drawings, symbols, poetry and musical annotations. Meticulously organized into volumes: Nine volumes of “From the Cradle to the Grave”, Seven volumes of “Geographic and Algebraic Books”, 3,000 pages of “Saint Adolf-Giant-Creation (allowing his nephew to conquer not only Earth but the entire Cosmos), six books of “St Adolf II” (his alter ego), six books of “Songs ands Dances”, four books on “Dances and Marches” and sixteen books and 8,404 pages on his “Funeral March”. Most of his drawings were part of the volumes but some, called bread art, were single sheet, occasionally sold and the basis of his modest early following.

The drawings are exhausting, epic, complex, grandiose, geometrical, adventurous, labyrinthine, mysterious, startling and based on an incredible imagination. He spent most of his mature life in an isolation cell, yet provided views on far reaching subjects he could not have observed through anything but imagination.

Here is a bit of trivia: Wolfli did his Campbell Soup Can (above) in 1929. Andy Warhol did his Can in 1964. It seems both of them liked the Tomato Soup. Warhol is the pop artist of fame. Wolfli is known for insanity. May the best man or image win.

Also interesting is the inclusion of musical annotations and hints. Recently, these annotations have been interpreted into actual performances. He is said to have inspired a range of musicians and composers. Here are a few words on the musical aspect of his work off his web site:

• “Naturally enough, the question whether Wölfli’s music can be played is asked again and again. The answer is yes, with some difficulty. Parts of the musical manuscripts of 1913 were analyzed in 1976 by Kjell Keller and Peter Streif and were performed. These are dances – as Wölfli indicates – waltzes, mazurkas, and polkas similar in their melody to folk music.”
• “How Wölfli acquired his knowledge of music and its signs and terms is not clear. He heard singing in the village church. Perhaps he himself sang along. There he could see song books from the eighteenth century with six-line staffs (explaining, perhaps, his continuous use of six lines in his musical notations). At festivities he heard dance music, and on military occasions he heard the marches he loved so well.”
• “More important than the concrete evaluation of his music notations is Wölfli’s concept of viewing and designing his whole oeuvre as a big musical composition. The basic element underlying his compositions and his whole oeuvre is rhythm. Rhythm pervades not only his music but his poems and prose, and there is also a distinctive rhythmic flow in his handwriting.”

Another curious aspect is that he apparently incorporated a detailed vocabulary into his work. This vocabulary included graphics such as birds, faces, decorative borders, snakes, musical staves and mandela shapes.

Adolf Wolfli’s creativity is only the beginning of his startling abilities. It is hard to even imagine what must have been going on in that isolated mind that astonishes a world about which he directly knew very little. There is only room here for three of his drawings (above). Given the uniqueness of his work, I’ve prepared a short multimedia show of samples from his work, accompanied by his own music as interpreted recently. Hit the “Wolfli” button in the next segment and let the show roll.

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The Case of Adolf Wolfli – A Multimedia Show

Sometimes, Outsider Artists are referred to as “Folk Artists”. Other descriptions include “brutish, rural, untrained, intuitive, menial, peasant, marginal, clumsy, naive, primitive, extreme, mental, elaborate and fantasy driven”. Personally, I don’t quite agree with any of these classifications. Considering that Outsider Art has become a commercially viable art form, some recent output might be described as opportunistic, simply bad or exploitative.

However, in the case of Wolfli, his music as interpreted in the show below is decidedly Swiss Folk style. Perhaps not all of us favor that particular music legacy but few among us can claim to simultaneously be writers of autobiographies, adventures, poetry, algebraic and geographic text books and symbolic essays plus be accomplished visual artists, draftsmen and illustrators plus be composers.

Hit the button for a rare glimpse of a long ago Outsider Artist and his quite strange world and who beat Andy Warhol to the Campbell Soup Can:

Wolfli

There are, of course, Outsider Music and Outsider Photography artists. Perhaps we have Outsider Postmen, Outsider Plumbers, Outsider Accountants and Outsider Neurosurgeons. Outsider Bloggers most likely is quite a large group.

Creativity Continued

Creativity Reviewed

The digression into Outsider Art shows how creativity can thrive on the fringes of society, far from the sacred halls of traditional art. It is not owned by any population strata: it makes no difference if you are rich or not, intelligent or not, mentally sound or not, physically well or not or trained or not. Artistic creativity surfaces where least expected. Being on the fringes does not mean the lack of ordinary artistic features such as clear cut visions and painstaking execution. Wolfli, for instance, was immaculate in both vision and execution. So was Bill Traylor and no doubt most others in the Outsider Art school. I’d suggest the label “Outsider” to be dumped at first occasion.

Perhaps none of the above is terribly important to you as an artist. To you, creativity is a deeply personal center that does not really require definitions or the interference by others. It is about you, no one else. It is your personal realm. It is your art. It is your way of recognizing and developing a multi faceted view of the world. Nothing is easy about creativity – your unique artistic and creative vision requires honesty, self discovery and a clear purpose. It’s hard, takes a lot of practice and leads to many frustrating dead ends.

You may be right about the personal aspect of creativity. But no one exists in isolation and most creative ideas are influenced by outside factors. Probably, your creative mind benefits from the widest exposure to the creativity of others and to experiences in general.

The worst case scenario is the ease of lazily overlooking the “vision thing” as the elder Bush put it, proceeding to completely ignore it in favor of lines in the sand. This disability he passed on to his president son who no doubt believes creativity is a four letter word. Creativity is not for everyone. Arthur Schlesinger differed and wrote about the ultimate leadership:

• “The president of the United States”, wrote Henry Adams, “resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grab, a course to steer, a port to seek.”
• The Constitution awards presidents the helm, but creative presidents must possess and communicate the direction in which they propose to take the country. The port they seek is what the first President Bush dismissively called “the vision thing.”
• “The presidency”, FDR said, “is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is predominantly a place of moral leadership. All our great presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.” In other words, they were possessed by their visions.

Here we have a helm to grab, a course to steer, a port to seek and a direction to follow while discarding engineering and administration and acknowledging historic ideas and moral leadership. Pretentious maybe, visions are not limited to artistic endeavors. Much of life depends on the creative visions of a few. Make sure you are one of those few as it relates to your world, artistic or not. To artists, the lack of a creative vision means artistic life is dead in the water – no helm, no port.

A vision is not an analytical notion; it has a strong emotional component. It can reveal very personal insights into where you are mentally and emotionally. You cannot truly shoot a happy documentary unless you actually are happy. The emotional context influences and might steer your personal connection with a particular subject. If you hate clear cutting, then that should be reflected in your images of clear cutting. Your emotional stance relates to another vital concept: honesty. If you aren’t convinced your vision is truly honest and reflecting your true convictions, then it is unlikely you will convince anyone else. You end up being or at least looking like a fake.

Creative Artists

Creativity is never static; it evolves in different directions and changes over time. Take Pablo Picasso and his periods: the Blue, Rose, African, Analytical Cubism, Synthetic Cubism, Classicism and Surreal Periods. Igor Stravinsky, shocking audiences, covered a vast musical landscape with his Russian, Neoclassical and Serial Phases. Arnold Schoenberg went from late Romanticism to Twelve Tone Music without stumbling one bit although perhaps his audience did.

In the same vein, Cartier-Bresson covered Cubism, Surrealism, went through an African Period, returned to Surrealism, became the Leica symbol in his cross-Europe Treks, moved into photo journalism, founded Magnum Photos (with, among others Robert Capa) leading to his Indian, Chinese, Mexican and East Indies Periods followed by refining the Decisive Moment idea (more later). Then he abandoned photography in favor of painting for the last 30 years of his life.

Leni Riefenstahl was a dancer, actress, film producer, director and a photographer. Starting as a dancer, she moved on to star in the 1920s German Mountain soap operas, climbed her way to her own production company, became a Nazi (later denied), a friend of Hitler, covered Nazi Party conventions and the 1936 Berlin Olympics as a documentary film maker and an artistic symbol of Nazi propaganda. Her film work was visually and artistically stunning. After a short imprisonment following the war, she became a Non-Nazi and gravitated into photography; no doubt a camera was friendlier than post war movie distributors.

She achieved renewed fame with her African photos. In her late 70s, she learnt to scuba dive and turned to underwater photography (and some film work). An infamous liar, social climber and self serving turncoat, she was, to her death at 101, an incredibly talented and multi faceted artist.

Other artists stayed in more or less one arena: Robert Capa was the War Photographer. Ansel Adams became the f/64 Yosemite Valley Genius. Diane Arbus fame came from disturbing portraits of society’s fringe. Robert Mapplethorpe showed an in-your-face, explicit homoerotic scene. Cindy Sherman staged portraits, often starring herself. Annie Leibovitz made inventive, staged and much published portraits. Ralph Gibson redefined the photographic notion of symbolic simplicity.

Other one subject artists include Ingmar Bergman who introduced a brand of intuitive existentialism and dark misunderstandings of Lutheran faith to an unsuspecting audience. Olivier Messiaen made strange music resembling birdsong. Rolling Stones “Can’t Get No Satisfaction” in spite of trying for the last 42 years. The Beatles quit. Richard Wagner locked in High German Mysticism and Romance. Haydn and Mozart found their grove and mostly stayed there. Ernest Hemingway’s language of concise clarity never changed. Jean Paul Sartre worked his anti-bourgeois and philosophical way through communism, socialism, atheism, metaphysics, addictions and most importantly existentialism. Albert Camus followed essentially the same path. Sartre refused the Nobel Prize while Camus accepted it. Although the fame of Sartre and Camus may have declined, both were
enormously influential.

All of these artists are or were hugely creative and they made a difference. Each practiced his/her own version of art. I doubt many of them bothered putting vision statements down on paper but they certainly had a clear understanding of their art and their convictions. Without pursuing convictions, creativity and the associated vision, they would not be the legends they all are. Luckily, they also knew how to share the results with their audience which leads to the next topic: from vision to results.

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The Case of Jeff Wall

Much of this section is a reprint of a preview to this post. Most of the material is updated. Use the button below if you wish to bypass this section. Otherwise, just keep reading.

Bypass

Jeff Wall is a photographer from Vancouver, BC. His unique art is exhibited and represented worldwide. He will serve us as a deep dive into the far reaches of creativity taken to an extreme. Jeff Wall is not your average photographer in any sense of the word. His 25 year career produced, so far, only about 130 images, sold in extremely limited editions for around $1 million each.

Jeff Wall is a fantastic example of the ultimate in creativity. He is also an example of Creativity (or Obsession) Gone Wild. To some he is a genius, to others a snap shooter on steroids. He is not included here to resolve that controversy. He is here as an example of what artistry and creativity can be in one person and how far it sometimes has to go. I believe serious photographers should think about what it would be like to be in Wall’s shoes and the commitment that implies. Then you can go back to your environment and perhaps think about it a little differently.

• Jeff Wall uses state-of-the art photographic and computer technology to create images that share the composition, scale and ambitions of the grandest historical paintings. His works often have the formality of documentary photography. He exclusively stages his scenes, sometimes reproducing or interpreting paintings or specific events.
• He does not seek the decisive moment or a picturesque scene. Nor does he create symmetry, lyricism, formal perfection or abstraction. He does not deceive you, hide his intentions or use the work of others except as visual inspiration. He avoids pop culture images and enjoys some irony.
• Each of his images is the result of immensely elaborate creative explorations. He may spend from weeks to years on completing a single image. He never repeats himself and is always unique. He tells the obvious story or none at all.
• The subjects range from very complex to surprisingly simple, even banal “every day” slices of life. He moves from landscape and street photography to still life and genre painting, to Japanese woodblock prints and medical illustration, to Impressionist and Baroque painting.
• He views himself as part painter, part movie director and part photographer, all three being part, in his opinion, of a single pictorial tradition. Some images are shot on location, others in his studio. The process may include paid actors and consultants such as marine biologists, stage builders and Hollywood special effects experts.
• His images are very large even considering his frequent use of large format cameras and medium format Hasselblads – often in the order of 6 feet by 6 feet or 2*2 meters. Some measure 10 feet by 16 feet. The people in the images are often life-size. He can combine hundreds of images into one. The images may be prints (traditional or inkjet) or transparencies mounted in light boxes.

Here is a sample of Jeff Wall’s art – “A View from an Apartment (2004-2005)” – a carefully arranged everyday scene where the harbor in the window contrasts with the indoor tranquility:

The present material partially depends on an outstanding article, dated 2007-02-25 and titled The Luminist, published in New York Times by Arthur Lubow. This original article is outstanding. I hope my summary, additions and reorganization hasn’t completely destroyed the spirit of it.

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Images

The Destroyed Room 1978

“The Destroyed Room,” shows a vandalized bedroom. It was made in 1978 as his wife, Jeannette, had left him temporarily for another man. The ransacked room contains a heap of women’s clothing. The violence directed against a woman’s possessions acknowledges feminist art criticism. Wall used his absent wife’s clothing to construct the scene. “I borrowed her clothes because we were still on good terms and she had the good clothes,” he said. You can easily detect the scene is staged in a studio – check the door and the window. There is no deception.

Wall based the image on a 19th-century painting, “The Death of Sardanapalus” by Delacroix. Sardanapalus, an Assyrian king, defeated in war, destroyed his court and harem. The influence is obvious in the diagonal lines and the rich, red palette. Wall wants you to see the reference to the painting:

Despite Delacroix and feminist art criticism, is this about a rejected husband’s anger? Wall sidesteps. “I don’t find my own experiences very interesting. I find my observations interesting. Maybe that’s why I’m a photographer. Maybe an observation is an experience that means more to you than other experiences.”

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Picture for Women 1979

“Picture for Women” (1979) interprets Manet’s masterpiece “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” by changing the setting to a photographer’s studio. In Manet’s painting, the central figure, a barmaid with downcast eyes, receives a gaze from the male customer reflected in the upper right corner of the mirror behind her. The customer is located in an impossible perspective that simulates the one occupied by the viewer of the painting. The key features are the male gaze by itself, the relationship towards the female and the viewer as an active, involved onlooker.

When Wall composed his photograph, he set his camera, seen as a mirror reflection, at the center; the woman stands at the left, coolly studying the camera and the photographer beside it. The camera and its operator become the central subject of the picture and the object of feminine scrutiny. Wall mimicked the receding globe lights of the Folies-Bergère bar into the overhead bulbs, deepening the space in the photo as Manet did in his painting.

There are some common elements in the two images. But they are so vastly different it is hard to see a real relationship between the two. The warm intimacy of Manet contrasts too much with Wall’s cold, stark image. Manet shows a servant engaged by a probing Parisian male while the Wall image allure to an antagonistic relationship between the two characters without any joy whatsoever.

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Dead Soviet Soldiers in Afghanistan 1992

Wall created an elaborate battle scene based on the Soviet Union’s conflict with Afghanistan in the 1980s. The image is old-fashioned, as if just exhumed from a war museum. Then you notice that this is a macabre vision: the dead Soviet soldiers strewn about are all awake — laughing, crying and fingering their wounds.

Given his propensity for finding guidance in history, here are two possible inspirations, both famous and real but without the laughing part. The left hand image is from the aftermath of the American Civil War Gettysburg Battle. The right hand photo, from the Crimean War 1855 by Roger Fenton, is called “Valley of the Shadow of Death”. Fenton was the first known war photographer. He did not show dead soldiers, as opposed by his slightly later American counterparts. He said of this image: ” …in coming to a ravine called the valley of death, the sight passed all imagination: round shot and shell lay like a stream at the bottom of the hollow all the way down, you could not walk without treading upon them…”.

The two images above are just samples of photos that bear some resemblance to Wall’s War study of the strange and absurd. There are many more similar images. Clearly, photographers have a rather morbid (sordid?) interest in the horrors of war. Moreover, the general public enthusiastically seeks out the most graphic war images possible. I know because my “Artistic Awareness System” tracks such trends using real data. Seeing both the supply and the demand side, I can’t help feeling a bit uneasy. Why are those alive so fascinated with the dead?

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A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai) 1993

“A Sudden Gust of Wind” is based on a famous Hokusai print in which several travelers are buffeted by unexpected turbulence that sends the sheets of a manuscript spiraling through the air. He used more than a hundred shots in the painstaking composition of the final 12-foot-long picture.

Here is the Hokusai wood print:

As opposed to the Manet case, the Wall image is great if seen in isolation. You may still ask yourself what is the purpose of mimicking (copying? plagiarizing?) another image? In this case, the two pictures are closely related – both are lovely. Looking at them close together is confusing.

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Diagonal Composition 1993

Documentary-style photographs of old, ordinary and neglected spaces and cleaning areas are longstanding parts of Wall’s work. “Diagonal Composition” explore the still-life genre with inspiration from early twentieth-century art, particularly the abstract images of artists such as El Lissitzky, Theo van Doesburg, and Alexander Rodchenko, whose paintings typically comprised grids of horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines.

The image is a modest social statement: time left the surfaces scarred and degraded, symbolizing lives gone by. Wall calls it ‘the un attributed anonymous poetry of the world’. His social and activist statements are generally quite mild and subtle, perhaps in line with being Canadian.

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Diagonal Composition No 2 1998

The perspective, composition and staging in this image are as elaborate as any of Wall’s works. It shows the corner of a sink, a rough wooden shelf and a pale green wall. To the right a small stick of plywood lays on top of a white rubber glove. It is placed at an acute angle to the sink. Just left of center, the dark side of the sink produces diagonal lines. The light linoleum above has traces of glue around it, breaking up the straight lines dominated by the molding, the diagonal trend of the work top, the shelf, the linoleum and the little plywood stick.

No doubt a lot of work went into this image. I find the composition lacking in any kind of interest. The perspective is too bland, especially compared to the more daring one in No 1 above.

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The Flooded Grave 1998-2000

Certainly complex, the “Flooded Grave” required nearly two years of work. It shows a freshly dug, open grave filled not only with water but also with orange starfish and sea urchins. The image is viewed as hallucinatory, strange, poetic and surrealist. The scene combines images from two sodden Vancouver cemeteries with photographs of a living aquatic system created in his studio.

Wall kept a large custom-built aquarium in his studio for more than six months. Two retained marine biologists caught sea anemones, sea urchins and octopuses from a single offshore spot. “I wanted to make it just like a moment in time undersea, not a compendium or display,” Wall explains. “I wanted to make it as real as I could.”

Wall likes going to extraordinary lengths. “The artistry of doing something is just fascinating,” he says. “If you don’t like artistry, why are you an artist? It’s fun.”

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After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue 1999-2000

Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel “Invisible Man” is about a black man who, during a street riot, escapes into a forgotten room in the cellar of a large apartment building in New York and decides to stay there, living in hiding. The novel begins with a description of the man’s home with its ceiling covered with 1,369 illegally connected light bulbs.

The image is an over-the-top re-creation of the light intensive basement dwelling of Ellison’s character. The photomontages are invisible without being truly hidden. The chaotic mass of details is staged to the extreme. Positioning is elaborate, precise and overdone. Its incredibly cluttered and overcrowded nature is claustrophobic: maybe the whole place will cave in. Yet there is some feeling of space because the bottom foreground is somewhat less overcrowded than the absurd ceiling.

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Outside a Nightclub 2004-2005

Wall devoted a full year to “In Front of a Nightclub” – a picture of young people standing outside a Vancouver club at night. The shoot took so long because the club Wall found is located on a heavily trafficked thoroughfare. It could not be photographed as he wished. There simply was no place for him to stand with his tripod and large-format camera.

He had the club exterior – the columns and grille, the facade, gum-spotted sidewalk and concrete curb – reconstructed in a studio. One assistant worked for six months constructing the set. “Of course, you can’t see everything he did, but that doesn’t matter,” Wall says. “There is dirt and moss growing in the cracks where the bottom of the building is crumbling, but you can’t see it. The discoloration of the sidewalk is extremely accurate, and it took many layers of application. Wall placed his strobes in the precise locations occupied by the street lamps and other lights that shine opposite the real nightclub.

He and his assistants parked outside the club on several nights and took 300 or 400 snapshots of the kids gathered there. Wall checked the photos for characters and clustering he liked. Then he hired 40 extras from a casting agency. Dividing them into two groups and giving them general directions, he photographed them over the course of a month on alternate nights. “People’s metabolism is different at night, their coloring is different,” he explains. For each group he finished with only one frame that satisfied him. “You only need one,” he points out. He digitally combined the two photos of the crowd with a third one of the building into his final picture.

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Men Waiting 2006

On a damp winter morning, 20 well-used men hung at a bleak Vancouver cash corner. Wall stands behind a tripod-mounted camera, patiently waiting for his vision of men waiting at a cash corner to come true. He had hired the laborers at an actual cash corner where the men normally hung out and bused them to the shooting location, a cash corner stand-in. The men waited for Wall to determine that the rain had become too heavy, the light too bright or the prevailing mood too restless for him to obtain the feeling of suspended activity and diffused expectancy that he sought in the picture.

He was prepared to come here, day after day, for several weeks. On any given morning, typically after three hours elapsed, he would adjourn until the next day. The men received their paychecks of 82 Canadian dollars and got back into the bus. “Men Waiting” is a small-scale Wall production in spite of its cast of 20 laborers plus Wall himself, assistants and equipment, its two-week shoot and on-the-street location. The laborers alone ended up costing as much as $35,000.

The risk is that Wall will overly manipulate the hired hands, transforming them into puppets. Asked about the laborers, he said: “My pictures are obviously related to my own life. Why would I be interested in them otherwise? I’m not a sociologist. I must identify with these figures, even though I often don’t like them, I don’t even feel that sympathetic to them. But I must identify with them in some way because they keep coming into pictures that I want to make.” Wall was fascinated by “the physical animal energy that is present on the street and waiting to be disposed of.”

He plans for all contingencies and commands a shoot start to finish. Yet photography is never fully controllable. Unforeseen events will occur. Some events are beneficial, such as the recompose of “Man Waiting”, which, even so, took several days to create:

• In spite of his elaborate planning for “Men Waiting”, he changed the frame of the picture. One of the reasons he liked the location he had selected was a scraggly little tree (in the middle right of the final image) that had shed its leaves for winter. Further down the street was another tree, a giant fir (in the extreme right of the final image). After taking five days to find his camera position, he concluded that he couldn’t eliminate the unasked-for fir from the picture, but by including only part of the trunk, he would minimize it.
• On one of the first days of the shoot, the rain increased, and several of the men huddled beneath the evergreen for shelter. When that happened, Wall realized that the fir had a role to play in the picture after all. He changed the camera setup to encompass the entire trunk, allowing the crowd of men to continue to the edge of the picture and, by implication, beyond. “That tree bothered me all along,” he told me. “If it hadn’t rained hard, I might never have noticed it. Now I’ll just include it. It’s stronger for it.”

Throughout the shoot, he found undirected details — an umbrella stuck in the mud, a hooded head lowered — and choose to keep some. Speaking on a walkie-talkie, he would ask his three assistants to adjust the position and behavior of the waiting men. The final picture was structured by his artistic sense, but did account for the unpredictability of his living subjects. “You can’t make these things up,” he said.

The Storyteller:

What do the horizontal power lines do to the composition? Presumable related to trains of some sort, they break the composition without creating tension. The one or two tiny groups of story listeners fit well but the power lines destroy the picture. That’s my opinion.

Mimic:

This is a picture with a well stated, clear and relevant message. An immigrant “foreigner” worker is mocked racially by a redneck, trashy “citizen”. The worker knows well there is nothing to be done; it’s a battle he cannot win. The redneck knows well what he can get away with.

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Techniques

Paintings

He makes photographs that are intended to be experienced the way paintings are. “Most photographs cannot get looked at very often. They get exhausted. Great photographers have done it [their masterpiece] on the fly. It [the on the fly opportunity] doesn’t happen that often. I just wasn’t interested in doing that [the on the fly shooting]. I didn’t want to spend my time running around trying to find an event that could be made into a picture that would be good.”

Insomnia:

The art that he liked best, from the full-length portraits of Velázquez and Manet to the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock and the floor pieces of Carl Andre, engaged the viewer on a lifelike human scale. The paintings could be walked up to (or, in Andre’s case, onto) and moved away from. They held their own, on a wall or in a room. “If painting can be that scale and be effective, then a photograph ought to be effective at that size, too,” Wall concluded.

Jell-O:

In Spain, “I saw the Velázquez, Goya, Titian — I loved it and wanted to be part of it somehow,” he said. “Every time the bus stopped, you were looking out the window, and there was a sign in a light box. I began to think, it’s luminous, Velázquez was luminous and I’ll try it.” When he emerged in 1978 as a mature artist, he presented photographs equal in status with paintings. In sheer size, they were measured in feet, not inches.

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Large Size and Staging

He dislikes the way photographs are typically exhibited as small prints. “I don’t like the traditional 8 by 10,” he says. “They were done that size as displays for prints to run in books. It’s too shrunken, too compressed. When you’re making things to go on a wall, as I do, that seems too small.” Many of his images exceed several feet in any direction. Some are over 10 or even 15 feet wide.

An Octopus:

He desires the sharpness of large formats which comes close to what the ever-adjusting and compensating human eye perceives. The size of his images requires the highest possible level of sharpness. Such precision eludes the documentary photographer who shoots split-second moments. We know the grainy, blurry images of Frank, Weegee, Cartier-Bresson and somehow deduct these technical deficits are authentic. Grainy, blurry pictures may convey a desired mood, but they do not reflect authenticity.

Some Beans:

Early on, Wall sidestepped the challenges faces by street photographers: how to impose a technically satisfying formal composition on a subject that has to be captured instantaneously. Rather than hunt for material to photograph, he manufactured all his subject matter in the studio.

Very soon he moved out of the studio to shoot landscapes and street scenes on location. He looks for “the indeterminate American look”, which he says he can find by not looking for anything in particular. “You have to forget about the idea of the spirit of the place,” he says. “It’s one of the big, consoling myths of people who live nowhere.”

Using a large-format camera on a tripod severely constrains street photography. Beginning in 1982, he circumvented the problem by re-creating subjects using that he calls “cinematographic photography.” Typically, he would see something, often a small event with compressed human drama and political overtones. Rather than snap it, he would go home, think about this glimpse of everyday life or popular culture. If he wants to proceed, he hires performers to re-enact the scene.

Stumbling:

Does staging a street scene and then photographing it as if it had “really” occurred betray honesty in photography? “Not necessarily”, Wall says. “What an artist can do with photography isn’t bounded by the documentary impulse”. He points out that in visual arts only photographers and cinematographers are criticized for staging rather than directly recording scenes. Other arts always offer re-creations of the outside world.

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Light boxes

By the late 1970s, Wall worked feverishly on the light-box transparencies that still are part of his artistic career. His images of the late 1970s and 1980s were enormous transparencies lit from behind by fluorescent bulbs. The “light box” format is similar to that typically used for advertising. Like a commercial light box, a Wall photograph grabs the viewer with its glowing presence and, unlike an advertisement, hold viewers with its richness of detail and harmony.

His use of a light-box format derived from advertising suggests a possible critical analysis of consumer culture: but no. “I was not especially interested in doing a critique of advertising — it was an accident.” His concern with the physical beauty of his images also set him apart from most of the contemporary avant-garde photographers and closer to the painters he admires.

Cardplayers:

He did his first one-man show in late 1978. He presented his exhibition as an “installation” rather than as a photography show. He put “The Destroyed Room” in the gallery front window, enclosed with a plasterboard wall. You could see it only from outside, where, especially after dark, it resembled an actual vandalized room. Before the show closed, the piece was purchased by the National Gallery of Canada, a great send-off to his career.

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Digitalization and Special Effects

Wall no longer restricts himself to light boxes. Over the last decade, he acquired four small buildings in a drug-infested downtown Vancouver district. There, helped by two full-time assistants and others as needed, he develop and print all of his work.

The Vampires’ Picnic:

In his studio he recently staged a vampires’ lawn picnic and, extravagantly, a conversation among resurrected Soviet soldiers slain in Afghanistan. He imported Hollywood special-effects consultants as part of his team. “I used up a lot of blood,” he says. He quickly grew tired of these outlandish subjects, but computer technology remains an important part of his artistic arsenal. By converting his film exposures into digital files, Wall can then superimpose them invisibly and endlessly, often assembling a final image on film from many different shots.

He has begun making large, beautifully gradated black-and-white photographs on paper in the mid-’90s and more recently inkjet color prints. Many recent images, such as “Men waiting”, “Volunteer” and “Citizen” are presented in black and white, breaking his past reliance on color.

Volunteer:

Citizen:

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Critique

Jeff Wall has a strong following both from the general art enthusiasts to professional curators and gallery operators. Some say his work revolutionized their view of art. But not everyone loves Jeff Wall’s work. One critical pool finds his obsessive micro management plain out of sight, not to mention a monumental waste of resources. Other critics find that his work lacks in depth and simply consists of elaborate snap-shots. Here is Walter Robinson:

• “The critics love his light boxes, which I think are obnoxious, and say his photos are beautiful, when I think they look like big snapshots — but I guess that’s the point of their being so laboriously constructed.”
• “Many of his images, much reproduced, are less than thrilling. ‘A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)’ is a yawn, as is his illustration of a scene from Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’, a set piece showing a shabby apartment with hundreds of light bulbs on the ceiling. ‘Dead Troops Talk’, a scene of fallen soldiers in Afghanistan, is in poor taste, to say the least.”

Other critics chime in:

Another critic says: he is an intellectually ambitious, morally earnest perfectionist navigating through avant-gardism. A control freak who smothers the life out of his picture, hung up on his process, he is seduced by the elaborateness of his techniques and the gorgeousness of his images. The effort to make viewers think hard in a Modernist way about the gaps and distortions inherent in perception is ignored.

Milk:

Another critic claims: his shift into narrative representation and pop versions of subject matter in the light boxes was a strategy to make conceptual art more communicative. It eventually became so grand and so glamorous, aimed so much at redeeming pictorial traditions, that the original intention was lost. Wall tries to do as a 21st-century photographer what 19th-century painters like Manet and Seurat did in their elaborate depictions of contemporary life which is a historically absurd undertaking. “His claim to be a new history painter is very problematic for me,” a critic says. “The pictures have become very overwhelmingly spectacular objects. There is a kind of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk quality. You have the set and the narrative; all we are waiting for is the sound.”

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My View

What do I think? First, to me it is impossible not to admire the immense creativity or at least magnitude of his visions and execution. Second, the dedication of spending weeks or years to find the perfect or near perfect image is a lesson to every photographer. Third, the combination of many expressive means, from large format cameras to digitalization to light boxes and huge prints with the references to other art forms is quite humbling; at least it is to me.

Just about everything he does makes sense – if you are him. His techniques are not for everyone but they should provide food for thought to any photographer. After all, no one imposes any techniques on anyone else. Although his influence on individual photographers is quite substantial, I won’t adopt his ways in my own work except as an inspiration to try new things.

A Fight on the Sidewalk:

My reaction to what counts – his images – is mixed. Admiring what it took to get there is not the same as falling in love with the result. The extreme staging leaves me with a feeling of aloofness and lack of spontaneousness. It is too deliberate and intellectual even if he intended it that way. Some of his subjects leave me wondering if they are worth the attention.

Why do I need to look at “A Fight on the Sidewalk” (above)? Especially if it is staged: the visual impact of the fight is lukewarm at best. To me, it could equally well be called “People Asleep on the Sidewalk”. The Rocky movies are safe in the fight department. Check out this movie scene (below) for more drama (I know – Rocky isn’t art and this scene is as staged as Wall’s is- but what the heck?):

His idea that photography should have equal standing to painting is fine even if it seems a bit defensive. Making photos look like paintings is by no means a new idea. It was very popular with British Victorian photographers in the mid to late 1800s, for instance. I can’t understand why that means the photos need to recreate an actual painting. What do the links to Delacroix, Manet or Robinson contribute to his images? Are the subjects “better” or more interesting because of these links? I doubt it. Speaking of influences:

Overpass:

The Overpass image above reminds me a bit of a Dorothea Lange (California 1934) Depression and Farm Agency photo (below) showing two men, clearly vagrants, walking down a dusty road, next to a huge roadside billboard, being the perfect juxtaposition, saying “Next Time, Try the Train”. That image is powerful indeed. The frustration, inequity and poverty of that piece of history are all perfectly clear. But the “Overpass” (above) does not have that power although it seems clear Lange’s photo is the blueprint. But where is the tension, contradiction or juxtaposition? Where are these guys heading? To the Hilton? To their annual Hawaii vacation? To pick apples in Western Washington? To deportation to Somalia? To a Soviet Gulag? Who knows and who cares.

What exactly does “Men Waiting” tell us? I find the “Picture for Women” to be of little interest, especially when compared to Manet’s picture. “The Flooded Grave” is impressive in its many contradictions – but why? How are sea anemones, sea urchins and octopuses related to a Vancouver graveyard? A few subjects are, to me, utterly banal and uninteresting, such as “Overpass” and “The Storyteller”. Perhaps, so are those of other avant-gardists including, say, Andy Warhol with whom, I think, Wall has more in common than he has with Delacroix.

I do like quite a few images for what they are, not for the elaborate staging or art links: “Outside the Nightclub” is great, as are the “Milk” and “Mimic” images. I enjoy the “Octopus” and “Some Beans” scene and the “Sudden Gust of Wind”. The original “Diagonal Composition” is much more interesting than the later No. 2. “The Vampires Picnic” is intriguing.

I do not believe painting, cinematography and photography are of the same pictorial tradition, not in execution or in vision. Ultimately a photograph is the result of releasing a shutter, freezing a moment. That’s the uniqueness of photography. Combining a bunch of such moments into a new image perhaps resembles the brush strokes of a painting. It still does not change that frozen, unique moment that makes photography a standout.

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That concludes the discussion of Jeff Wall’s work.

Innovation: Make It Happen

Jeff Wall and the Outsider Artists are two extremes of creativity. It is time to get back on our main track that perhaps is not quite as extreme but yet, hopefully, a challenge. Creativity is a very personal trait and so are visions. No creativity, no vision. No vision, no fame. No fame, no money (Go to Start). But once you have the vision, you must make it real, that is, actually produce some art!

The Process

The vision is clear and in your mind. The next step – execution – might be simple. Shoot the image and take the roll to the nearest super market developer. Or plug the memory card into your photo printer. Out comes the master piece. Possible, but it is not a very likely outcome. So let’s start over again.

It takes a process to translate the vision into a real life piece of art. This process may be intuitive or defined in formal detail. It can be based on technicalities such as equipment or items such as location, time of day or target audience. In most cases, existing and well known paths are good enough – not all of us must do it the Jeff Wall way. In other cases, the vision requires innovation for it to become reality.

The start to finish process plan requires effort but truly is a good idea. Without a clear path, the original vision will likely founder in random dead ends such as those New Years good intentions. “A monkey and a typewriter will eventually produce a Shakespeare play”. But monkeys do not come up with Shakespearean plays very often. Neither do amateur photographers frequently exhibit at Museums of Contemporary Art.

You consider and define every step in this process path. The path is always changing, improving or matching new visions. Every path involves trial and error and a lot of tinkering. Do not stop: it is never done – repeat as is needed. Then repeat some more, over and over. It’s a life long task.

Adding complexity to this endeavor, new ways of performing old tasks come along at a dizzying pace, all originally being the result of some one else’s innovative spirit. Not only is it hard to figure out the current path, the ground rules constantly change. Standing still is not an option – take the “digital revolution”:

• Companies no longer in the film camera business: Minolta, Kodak, Contax, Rollei, Olympus, Polaroid (sort of), Canon and Nikon (both almost), Kyocera, Mamiya – in fact, almost everyone left town. Iconic film camera makers going digital: Leica, Hasselblad and Mamiya. Iconic camera companies leaving the digital camera business: Kodak and Agfa. Digital life isn’t easy.
• Companies that dumped the film business: Agfa sold film busyness to AgfaPhoto which ended in bankruptcy within a year. 3M, Ilford (off an on), Kodak, (they wish) with perhaps only Fuji hanging on.
• Film Accessories, Chemicals, Dealers, Development and Processing Specialists going out of business – too many to count. Digital Kiosks, Internet and Retail Printing Businesses, Internet Photo Sharing Specialists entering, struggling and leaving (some) the image business – too many to count with competition our of sight.
• Commercial Image users (ad agencies etc.) requiring film based formats – almost none. Accepting or demanding digital images – almost all.
• Photographers still in the film business – more than anyone of sound mind would find believable. A reactionary bunch of bums, we are. We also favor 8-tracks, typewriters, employ secretaries, drive Beetles and smoke unfiltered Camels with our Wild Turkey breakfast.

Does the last point about photographers make you feel guilty? Heck, we deal with Art here – the painting business – colored pigment, fluid, an easel and a brush or two – has been around almost unchanged for about 32,000 years and sculptures (Big Rock or similar, chisels and heavy things) were first sold maybe 5,000 years ago after being initiated 23,000 years ago – why wouldn’t we photographers survive? With the right visions and execution, maybe we will.

Pre visualization

Pre visualization is a great tool to help defining the process although it means vastly different things to different people. First, we have visualizations, then the special case of pre visualization.

Visualizations are common in our cultures. It’s used to communicate messages, concepts and abstract or concrete ideas in industry, science, engineering, education, multimedia and medicine. Computer graphics, drawings, diagrams, napkins and back of envelopes are some of the means. Visualization is prominent in meditation. Alternative health treatments might include visualization.

Pre visualization is a form of visualization that provides a view of a future outcome. The movie industry use pre visualization as a cheap method to check out movie scenes. Ad agencies use story boards in various forms. Most of us pre visualize – or perhaps fantasize about – future events, be it the review meeting with the boss, the next vacation or the Powerball winning number.

Pre visualization in some form is part of most photography. On the simplest level, most off us want the picture “to come out nice” or “better than last time” and we often take some steps, such as focusing, flash on, lens cap off and steady hands, etc., to improve the likelihood of that visualization.

Ansel Adams viewed pre visualization as a part of the Zone system: the scene of a potential photo is analyzed from a reflected light stand point. That analysis is coupled with a development and printing strategy. The end result (a print) is visualized even before the shutter is released. The process itself is reused and refined over and over.

My own version of pre visualization operates on two levels. On the lower level, I include the Adams Zone system. I practice it but not in all its intended detail – I’m closer to the more intuitive Cartier-Bresson school. The higher level focuses on your creative vision, applying it to an overall strategy for your shooting and processing sessions. This higher level does not just analyze light ranges, development tactics and printing tricks, it combines items such as story, composition, dimensions, mood, emotions and subject matter into a more complete view. My “City Night Scenes” sequences and my multimedia “Symphonie Noir” are examples of such a broadly pre visualized path.

Modern Times

First we had the digital revolution in photography with devastating effect on some and new opportunities for a few. Artistically, that revolution may not mean much, but the world started mass producing images that ended up in a brand new distribution and publishing media called the Internet. Cyberspace is littered with images. Not only do we have a billion (or whatever) amateur images: museums, agencies, galleries and individual artists got into the act, putting just about every photo, painting and last week’s grocery lists up for grabs on the net’s dedicated, shared web sites or on private sites.

Practically every artist – dead or alive, major or minor – has a web site, many very sophisticated and expensive. A particular artist may be represented on scores of web sites. The artist has little say about the use of the images beyond his/her private site. Photos are passed around, used and shared with no control or consideration of copyrights.

The big time entertainment companies have suffered the mp3 and video problem for years. The difference is they have about a billion more resources to fight piracy than do most photographers. Not even the billion dollars could beat the people happily sharing music around the globe. Remember a few years ago when record companies started to sue grand mothers and minors (etc.)? That sure was a PR winner – not. The fight is by no means over – companies push backwards, the people forwards.

There are millions of bloggers (such as me) that may comment, review or criticize any artist’s work without mercy. 1.4 million Web sites have some explicit connection to “Ansel Adams”, according to Google. “Henri Cartier-Bresson” is linked to 1.1 million sites. Below a million means you’re pretty much a nobody – bad luck to most artists who rather create art than optimize their web presence.

Never have so many images been printed, eBayed, Web2ed, newscast, talk showed, spammed, fixed, copied, blogged, stolen, podcast, voice mailed, downloaded, uploaded, emailed, serialized, peddled, YouTubed, chat roomed, eHarmonized, pdf’d, pirated, multi mediated, Flickr’d, socially networked, Bluetoothed, SMS’d, invented by Al Gore, narrated by Al Gore, evangelized by Al Gore or shared in any other of the thousands of ways humans miscommunicate these days.

Not only is the distribution and sale of images changing drastically, but the actual processing of images is changing too. Adobe is creating an online version of Photoshop. Scores of Net vendors provide professional printing at rock bottom prices. Other Internet vendors specialize in supporting top quality self publishing. Specialized vendors provide just about any niche service ever thought of. Others pursue services no one ever thought or cared about. A search of “Photo processing” yields 1.1 million returns on Google. Narrowing it down to “Photo processing service” still lists 20,000 entries.

I won’t even touch the subject of society changing. The “war on terror”, the War on Arabs, the War on Iraq and Afghanistan (Korea, Iran, Syria…..), Global Warming, nuclear threats and the decline of human rights – the list is long. I do discuss my takes elsewhere.

Do your visions, plans and paths consider the mysterious ways of modern times? If not, think again. It’s better to benefit than being clobbered – not a trivial issue. Just sticking to the Internet, you better consider web design, eCommerce, RSS, Bookmarking, Flash, blogs, search engine optimization, eBay, AJAX, FLEX, XML, ASP and a myriad of other obscure technologies you probably never heard of or wanted to hear about.

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See Start to Finish, Act Accordingly

Define the vision. Find the path to make it real. Execute. Exhibit the results. Reap the rewards. Is that simple enough? Well, there are a few other details to consider. But the intuitive view of understanding the simplest of path is a good start. Let’s build on that. Keep it simple.

I’ll borrow a technique from journalism to organize that path in more detail. It’s a simple technique – the Five W’s: Who, Why, What, Where and When. It is a way to conveniently organize the points I want to make. The 5W’s are used in many creative environments.

The 5W’s are often associated with a “How” item. The upcoming section “The Toolbox” is the “How” part. You may be surprised to find its two sub sections deal with “Distortions” and “Dimensions”. What’s that got to do with photography? Hang in here and you will see.

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Who: The Human Angle

A painting takes hours, days or even years to complete as do sculptures and symphonies. Master painters and composers sometimes use students to complete parts of the work. Two or more people can collaborate writing a book. Literature Nobel Prize winners see their works translated into many languages by collaborative translators. Several people collaborate to produce one of Dale Chihuly’s glass sculptures. Jacqueline de Pre relied on Sir John Barbirolli and the London Symphony Orchestra when recording the most famous version ever of Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Rudy Van Gelder’s recording mastery contributed to legendary albums by Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane and countless others. Where would Mick Jagger be without Keith Richards, Ron Wood and Charlie Watts? Or where would California nrBritney Spears
and Paris Hilton without paparazzi?

But a photographer can’t rely on anyone in the crucial moment of taking a picture. Photography is unique in art as the critical moment truly is a one person event. Only one eye at a time can look through the view finder. There is only room for one finger on the shutter release. No one is with you at the crucial moment, when the shutter release is pressed. You are it. You alone created the image and it is yours.

Once the shutter closes, everything changes. You may be, or should be, in charge of the post-exposure process. You might have a team helping you. In commercial photography you work against a specification; various art directors, publishers, editors and accountants will unmercifully walk all over you. Photojournalists have bosses prone to smoking cigars and sneeringly dumping your stuff into the waste basket, next to last week’s Wild Turkey. In wedding photography you work for the bride who sometimes (often) blames the photographer for this loser of a groom she regrets ever setting her eyes on. She, as any client, can make your life quite difficult. They do, yet not one of them can take the magical moment away from you.

Many photographers never set a foot in a dark room (traditional or digital), relying on labs and assistants. Annie Leibovitz uses a small army of helpers to set up her portraiture stage. Jeff Wall hires scores of people for weeks as stage props. Robert Capa’s and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work started and ended with their Leicas; others did the rest, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Ansel Adams used assistants but each image was the result of his own detailed plans and specifications (pre visualization) start to finish. A news or sport photographer submits his image and it appears, or not, in the paper after several reviews by editors. Lucky or rich photographers have assistants carry all the heavy equipment around.

Naturally, whether the whole show is yours start to finish or you have an army of assistants looking for guidance. Various clients testing your patience, there better be a coherent plan in place. But that is for later. For now, the final decision to fire the shutter is yours. Nothing permanent will exist till you make the decision. So you have all the power in the world in that particular moment. That power declines quite a bit once the release is triggered, so savior the moment for what it is worth.

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Why: Rewards for the Industrious

We shoot because we expect a reward. The reward is a highly personal part of our photographic career. It means vastly different things from one individual to another. Rewards may be internal – such as the satisfaction of creating a piece of art or pursuing a worthy cause – or external – such as getting paid for the piece of art or receiving praise from critics.

Famous Icons

Some photographers never attempt to publish a single image but go around shooting for decades, being happy with internal rewards. After their death, sometimes the mass of images catches someone’s attention and suddenly the dead photographer is declared a genius. This, of course, is the exception and in most cases the images end up in a landfill. Eugene Atget received more fame and recognition after death. Angus McBean is another such example. Other artists from many art forms were not well known while alive: J. S. Bach, Carl von Clausewitz, Franz Schubert, Emily Dickinson and Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Franz Kafka, most Outsider Artists and the tragedy of Anne Frank.

A few photographers become icons in their life time: consider legends such as Ansel Adams, Robert Capa, Eddie Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson or Alexander Gardner. Sometimes being an icon brings lots of money: take fashion photographers such as David Bailey, Guy Bourdin, Edgar de Evia, Annie Leibovitz, Terence Donovan, Horst P. Horst and Gordon Parks who did or do make fine money.

Sometimes an icon photographer receives “just” the admiration of some strata and remains largely unknown. Some are cult phenomena: Charles Gatewood, Robert Mapplethorpe, Chris Nelson and perhaps Diane Arbus fit at least partially in here. In other cases, the icon status means devotion to some cause, be it whales, Iraqi wars, inner city poverty, VA hospitals, African genocides or globalization. Entities such as Magnum Photos, the Farm Security Agency of 1935-44 (Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks and others) and National Geographic often explore(d) issues and causes.

Then we have the money sharks. We suffer paparazzi, ambulance chasers, tornado shooters, disaster specialists and National Enquirer forgeries. There is even a new term Waparazzi, standing for amateurs lucky enough to be present at some event, usually catastrophic, with their camera or cell phone shooting away. The videoed execution of Saddam Hussein is a good example. 9/11 and the 2004 tsunami are other examples of amateurs exploiting misery for money.

Ordinary People

To many, the reward is simply capturing memories for oneself, the family and others in a close knit circle. Millions merrily shoot their brother’s wedding, grandma’s 100th birthday, the twins’ high school graduation, the Acapulco vacation or Daddy testifying before the Ethics Committee and so forth. Memories provide long lasting rewards at a very modest cost.

Most photographers simply toil away at the photographic craft because they want to. Hard work, high hopes, little money, no fame, disillusion, 9-5, occasional successes and many failures dominate that life. No matter – they (we) do what they (we) love to do. That is not a bad reward and explains why millions of photographers choose a life style in relative poverty and even isolation.

Lastly, there is the never ending stream of hopefuls who never make it. They come and go, without ever experiencing the reward they dreamt of and perhaps felt entitled to. That is fine; we do need accountants, waiters, CEOs, coal miners and butchers. Photography as a career is not for everyone.

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Where: Spatial Abstractions

The Location

The original subject of a photograph must be in front of the lens when the shutter is released. This rule is a unique and obvious feature of photography. Other art forms do not have such a restriction. A painter may paint offsite in a studio from memory, photos or sketches. Music and sculptures do not usually even have a tie to a specific location.

There are exceptions to this rule. In photography, combining existing subjects can lead new subjects. This normally happens in an offsite lab. That’s why I said “original subject” above. Music may have a strong regional root, such as Brazilian Samba or Alpine Yodeling. Likewise sculptures might build on Greek mythology, the 1906 Olympics or the 1945 Iwo Jima Flag Raising. A photo may have such roots as well. OK, that’s a point but not very exciting, let’s move on.

If you have the vision and the requirements firmly in mind, the location of your shoot may well be a no brainier, at least in broad terms. When Leni Riefenstahl found her African vision, the answer obviously was – go to Africa. But Africa is a big place – did she mean downtown Johannesburg, Congo’s gorilla habitats, Sahara Bedouin tribes, Kenya safaris, Darfur famines, Rwanda genocides or what? As it turns out, her focus was on “straight day time, outdoor color portraits of individuals from the Nuba tribe, onsite in Sudan”. The vision needs to be quite specific if it is to be useful.

It’s easy to allow the vision be imprecise, letting you go out on unfocused fishing expeditions. For instance, one of my visions focuses on low light, usually night time, subjects. What does that mean? Is it shooting the moon, July 4th fireworks or New Year’s Festivities? Perhaps the goal is to set up long exposures catching some dim scene or to fire off flashes on sleeping homeless? Maybe it is chasing African wildlife at their nocturnal watering hole? Well, none of that. My actual vision is quite explicit in terms of when and where.

Staging the Scene

You have the location, now what do you do? The issue is staging. Some are uncomfortable with the very word “staging” as in faking. In reality, the only type of photography disallowing staging is photojournalism and even that is on shaky grounds. There are many very famous examples of “journalistic” photos that to at least some degree were staged: Capa’s dying Spanish soldier, Eddie Adams’ Saigon execution or Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima flag rising (all of these cases are debated) are just three possible examples.

In just about all other styles of photography, staging is required, optional or allowed. That does not mean all photos are staged but, more often than not, they are. Take commercial photography (advertising, fashion, food etc.) that is just about always heavily staged. Documentary photography and portraits may or may not be staged. Technical photography (industrial, medical or forensic) is staged in the sense the specifications are very tight regardless of the actual shooting environment.

When shooting your brother’s wedding and you ask Uncle Joe to please stop fooling around; you’re staging the shot. Making you son repeat that home run is staging. So is that tricky shot you took proving the officer could not possible see your illegal turn. Moving Egyptian pyramids around in a news photo is much undesired staging. So is adding extra smoke to the Beirut skyline after an Israeli attack. The Soviets famously removed suddenly undesired individuals from all relevant photos – not to mention these unlucky people were also removed from the socialistic brotherhood of the living.

In some cases, on-scene staging is impossible. Street photographers, such as me, cannot stage anything significant. Paparazzi cannot usually choose or modify the stage, nor do they care. When I shoot a music event or a play, I cannot change the setup. There are photographers who categorically refuse to stage anything at all. I tend to be in that camp, except when it comes to processing the image.

Of course, a photographer may stage him/herself too. In the name of great photo taking, standing on one’s head, crawling in that ditch, dressing as a clown, hiding in a bush, climbing a lamp post or – as you’ll shortly see – performing the “As Time Goes By Can Can” all are examples personal staging.

After a staged or non-staged photo shoot, I’m free to use, and do use, all kinds of processing techniques in effect staging the scene. Cropping, burning and dodging, masking, toning, tilting and filtering are just a few examples of possible manipulations, whether done in a traditional darkroom or using Photoshop.

Composition – Position thyself

Composition is yet another ambiguous concept. There are at least a dozen completely different meanings ranging from math to music to visual arts. Focusing on visual arts, dozens of elements may make up a composition. In effect, these elements are rules. In photography, we struggle with the rule of thirds, perspective, straight or curved lines leading to a vanishing point (or elsewhere), depth of field, simplification, symmetry, viewpoint, juxtapositions and the interaction of all these possible rules.

Creative photographers gain their fame by breaking rules, including those of composition. The perfectly composed photo is possibly utterly bland. A vision is similar – a perfect adherence may be quite boring. The tension and challenge of a great picture comes from breaking the rules of composition and/or the vision. Breaking rules is not, however, some random, anarchistic event (actually, sometimes it is!) but something planned for and consciously executed.

Leaving such subtle points for now, let’s consider the down to earth technique of composing by moving around (in, out, left, right, up, down) and, then, deciding on simplicity, detail or complexity.

You are on location. Staging, if required, is done. The subject is present and ready. Camera is loaded. Loaded, you are not. Now you have to come up with a thrilling image consistent with your inner self, your honest convictions, your vision, compositional rules, pre visualization and, now, the idea that rules must be broken or the result will be bland and boring. All present, the model, assistants, art directors, corporate sponsor, bride, portrait customer, and the guy no one seems to know but who looks like a terrorist – they all have a zero tolerance rule about you wasting their time, money, integrity and lunch date through your utter and habitual incompetence.

Keeping your cool, you already know these realities. So you are at the point of improvisation. Your vision did not really get down into this detail, did it? It shouldn’t. If it did, you’d likely have an unworkable vision – too detailed and too complicated, filled with ifs and buts. A vision is guidance, not a blue print.

When on location, you face unforeseen details unique to that particular occasion. You are looking for a successful composition while adjusting to reality. One of the most powerful compositional techniques is simply finding your optimal position relative to the subject. Some photographers walk in on the scene, shoot the quota and leave. They are not likely to find the best shot or composition.

More enlightened photographers perform a curious dance before each shot. The photographer is bobbing here and bopping there, up, down, sideways, in and out with a camera stuck to his/her face. Occasionally, the photographer stops, looking thoughtful and rushes over to try a different lens. Then the magician might fire a test shot or too, staring at the result with disbelief. Dance is repeated, all to the amusement (hopefully) of those present. Eventually the photographer stops, mutters incoherently and starts actually snapping away, possibly moving and snapping some more. More muttering; repeat the dance again. On it goes till photographer skeptically says “enough”. The dance is called the “As Time Goes By Can Can” (just kidding). The photographer, of course, is composing the image by trying many different angles and keeps going till
the right stuff finally is secured.

Henri Cartier-Bresson was a master of this dance, performed right in the middle of unsuspecting Parisian crowds. He is even said to perform this dance with a hankie over the camera, pretending to blow his nose. In his case, he not only looked for the shooting angle but also the Deciding Moment. Walter Evans took an opposite approach by parking himself in a NYC subway train for about three years, camera disguised under his coat, proceeding to take now famous pictures of unsuspecting fellow riders.

Composition – Simple, Detailed or Complex?

Take Ernest “Papa” Hemingway: A sparse prose based on economy and understatement earned him a Pulitzer and a Nobel Price, mostly based on “The Old Man and The Sea”. The winner of the most prestigious literary award on Earth got the job done in 77 pages. Not only a sparse prose but the point was delivered in a record concise form. Simplicity works.

Compare that to Charles Dickens, acclaimed for “rich” storytelling. Many of his novels are sequential, making the style even more elaborate. Florid, poetic, satirical, episodic, social and sentimental, he was not concise and brevity was not a strong characteristic: one set of serialized four novels runs 846 pages. Tolstoy’s War and Peace contains 1,424 pages of narrative, details and subplots. The bible runs around 1,000 pages. The Qur’an gets the job done in half the pages of the bible.

Nature photographers usually favor the “rich” approach. Ansel Adams zone system is designed to set the light range in the final print so that no detail is lost. His images are incredibly rich. Ralph Gibson, a modernistic Leica photographer, favors utter simplicity. Both styles work superbly. Edward Weston did nudes or vegetables. Some of the images are so simplified and stylistic that it is hard to tell if the subject is a pepper or a nude. As a contrast, Art Wolfe’s or Galen Roswell’s nature work show exquisite detail and richness. Two sides of a coin, pick your medicine.

Capturing detail is not the same thing as capturing complexity. Forensic photography collects the maximum amount of some specific details, while eliminating irrelevant aspects and complexities. A nature photo is not complex just because it contains a lot of sharply focused details and textures. Complexity implies more than just details. Typically, complexity means there are disambiguates such as perspective gone wild or startling juxtapositions. Juxtapositions create a sense of tension in a photograph.

But complexity in not just based on tension; it may well imply unharmonious relationships between a number of subjects. Nor is complexity the same as complicated. Thought patterns in your brain are complex. Operating on your brain is complicated. Photographs are not complicated but may be complex. Processing the image may be complicated. There is a difference.

On the literary scene, Albert Camus and Franz Kafka wrote quite short, yet famous novels. Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” is only 48 pages long (others of his novels are longer), Camus’ “The Stranger” has 144 pages and “The Fall” 148 pages. Most of us would call those novels “complex” and yet stark. Obviously complexity does not need to depend on a mass of detail. Then you have cases such as Jean-Paul Satre going at it for 688 pages in “Being and Nothingness” while James Joyce needed 736 pages to complete “Ulysses”, neither your trivial summer read on the beach. One can certainly be both complex and longwinded.

Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling is anything but stark. Anything Baroque is rich indeed. Miro’s “Landscape” of 1927 contains only the starkest of details as does Picasso’s “Minotaure Courant” of 1928. Sitting through Wagner’s “Niebelungen Ring” sets you back 15 very solid hours of detailed but not complex German Soap Opera. It set him back, deservedly so, 26 years. Chopin’s “Minute Waltz” requires less than 2 minutes of your attention. Reading one of Hemingway’s short stories is a 10 minute affair. Reading “Ulysses” or “War and Peace” might be a lifetime event. It probably will be the next life time.

Those in favor of simplification simplify the matter into simple statements such as:

• What’s really important is to simplify. The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous. If you strive for simplicity, you are more likely to reach the viewer. -William Albert Allard
• Ultimately, simplicity is the goal – in every art, and achieving simplicity is one of the hardest things to do. Yet it’s easily the most essential. -Pete Turner
• My pictures are complex and so am I. When I am almost symbolistic in writing, there is a more limiting difference’s of accepting, while I can be even more complex in the photographs and people can usually accept them within the framework of their own limitations or lack of limitations – there is no dictionary meaning… they can look up for the photographic image and allow it to confuse them… -W. Eugene Smith, 1987

Simple/complex, big/small or detailed/stark classifications have absolutely no bearing on whether or not something is a piece of art. These classifications define different camps and, in your vision, you need to be clear on which camp is yours.

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When: The Time Factor Where None Exists

It takes a fraction of a second to create a photographic image. Such suddenness is unique in the world of art. Even Mozart could not produce a symphony in such a short period of time; he no doubt tried. It took Michelangelo four years to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Rome was not built in a day, as clichés goes. God created Paradise in six days according to the bible. Or it took Universe and its Big Bang a tiny fraction of a millisecond to create itself and then leisurely spent billions of years to evolve humans.

Many events trigger a significant and sudden transition from one state to another – turn the light off and it is dark. The suddenly dead from the roadside IED will stay dead forever. The Big Bang hopefully was a one time deal. You release the shutter; the image is frozen forever. The moment comes and goes, never to be repeated. There is no going back – the event happened and that’s that. The state changed from the scene being fluid and temporary to one captured and forever part of our heritage.

That magic fraction of a second is photography’s biggest asset as well as liability. T. In a split second, the image becomes timeless or time bound. Does it abstract an event over time or capsulate a short moment in time? The image can do either. You decide. The decision is yours only.

The Decisive Moment

In 1952, Henri Cartier-Bresson quoted, apparently from the memoirs of a 1600s Cardinal de Retz, “There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment”. In 1957, he added: “There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative,” he said. “Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.” He concluded, in 1999, “To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms that give that event its proper expression.”

Cartier-Bresson published, in 1952, “Images à la sauvette” which translates into “Images on The Run”. The English edition was titled “The Decisive Moment”. Whether it was the translator or Cartier-Bresson who started the “Decisive Moment” fame is up for debate. The publishers choose both titles. The preface to “Images à la sauvette” consists of a lengthy article by Cartier-Bresson. You can read the complete article (highly recommended) online through this link. Here are a few quotes from the article:

• “I had just discovered Leica. It became the extension of my eye, and I have never been separated from it since I found it. I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung up and ready to pounce, determined to ‘trap” life’ – to preserve life in the act of living. Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.”
• “Sometimes there is one unique picture whose composition possesses such vigor and richness, and whose content so radiates outward from it, that this single picture is a whole story in itself. But that rarely happens.”
• “Sometimes a single event can be so rich in itself and its facets that it is necessary to move all around it in your search…. you cannot be stationary…. sometimes you light upon the picture in seconds; it might also require hours and days. You must be on the alert with the brain, the eye, the heart; and have the suppleness of body.”
• “A photographer must reach a precise awareness of what he is trying to do…. The photographer must make, while he is still in the presence of the unfolding scene, that he hasn’t left any gaps…. he is never able to wind the scene backward in order to photograph it all over again…. We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing. From that fact stem the anxieties and strength of our profession.”
• “To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.”
• “I believe that through the art of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us which can mould us, but which can also be affected by us. A balance must be established between these two worlds – the one inside us and the one outside us. As the result of a constant reciprocal process, both these worlds come to form a single one. And it is this world that we must communicate.”
• “But this takes care of only of the content of the picture. For me, content cannot be separated from form. By form, I mean a vigorous organization of the interplay of surfaces, lines and values. It is in this organization alone that our conceptions and emotions become concrete and communicable. In photography, visual organization can stem only from a developed instinct.”

The article continues with some pretty down to earth advice on practical photography that is well worth reading, although perhaps it is a bit dated – after all, the article is 55 years old.

The main text of the preface article does not mention “Decisive Moments” except in passing when discussing portraits. The only significant mention of “Decisive Moments” is the English title and the quote of the Cardinal de Retz statement mentioned above. The quotes above are as close to the concept as you get. Clearly, his “invention” came later if indeed it ever was as an invention.

What is a Decisive Moment? Cartier-Bresson’s discussions explain quite well its importance as a photographic concept but do not explain what constitutes an actual Decisive Moment. The memoirs of Cardinal de Retz do nothing to clarify the matter. A thesaurus provides the following synonyms: Critical mass, crucial point, defining moment, important, substantial, momentous, moment of truth, point of no return, crisis, climax, high noon, zero hour, kairos and race against time, crunch, conspicuous, imperative, serious, vital and pregnant plus maybe a hundred others. Clearly, the concept covers a lot of imprecise and not too helpful ground.

“Decisive Moment” photographs usually have a strong time dimension where time is a crucial element of the image. That also means that motion is usually a strong feature.

That means not all photography focus on Decisive Moments. But much does, in addition to the time/motion “rule” above. Even the case of Cartier-Bresson’s opposite (as conveniently depicted in this essay), Ansel Adams, every picture relies on a decisive moment. The sun, shadows and clouds in that Adams’ nature scene have to be captured at exactly the right moment. Or take Robert Capa’s photo of the dying Spanish soldier – that certainly was a Decisive Moment captured 15 years before “Images à la sauvette” was published.

What is the difference between a “Decisive Moment” and “Random Luck/Chance”? Did the shooters capturing planes hitting the World Trade Center experience a Decisive Moment? Do the (many false) photos of the 2004 tsunami reflect Decisive Moments? I do not think so. There was no vision or deliberation behind those pictures. A monkey would be equally likely to take such random images, with a little bit of training.

The difference between “Decisive Moments” and “Random Luck” is razor thin as Cartier-Bresson voices it. He views it as a spilt second event where a combination of form and content comes together once in a life time. Shoot or it is forever lost. He finds these opportunities by wandering around, keeping his eyes and mind open. He is an outsider, looking in towards the subjects without a strong emotional involvement – after the shot he walks away and isn’t really interested in what he left behind.

Given this remote, outsider approach, the “Decisive Moment” strategy is hard to execute. It is well known that Cartier-Bresson did not easily find such moments – in most cases, it took many false starts, a lot of film and shoe leather to create a single successful image. Many of his images do not show a Decisive Moment. For myself, I do not expect, or look for, Decisive Moments. I concentrate on vision, emotional content, honesty and form. If a Decisive Moment happens to come along, that is fantastic but, of course, rare. I am in the camp of “insider, not outsider” view of Sebastiao Salgado:

Famous photo journalist Sebastiao Salgado rejects the notion of Decisive Moments, asserting that, instead, photo journalism requires the immersion of the photographer into the context he is documenting. The essence of the image depends on the rapport which you have with your subjects, and the knowledge that you acquired about their situation. That is not a Decisive, split second, Moment; it is a longer term commitment. Salgado routinely spend years on his projects:

• “You photograph here, you photograph there, you speak with people, you understand people and people understand you. Then, probably, you arrive at the same point as Cartier-Bresson, but from the inside of the parabola. And that is for me the integration of the photographer with the subject of his photograph…. An image is your integration with the person that you photographed at the moment that you work so incredibly together, that your picture is not more than the relation you have with your subject.”

Looking at Salgado’s pictures, it is easy to see his commitment and immersion into the subject matter. Yet in the end they all show if not Decisive, at least Special Moments. They magically freeze an event that may or may not be of great significance. Does it matter how you got there, whether it took years of dedication or the split second recognition of the significance of some event? The Decisive Moment is subject to the same fundamentals as any quality photography. That means a vision, a path, patience and persistence. That is the same, always, in any worthwhile endeavor.

Sequences Everywhere

Now, here is an ambiguous term – sequence. It has meanings in math, computer science and real life. Sequences are present in archeology, poetry, music, filming, games, bio polymers, DNA, geology, dance and biology. And it is present in photography.

A sequence of photographs may document a process of some kind, such as the demolition of a building or the launch of the space shuttle. A medical MRI session results in a sequence of images that shows consecutive slices of a body. An MRI is not a photo in the traditional sense but the result is captured sequentially on film, or, these days, on CDs as image files.

Any table top photography book contains a sequence of images, as does a regular old photo album. Slide shows can contain photo sequences as can PowerPoint presentations. Photos can be sequenced in multi media shows. Photos of kids growing up are sequences. There are sequences built into many cameras: bracketing and fast multiple exposure series. A roll of negatives or a full memory card contains sequences of images.

Sequenced photographs add a time component. There cannot be two exposures at precisely the same time. One image is exposed before or after another, a sequence over time. Not all sequences aim at a time dimension – a panorama by shooting a horizontal spread of images, going around in a circle is not a sequence over time. Collages or composite images do not necessarily reflect time. Wedding and documentary photography both have strong sequential time elements, as does sports photography. Advertising, food or portraits usually rely less on sequences since the end product may be one single image.

Emmet Gowin is a photographer that chronicled his family from 1965 to 1974. The sequence (small sample to the right) is symbolic, intense, revealing, relevant and honest with a gothic overtone. Incidentally, he started playing with dimensions quite explicitly in 1970 by using a circular lens.

Alfred Wertheimer gained fame as a photographer through an obscure assignment in 1956. He was hired to shoot a young, largely unknown, upstart singer with odd music, odd hairdo and very odd stage behavior. I’m sure you guessed right – the singer is a young but not so innocent Elvis Presley. I used a few of the images and some music for a little modest, but fun, multimedia show as an example of sequencing. The second show is a brief portrait of Seattle jazz pianist Marc Seales and his band. This time I did both the show and the photography.

Elvis

Seales

Technically, all photography makes up a sequence as it is unlikely the photographer makes only one exposure in his/her career. From a vision stand point, the trick is to, first, recognize the sequential potential and, second, make the sequence meaningful. It adds an extra, very powerful dimension. Don’t miss out!

Sequences also have a totally different meaning. All photographers end up with hard drives full of images or filing cabinets stuffed with prints, notes, negatives, last week’s lunch, invoices and other junk. A smart photographer tackles that mess and makes sure it is organized to smoothly meet needs. Many of us don’t tackle the issue which is a rather dangerous way to treat your primary business or memory assets.

Do not forget the aging factor. Most photographic assets deteriorate over time. Hard drives crash. CDs and DVDs become unreadable. A traditional print deteriorates as do negatives. You are wise to consider this issue and act in your best interests. Enough said. Sermon is over.

Other Timing Stuff

Seasons: Spring, summer…. Time of day: Sunrise, high noon, sunset…. Events: weddings, births, sports, coronations, vacations and dinnertime. It might be a summer lunch by the river. All these examples can have a time, or perhaps more accurately, a timing element. Consider time and timing in your vision and game plan. Different events or timings require different tactics.

Sometimes time and timing factors go together. The wedding photographer must show up on time. He/she needs to consider the light situation given the time of the day. Another practical variable is the seasonal impact – in December, outside shots are fairly rare in Minnesota but much more common in Australia. The photographer must visualize the time and timing elements in addition to the standard wedding scenes, then act accordingly.

Another example: Several of my photo sequences use extreme low light scenes (no flash). This may be shooting a street scene at night or performances in some music club or a theater. I shoot outside at night or in dark interior spaces. Since I have done that for quite a while I know what I aim for and how to get there and it is certainly a vital part of my particular vision. There are many samples of this vision illustrating this essay.

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What: Context Layered on Contexts

Here is a summary of the discussion so far. A few items belong to the Toolbox and will be covered in the next main section. In effect, there are four major items (blue): Vision, Plan, Execution and Show. Then there are sub items (yellow). Think of it as a wedding cake – layer after layer:

Does this start looking like some Corporate Planning fad? If so, the point is missed. Read the discussion all over again. I have yet to meet an artist who goes overboard on corporate mania. Most artists I’ve met or studied tend to belabor abstract, mystical and philosophical thoughts and theories. The Paris gatherings in the cafes and restaurants, such as the La Closerie des Lilas, on the Parisian Left Bank in the 1920s come to mind: The Lost Generation of Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Getrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald, Natalie Barney, Man Ray, Madox Ford, Robert McAlmon and William Carlos Williams smoking and drinking their cigarettes, coffee, Pernod and Armagnac. Perhaps the gang fell into stupor as the nights wore on but they were definitely not corporate in style.

All artists do go through the self discovery, work and dedication associated with creating a vision. All successful artists translate the vision into something tangible that can be shared with others. The graph above crystallizes the steps most commonly used. Most artists probably will not explicitly spell out as much detail as implied above. Not everyone will reach the vision and the plan in the same way. The components may be very different from that of the next guy or the graph. The graph is only a list of useful components. Those components may or may not apply to you. But be very explicit about what you include and exclude from your vision and plan.

All Those Styles

The next step explores the many different types of photographs and their widely different purposes to which the photographer must conform. In some types of photography, “accuracy” is crucial – even though we know accuracy and photography have little in common. No photos are accurate – they all distort reality. Then we have abstractions where eventually the original subject no longer is recognizable. In such a case “accuracy” is nonexistent and undesired. Here is a list of some major types of photography ordered by the elusive requirement of “accuracy”:

• Industrial, Medical, Forensics photography renders artistic creativity irrelevant. A forensic picture uses precise techniques to capture all relevant detail of a specific item or event. It is not an “accurate” picture of the crime scene but a highly specialized one, serving exact needs of crime investigators. A sequence from an ultra high speed camera might document some industrial or medical process, having little to do with reality as a human might view it. Such a sequence is conceptually closer to an abstraction but covers the specific, exact requirements of the engineers or scientists involved. More examples include ultra high speed pictures of nuclear explosions and the Doc Edgerton stroboscopic images of flying bullets. Current technology easily allows capture rates of 1,000 frames per second.
• Photojournalism emphasizes ethics, accuracy and objectivity. These images should contain a time element (when) and a narrative (what etc.), telling the relevant story as reflected in the 5Ws. That has to happen while under fire in Iraq, Boise or Watts, during riots, weather extremes, catastrophes, NBA games or Congressional hearings. The ability to run Photoshop in the middle of any war zone, famine struck desert or New York grid lock adds to the controversy. Strict procedural guidelines are in place but overlook that real photography has little to do with such guidelines. The guidelines are typically arbitrary. Photography is not truly accurate or objective.
• Non-Fiction and Educational is a category I just invented. It represents a middle ground between Documentaries – that may be quite biased and opinionated – and idealistic Journalism. An educational photo sequence of, say, frog eating habits is quite different in tone than documentaries on abortion or IEDs in Baghdad. The latter two are most likely politically charged and the former is, well, about frogs eating stuff. Unless the frog reside in Love Canal, that subject is probably non controversial. Other examples of this “innocent” category include most Discovery Channel “documentaries”, biology text book photos, photo sequences of grass growing or a sun eclipse.
• Documentaries are another step away from “accuracy and reality”, yet many assume documentaries are objective and accurate. They are not. On top of the fallacies of journalism, nothing prevents – ethically, contractually or guide lined – the photographer from expressing a personal bias or perspective on the subject. Documentaries take stands – Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is a great example. If the bias is hidden, misrepresented or not clearly stated, then we do have a problem. We suddenly deal with propaganda – the recent BBC TV show “The Great Global Warming Swindle” is a perfect example of conscious misinformation.
• Essays are similar to documentaries but generally advocate a particular opinion even more than the documentary. You are reading (viewing) an essay because you are curious about what the author (photographer) has to say (show). You realize that there are probably conflicting views. Quite likely, you will read those too. Neither essays, nor documentaries are text books. However they are not just polemic tirades either. The more militant in your face view points belong in the editorial field:
• Editorials sometimes go beyond most journalism or documentaries/essays by expressing personal opinions with little pretence of being unbiased or even fair. In the news world, there are sometimes rules and editorial boards in place to control editorial excesses but as often, editorials are measured against its ability to grab eyeballs by whatever means available. (Falsified) photos of John Kerry and Jane Fonda at a war rally are an example used in many conservative editorials. Greenpeace editorials on Nuclear Energy or Whaling, ExxonMobil on Global Warming, Philip Morris on Lung Cancer and Bush’s representations on Climate Change, Terrorism and Iraq are all very opinionated and biased viewpoints supported by photography and editorial photography.
• Sensationalism represents the highest level of vulgarism in photography and journalism. The graffiti contra point of art, descriptions include “culture of fear, exploitation, star or Satan worship, junk news, infotainment, reality shows, media circus, absurdity, moral panic, pulp news/books/magazines, tabloid junk, trial by media and, not least, Fox News, Jerry Springer, Bill O’Reilly and Russ Limbaugh shows”. Of course, the reason sensationalism exists is because people want it and are willing to pay for it. Some photographers enthusiastically enjoy such money, including paparazzi and waparazzi. Others continued straight to pornography.
• Extremism goes even further by typically combining sensationalism with another message. Consider videos and photos produced by authorities on executions, terrorists on beheadings, snuff movies, torture, medical and psychological exploitation of captives may show real events but against a backdrop that is real only to the producers and deplorable to all others.
• Portraits add another dimension to the “accurate” versus “abstract” spectrum. Some portraits do not even deal with the person. Diane Arbus portraits of fringe people are more about fringe society than about the people she used as subjects. Other portraits go beyond the person’s features to tell a story about their life. The famous pictures of Stravinsky (Arnold Newman) by a piano, Pablo Casals (Yousuf Karsh) playing the cello or Auguste Rodin (Edward Steichen) looking like a sculpture rather than a sculptor are all good examples. These three images take on a life of their own, rising far beyond what most think of as a portrait. On the other end of the spectrum, a Sears portrait usually smoothes reality to the customer’s relief. However, portraiture work is, in its day to day
  frame, mostly about customer satisfaction, not accuracy or reality.
• Commercial photography implies commercial interests are more important than purely creative visions. The focus is on selling products, promoting travel, educating employees or simply informing some targets demographics. Each form of commercial photography has its own requirements. The trick is to mesh the photographer’s creativity with the commercial requirements. “Accuracy” is not a major concern; looking good, polished, unique and attractive is. Here are some of the key types of commercial photography:
• • The super slick arenas of Advertising, Fashion and Modeling.
  • The seductive fantasies of Food & Travel.
  • The ultra conventional fields of Wedding Photography.
  • The matter of fact Catalogs.
  • The huge cottage industry of various specialties – local post cards, souvenirs, real estate etc.
  • The ups, downs, this, that and “anything you want” of Stock Photography.
  • The insincerely nonobjective shadow land of Corporate Photography.
• Fine Art ranks the highest on not presenting accuracy. Creativity comes before the literal meaning of “accuracy”. Fine Art is actually very accurate. You just have to expand the notion to include impact, metaphors, messages, statements, convictions, emotions and other elements. The all important artistic vision may include sophisticated abstractions and many different manipulations. There is no rule book. Creativity rules the day. But Fine Art is a subject that covers many types of photography. Below are just a few of them:
• • Nature photography may rank high on accuracy, detail and, often, texture. A typical image is much more elaborate than, say, street photography. Large format cameras are still in use. Aesthetics are more important than in most other areas. The genre includes landscape, wildlife, clouds, underwater and some macro photography.
  • Street photography simply implies the image is shot in a public place. In most countries, shooting in public places is a right protected in law (France and Saudi Arabia are exceptions) with some obvious limitations such as not endanger anyone or disturbing the peace. It’s a good idea to observe some ethical standards as well. The step from a legal right to exploitation and discrimination can be quite short. In many cases, the step from the same legal right to invasion of privacy in a non-public place is quite short too.
  • Abstract photography is a matter of degree. Strictly speaking, all photography is abstract since no photos reflect reality. The degree of abstraction usually relates to the degree of distortion invoked on the original subject, but can also simply convert the object to a different level than its ordinary role. There are endless techniques that achieve distortions, such as lens filters, development abnormalities and/or Photoshop. Or you may convert the object to make it appear in some other dimension. The line between art and weirdness is quite narrow. Abstraction truly requires a clear artistic vision to work.

Different applications, different requirements, different techniques. Different visions and different execution paths. Similar creativity, aesthetics, dedication, honesty and ethics. The top level of the stack includes creativity, then one level down you have visions, then there is the convictions-message-activist layer followed (down again) by the execution path and at the lowest level technology. That is the Prerequisite part of creating great photos. Let’s move on to the Magical Toolbox that is a great complement to the stack we created.

Techniques of the Clever Photographer

Before jumping into the magical toolbox, here are a few one liners from the text to date. They may be helpful as a summary of the wisdom so far:

• Start
• • Define your a creative, artistic vision – honesty, emotions, facts. Be persistent. Don’t quit.
  • Understand your need for rewards. Money, fame, gratitude, sex, inner satisfaction?
  • Determine the execution path you need to follow to translate the vision into real Art.
  • Take advantage of relevant parts of trends such as Web 2.0, etc., etc.. Just face it.
  • Consider technology needed to realize the goals. Use what you need, not what you have.
• Research
• • Do the subject research, repeat over and over. Immerse yourself. Live it, breathe it.
  • Start shooting, realizing it is not the final stuff but part of the immersion process.
  • Unravel the story, understand the cause, determine the message, show compassion.
• Preliminaries
• • Pre visualize your end product and revisit the execution path. What modifications are needed?
  • Pre compose the imagery: Simple, detailed, complex or neither. Keep shooting.
  • Define the location, stage the scene: light, color, mood, composition, time of day, season.
• The Main Event
• • Collect your team, especially if it consists of your lonely hand, eyes and shoe leather
  • Lead the assistants, models, make up people, crane operators, art directors, clients and lab people.
  • Look for the Decisive Moment if you are an optimist and figure out how to find it. Keep shooting.
  • Improvise. Break the rules. Create emotion, tension, harmony, conflict, contradiction as possible
  • Savior the Magic Moment of exposure. It’s you and no one else. This is the moment of truth.
  • Execute the magical moment!
• Post Shoot
• • Execute the pre visualized path to the final image. Keep innovating. Break the rules some more.
  • Realize the power of sequences. Put that time element back into the static single shots.
  • Sell, exhibit, store, backup, manage and be a good little businessperson all around.
• Move On

Obviously, steps and their order will vary by shoot and the attitudes and work habits of individual photographers. In this sample series of events, the main event – actually shooting for the final image – is at step 18 out of a total of 21 steps. That’s a very front heavy, deliberate approach favored by some but not all.

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The Magical Photograph – Quotes by the Wise

To finish off this essay’s first main part about visions and paths, here are the words on art by a few prominently wise photographers. To me, these quotes highlight the breadth of ideas while the creative focus is remarkably constant:

• 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
• “A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.”; “Nothing would be funnier than the photographers’ contortions to produce effects that are “lifelike”.”-Roland Barthes
• In photography, if you have purpose and intent you can [still] allow yourself to be beset by gargantuan problems during the taking of pictures. These problems must be worked out in advance … I do not mean that every minutiae should be rehearsed in advance, for if the taking became a purely mechanical routine, all spontaneity would be lost and the result could only be lifeless and dull. -Ralph Bartholomew Jr.
• Too many photographers try too hard. They try to lift photography into the realm of Art, because they have an inferiority complex about their Craft. You and I would see more interesting photography if they would stop worrying, and instead, apply horse-sense to the problem of recording the look and feel of their own era. -Jessie Tarbox Beals
• Photojournalism is the worst it’s ever been. Nobody is doing anything. Today all the photographers are making setup shots, where you go in to shoot someone with a couple of assistants and a few stylists. Everyone does it. I do it. It’s the Value Jet of photojournalism -stuck in the mud. In the end, those kinds of portraits mean nothing. They don’t convey any information. The idea in that kind of photography is to make a picture the subject will like. That’s not journalism. -Harry Benson
• My quest, through the magic of light and shadow, is to isolate, to simplify and to give emphasis to form with the greatest clarity. To indicate the ideal proportion, to reveal sculptural mass and the dominating spirit is my goal. -Ruth Bernhard
• Fashion, flowers, nudes and portraits – they’re all the same: light, form, color and mystery. Mystery is very important. When I started photographing flowers, I thought, “My God, where have I been?” I’m totally addicted to this project. I’d never seen the mysteries of a flower. We walk by wonders every day and don’t see them. We only stop at what shouts the loudest. -Barbara Bordnick
• When I have seen or sensed – I do not know which it is – the atmosphere of my subject, I try to convey that atmosphere by intensifying the elements that compose it. I lay emphasis on one aspect of my subject and I find that I can thus most effectively arrest the spectator’s attention and induce in him an emotional response to the atmosphere I have tried to convey. -Bill Brandt
• “There are many photographs which are full of life but which are confusing and difficult to remember. It is the force of an image which matter.”; “The thing that is magnificent about photography is that it can produce images that incite emotion based on the subject matter alone.”; “The purpose of art is to raise people to a higher level of awareness than they would otherwise attain on their own.” -Brassai
• What I feel is that the picture-taking process is an intuitive thing. You go out and intuitively plan a picture. When you come back, reason takes over and verifies or rejects whatever you’ve done. So that’s why I say that reason and intuition are not in conflict–they strengthen each other. -Wynn Bullock
• A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves. -Wynn Bullock
• I now measure my growth as a photographer in terms of the degrees to which I am aware of, have developed my sense of, and have the skills to symbolize visually the four-dimensional structure of the universe. -Wynn Bullock
• A very fine photographer asked me, “What did it feel like the first time you manipulated an image?”, and I said “Do you mean the first time I shot black and white instead of color, do you mean the first time I burned the corner of a print down, do you mean the first time I ’spotted’ a dust speck on my print, do you mean the first time I shot with a wide angle instead of a normal lens, I mean what are you referring to? Where does it stop?” -Dan Burkholder

And that is it. The next major segment takes an unusual look at some major tools for creative photography. Think outside the box. Benefit from tricks of the trade in other art forms and even sciences.

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Part 2

And hereby, Part Two is awaiting your attention. It is labeled “Build the Mysterious Toolbox”. This toolbox is not a collection of cameras, assorted lenses and wonderful flashes, light meters and camera bags built to survive WWIII, Global Warming or a dive to 3,000 feet beneath sea level. If you haven’t noticed, this essay likes a somewhat abstract level. The vision thing, pre visualization, immersion, complexity, creativity and innovation can be rather heavy subjects if all you wanted to know was how to load film into a Leica M series (damn tricky if you ask me). Of course, these days you load a memory card into your brand new M8 and, of course, you still have to dismantle the camera to achieve this task.

This toolbox contains only two “tools”. The first tool is light. No photography is possible without light. Photography is all about the art of capturing light in the tiniest of moments. Light is a vital component in your toolbox but also a tricky and treacherous one.

Some of us don’t realize that we do not see things. We see light, nothing else. Otherwise invisible objects may have the ability to emit light (the sun, light bulbs and certain insects). Other objects can reflect light (the moon, your significant other and Mount Everest). Light is simply energy vibrating at a certain speed. This energy is influenced by thousands of factors, all serving to distort the light originating from some source.

The second tool contains assorted dimensions. The idea is to go beyond the obvious two dimensions of a photographic print to understand what is really in the image. As you’ll see, there are many more dimensions to consider. Some are simple – such as expanding the scope into time and distance or depth. Others are much more complex: the dimensions as exist in math, physics and quantum mechanics and – truly mind boggling stuff.

Then there is another angle – using psychology and its very different view of dimensions to understand art and how an artist relates to the world. If you hang in here, you’ll get a glimpse into some research by yours truly.

Leonardo da Vinci was one of the most creative and innovative giants of all mankind and all ages. He was a master of almost any field from science to art and far ahead of his time of 500 years ago. He created Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, drawings of helicopters, tanks, calculators and advanced research into anatomy, engineering, optics, geology and much else.

He described a Camera Obscura in 1490 and commented “…Here the figures, here the colors, here all the images of every part of the universe are contracted to a point. O what a point is so marvelous!”

Here are some other statements: “He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.” “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” “Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.” Still relevant after all these years.

The drawing below by, of course, da Vinci, is also relevant to this discussion of light and dimensions. Light is obviously present. The dimensional aspect is curious indeed. There is a very strong spatial, perspectural, scientific component. Then that is coupled with a human aspect – the mysterious people occupying the scene. Clearly, Leonardo saw an interaction of dimensions – scientific and human which is exactly where we are heading.

Execution – Build the Mysterious Toolbox

Photography is a very gadget friendly environment. Starting with hundreds of camera bodies, lenses and equipment left and right, camera stores happily sell thousands of accessories. Add chemicals, development materials, printing accessories, computers, memory cards, special monitors and you end up with an empty wallet and far more headaches than you deserve. Or as some partners put it, all the headaches you do deserve. Boating is a hole in the water into which you throw money. Photography is a hole in the ground into which you throw not only money but perhaps your marriage, career, cat and sanity.

Here is yet another example of Jeff Wall’s art. It appears to be his interpretation of a Magical Toolbox. This particular toolbox seems to contain all kinds of goodies, gadgets and misc. survival gear. No doubt the owner is a happy, well organized photographer with a clear vision and an obviously grand toolbox.

The first camera I used was one I liberated from my father. Equipped with a bellowed fixed lens, zero batteries and no focusing assistance, it sure was a curious little machine. Using medium format film in a body smaller than a Leica rangefinder, it took remarkable photos. Not only that, the absence of any modern convenience resulted in complete freedom from gadgets. In fact, available accessories numbered exactly zero. Those were the days.

The discussion from now on applies to a camera like that as well as the latest high-tech monster. By toolbox, I do not mean a box filled with gadgets, I mean a box filled with ideas. The discussion splits into two main parts. The first part deals with light, distortion and how to use both to your creative benefit. The second part covers a rather unusual way to look at tools by discussing dimensions and how to add them to that boring two dimensional image.

Here is the idea: the first priority is to understand the basic features of a photography toolbox, such as how light works and why dimensions are relevant to photography. The second priority is to provide some ideas on how to use these features in practical photography. However, all of us photographers are responsible for our craft; the real aim is to inspire you to create your own toolbox – there is no way I can determine what is right for you.

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Part 2a – Distorted Light, Distorted Reality

Distortion is the alteration of a shape or characteristic of some object after some change in state took place. In stereos, it is the difference in shape of the signal fed to the stereo and that of the output. It is the difference between the signal from a CD and that of an mp3 file created from that CD. It could be the difference in the sun’s light wave patterns and the light patterns measured in Los Angeles on a smoggy day late in the afternoon versus the noon measurements on top of Mount Everest.

Parts of the discussions below update and expand on the content of some previous posts, notably On Reality – Part 1 – Elements of Light and On Reality – Part 5 – How Perceptions and Illusions destroy Reality.

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That Treacherous Light

Nothing is more important to a photographer than light. No light, no photography. The one thing your toolbox must contain is your love of light. You better like how light bends, creates color, enters a lens, refracts, reflects, bounces, scatters, disappears, enters eyes for processing in the brain and how it is affected by sun spots, black holes, cosmic rays, atmosphere, clouds, rain, weather, pollution, dust and much else.

All of the factors above are distortions. The original light source, the sun (for most practical purposes) emits “pure” light. By the time that light reaches some place on Earth and your camera lens, it is very different compared to that original “pure” light and its spectrum. Light from space is distorted even before it reaches our atmosphere, then the atmosphere adds its set of oddities. The camera is a virtual snake pit of distortions. Manmade light adds other distortions since its light is differently colored than the “norm”. Our eyes and brains add more layers of distortions. Can you, the photographer, use this mess to your advantage? You sure can and, further, you pretty much have to.

Historical Light

In the beginning, people assumed one saw by emitting beams out of one’s eyes. Pythagoras, 500 BC, assumed light traveled from the eyes and a sensation of seeing followed as the beam hit some object. Plato, 400BC, supported the same theory. Around 300BC, Euclid questioned that eyes were the only source of light and formulated quite a bit of light related mathematics. Still, the view of the eyes beaming light prevailed. Then the Bible mentioned “And God said, let there be light, and there was light”, associating light versus darkness as a good versus evil issue.

Around 1000AD, al-Haytham of Egypt finally voiced the idea that light entered the eyes rather than the other way around. He concluded the sun was the source of light. He also invented the Camera Obscura although Leonardo da Vinci received some of that credit 500 years later. Unfortunately, our gentleman resided in jail, so his findings were not immediately available. Most of his ideas were based on the sun light coming into his cell through a tiny opening or crack.

It took over 500 years before al-Haytham’s theories reached Europe, inspiring Kepler to formulate some fairly correct theories late in the 1500s. Galileo, Descartes and Newton added tremendously to the understanding of light over the next 100 years. The wave theory came along through Euler in the mid 1700s. Other contributors include Fresnel, Poisson, Faraway, Planck and Maxwell, leading up to the late 1800s and pretty much the way we understand light today.

A Simple Theory of Light

Light is produced by light emitters, reflected by certain objects and consumed by others. Light is radiation energy affected by combinations of photons, atoms, molecules and other low lives. It has characteristics such as wave length, frequency and intensity, all of which vary tremendously with quite spectacular results. Most light originates at the sun and manmade processes. Light may be a single beam or scattered in a collision with some obscure molecules.

Radiation is a form of energy with intensity and wave length, vibrating around us constantly. Low frequency waves represent sound. There are TV and radio waves, visible and invisible light, radar waves, cellular phone radiations and X-ray emissions. Light as we see it and as used by a camera is only a small part of the energy waves around us. In some cases, invisible wave lengths affect film or memory cards in undesirable ways. Don’t X-ray your films. Another rather extreme example is the HEMP bomb that can fry all electronics within a large radius, including your camera (unless you use a camera similar to that of my father, but the film is probably a goner).

Light is created in many ways – the sun maintains a controlled nuclear explosion emitting lots of radiation energy, some in the form of light, other in the form of quite deadly variations such as gamma rays. Light bulbs, neon lights and many other manmade devices emit light on demand. Such light is usually created by the combination of energy in an enclosure containing suitable gases. Other light sources include computer, radar and TV screens which operate using cathode rays and energy sensitive coatings or by turning transistors off and on. Nuclear reactions produce lots of radiation, some of which is visible.

Light is generated by heat; increasingly hot temperatures transform light from the original color to a glow of red, white and eventually blue – think about your stove, fireplace, kerosene lamp or volcanic lava. Military night sights use slight heat variations as emitted in the infrared spectrum to “see” a battle field. Chemical processes generate light in some organisms: fireflies, glow worms, krill and others. Lightning produces a short burst of light based on heat.

When light falls on an object, some waves with a specific length are reflected and others absorbed. Light emitted by an object also have a specific set of wave lengths. We perceive the light of a specific wave length as a color. We thus “see” the object having a color. The reflected light is not a constant since it depends of the wave lengths of the incoming light. Reddish sunset light makes any object look reddish while the same object is bluish at noon.

Photographers and light meter manufacturers make a big deal out of incident and reflected light. Incident light measures incoming light only and then make assumptions about correct exposure. Reflected readings do the same for reflected light. The problem is that different object reflect light very differently – snow, water and any light object reflects much more light than dark soil, a black car top or any dark object. That means that neither incident nor reflected light measures result in correct exposure. In the case of snow, an incidence measure will overexpose the scene while a reflected metering will underexpose the same scene. The only time you get a good measure is when the scene is a uniform 18% grey – a very rare occurrence.

Auto exposure cameras use reflected light only as does the Zone System. The Zone System is unique by actually attempting to correct for the ambiguity in light measures. In fact, that is the major point of the Zone System. Meanwhile, the auto exposure camera relies on you to override its automatics to produce a correct reading. Nothing automatic about that, is it?

Most objects are not producing light at all. They are only visible because they reflect light. A chair does not normally emit light. The moon does not produce light – it solely reflects light mostly from the sun. There is a bit of a fallacy here because heat produces light. Heat the chair up and it will produce light. Humans do not produce light but we do have a body temperature that does cause light emissions in the invisible infrared spectrum. If we actually turned into visible light emitters we are very dead because that implies heat sufficient to make us glow red – blue – white. That would not be healthy. However, it is possible to photograph people in total darkness. All you need is a readily available sensor or film sensitive to infrared light.

Light intensity declines rapidly with distance. Most photographers use a simple formula stating: double the distance from a light source and the intensity is down to a 1/4 of the original intensity. That is an approximation that serves photography well in most circumstances but is actually wildly inaccurate. If you get close to a light source, then light intensity is almost flat regardless of distance. Nor does the rule hold up when the light is focused with some sort of reflector as you may have noticed using a flashlight, driving at night or watching the beam from a lighthouse.

Light never dies. As time goes by and the light travels great distances, the intensity goes down but it never reaches zero. We are surrounded by light originating billions of years ago. Unfortunately, the intensity is way down making it impossible to see for us humans. The Hubble telescope is extremely light sensitive and can pick up very distant light originating a long time ago.

There is no such thing as “seeing” an object; our eyes only receive light emitted and reflected by the object. The light waves reaching our eyes are quite distorted. The eyes introduce more distortions due to various imperfections. The brain then makes up a “view” of the object, introducing additional distortions. The brain is easily fooled into providing false or biased views. What we “see” is not an accurate representation of the object, it merely is one deemed safe by our brain.

Light Traveling Space

The sun is the major source of light. This light is comes from a massive nuclear reaction that has been going on for billions of years. Sun light affects human health and climates. The current Global Warming crisis is caused by sun energy being trapped by CO2 concentrations rather than reflected back into space, which causes temperatures to rise to dangerous levels. Sun light produces Vitamin D but also skin cancers and ultraviolet radiation aging us.

Stars, clusters, galaxies and nebulae provide some light. Polar lights (Aurorae) are clearly visible in high latitude areas and seasons. The moon reflects sun light mostly at night. Magnetic fields in space bend light, space storms distort light, black holes does who knows what with light and sun flares send out a lot of unpredictable and usually harmful energy.

Cosmic “rays” refer to Earth being bombard by energy containing particles. These particles originate with the sun but also exploding stars, novae, galaxies, quasars and black holes. These generally low energy (unless you are an astronaut) particles have some limited effect on climate by affecting lightning and cloud formation. Solar cosmic rays can affect electronics on Earth such as communication devices and possibly digital cameras. Then there is the Oh-My-God particle (really) traveling around the Universe at extreme speed and containing enormous energy, given its tiny size. But that is another story.

Photography in space is quite different than on earth. The radiation levels are harmful to film. NASA tests film extensively to reduce fogging and color shifts – they tend to use film specially made for them by Kodak. Today I’m sure they use digital cameras with similar quality considerations.

Light in space is either on or off with photography taking place when light is on. With the light is on, it is very constant – no clouds, haze, rain storms or shadow. There are only two basic shooting scenarios: close or far. Shooting earth from the space station means using one standard exposure (reflected light is quite constant) and the lens set at infinity. Shooting “close ups” such as space walks require a similar standard exposure and some focusing. Photography inside the space vessel is similar to that on earth.

Space light is much bluer than on earth. There is far more ultraviolet radiation which is not visible with eyes but may impact images. Contrast ranges are extreme – consider an astronaut in a white suit against a pitch black background. The seasoned space photographer must consider speed. Everything moves way faster than earth speed limits. The shuttle moves at 17,500 miles an hour (5 miles per second or 110 feet a typical exposure of 1/240 seconds) so panning is a necessary skill. The Cartier-Bresson Decisive Moment takes on a different meaning.

Atmosphere and Time

The atmosphere greatly impacts light from space. There are seasonality, clouds, storms, humidity, dust, pollution, inversion layers, refractions and reflections. Other factors include time of day effects and temperature distortions.

When light beams reach the atmosphere, they scatter as they collide with atmospheric particles. During the day, this results in a blue sky because the light is coming from a high angle. In the early morning and late night with a low sun, we see a reddish sky because the angle of the incoming beams is low. Without clouds, we experience a mix of sun beams and scattered light. Snow, water and beach sand reflect light more than dark objects. That amplified light level reaches your camera, confuses the light meter and you better step down the exposure. Ice also reflects light but amplifies the blue wave lengths. Thus, photos of ice bergs have a deep bluish tint.

Seasons display unique light effects. Snowy landscapes require special attention to exposure. Fall foil colors can overwhelm a landscape. Some enjoy the Christmas feeling and warm toned nostalgia. Seasonal sports and graduations are popular events. Some regions suffer extreme weather seasons such as the Arctic winter, the hurricane plagued Southeast US coasts, the mid US Tornado Alley and the Asian Monsoon and Cyclone season.

Clouds reflect the direct sun beams and all we see is the scattered light waves – shadows disappear or dilute. The water content of the clouds scatter light in a way that produces no particular color, hence the grayish feel with a complete cloud cover. The thicker the cloud, the less light passes through. Extreme weather can lead to almost total darkness and a general loss in color. The red rose is suddenly grey.

Bounces and Refractions

Refraction of light is the bending effect that happens when light passes through certain media at certain angles. The straw in a glass of water is the classic example. Refraction is, for instance, the cause of rainbows. The atmosphere provides refraction of sun beams: the lower the sun, the more the refraction. At sunset the refraction can be as much as half a degree or about one sun diameter. This explains the “oval” sun at sunset or dawn. Another effect of refraction is the “floating mountains” or “elonged islands or ships” seen on hot days (Fata Morgana). Other special effects include mirages and the common illusion of distant pools of water on hot roads. Refraction also makes it possible to see beyond the natural horizon.

Refraction in a vacuum is exactly 1, which means there is no refraction. The atmosphere has a refraction of 1.0003 while ordinary water refracts 1.33, quite a bit more. Acrylic glass has a refraction index of 1.49 and diamonds are at 2.42. Silicon has an index of over 4 although that probably won’t be much of a photography issue.

Refraction also is important because different wave lengths of light have slightly different refractions in different materials. This causes dispersion of the light into colors. Diamonds, for instance, are very high in dispersions causing their extraordinary “fire”. One moment you see blue light reflected from the stone, then perhaps green or pure white. Rainbows are another example of this phenomenon. Reflection, dispersion and refraction are the mechanisms by which many different kinds of prisms work – very important design aspects of your camera’s lenses.

Pollution and Dust

Atmospheric pollution affects light. Compare light in a smogged Los Angeles, Mexico City or Shanghai to that experienced on top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Broadly, there are three kinds of atmospheric pollution agents. Some reflect solar beams back out into space, resulting in less light and cooler temperatures. The sulphur dioxide crisis of the 1960s and early 1970s is a good example. Other pollutants, such as carbon dioxide, do the opposite – they allow the sun energy to pass to the surface of Earth but disallow the required reflection of excess energy back out into space. The result is Global Warming. Yet another pollutant, typically Freon, destroy the ozone layer allowing ultraviolet light through at levels threatening health.

Here are the smoggiest cities: London, New York, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Houston, Toronto, Athens, Beijing and Hong Kong. Smoggy areas include the Ruhr Area and Silicon Valley and many places in China, Southeast Asia and India. Forest slash and burn practices in Indonesia cause severe smog and smoke in much of surrounding countries. The disastrous 1952 smog in London killed 4,000 people in four days, followed by another 8,000 in the next six months. On a happier note, both LA and Mexico City have made substantial gains.

Apart from the health issues, heavy smog easily can make any normal photography impossible.

Dust in the atmosphere typically reflects sun energy back out and thus has a cooling effect as well as a darker sky. Sunsets tend to be tremendous. Volcanoes cause massive emissions of dust, particles and ashes into the atmosphere. The eruptions of Mount St. Helen and Mount Pinatubo spewed out ashes that traveled the world for several years. Dust storms due to drought are another major source. The Oklahoma storms of the 1930s, today’s Sahara storms and those of China affect all of Earth. Global Warming will amplify dust storms due to extreme droughts. Yet another source of particles in the air stems from forest fires due to deforestation in Brazil, Malaysia and, above all, Indonesia. The uncontrolled fires in Indonesia cause severe health problems in not only Indonesia but all of Southwest Asia. The particles circle the
globe.

Manmade Light

Ambient, natural light is terrific. Manmade light is a pain. Hundreds of different devices, lamps, bulbs, processes, materials, gases and energy sources result in the strangest of light spectra. Add that manmade light is generally there because the natural light is not available. You are stuck with the darn thing. True, you can set up your own light version with all kinds of expensive photographic lighting devices. That’s fine but really what you do is to replace one manmade environment with another manmade environment.

To photographers and others, K (Kelvin) values and wave spectra are important. A K value is an average of a light source’s color spectrum. The spectrum provides much more information about the scene than does the K value. For instance, the spectrum may have a high wave length peak and a low peak – a ‘U’ pattern. The K value will fall between the peaks and not really mean a thing. What you need is, perhaps, double filtration to correct for the two peaks.

The K value of sunlight is about 5,800. Typical daylight is either 5,000K or 6,500K depending on if you go for the US standard calibration or that of Europe. Computer monitors are calibrated to between 5,000K (reddish yellow) and 9,300K (bluish). Digital cameras often display white balance settings in terms of Kelvin values. In the spectrum of colors, red is around 1,800K, neutral is 5,000K to 6,500K and blue starts around 12,000K continuing up to 16,000K. Examples of low Kelvin light: Match flares, candles and ordinary (tungsten) light bulbs. Here are some high Kelvin items: Xenon light, analog TVs: “the bluish flicker from you neighbor’s window”.

Unless going for abstraction, photographers compensate for the local K value/spectrum to bring the image back to “normal”. For instance, you try to make skin tones similar to those recorded in regular daylight. That may be accomplished through lens filters, white balance adjustments or post production trickery. When you do that, obviously the original scene is distorted – the ugly manmade light was, after all, the real thing.

Most fluorescent and gas discharge lamps have “interrupted spectra”, meaning the spectra are not smooth curves but a series of narrow peaks over the frequency band. Such irregular peaks, often in the yellow to green range, are very hard to filter away. The only real solution is to use alternative lighting such as flash. Gas discharge lamps include neon light and high intensity lights (mercury vapor, metal halide and sodium vapor) as used in light streets, stadiums and factories.

Then there is another issue. Film or sensors react quite differently to odd light situations than do your eyes. Your eyes and brain compensate for strange light to make it more consistent with your built in database on how a face “should” look. A camera has no such database or ability. It records incoming light according to its sensitivity to different wave lengths.

Shadows

Are shadows the opposite of light? Of course not, shadows are light just as is present elsewhere. They are a bit darker, that’s all. Zone system proponents know all about shadows being as important as high lights. The old film saying is: “expose for shadows, develop for high lights”. Or, in the case of digital photography, do the reverse, i.e. shoot for high lights and balance shadow detail in Photoshop.

The dynamic range of light in photography is typically measured in f stops. If the ratio of light intensity in high lights compared to minimum light is, say 1024:1, or 2, raised to the power of 10, then the range is 10 stops. There is a huge difference in the ranges different media are capable of recording or displaying. Your eyes are amazing in that not only can they cover the largest dynamic range, they also are self adjusting in real time. Other devices don’t even come close.

On a cloudy day a scene may display a dynamic range of as little as 3 stops. On a sunny day, the same scene may display a range of 12 stops. That is well within the capabilities of most eyes, being able to dynamically adjust to a 24 stop range although a more static range of 10-14 stops is more realistic. Most cameras (film and digital) can handle a range of about 8 stops, a considerable reduction. A typical print covers about 6 stops and a monitor slightly less. Newspapers only display a range of 3-4 stops.

Several techniques and technologies exist to extend either the original or the displayed range. One recent example is High Dynamic Range Photography. In traditional photography, special development techniques coupled with corresponding exposures can do the trick. Consider the Hubble telescope and its ability to record and then enhance the dimmest of light.

In practical, everyday photography, the biggest factor in getting a decent dynamic range is simply to use correct exposures. Over or under exposure quickly destroys the dynamic range. One stop overexposure loses one stop of range on the high light side. Please note that correct exposure is not the same as pointing your camera at something and letting the built-in light meter (or for that matter an external meter) blurb out some numbers. Light meters are very stupid about measuring light. Practice, practice so you truly understand exposure. Otherwise, your shadows or high lights are off, were off and will stay off, blowing you out of the water every time.

Using Light

Now that you know a little bit about light, how do you use that knowledge? In generic terms, the benefit of this knowledge is that you know more about what to expect. Make that an element in your plan. Photography in big cities usually means polluted air which produces a different light than that on top of Mount Everest. If you shoot in an ice cave, the light is blue, while if you shoot in a sand cave, the light is reddish. Indoor shooting at, say, Christmas, will probably produce warm, reddish photos. Shooting on a lit street may produce very strange color casts.

We do not know all there is to know about light – much remains a mystery. The current knowledge is recent or no more than a hundred years old. Yet we speak of light with deep convictions, especially in photography. An image “captures” the light, a print contains the “full range” of light, the light reflected from a face “accurately” captures the skin tones. Professional critics have a language, of their own but incomprehensible to many of us, classifying and judging light and how a photographer deals with it in his art.

A photographer can use tools to analyze light. The intensity of light falling on a subject or reflected from a subject into the lens is easily measured. He/she can even determine the color of light falling on the subject. Once the picture is taken the image can be analyzed either with software in the case of digital images or by a densitometer in the case of film. That is all fine, but no meters will ever tell the full story and in fact they may even hide the real magic.

The true story about light is not one of analysis. It is about the creative use of light presented at a particular shooting event. To create that vision, you need to realize light is not just one thing. It is a combination of many different kinds of effects and distortions. Once that is clear, here are a few ideas that you might use to figure out your very own creative toolbox. A tool box is an individual treasure chest. What is a trap to some is an opportunity to others. We are all as different as are our visions. So take the following as nonexclusive ideas, not sinister laws.

• History and Theory: The history of our understanding of light is long, colorful and by no means finished. The “seeing” interaction of eyes and brain is only partially, and very recently, understood and no doubt inaccurate. Think about the significance of all those tricky images designed to fool the brain – where straight lines suddenly look bent. Or where stationary images impossibly start to move? In your fooled brain, that is.
• Space: Most natural light comes from space. As light travels through space, it undergoes transformations, most quite subtle. It bends, gets malformed, disappears, reflects, is colored and ends up differently than expected in largely a random, uncontrolled manner. Light in its “cleanest” form is quite variable even if you reside on the International Space Station. The atmosphere is then doing it’s best to make matters even more complex:
• Atmosphere: The atmosphere shields us from a quite harmful space environment. The ozone layer filters out UV radiation. Space is filled with particles harmful to humans that have come close to killing astronauts. These particles luckily do not penetrate the atmosphere. As the atmospheric filters do their work, light from space becomes even more modified. Then local conditions change light again, either by less filtering or more. A photograph taken in Australia or in Antarctica may be subject to a lot more UV light than elsewhere. A picture shot from an airplane at 37,000 feet is subject to more bombardment of essentially radioactive particles than one taken in Times Square, New York.
• Refraction: Light bends as it passes through certain media such as water or a lens. This leads to many special situations and opportunities, whether you appreciate oval suns, mirages, Fata Morgana, rainbows, floating mountains or tilting buildings. You figure it out. Make a list of the special situations created by refraction in your shooting environment.
• Reflections: We all have many so-so shots of tall buildings reflecting wobbly images from their glass walls. And those self portraits using a mirror belong deep in that shoe box in the garage. We realize how reflections from snow and water may be controlled by polarizing filters. Portrait photographers use reflectors to create a pleasing light. Film and TV crews do the same. Daylight may be modified by fill flash to create an illusion of reflections. Reflections, in any type of photography, represent huge and under used opportunities for creativity. Think about it. Create you own sun! Make your own shadows!
• Time of Day: Time of day is an essential tool. Most photographs can only be successfully shot at very specific light conditions, whether it is due to the light intensity or its color balance. Examples: Rarely is noon light the best for nature photography. Long shadows may accentuate the emotional impact of a scene. Some animals are only reachable at certain hours. Downtown traffic is busier at rush hours. Indoors, the uses of ambient light through windows depend not only on time of day but also on the angle to the sun. At noon, light from a south facing window is quite different from a window facing north.
• Seasonal: Many of us associate seasons with specific events. You shoot fall colors as leaves fall. Or delicate spring colors as leaves return. Cherry trees bloom. Whales, salmon and birds migrate. Grizzlies wake up or retire. Frozen lakes thaw. Change your wardrobe. The barbeque is manned. The car gets its annual wash. The first strawberries show up. Taste the Beaujolais Nouveau or fresh halibut. Eat your heart out at Thanksgiving. Do the Christmas shopping. Snowmobiles, motor cycles or power boats roar. Sailboats tack. Dust off the camera after its winter slumber. Wash the windows, cut the lawn. File April tax returns. Harvest the apples, wheat and oranges. Does you vision include such items and more?
• Weather: Nature gives us hurricanes, tornados, cyclones, fog, heavy rain, soft rain, clouds, thunder, lightning, sunshine, snow fall, heat waves or cold spells. The impact on your creative situation and challenge is obvious. Weather not only impacts light, it affects the range of possible or desired subjects. Some like shooting close up pictures of tornados. Most of us prefer to run like hell.
• Pollution and Dust: Imagine grabbing your camera, crawling into your bed and under the covers. Try taking a photograph of your left foot. That’s not real easy, is it? The bloody covers filter out the light. So do pollution and dust, both of which consist of airborne particles (and perhaps gases), covering earth like a blanket. Both reduce light coming through and both modify the color of light. Dramatic pictures from hazy Shanghai are perhaps interesting but not real artistic in most cases. The thing is, not all light effects are desirable in the sense they create creative opportunities. Some are simply bad news to most photographers. Here is another example:
• Manmade Light: Speaking photographically, manmade light is a pest unless specifically created for photographic purposes. Blast that sodium light. Darn that fluorescent office light. Curse those wave length peaks and valleys. Green faces, orange hair. What is fun about lobster red skin? Well, nothing much. Maybe useful in some artistic visions, manmade light is a curse to most photographers.

There you are – you have a shopping list for your magical light tool box and a list of features to think about. This discussion of possible opportunities could go on much longer. It won’t, at this moment. The main idea still is that you are the one to create your own box, preferably by thinking outside the box. Try it on. Now, let’s check out colors which are just one form of light.

Colors that Aren’t but Light

The impact of color falls into two categories: First, we live in a color filled world, and therefore our art is in color: we shoot in color. Second, color may be used to accentuate something in the scene we shoot, paint or film. We let some color dominate for specific reasons, usually because of the possible emotional impact of that color.

Color can be a major part of an artistic vision and its execution. Examples include Picasso’s blue and rose periods and van Gogh’s yellow sunflowers. Of course, selecting to shoot in either color or black&white is the obvious example. Colors are part of the science surrounding photography. Equally, colors have an emotional or psychological context in photography.

A Bit of Theory

Light is characterized by three components: amplitude (intensity or brightness), frequency or wave length which relates to color and polarization (angle, vibration, reflection). Light may come in the form of a beam emitted from a light source. If the beam is aimed straight at you, it is visible as a point of bright light. From the side, that beam is not visible till it is scattered into a spectrum of different wave lengths. Our retinas and brains map the spectrum of wave lengths to colors.

I’m sure you have seen the standard graphs of wave length and associated colors. It goes like this: the lowest wave lengths are associated with sound as heard by humans. AM radio, TV and FM waves are next up in frequency (lower in wave length), followed by kitchen, radar and signal transmitting micro waves.

Then comes infrared light which is associated with heat – the burning logs in your fireplace emit infrared “heat”. The TV remote uses infrared waves. So far nothing is visible to us. A very narrow band of visible light, split into colors, follows. This spectrum goes from red, yellow, green, blue and magenta to violet.

After the band of colors, we return to invisibility: ultraviolet light causes sunburn. It can’t be seen by humans but is visible to bumblebees. UV light is real important in astronomy – distant galaxies and stars often only emit UV light so the Hubble telescope and some satellites are very sensitive to such light. Then X-rays follow. Finally, gamma radiation can kill, very important both to space travel and astrology.

Have you noticed I sometimes talk about frequencies and wave lengths as in an analog beam (scattered or not) and sometimes about light consisting of particles bouncing around in some pattern? Both ways to look at light are correct but how light consists of both waves and particles is a bit mysterious. An issue of quantum physics, debated by many from Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein, this unresolved subject is a bit beyond this essay.

But think about it: why would an electromagnetic pulse (light beam) be split or scattered by an atmospheric particle unless it too is a particle? On the other hand, are our eyes really letting in all these dirty particles that have traveled space and bounced off all kinds of pollution? I’d hope not. How do light particles penetrate a camera lens? This mystery will remain unsolved in this essay (as it is in science).

Emotional Colors

So much for theory – electromagnetic waves, infrared this and gamma that, particles, amplitudes…. Let’s switch tack a bit. Visions are emotionally driven, inner convictions. Colors, in psychology, not to mention advertising and web design, associate freely with emotions. I’m blue today. He was red hot. She was green with envy. Here is one opinion (of many) on how colors associate with emotions:

• Red is the color of fire and blood, so it is associated with energy, war, danger, strength, power, determination as well as passion, desire, and love. Red is a very emotionally intense color. It enhances human metabolism, increases respiration rate, and raises blood pressure. It has very high visibility, which is why stop signs, stoplights, and fire equipment are usually painted red. In heraldry, red is used to indicate courage. It is a color found in many national flags.
• Orange combines the energy of red and the happiness of yellow. It is associated with joy, sunshine, and the tropics. Orange represents enthusiasm, fascination, happiness, creativity, determination, attraction, success, encouragement, and stimulation. To the human eye, orange is a very hot color, so it gives the sensation of heat. Nevertheless, orange is not as aggressive as red.
• Yellow is the color of sunshine. It’s associated with joy, happiness, intellect, and energy. Yellow produces a warming effect, arouses cheerfulness, stimulates mental activity, and generates muscle energy. Yellow is often associated with food. Bright, pure yellow is an attention getter, which is the reason taxicabs are painted this color.
• Green is the color of nature. It symbolizes growth, harmony, freshness, and fertility. Green has strong emotional correspondence with safety. Dark green is also commonly associated with money. Green has great healing power. It is the most restful color for the human eye; it can improve vision. Green suggests stability and endurance.
• Blue is the color of the sky and sea. It is often associated with depth and stability. It symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven. Blue is considered beneficial to the mind and body. It slows human metabolism and produces a calming effect. Blue is strongly associated with tranquility and calmness. In heraldry, blue is used to symbolize piety and sincerity.
• Purple combines the stability of blue and the energy of red. Purple is associated with royalty. It symbolizes power, nobility, luxury, and ambition. It conveys wealth and extravagance. Purple is associated with wisdom, dignity, independence, creativity, mystery, and magic. According to surveys, almost 75 percent of pre-adolescent children prefer purple to all other colors. Purple is a very rare color in nature; some people consider it to be artificial.
• White is associated with light, goodness, innocence, purity, and virginity. It is considered to be the color of perfection. White means safety, purity, and cleanliness. As opposed to black, white usually has a positive connotation. White can represent a successful beginning. In heraldry, white depicts faith and purity.
• Black is associated with power, elegance, formality, death, evil, and mystery. Black is a mysterious color associated with fear and the unknown (black holes). It usually has a negative connotation (blacklist, black humor, ‘black death’). Black denotes strength and authority; it is considered to be a very formal, elegant, and prestigious color (black tie, black Mercedes). In heraldry, black is the symbol of grief.

Some claim colors guide our lives in a sublime mix of emotions and realities. Personally, I’m not so sure. I believe we all are more complex than that. Form, harmony and discord, for instance, seem important as well. Probably context, such as being fired, getting married, suffering from depression or winning the lottery, emotionally overrides any color setting. Colors as emotional impacts are nevertheless legitimate parts of the magical toolbox but not at the exclusion of other factors.

Real World Color

AA Gills of the London Times recently visited Tasmania and filed the following observation (italics mine). Rarely have I seen so many unusual wave lengths covered in so few sentences:

• The rocky shore is tortured into a macabre and dramatic beauty. The waves stand up on their hind legs and lunge at the land, to be flayed into bone-white shreds by the black rocks. In the late afternoon, the sky is glowing pale gold, dark mauve clouds are filigreed pink, thousand of mutton birds (sheerwaters) fly low over the silver water, and we hurry back in the teeth of the wind to our hut.

Now, that is the drama of colors, if somewhat tortured. I’m sure Conrad had not been able to put it better. AA Gills actually is a restaurant critic and feature writer for the Times but seems to have his hands in plenty of pots. Good for him.

Take that sun beam traveling through space towards you. At high noon, that beam will hit the atmosphere straight on. Since the atmospheric particles are much larger than those associated with the beam, the beam is scattered into predominately short wave lengths – blue. Thus the sky is blue during the day. As the sun sets, the angle of the sun beam is to close to 90 degrees. Now we see more of the longer wave lengths – red.

Colors depend on altitude – the higher you are the bluer the scene and the sharper the shadows. A higher altitude means mostly less pollution and more unhealthy radiation from space ranging from UV to gamma light. Sun beams are less scattered, hence the scene is lighter. There are fewer clouds if you go high enough. Perhaps you are high enough to encounter snow which reflects enormous amounts of light. Or, returning to zero altitude – sea level – you better consider a similar high reflection of light from the sea surface. In this case, polarization becomes yet another tool. Keep this in mind next time you climb Mount Everest.

The color spectrum varies tremendously from one location to the next. You have monochrome environments such as deserts, ski slopes, some beaches, polar ice areas, tundra, oceans, mines and tunnels. Next, there are monochromes with occasional color items, such as many parts of an inner city or fireworks. Low light photography is usually close to monochrome, wherever you are. Intensive colors are found in many tropical locations. Specific places such as the Dutch tulip fields in the right season or Brazilian Samba festivals are colorful. You choose your film or white balance (or other settings) with that in mind.

Colors Ain’t Colors

Colors aren’t real. They simply are associated by your brain with light particles vibrating at certain frequencies. As humans, color processing follows a complex path through the eyes, to the retina with its three basic sensors (blue, bluish-green and yellow-green of all odd compositions) and on to the brain, where it is all sorted out according to a set of rules. A given wave length is translated into a “color”.

Put an 80A blue filter on your lens (or simply look through it) and colors change. This particular filter changes light emitted from reddish tungsten sources back to “normal” daylight color spectra, given daylight film or white balance. Here is what actually happens: the filter is manufactured so it absorbs vibrations in the 1800-2500K range (perceived as red) while letting the shorter wave lengths through. The result of applying the filter is that the scene appears to emit relatively more short wave length rays, correcting for the excess emission of light in the 2800K range typical of tungsten light. It’s all a matter of wave lengths, not “colors”.

Walk into a color darkroom and twist the color correction dials a bit and the color print comes out quite differently. Play with color settings in Photoshop and the image changes accordingly. Put on your sunglasses and colors shift. Color blindness shifts how wave lengths are mapped in your brain due to some part of the system being damaged. Several other deficiencies change our perceptions of color. Colors are what you make them to be.

Next, we need to represent color in print. Now we deal with a totally new set of representations. CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) is the traditional print representation which has absolutely nothing to do with how we humans perceive or process color. Pantone’s system of six colors for increased precision adds orange and green to the CMYK system.

Do Computers See Colors?

Computers use their own concepts of color representation. Colors are associated with an RGB (Red, Green and Blue) model. This model assigns trios of numbers from 0 to 255 to the “colors”. Red, for instance is coded as (255,0,0) and blue is (0,0,255). (0,0,0) means black, (255,255,255) stands for white. These numbers are used not only to describe colors internally but also to control the electron gun of an analog monitor or the transistors in flat screen monitors.

The RGB model does not actually represent real colors but are simply some numbers that could represent anything or nothing. The numbers do not automatically result in accurate colors. The computer and the monitor need to be told what an “accurate” color is. This information is held in one or more arrays that say “apply this correction when sending info to the monitor or printer”. You are responsible for keeping those arrays up to date, using available tools. Many of us don’t do that and hence get used to strange colors and fail to understand why others complain.

Monitor color guns or color sensitive “dots” must also be carefully calibrated to some standard color space. Such calibration uses elaborate color management tools. The standard monitor color spaces come in many flavors of RGB (red, green, blue): sRGB, Apple RGB, Adobe RGB and ColorMatch RGB. On the printing side (CMYK), we have a set of US standards together with corresponding (different) European and Japanese variations.

A simple but crucial monitor setting is the brightness, referred to as the “gamma” setting. Just for fun, Apple uses a different gamma standard than PCs. A Mac calibrated image looks darker on a calibrated PC and vice versa. Great, isn’t it?

It’s not over yet. Next is the coordination of color spaces and calibration across devices. The digital camera, the scanner, the monitor and printing using external labs or the onsite photo printer must be calibrated accurately to compatible color spaces. This is not a trivial undertaking although special software may reduce the pain a bit.

Computers have no understanding of colors – to them it is just a numbers game.

Colors, Oh Those Damn Colors

Maybe you conclude things were simpler in the old days of taking your color film to some lab or retailer. Heck no. In the “old days”, a good print meant endless darkroom exercises tinkering with enlarger settings, which doesn’t even start dealing with the external viewing or printing issues. Color management was not easier but merely overlooked in many cases, or more accurately, achieved in a different way.

Colors and photography are a mess. Technology makes it all harder, not easier. Truly managing colors in photography is a massive undertaking that many photographers avoid or ignore. The bright side is that if you make the effort to master color and its management, you are far ahead of much of the competition. The bleak side is the hours you spend on tinkering with calibrations, devices and standards. Many of us end up with a compromise. One compromise is to let specialists deal with the whole issue. That is expensive. Another option is to wing it. You learn what makes a nice print on a trial and error basis. You learn that a bluish tint on the monitor results in a great print on your Canon printer. And you get on with life.

Let’s jump into yet another issue. Different films as well as different digital chips have unique sensitivities to the wave lengths of color. A particular film (or sensor), black&white or color, may be more sensitive to blue than red. Another film or sensor may behave in the opposite manner. Each film is associated with a sensitivity profile ranging over the wave length spectrum. This spectrum sets the film apart from other films. The same is true for sensor chips in a digital camera. The difference is that the chip is permanently in place while, in the film case, you can simply change films to match the shooting situation and your vision. The back end (film or chip) may be sensitive to waves beyond the visible spectrum. In the case of film, that may be X-ray waves.

The latest Leica M camera, the first digital version, suffered (suffers?) from an abnormal sensitivity to infrared light. This resulted in strange distortions that were visible in the images under some circumstances. Given a price of around $4,500 for just the camera body, that is a bit embarrassing. Is it a unique case? I think not.

Now you know one major reason I love black&white photography. Not that any of the color issues magically disappear (they surely don’t since you have to manage the color to gray scale transition) but dealing with a gray scale is a lot more natural to me than tinkering endlessly with scores of color standards. And in my mind, b&w has an artistic impact unmatched in any medium. That, of course, is just my view.

Using Color: The Magical Toolbox

Color issues fall in two arenas: Before Exposure and After Exposure. Colors are only a form of light or, precisely, they come from light beams split into color waves. Everything in the previous section about light applies to color waves as well. This section expands on the special form of light referred to as colors.

The Before Exposure considerations include:

You have an artistic vision. You developed a photographic style. You are on assignment. Let’s say you’ll shoot color. The first consideration is that your vision most likely favors certain color combinations, mood and overall light. It may be in-your-face harsh light and strong, exaggerated colors. Or perhaps it is calm muted colors with a minimum of shadows. It might be a mix of the two. Next, mesh that vision with the requirements for the shoot (if any). The vision rules, the requirements are the handcuffs.

Then, find the location that matches the vision and requirements. You are, of course, familiar with all the ways in which colors and light vary depending on a great many, but often predictable factors (excluding weather in the case of outdoors shoots – if you need sunshine and it’s raining hard, you’re out of luck).

Now you have advanced to the chosen location. It is a matter of setting up the actual shoot. The dominating consideration still is color and light. Even with the most informed choice of location, there will be color and light issues to deal with. Things are always just a bit out of sync. Sometimes they are way out of sync. The exception, of course, is if you maintain your own control over light and color by supplying you own lighting setup.

Your vision, of course, favors certain compositional elements, including color preferences and associated moods and balances. Now faced with the real world, perhaps the scene does not match the vision perfectly or, maybe, not at all. It is time to reconsider and improvise. Or walk away which might be costly.

So a particular dance starts up, similar to the “As Time Goes By Can Can” already mentioned for exposure and composition. Let’s call this dance “The High Noon Two Step”. You run around the location, checking out shadows, highlights, midtones, light ratios and color shifts, perhaps wishing you were free to move around the country instead. You’re adjusting this and moving that. You tinker with the camera, fitting filters, changing film, moving the white balance this way, then that way. You’re pre visualizing like a mad man. You snapping test shots left, right, up, down and possibly upside down.

Eventually, you have to admit you used all the tools, the scene is OK and it’s time to actually start shooting. The madness actually followed a path (although no one may believe it). So the “As Time Goes By Can Can” compositional dance is about to start. The color work is temporarily on hold. Actual pictures are about to happen.

After Exposure, there are more opportunities to screw up or to enhance the images:

Development strategy or initial Photoshop corrections: You did, of course, pre visualize the image which should define the steps to take in development and printing. But sometimes the initial result isn’t quite what you expected. Maybe your white balance setting was a bit off. Perhaps the color film wasn’t quite to specs or the development chemicals a bit too old. So don’t be too surprised you have to apply some initial corrections to get the colors back on the intended track.

Alter the color balance and related features: Your pre visualization may well include corrections to the original image. Perhaps you shoot digitally but the plan is for a black&white image. Maybe you planned to enhance the original image to fit into your vision or work spec: apply more vivid or muted colors, shift the colors to some off beat point, add some special effect or combine several images. There are literally infinite possibilities to make your vision come true, whatever it is.

End use adjustments: Most likely the image has to be adjusted fit the particular color (and other) requirements of the intended end market, be it a photo album, web site, print advertisement, gallery show, museum purchase or a shoe box. Each end-use has different requirements, usually radically different: the color capabilities of the web are very different from an offset printer as an example. Typically, your image must be adjusted into several versions: perhaps one to show to clients in your carry-around portfolio, one for your web site portfolio, one for your long term hard drive storage, one containing your printing instructions, another for off-site printing, low resolution versions for Flickr, MySpace and the hundreds of other promotional web sites.

The final image and follow ups: You’ll produce the actual high resolution image in all its glorious colors to be used, published, shown or exhibited. Hopefully you’ll reap the well deserved rewards. Then you’ll consider documenting and protecting all the color (and other) work you have put into not just this image but the perhaps thousands of other images in your portfolio. This is a real management issue – how do you keep track of all these versions of a single image and all its unique settings for different purposes? Especially considering you own thousands of images? How do you keep them safe over long periods of time? How do you record color (and other) settings so you can repeat them? There are many solutions available – I’ll have to leave that part to you.

That’s it for the discussion of colors. Together with the light discussion, you have a pretty good foundation for dealing with these two critical elements. The idea was to alert you to some of the intricate details of these basic components of your magical toolbox. Next, we’ll examine the two other fundamental components. That is the camera with its lenses and backends followed by the human system of eyes, retinas and the brain in processing the images.

TOC

Light in the Camera

A camera is basically a fairly simple mechanical object. It consists of a lens, a shutter system and a back end device such as a digital chip or a film. The back end catches the light remaining after passing through the lens and the shutter system. Then the back end stores a representation of the light by chemically altering the film or by writing to file a digital representation of the energy hitting the sensor chip. That’s about it. Of course there are additional elements supporting the three basic ones – light meters, flashes, digital software and much else for the gadget happy photographer. One good advice is to stick with the basics as we will in this essay.

Expensive Lenses or Not

A lens is just some pieces of glass or, occasionally, plastic mounted in a tube. It gathers light to be recorded by the back end of the camera. Engineers discovered, over the last 150 years or so, that it is not possible to build an accurate lens. Today’s lenses are incredibly complex in pursuit of the fewest inaccuracies and/or the most pleasing distortions. Even so, a lens does not pass on what it sees but its distorted version of what is in front of it. Each brand with its focal length, f-values, focusing system and even individual lenses of a particular specification/brand have different and, to some extent, measurable characteristics.

Hence, no matter what you pay, lenses are not perfect from a scientific point of view – the light coming through the lens is reduced in intensity and the light beams hitting the back end are distorted due to the optical imperfections of any lens. There is no way around that. Most of these distortions are correctable, either in a darkroom or in Photoshop (or similar software).

Here are just a few of the possible imperfections: pincushion or barrel distortion, image corners out of focus, image corner light falloff, vignetting, ghost images, flares or the curvilinear effect from fisheye lenses. More generally: there are out of focus optical distortions (monochromatic aberration) such as tilt (perspective changes), defocus (sensitivity to focus changes – related to depth of field and focal length), spherical (imperfect refraction resulting in “circular” blurs of light points), coma (off-axis points are rendered wedge-shaped), astigmatism (certain images appear doubled) and field curvature (this stands for barrel and pincushion distortion). Lastly there are the optical lens color shifts (chromatic aberrations) that may be axial or lateral.

Aesthetically, what is pleasing given the distortions to one photographer is deplorable to another. Lens snobs (connoisseurs) often concentrate their attention on the “bokeh” of the lens – how the out of focus parts of the image are rendered. Bokeh is generally not measurable but subjective. In a digital world, bokeh of a lens is easily manipulated in Photoshop.

Adding to the imperfections of the lens are the human errors – using the wrong lens and the wrong settings. Then the problem of low light and handheld shooting often results in handshake blur, in some cases reduced by built in image stabilizers – a fairly new feature.

The wise photographer learns to live with and benefit from the characteristics of a set of favorite lenses. Realizing the full benefits of a lens consists of long and intensive use in typical shooting situations. Some photographers claim the only way to understand the strength and weakness of a lens is to exclusively use it for a year.

The Mechanical Wonders of Shutters

Then we have the shutter system. Better yet, we might include the aperture device and call it the light control system. While we are at it, let’s add the light meter present in most cameras. There are endless engineering variations of these systems. All of them share one characteristic. They are inaccurate.

Accuracy is a relative concept. The shutter and the light system may actually be quite accurate except it is not doing what you tell it to do. Say that you set a shutter speed of 1/500 second. The shutter will actually give you 1/400 (say). Typically, every time you set 1/500, you will consistently get 1/400. The shutter will most likely not randomly jump around from 1/250 to 1/700 and everything in between. Likewise, the light system may consistently set you up for 1 stop overexposure. These issues are not fatal as long as you calibrate the camera or at least identify the issues. This is not very hard to do.

Potentially a much worse issue is that of relying on automation – auto exposure, auto focus and in digital cameras, auto white point. Both work efficiently only in trivial shooting situations and actually encourage bad or at least boring compositions. Consider auto focus which requires you to point the camera at the subject and then expose. That composition is not likely to be very exciting. Of course, you can point the camera at the subject, lock the focus and recompose. But if so, why not manually focus which is faster, easier and more accurate?

A few cameras allow you to use off center focus points. My Canon has that ability and that works quite well although even the nine or so focusing points are not enough in my case. How about a continuously adjustable focus point? Is that too much to ask for?

Then, there is auto exposure which works great if you shoot even surfaces of 18% grey. If not, trouble soon pops up. Try this on: grab your camera, go out on a dark night to a nearby well trafficked road, making sure you don’t get run over. Try to take a picture using auto exposure of the oncoming traffic. First, point the camera in the vicinity of the headlight coming towards you and expose. Next, place the headlights off center and expose. The first image will be way underexposed while the second will be overexposed. The correct exposure is somewhere in the middle and only some intelligent guess work will save the night.

To help exposure issues, many cameras can bracket the shots automatically, up and down a few stops. That is quite helpful but won’t work in the roadside example – that variation in exposure far exceeds the typical bracketing settings.

Back ends – Film or Silicon

In a film camera, you load a particular film. That film possess unique features: brand, batch, age, overall sensitivity (ASA or DIN) and the more precise spectral sensitivity over wave lengths all the way down to the individual roll and how it was handled and stored from manufacturing and on. Many photographers overlook the importance of handling and storing film correctly and are punished by color casts and other unexpected issues. High temperatures and any kind of radiation make bad news. Film may be over or underexposed, either by mistake or by purpose, in which case the film is pushed or pulled, which, then, is compensated for in development.

In a digital camera, the back end consists of a chip, onboard memory and software. The chip possesses various unique characteristics ranging from resolution and sensitivity to size. The onboard software takes the raw input from the chip, massages it and converts it into an image file of some standard format, usually JPEG. RAW images may – or not – bypass the onboard software to produce an “accurate” image. Some digital cameras allow you to modify the onboard software for white balance, shooting what the manufacturer considers typical situations (”Hawaiian Sunsets”, “Cathedrals” etc.) and much else. Removing “red eyes” has become quite an industry because most camera manufacturers knowingly put the flash in the wrong place.

Of course, the image produced by the back end – film or digital – is not accurate at all. Consider the journey of light from the sun towards earth, bent and hammered as it flies along. Then the atmosphere with reflections, refractions, collisions and lots more does its trick or treat act. The treacherous lens adds to the wounds, the shutter and light system adds to the insult and the back end lets everyone down. Then add this little element to the pot:

If you are a Photoshop affectionate, you may have played – or even used – some of the fancy plug-ins that attempt to change the characteristics of various back ends. There are plug ins that “compensate” for or “emulate” all kinds of film brands. You can make your digital photo look like it was shot with HP 400 black and white film. Or Velvia color film. Or anything else you may fancy. There are other plug-ins making your film images look like they were digitally shot. Other filters make your image look like it was shot in 1853. Of course, all you do is to add more distortions to your image.

The Ultimate Camera

All we can expect of a camera is for it to give us images we like. Or images we can “improve” using various tools. We must have sufficient control over the shooting session. We can’t get bogged down in technical gadgetry. We can deal with the distortions produced by the camera. Just accept the unavoidable fact that the camera gives you a highly distorted view of the light from the subject you’re shooting. Then keep shooting.

The Ultimate Camera is the one you are happy with and gives you images you like without too much fuss. It may play nasty tricks on you once in a while but that’s life. Do be aware that automations and gimmicks will generally make your life harder. Keep it simple and shoot as much as you can afford. Equipment prices have little to do with this – $20 Holga cameras have quite a following and artistic acceptance because of the extreme amount of distortions produced. They aren’t as great if you want to be a basket ball sports photographer.

This post surfaced a lot of issues about cameras and photography – sources of untold inaccuracies, distortions and fallacies in almost every step on the road. Some may think that digital technology will make all that hassle go away. The answer is no. The reason for that is that most of the issues have nothing to do with photography. The behavior of light and how our brains process color information are items completely outside our control and do not change no matter what the camera is doing or if it is digital or film based.

The few remaining professional film cameras are marvelous technical machines, built from 60-80 years of crucifying development. They survived anything from nuclear blasts to World Wars to landing on the moon. They even survived Uncle Ben and the punch bowl. They have been used to punch out muggers, stop bullets and to drive down nails. They are stolen, fenced and stolen again. They remain faithfully capable of taking great photos as long as there is film to load and a live finger to press that shutter release.

Professional digital cameras build on that tradition but have not quite been through the hazing of their film brothers. Yet they are the result of terrific technology advances that won’t stop for a long time. But no matter how big a sensor or how smart the auto focus, physical laws do not change. Digital technology faces exactly the same issues as does film technology but is nowhere closer to overcome such issues. That is because these issues go beyond cameras. A $40,000 digital Hasselblad system does not reduce pollution in Shanghai. Nor does it correct for ice cave blues. It can’t cure color blindness. Compositions with the Hasselblad are no better than those from my father’s old mechanical monster.

Cameras give us an image frozen in time. You press the shutter button. The shutter fires for a given period of time. The back end records the light received in that period of time. The raw image is done and reflects only that slice in time. This leads us to the next subject and two very different devices – our eyes that record images in an analog manner and our brain that processes those analog images in real time. This is way more complex and sophisticated than that camera. But first: some words from the wise.

More Quotes from the Wise

• I like to watch the person viewing my photographs to see if their eyes twinkle or cloud with tears. Does the smile sneak out when they were not expecting it to? Then I know I have captured emotion that can be shared. -Marsha Cairo
• A big shot is a little shot that kept shooting. -Amanda Caldwell; The mystery isn’t in the technique, it’s in each of us. -Harry Callahan; If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough. -Robert Capa; Rules aren’t any good if they don’t work! The only real rules are the laws of physics and optics. -Dean Collins
• Images at their passionate and truthful best are as powerful as words can ever be. If they alone cannot bring change, they can at least provide an understanding mirror of man’s actions, thereby sharpening human awareness and awakening conscience. -Cornell Capa
• (Professional) photographers are like hookers: at first we started doing it because we liked it and it felt good, then we kept doing it but only for our friends, and NOW we’re still doing it but are charging money for doing it! -Dean Collins
• Pictures, regardless of how they are created and recreated, are intended to be looked at. This brings to the forefront not the technology of imaging, which of course is important, but rather what we might call the eyenology (seeing). -Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing. Success depends on the extent of one’s general culture, one’s set of values, one’s clarity of mind and one’s vivacity. The thing to be feared most is the artificially contrived, the contrary to life. -Henri Cartier-Bresson
  • Our eye must constantly measure, evaluate. We alter our perspective by a slight bending of the knees; we convey the chance meeting of lines by a simple shifting of our heads a thousandth of an inch…. We compose almost at the same time we press the shutter, and in placing the camera closer or farther from the subject, we shape the details – taming or being tamed by them. -Henri Cartier-Bresson
• ..throughout the history of art it has been art itself – in all its forms – that has inspired art… today’s photographs are so geared to life that one can learn more from them than from life itself. -Van Deren Coke
• The camera is a killing chamber, which speeds up the time it claims to be conserving. Like coffins exhumed and pried open, the photographs put on show what we were and what we will be again. -Peter Conrad
• Photography is like fishing. You go out in the morning with no idea of what the trip will bring. Sometimes luck is on your side and all your crab pots are full of prime Lobsters. Other times you get nothing. -Bob Croxford
• …There are too many people studying it [photography] now who are never going to make it. You can’t give them a formula for making it. You have to have it in you first, you don’t learn it. The seeing eye is the important thing. -Imogen Cunningham

Light in Your Head

What Do the Eyes See?

Superficially, our eyes share some characteristics with a camera. Eyes have lenses, irises and corneas that work like aperture and focusing controls. They understand and adjust for different light levels. There is a retina back end consisting of seven layers of light sensitive receptors that pass information to our brains. The eyes’ focusing, aperture and light controls are infinitely more sensitive and fast than those of any camera, however costly or “digitally advanced”.

Do our eyes accurately record the Truth and pass it on to the brain? No. Eyes have limitations. Some of us are near sighted, others far sighted and a few are color blind. Others are blind, or nearly so. Not to forget crossed or wandering eyes. To older people, focus muscles get worn out. The eyes may contract illnesses. The lenses and corneas are easily damaged. Many lenses are shaped in an inaccurate way, resulting in distortions. The receptors may get temporarily blinded by sudden surges in light levels.

There are big businesses involved in fixing your eyes. Eye glasses, sunglasses and contact lenses eat up billions of our dollars while introducing even more distortions. Many of these devices change the focus and color of the light reaching your eyes. Some even change to color of the eyes themselves. Surgery chains happily operate on your eyes at a remarkably low price, changing your point of view again.

The eyes and the rest of the visual system do not operate on light or colors the way a camera does. The human system transforms the light entering the eyes to initially straight lines that eventually combine into curved lines and contours. Colors and light levels are judged by comparing the curves. Colors are no longer represented by K values or any other ordinary system. Light is no longer measured by absolute levels, as is done in the photo cell of a light meter. The process of interpreting all these lines, contours and relative levels introduces yet another level of inaccuracy. It is the basis of the many illusions with which some (such as psychiatrists) like to work or play.

Add the analog feature of our eyes and visual system. There is no such thing as one view of our surroundings. The eyes constantly receive new information. They react to the information in an eternal cycle of adjustments. Most of us have two eyes. Each eye receives a two dimensional view. The visual system combines the two dimensional views into a three dimensional view. Take that, you one-eyed, two dimensional cameras.

Think about it. Here are your relatively tiny eyes that have incomparable power and flexibility relative to any camera at any price and size. But accurate – don’t look for accuracy or “Truth” here. Sorry.

Your Brain Is Fooling You

The brain does fix it all, in a manner of speech. It is in complete charge of our perceptions. It even adds a whole emotional dimension to the information from the eyes. Of course, the brain controls the eyes themselves, not to mention all of you. A regular control freak, your brain is. But whatever the brain decides to present to you is the truth because you have no source for a second opinion.

The trouble is we don’t quite understand what our brain does with that relatively straight forward stream of distorted light entering the eyes. We can’t control the process. We do know that what we see is an interpretation created by the brain. What are the rules for this interpretation? Here you enter a real complex issue studied by many very clever people with lots of theories, some of which are contradictory.

One theory states that the brain creates an interpolated view that is based on incomplete information from the eyes. This, again, explains the visual illusions mentioned earlier. Manipulate the incomplete information reaching the brain and it makes predictably bad decisions. There are various theories how this interpretation works, such as the one claiming the brain uses the complex math of Bayesian science.

Most theories agree that the brain is not an impartial recorder or interpreter of truth. It receives input from the eyes and all our other sensors. It examines the input, compares it to prior input (“experience”, “knowledge”) in its database and modifies the original input to make it more understandable and safer. Take, for instance, the novice 911 medic. The first job experiences are extremely traumatic but become routine fairly quickly. The work isn’t getting easier but that the brain distorts the reality to protect the worker. The same goes for novice soldiers entering their first battle. Later they become seasoned veterans as their brains and experience database kicks in its protective circuits.

In a more peaceful world, how many times have you used the expression “If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all” as applied to practically anything. The brain learns from experience and applies it to any similar situation in the future. The phenomenon of “deja vu” is similar. A new input is suddenly associated with a previous experience that may or may not be real. Theories abound on how this works, but suffice to say that the brain is quite prepared to play games with you.

The brain also makes basic assumptions such as that light is usually coming from above. It relies on prior experience to produce a predicable, safe interpretation. It is almost like the old (very outdated) saying in IT circles: You will never go wrong by buying IBM. The brain produces an image that it thinks you will like. It even goes as far as making sure that image won’t hurt you too much.

Then there is the “Gestalt” theory. It states that the brain receives a bunch of sub components of the visual image. The brain then combines these sub components into the whole according to a set of rules. This theory claims the brain uses six distinct rules to achieve its goal: perhaps, perhaps not.

Other theories claim the rules depend on personality, race, gender, occupation, education, age, attitudes and values and so on. I suppose that makes intuitive sense. A different theory discards most of this theory: the brain receives sufficient information and does not make interpretations.

Here you are: a full circle and total confusion. Does this sound like the visual system capable of presenting Reality? Is it even designed to show Reality? The simple answers are No and No. On top of all the other distortions, the brain adds/filters out its own version of Reality. It’s not a damn thing we can do about it. Don’t look for accuracy or “Truth” here. Sorry. Jack Nicholson cried out to Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men: “You can’t handle the truth”. How true.

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Part 2b – Dimensions and Photography?

What on Earth do dimensions have in common with photography? That’s an excellent question and I’m sure the answer is not all that immediately clear. For one thing, the word “dimensions” can mean many a thing. Which meaning is it? Photography is physically two dimensional: up, down and left, right. That print or computer image is definitely flat, so what’s the problem?

There is no problem. But “dimensions” can lead to many useful ideas to be included in the magical toolbox. As all of this post, the goal is to somehow generate thinking outside the traditional box.

Here are a couple of the “dimension” issues in photography. The simplistic way of looking at a printed photo is to view it as the flat two dimensional object. Yet, we’re concerned with the meaning of the photo and how it gains sufficient interest to be regarded as piece of art.

First, that two dimensional photo really is three dimensional. Very few photos lack some form of depth aspect. Ansel Adams’ landscapes would not have their impact without their strong perception of depth. On the other extreme, depth can be minimal in macro photography due the characteristics of the lens. Take a look at the Picasso paintings in the section – many use a very limited depth perspective.

Second, take sports photography. Sports photography is all about catching excitement. No one cares about a photo with a bunch of 7′ guys in baggy uniforms hanging around gazing at the moon. Kobe Bryant rounding up three defenders and sinking that buzzer shot in split second action is more like it. The basic dimensions here are position, distance and time (aka speed).

Third, a really good photo contains more than a two or three dimensional space. There is something special about that picture. We naturally want to know what that “special” is. It might be an “emotional” or a “time” dimension. Perhaps it is a “social” or “racial” dimension. It can even be a dimension used in math or physics. It can be a lot of things and the purpose of this discussion is to figure out how dimensions – aka unique characteristics – can become integral parts of photographic visions and toolboxes.

Like everything else, the dimensions of an artist’s work are unique and personal. Camera stores do not carry ready-to-go sets of dimensions. There are no standard set of dimensions; each artist defines a unique set. Some dimensions are lifelong companions, some are more flexible. The often lifelong racial dimension, for instance, is important to some, while others only care about perhaps more short term emotional dimensions such as depression or euphoria. Dimensions leave you open to think about your art and its character in a slightly different way.

If it sounds as if dimensions are just another word for beliefs or opinions, you are partially right. A belief system certainly is one part of these dimensions – but not the only influence. There are two groups of relevant dimensions: first – physical dimensions which can project a unique view of the world on our art. As an example, the images in this section distort regular physical dimensions. You might say these dimensions come from the outside flowing inwards. The second set flows from the inside outwards and includes creativity, beliefs, attitudes, skills and motivation. This is about how the world views us as artists – good/bad – and how we’d like the world to view us – and what we can do about any discrepancy between the two. Impact is an important part of art. The images seen here project the artist’s view very efficiently. They make a difference.

Here is an example of impact. The mural below is one art’s most influential statements on war. Denouncing the 1937 Nazi bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, it shows the death, violence, brutality and suffering of war. Hundreds, maybe thousands, were killed as the war’s Fascist side used massive fire power on Republican civilians. In 1937, the artist said:

• “The Spanish struggle is the fight of reaction against the people, against freedom. My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art. How could anybody think for a moment that I could be in agreement with reaction and death? … In the panel on which I am working, which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death.”

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Images in this Section

The approach to the images in this section is a bit different. There are a few photos but the main thrust is based on the artistry of Pablo Picasso. If there ever was an artist with very personal dimensions, his name is Picasso.

Picasso’s dimensions are not the obedient linear objects where the sky is blue, the sun yellow and the ladies have creamy skin. Skins are blue, red or perhaps rose, noses are displaced with two eyes on one side of the face, men are part bulls, perspective is in uproar or even not existing. He shamelessly uses all imaginable linear and often non linear distortions.

That’s Picasso, one of the greatest of them all. As you get further into this section, I think you’ll realize why he is such a splendid illustration to this section.

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What’s a Dimension?

Most of us intuitively know what dimensions are. They are horizontal, vertical and depth – aka a basic three dimensional space. That’s what our senses, especially eyes and brain, are accustomed to and how most of us perceive our surroundings. There is nothing wrong with this basic view.

Many of us go on to muddle up this basic set by mentally adding dimensions that aren’t dimensions. That might include adding altitude, direction, distance and position. Even worse, some would add movement, speed, departure, arrival, season and weekday dimensions. None of these are good dimensions – in the first case, all those “dimensions” are just combinations of the three basic ones and in the second case we should add the common dimension “time” instead of the other “junk” dimensions. It is perfectly fine to use computed measures such as altitude, distance and weekday – they are not basic, unique dimensions of the context. Overuse of false dimensions doesn’t really matter to the average citizen but can cause a great deal of confusion to a visual artist.

Here is the definition we’ll use: a dimension is a unique, basic characteristic of an object that does not depend on any other characteristics or dimensions. That is by no means the only definition – many others are more permissibly. Consider a common statement such as “He added another dimension by claiming Iraq had WMD”. Do Iraq and WMD somehow make a dimension? Do they define some other dimension or is it just a cliché? Apply the definition then the statement probably is junk: no dimension was added. Saying “He claimed Iraq had WMD” is more accurate.

Take “time” as an example of a common dimension and say we define that characteristic as “seconds”. The definition then means that “hours” is not a valid dimension since it simply is “seconds” multiplied by 3,600. In a similar mode, “velocity” is not a true dimension since it is equal to “distance” divided by “time”. “Hours” and “velocity” of course are perfectly valid measurements of an object – they are just not true dimensions.

Incidentally, “distance” is not a good, basic dimension since it relates two points to each other – “point” is perhaps a better dimension? But point usually is represented by coordinates so then “point” is not a good dimension. And coordinates combine the height and width dimensions in a two dimensional space. Just scratch “distance, point and coordinates” from your list of dimensions – height and width are sufficient to provide calculations and measurements such as distance, points and coordinates.

Here is an example from the business world: Products and Customers are commonly used, valid dimensions. Neither can logically be expressed as some permutation of the other: “Customers” are not some combination of “Products” or vice versa. On the other hand, “Invoice” is not a dimension – it’s a combination of Customers and Products. “Delivery” and “Rebates” are not good dimensions but “Time” and “Money” are all valid.

Technically, true dimensions are orthogonal to all other dimensions of that object. That means true dimensions are independent from each other – they share no characteristics and cannot interfere with each other. When you think about your art and its different features or when you split up the various important aspects of your work, independence of each feature and aspect will help make them much clearer and actionable. That’s how dimensions come in handy.

Maybe you still wonder what the point of this discussion is. The goal is to extend your photographic art by adding additional content or “dimensions”. We want to reach beyond those naive, two dimensional photographs. This is hard to do unless you know what make a real and unique dimension.

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Combining Dimensions

Very few objects are characterized by only one dimension. In fact, if an object only has one dimension, then it probably is a dimension. Already mentioned are the common, basic “spaces” of two (vertical, horizontal), three (add depth) and four (add time) dimensions.

Let’s play a little game. Below are four photos. They all, of course, contain the two basic dimensions but the question is what other dimensions are contained in the images. Now, that is a trick question because we don’t know what the dimensions that the photographer thought about and, second, your answer is unlikely to be the same as my answer. There should be no rights or wrongs. Do make the effort of identifying two or three extra dimensions for each image. Better yet; write them down before continuing to read – no cheating!

Did you come up with your set of dimensions for each of the four images? If not, go back and start over!

Here is my take – yours probably is different. The first of my dimensions is shared by all images – “light”. All of the four images manipulate light which easily is a unique dimension. Then, “color” or “black and white” are not dimensions. They are just special aspects of light. The first photograph emphasizes “depth”. The second deals with a “social” dimension – the subject is a mine in South America with less than human working conditions. The third image is primarily “emotional” – in this case happiness or joy. The last photo includes a “motion” component, which isn’t really a dimension – use “time” instead.

Let’s go back to the business example – do you think “Customer” and “Product” are relevant dimensions to the images above? That would be really stretching it, right? Dimensions are not universal; they are very dependent on context. If you care to continue this exercise: what dimensions would you associate with specific photographic styles such as Forensic, Journalism, Documentary, Commercial (e.g., Fashion, Wedding, Modeling, Food and Travel), Portraits, Nature, Street and Abstract?

On the flip side, what kinds of photography do you associate with dimensions such as Spirituality, Evil, Cost, Price, Manners, Danger, Meters, Ounces, Health, Ethics, Shadows, Emotions, Money, Climate, Politics, Capital and Food? Are these items actually real, unique dimensions in a specific context? For instance, Evil is hopefully a rare component of Portrait photography. Ethics are especially important in Journalistic and Documentary work. Starting with these two examples, what dimensions associate with particular contexts? Are the associations relevant to photography? If so, how precisely does a photographer make use of this insight? What other (better) dimensions can you think of?

Very few of us have trouble with three or even four dimensional spaces – horizontal, vertical, depth and perhaps time. Another way to describe the four dimensions is width, length, depth and time. Most sciences claim humans can only really comprehend a three dimensional world with some time elements added in, such as motion. The scientific world has identified more basic spatial dimensions although humans really cannot comprehend or “see” any of them. But spatial dimensions are only part of the picture. We will deal with non-spatial dimensions as well.

Rocket Science – Spatial Dimensions

Spatial Euclidian Spaces

Math defines spaces consisting of any number of unique dimensions based on work by Euclid, about 300 BC. A zero dimensional space consists of an infinitely small point. A one dimensional space is a line.

A generic space includes N dimensions where N is any number, including infinity. An actual Euclidian space is usually characterized by a series of planes, defined by sets of points on which certain operations are allowed. You can tilt the planes, move them around, rotate them and measure their distance and angle relative to some point.

The Euclidian space consists of coordinates, angles and distances. Coordinates define points. Two points define a distance. Angles compare lines, vectors and planes. Think about how to apply what you just read to photography: coordinates and points, distances between points, planes made up by sets of points and angles of planes. Henri Cartier-Bresson once said:

• This recognition, in real life, of a rhythm of surfaces, lines, and values is for me the essence of photography; composition should be a constant of preoccupation, being a simultaneous coalition – an organic coordination of visual elements.

Cartier-Bresson was no mathematician. Yet he applied Euclidian multidimensional theory to his art, perhaps without knowing. In reality, anyone applying composition to photography uses the Euclidian principles. Your Euclidian space was initiated 2,300 years ago. After all these years, you are still free to add your personal dimensions.

Euclidian spaces decompose visual composition quite well and have plenty of practical, real life applications in economics, physics, medicine and countless other areas. Yet it is not the only way of looking at dimensions. The weak point of Euclidian dimensions is that they do not define what its dimensions are in a real world. You might assign length, width etc. to some dimensions but, generally, neither Euclid nor modern mathematicians do or care to. Reality is conveniently abstracted away.

Modern scientists have extended the Euclidian spaces in many different directions. The case of up to three dimensions is pretty straight forward. At four dimensions, differences start to occur. Although many regard Time as the best addition, others look at it differently. A fourth dimension may consist of a way to connect several three dimensional spaces, Put your slippers in the floor. Go get a rope. Tie up the slippers with the rope. Congratulations, you just entered the world of four dimensions. Untie the slippers and you return to a three dimensional world. The rope is the way to connect the three dimensions with a fourth.

The slipper example certainly is pretty silly. The point isn’t. In the current context, the fourth or Nth dimension can define a way to go from an N-1 space to N or N-2 dimensions. That is quite useful. Let’s go back to our eyes. They record a three dimensional world flattened into the two dimensional space of the retina. The brain then applies a third dimension to give an illusion of three dimensions that we “see”. The brain analyses the two dimensional information for clues to the next dimension: shadows, foreshortening and perspective provide information to the brain how the two dimensions might extend to three.

As always, the brain is easy to fool. Consider this example of a two dimensional picture, below, that completely violates the brain’s rules making it impossible to get to an illusion of three dimensions:

Look at the picture (which is no Picasso) above long enough and you will likely go crazy. Now, juxtaposition in photography refers to including an object that contrasts in some respect with the rest of the scene. Such an object usually is there to challenge the viewer and to add tension. The tension is achieved by breaking the rules of the brain’s attempts to add a dimension to what it sees: for instance, include a flower vase lit from the opposite of the rest of the image. It can also be an object that is out of context: a portrait of Oprah embracing David Letterman or the pictures of Saddam Hussein with small children. The picture above is an over-the-top shopping list of ways to offend the brain and creating tension (or confusion).

So far, dimensions are useful for cleanly defining compositions that generically create harmony and juxtapositions that add tensions. Compositions and juxtapositions aren’t really dimensions since they basically are combinations of the planes, angles and lines already present in Euclidian space. The usefulness of this to photography consists of adding formal elements and organization. That is not bad at all. But the story on dimensions is by no means finished yet.

Spatial String theory

Scientists are not satisfied with two, three or four dimensions, however you define them. String theory, also known as Superstring theory, is an attempt to explore areas in Nature and the Universe and create a universal theory covering more known events than is possible by four dimensions. The areas include explaining the interaction and nature of particles, planets, orbits, stars, black holes, electromagnetism, gravity and the Big Bang when the Universe was born. The scientific driving force is quantum mechanics. Our driving force is looking for new insights and becoming better artists. Perhaps a few warped dimensions will do the trick as it did for Picasso.

String theory went through and will continue to go through many evolutions: originally dealing with special particles called hadrons, then pondering the interaction, at zero distance, of particles with zero mass spinning around, leading to explorations of gravity. String theory can predict these natural and cosmic behaviors.

Strings are like guitar strings except not attached to anything. The strings may be stretched and set to vibrate, emitting “tones” or, rather, energy. These strings are quite small or in the order of a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter. The strings may be closed loops or open ended. They are paired with other particles in super symmetry – if a string emits force (“tones”) then there must be a receptor of this force.

Now that all of that is perfectly clear, none of this has been truly confirmed as existing. Those strings are way too small to be seen. Then there are several string theories to consider. These theories combine with quantum mechanics to add the notion of dimensions. These dimensions are as many as 26 or as few as 10 for “superstrings”. Work is ongoing to reduce the different theories into one single theory called M theory which is known as the Mother of All Theories.

We now have ten dimensions with vibrating strings. One of the dimensions is Time, leaving nine others. Of these nine, you might have a circular dimension. A string particle entering such a dimension starts circling, adding momentum energy to the whole setup. The string can wind itself around the circular dimension. This represents momentum and winding modes. There is a coupling of the string to the dimension. There are now zero dimension objects (infinitely small ones), one dimensional (points), two dimensional lines and three dimensional membranes similar to Euclid’s planes.

Here is where we are: we ha