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Who gives a shit about a photo of some dumb fence post when the world is burning?
Some years back now, when I was in a manic love affair with street photography I wanted to write a book about it. I had the title worked out.
Be There.
Where is there? Wherever there are humans, light and shadow. A simple algorithm for putting yourself in a position to see things. It turns out no matter how much we want to intellectualize (or ruminate, i love me some deep ruminations) you have to actually see the thing that fires whatever dusty old engine you still have kicking. You have to see something that matters to you, in a way you didn’t expect and it sets off a chain of thoughts and feelings which hopefully result in a photograph.
You can think about light and dark all you want but it isn’t till you’re in the darkness quietly peering out at what’s lit before you can have a real response. You know, be there.
Even on a slow year like last year where I had trouble with motivation I still put myself there probably over 150 times. Out with the camera watching for something, but feeling so very little and now a decade or so on I realize there was a missing step in that simple plan, or at least an assumed one.
you need a subject you care about or are moved by, and light and shadow. If you’re into street it could be humans. Maybe you love still lifes, grab some pears. The subject only needs to stir you. This runs counter to the motif of the instagram era where we select our subjects by what people want to see, or by what someone else had success seeing.
But the truth is no one knows what they want to see, or will feel when they see something till they see it and feel it. humans are beautifully unpredictable and adaptable. Witnessing the decline of photography on instagram underlines this idea. That damned windswept tree we’ve all seen 100 times was so magical the first few times. Now you want to gouge your eyes out when you see it.
This sounds a lot like novelty. Like chasing the new is the solution and believe me I’ve tried and it isn’t. Everything can be new because it’s not the novel subject its the novel expression of the subject being pressed through the eye, heart and mind of someone engaged by some interest or passion that creates something “new” for us to look at. Yes, even that windswept tree could again be new if someone was truly moved to a new mental place with it and had the skills to convert that to a photo.
I’d half written a mopey post this past couple weeks about how the world doesn’t value beauty anymore. That photography is dead by sheer inundation. That the democratizing of the image and its transmission we just wore out our eyeballs. or some such shit.
I was feeling pretty frustrated and a bit sorry for myself too. I’ve invested the best part of my life into this and when set against the climate, the political, the culture wars, AI, war and on and on this all looks like masturbation.
Who gives a shit about a photo of some dumb fence post when the world is burning?
The thing is… The world has always been burning. or freezing. or hungry. We’ve always been dying or about to die. We’ve always had plagues and disasters and crops that failed. Greed destroying everything is not a new idea for us. Humanity (and by virtue of our oversized place in the world, everything else) has always been on the knife’s edge of complete collapse or death. The whole of us, and each individual too.
It’s easy to forget in the relative comfort of our modern lives that we live in absolute comfort compared to the bulk of those who’ve come before us and there was never any surety we’d get to live our lives out like this.
What I’m trying to say is that in truth nothing changed. Images still don’t matter and never did. Objectively.
There have always been larger problems and more important things we could spend our energy on, yet somehow photography has helped us have better lives despite its limited and subjective value. Not to go too deep but I think this is because of its collective subjective impacts. Photos large and small, famous and personal touch parts of our lives a million times and help educate us, excite us, motivate us, remind us the world can be beautiful and each of those tiny tiny moments subjectively influence nearly everyone which doesn’t make sense on it’s own until everyone together has been changed one person at a time in some way, by the role of images quietly moving them.
They only matter to us. Our personal individual experiences with them. That’s enough to change the world, all the while not mattering objectively.
I could go further and argue that this is true about almost everything in our lives. The large wrought small and expressed for our own enjoyment, or education. How does my mother’s death which changed me greatly matter in the grander scheme of life. It doesn’t, and neither did her life, yet the world is richer for having had her.
The things we do don’t matter. But they do. To us.
So having escaped that existential box of ridiculousness I had to think about what still moves this tired heart. What in the world could shake my heart awake and provide opportunities for the unexpected collision of light and gesture if I just be there.
Despite my wishes otherwise I still find the female form, and women in general (yeah, I’m a caveman) very energizing and when Marla asked if I wanted to shoot I said Covid be damned I’m going to be there with a light and all my hang ups and see if my heart can feel it’s way to something that matters (to me).
It was a challenging shoot. The first in my overly small room with an overly large bed. Not enough room for my big octabox and very limited lines to shoot on. I fought with my light stand and my light the entire time and as much as I want to say it was transformative in some way the shoot itself was hard. Marla did her Marla things, working hard to provide me opportunities to make beautiful pictures and I tried to get out of my head, get out of the constraints and just see.
In truth I only got there a couple moments through the shoot but in the edits I came to realize a few things which will come with me out into the prairie next time I go.
I realized while editing these 100 megapixel monsters with 13 or more stops of dynamic range that dynamic range has ruined me. I’m not netflix. You don’t need to see into the shadow detail for everything. It’s okay to cook some highlights. Chasing a broad dynamic range evolved naturally out of storm chasing where the light is often ridiculous in its contrast but it somehow worked its way into everything and medium format has just encouraged me down this road.
I realized while working on these that when I tried to extend the dynamic range of the photo I also lost the emotion and feeling. I lost something organic to how I experience the light (particularly now that bright light is painful for me, and high contrast invites a migraine). So I edited these with the guide of feeling rather than caring about crushed blacks or cooked whites or losing details and it felt right.
It felt like I was conveying something I experienced, something that moved me, how i experienced it and how it moved me rather than an exercise in technical perfection.
Here’s a bit of what we made.
Do these images matter matter? Nope. We’ve shot over 35 times in 14+ years. I have thousands of images of her. We’ve shot in every imaginable situation and yet, I learn something every time. I find something out about me, or her, or us, or light. Every time.
And these small, seemingly meaningless moments combine and change us and over time make us new again. without mattering. without meaning anything individually or wholistically. They are just the flow of light and shadow affecting everything they they touch.
No extra links or recommends for you folks this week. I’ve been using all my spare time trying to get my chess rating up and it hasn’t left time to explore much.