Christmas and a few words about the times to come

Guests have arrived to my mother's house. It has stopped raining, and the leg of deer that I have in the oven is almost ready. There's a Pedro Ximenez, cranberry and apple sauce going with it, so fingers crossed.

I have been ill during these last days, and extremely busy. Maciej Dakowicz and I are opening the Third Floor Gallery in Cardiff Bay in February. We have the first two shows scheduled already (if you're interested, get in touch, even if it's because of curiosity on how things work). I just bought the domain but we have not set up the page yet. Next goes creating something followable on facebook and flickr, so that people can stay in touch. It is going to be quite a blast. Exciting photography is coming up and I must say I'm excited myself. On the other hand it is all quite hard work and economically risky, but once in a lifetime it's worth trying. It has been a very long journey to get to this point, and it all started about a year ago.

So, I'll stop emailing, registering stuff, and so, get back to my leg of deer and wish a merry xmas.

Mirroring

It's fun when photographs mirror other photographs. This is mine, from some night out in Cardiff not that long ago:





And this one is from the Ma'alot massacre 35 years ago:





(Thanks to nir kristal for noticing.)

Into the mainstream

I shot a handfasting (sort of a wedding) last weekend. In nice sweet 220 colour film in square format. It's kind of fun to give a go to what is the ultimate breadmaker of the professional photographer. I got the film processed pretty fast, so I'm already making a dummy of the book. This is misleading in the speed, as I only got low res scans of the film, and the final copy will need rescanning of all the images that are bound to be printed.





Anyway, a truly enjoyable experience.

Seen in Arles... Stefan Vanfleteren

The European Night of Rencontres d'Arles was for me a bit disappointing. Lots of boring photographs of more of the same shot in more of the same way. It is amazing how many photographers from different countries decide to put a photograph of an abandoned car in the middle of the forest in their slideshow. Coincidence?

At least the Belgians were hitting a bit harder. They had at least two photographers that got ovations from the audience each time that a new bunch sat to look at their work. One of them was Stephan Vanfleteren:







The edit he has online doesn't seem as strong as what he was showing in Arles, and I can't find many of the photographs. His portraits of Belgians at home and in bars were very strong. Often funny, close.

Photographs, diaries, snapshots

I was talking with my friend Neil the other day. He said he was shooting after a funeral, in order to have some sort of memory of the even happening at all, and that people were most surprised of this. Somehow, the function of photographs to be reminders of events seems to be fading, slightly... it doesn't come up as the first thing in most people's minds when asking why do they take pictures. Everything goes faster. The diaries are uploaded on facebook and they are massive collections of snapshots, compared to those big books we used to have before, which due to sheer size had to be somehow edited down (and on which the events would be written down). Also, I have the feeling that the photographer himself is more self aware nowadays when shooting. If you check flickr, you'll see that lots of people that shoot daily life diaries have either an explicit or implicit artistic presumption. The thing photographed has to produce an artistic result that is greater than the thing photographed. Back in the day, when you took holiday photographs, the circle of people you shared them with was small. This lead to some unpretentious gems. Maybe the attitude to photography (by photographers) will not bring these back.

I probably wouldn't have noticed this if I had not been sailing through 70's and 80's snapshots in flickr. Rarely anybody takes photographs like these anymore. Some work amazingly well. The photographer is slightly on the shade, and the subject is well delivered through a rich composition. Some of my favourites come from the archives of Harald Hauesler:









These are from 1962 Familie Kramer.

All tomorrow's parties...

I like shooting in parties. Birthdays, happy things. Somehow they lend themselves for double readings and anarchic compositions of people. I guess you have to be a bit cheeky when you look at things, but well, it's much more fun than do straightforward pictures of things.





I guess I just write this because it had been quite a while since the last time I uploaded any pics in this blog. Also, quite a while that they weren't in b&w. Well, happy birthday that is!





So, anybody has favourite party pictures?

(Both pics from last Saturday, by me.)

Editing and horror films

This is going to be a confusing post. Stills from The Shining, general chitchat about editing photoessays and a review of The Orphanage. Sorry about that.





Last week I saw The Orphanage (El Orfanato). It's a ridiculously good Spanish horror film, that works in several subtle layers and has that classic buildup tension that good -and nowadays fairly rare- horror films have. Actually, there are not that many really frightening moments in the film, but they are sometimes so tightly knit together, and others they are so unexpected that they make a great film. On the background you have this strange arousal... all the time something is a bit wrong about the whole film but there you sit watching. Is probably these moments in which nothing scary really happens that makes the film stand out. If it was all the time bang bang, ghost here, ghost there, people dying, etc. it would have been crap. Instead, it's an extremely well paced and thought film. Exactly like editing pictures, at least for me.





With editing pictures... selecting and arranging a photoessay, I find that the best way of describing my modus operandi is some sort of horror film. You start by hinting that something is going to happen or something is slightly wrong or crooked about all this. It doesn't require a strong internal logic, just something ambiguous, worrying. Then you try to get into the stronger shots by building up tension to them. Some things that you want to cover with the images don't somehow work together (last edit I did managed to contain two portraits, I still don't know how I pulled that one), so somehow the sequence should lean in their direction without losing the main track. Once you get into the particular strong shot, you can sometimes follow with another very strong shot, a bit like those shocking aftershocks of horror films, but doing it too often creates too much of an expectation. It's all about guiding the viewer's state of mind through the images... to play with that theoretical observer that might look at the sequence, hopefully being absolutely naive by when they start.





Of course it's not all frights. The Orphanage contains that little bit of drama that reminds you that the characters are still human beings after all, that you could be one of them. It opens with a happy and long scene, that just makes you more worried on your seat, as you expect the awful to happen, but not. There the orphanage is, back in the fifties, probably, and all this kids that nobody really wants are playing in the garden, chasing each other. You barely need this in terms of the story itself, but it's setting the mood. It's like a backdrop that you get back to when you are viewing the rest of the story. Half way through the film there's a big pause. The whole story moves forward by six months and sort of resets. It had got to one of its peaks in terms of horror, the plot had advanced suddenly, your nerves don't take it much more. Then the pause comes and gently everything resets a bit. All the paranormal lightens and you get back into reality and into the characters. You sort of need this to take another good dose of horror.





A tight pace, a sequence of images without bumps, up and down, an "easy" ride for the viewer. Reaching the peaks and playing with expectations. Sudden but announced shocks every now and then. A coherent whole that goes around hitting very different images. Hide the repetitions, don't put them together... returning to some motives gives it a beat. Not too obvious either, just hinting to things that will come and reminding of things seen. Of course there are lots of exceptions, not all sequences are horror films, but I do love horror films. Damn.

Boredom, photographs, paintings, art

I remember when in primary I saw for the first time Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase...





We had just got out of impressionism, and hitting abstraction, cubism and futurism. On Duchamp's painting I stopped and said, damn, I see it! Well, it's not as if you couldn't see all the stuff, but most of it was fairly obscure (like music for musicians we do have art for artists, I'd say). But, hey, here you could stop for a moment and actually think that that is, in a sketchy way, what a person looks over time when they walk down a staircase. Everything superimposed. Seeing this so many years later took me to reading the wikipedia entry, and it has this interesting bit...

In the composition, Duchamp depicted motion by successive superimposed images, similar to stroboscopic motion photography. The painting shows elements of both the Cubist and Futurist styles. Duchamp also recognized the influence of the stop-motion photography of Étienne-Jules Marey.

Well, the influence of that was recognized looks like this:



- Man walking down an inclined plane


- Horse walking


- Pelican landing


That makes Duchamp look a lot easier actually. And it somehow brings me full circle to photography and Trenk Parke...

Boredom, paintings, art

Hah, plenty of people seem to be bored of conteporary photography out here. Not very surprised. People have always been bored of contemporary photography at least since the beginning of last century. I'm bored as well. Maybe it's time to bring in that old clash that photography shouldn't try to imitate paintings. Too much painterly stuff out there, when the interesting thing are all those images that you collect with a camera through a viewfinder and you wouldn't conceive on your own or through your eyes.

This reminds me. When I look at this Bruegel painting I can't help but to think...





... that the framing is sort of not perfect. There are chopped trees at both sides and even the people are in a slightly non-optimal position and they are slightly cropped also at the bottom. There are multitude of small scenes and actions going on, just like in daily life. I just guess that the framing and choice of the scene is for enhanced realism.

If we now compare with a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson depicting a similar snowy and populated scene...





... well, somehow the composition tries to imitate paintings and it's more clean than Bruegel's. Just because it being a photograph brings the realism that the painter tried to achieve? So painters imitated life, and photographers imitated painters? Aren't we missing something here?

Post-London

Got back from London. Didn't shoot even one roll of film, but now I have applied for being Finnish. At the embassy they gave me back a receipt and 20 pence. I'll keep them dearly. Also got drunk twice. They stopped serving me at a pub somewhere close to Leicester Square. That annoyed me a bit. Met up with lots of the usual suspects of Londoner street photo, which is always a joyous event. Somebody stole a camera (if anybody sees a Yashica Lynx-1000 with an Olympus T-32 flash, it's mine). In overall, nothing too bad. Busy place. Oh, I also bought a book of Shomei Tomatsu. It drives me nuts. Good to know that he liked the work of Kerouac.













(All pics by Shomei Tomatsu)

Bryan Formhals is not dead... he just smells funny... hah...

At some point I said that some mates were leaving flickr (where we met) and going on their own. Well, Bryan got into his stream of consciousness blogging with Photographs on the Brain, which I think is his daily ration of food for thought. Pretty good. Very much worth having the RSS feed sindicated, because the flow of short notes, links, and mostly, photographs can flood you in very short notice.

Trying colour...

I have very rarely shot colour and now I'm giving my first go ever at scanning it. It's a bit of a strange experience. I try to keep it small, so I only use the (damn) thing when I'm in Spain. During Easter I shot a bit here and there (Alicante, Valencia, Malaga, Fuengirola) and it was very very odd. I maybe don't really like it, because instead of just reacting to stuff and shooting away and running and dancing and looking at lines and things going on, I have to also take a look at what colour they have.

I mean, this is a pretty monochromatic shot at the end of the day... it has colour just because it's the thing it was shot with...





Instead, this is much more the thing you should be looking forwards to when using colour... something in which the elements, or at least some of them, are told apart because of the colour. In other words, in this shot colour is important:





I also found out that all that old portrait film I was shooting with happens to be pretty good for -surprisingly- portraits and natural light. Duh.






So what are those things you're messing with that you never dared to touch? I'm losing a bit my fear to colour but I'm not yet sure if I'm seeing it at all...

(All photos by me.)

Photography is unnatural

Many times I read comments saying how much better real life looks like than photographs. For example, people say that "out of focus" isn't part of real life, that blur is something that photography brought to other forms of art or that a rectangular frame is something arbitrary and unnatural. I remember for example this thread on circular photographs which although cool, doesn't really relate to how we perceive the world around as relative to how a camera perceives it. I mean, compare these and figure our if they have to produce a similar image on the sensor, film or retina or not...







I always wonder if people who say that they don't see out of focus in real life have looked at their fingers. If I take the thumb of my left hand and place it ten inches away from my eyes not only I get a background that is out of focus (if you have normal vision) but also a background in which objects appear twice! Diplopia is a natural consequence of us having two eyes, and it's something that this far I haven't seen anybody try to do with a camera. Try a couple of times, it does exist. About the quality of photographs... well... I have always thought that for a moment they are much more precise than our own visual system. After all, the only part of our retina that is particularly sharp and able to perceive colour is the fovea, which is also extremely small. The illusion of a richly coloured world that is entirely in focus and sharp takes places when our eyes move around it constantly and our brain keeps on storing this information. But if you only have the amount of time that a camera employs in taking a picture, it beats us neatly in doing the job of rendering reality as it is, as no needs for scanning the scene are required. Everything gets in in one single neat click. And what about the arbitrary shape of photographs? Oh well, we have two eyes that share part of the visual field, so after all... rather a rectangle than a square...

Getting in...

Don't miss the words of Paul D'Amato about his work Barrio. Not only the images of his project are very compelling, his writing also makes you want to get somewhere where you don't belong. In the case of Paul, this was a Mexican community in Chicago, but it could be anywhere. Diane Arbus said that she wanted to be where nobody had been, and that a camera was an excuse or license to get this done. But how cool it is to blend as a stranger were you don't belong, for moments forgetting the difference between you and your surroundings.





My subject isn’t that sensational. It’s more like: this is truly a privilege to see - - - and I know that I have to concentrate like hell because I know I’ll never get an opportunity like this again. I live for these situations where I feel a kind of profund sense of emotional resonance. It takes a lot of looking, clarity and luck. - Paul D'Amato

Influences

I spent some time in Milano shooting at the end of August and beginning of September (about five days). I edited down those pictures into a short set that I'd say was done in a very direct and fast fashion. I sort of like having worked on something that is fast, dirty, incomplete and superficial. (I say that, but I still think it has a couple of nice shots.) Oh well, so I was looking at images on flickr, and one of my contacts, Luca, had this picture that made me think about the streets I had been wondering in:





So I pointed him out one of my shots of Milano that reminded me of his (he shoots there):





What I was not expecting was his reply, in which he pointed me towards this image he took a couple of weeks ago. I know the locations so and so, so I had a good giggle when I saw...





... mine is the next one...





So, have you ever been influenced by your peers? Do you have an agenda of pictures 'to steal'? (I do have such an agenda of very precise and explicit images, not just overall style, but I never see them emerge in the places I shoot.)

Captions

I always wonder what captions are for. I mean, they sort of end up with the ambiguity of some images, but some happen to grow with them. My last favourite caption is in this image by Christopher Anderson:





When I saw it at first I went. Duh, a bearded guy having a good time in a swimming pool, probably after a few margaritas. What's that about? Then I noticed the caption. It reads: "KUWAIT. Kuwait City. 2003. Antonin KRATOCHVIL swimming in the Hilton pool just before the invasion of Iraq."

Woh, now the image completely changes, as Kratochvil is pretty much involved in shooting wars, catastrophes, etc. Suddenly, a nice bite of sarcasm warms my heart. Thanks, mr caption.

What are your favourite captions?

Technique: things nobody told you about...

Today I dropped by WHSmith to see if they could help me out with the archival process. I mean, when you shoot and shoot and shoot you end up with lots of negatives. These negatives accumulate in negative preservers (Printfile is pretty cheap and it has a useful tagging system). The negatives preservers accumulate then into ring binders, and ring binders go inside cardboard boxes. So you end up with a big mess. Well, that was a reason to go to WHSmith... they had sales as well. 75% off two ring binders, three big cardboard boxes to store them for £1 and a ring binder with a zipper to carry prints for almost nothing (£2.49). But my most amazing discovery were the tags. Damn, I hoped there was something like this. Small white sticker tags for a quid and the most amazing of all... coloured spot stickers for a quid as well! Finally I can mark all the keepers in each roll by placing a tag of the adequate colour (yellow for stuff you shouldn't forget, green for keepers, red for things that already go inside an edit). Happy times.

Next I'll post something about editing. But editing is impossible without lots of ringbinders, stickers and small prints, so it's good we go through here.

And how do you make sense of your mess?

Shoot like... Diane Arbus

"Oh, that little lady is giving me such a nice look... I wonder if she's up for a chat..." seems to be a bit what went the first time through the head of Diane Arbus' subjects. There are anecdotes here and there on her charm and how people just approached her to openly talk about intimate stuff. You could also tattoo in your forefront "I studied psychology" for a similar effect. Then, well, at some point pop the camera out as an extension of your interaction.





It's been said many times that the photography of Arbus shows us how no matter how much we try, we can't capture the essence of others. Nan Goldin always remarks that she made a huge effort to not show the subjects... but try to be them, even to a point of sickness. Well, no matter what happens in the images, somehow the real ugliness of reality as it is hits you in the face in those large fine grained prints. (If you read text by her, you'll be surprised on how beautiful and poetic it is in contrast.)














You need

A medium format twin lens camera, or a medium format SLR with a waist level viewfinder. This makes your subjects look at your head while you giggle and look at their faces from a point of view slightly lower (that's why they have that sort of sheepish look).

Very fine grained slow film. Remember, you really want to show things as they are. You have to be a bit obsessed about the truth of the image. No, not that obsessed, a bit more than that. Yes. Better... feel it torturing you when you don't reach it.

Inhuman charm. This takes lots of practice. The day that you enter a pub and a complete stranger buys you a beer, you're getting close. When you manage this every other day and they open their hearts to you when you open your mouth, you're on the right track.

Patience. Yes, a day shooting a single person is needed more than once. Or do you think people relax for the camera just with your charm? No way, you have to be there till they are so tired that they forgot about you, their daily job and the world. Giving them valium is considered cheating. Also, you'll need all that patience to hear the weird stories your subjects tell you.

Distaste for composition. Did I say composition? Ha! That's something that happens to others! If a subject does not work dead centre, it wasn't worth shooting.

A taste for the strange and nocturnal. Midgets, circus freaks, old men that think they are vampires, men dressed as women, Disney memorabilia. Yes, go for it. If after seeing your prints your mother throws them into the bin you are doing it right. If some chick that thinks she's the twin soul of Tim Burton thinks they rock, well, yes, whatever...

Master use of flash. Well, it's not only that it's a handy skill to have, but if there's something that can reveal the tiniest little ugly thing in a portrait, that's a good and powerful flash.


Pros

Art galleries really appreciate your stuff after some initial uneasynes.

Your subjects after some initial outfreaking learn to love their portraits... some of them.

Shooting can be easy and spontaneous, and you can have a good time meeting people while doing it.


Cons

The art galleries that appreciate you mostly do so when you're dead.

Commisions are few and far apart. If you are an old rich toothless lady, you probably didn't want anybody reminding you that.

People you meet are pretty, pretty weird. I mean, this is not a job for any average Joe (or Jane) to take.


Overall

You take ugly and misunderstood pictures that are fairly illuminatory for an artsy minory. Being dead is not really a requisite for this achievement, but it helps. In overall I wouldn't recommend to shoot like Arbus unless you're a complete copycat that fancy galleries can recognize straight on. I mean, to build up a career on a bunch of weird pictures is not going to get you money unless you stole the whole thing from the original... and acquiring all the charm and sweettalk is hard unless you were almost born with it. But after all, who's into this for the money?

Life... First day of 2008...

I woke up with a bit of a hangover on a kitchen floor today. Everybody had left and it was about 3pm. I went for a stroll to snap some pictures in that bit of the city that limits with the countryside. Two years ago none of those buildings existed here in Fuengirola. Oh, and I played Guitar Hero with a goth chick last night as well. I only hit the right notes in Slayer when banging my head.

And now later on I went on search of a cigar but I didn't find any. They don't seem to sell them in supermarkets. Laws seem to be changing in Spain. The reason for a cigar was not only the lack of one last night, but the results of the David Alan Harvey Fund for Emerging Photographers. I managed to get my name into the list! I am looking forwards to see what it ends up looking like, and upload some shots when the pictures end up in some gallery.





Fuck, I have no funny, sarcastic, dry, cynical or very tongue in cheek words to add...

Interview and some pictures with Tom Wood

Includes an essay. Everything is here. It's just a must see. Tom Wood has been for decades documenting daily life in Liverpool, and according to the essay, not getting much recognition to start with. I've heard of him many times referenced as an influence.





Happy new year, by the way!