Of worn-out jeans and crappy cameras

Those of us of a certain age remember what it used to be like to buy and own a pair of blue jeans. They came in mostly one color (“blue”), one style (“jeans”), and one somewhat undesirable cut other than “regular” (“husky”). Worn right off of the rack, they appeared to be made of some sort of ballistic cotton that could stop a small-caliber rifle round, and were so stiff that we couldn’t bend our knees in them for the first few weeks. We didn’t fold them and put them away at night, we stood them up in the corner. We bought them six inches too long because, of course, they would shrink when first washed and because they would last so long that we would “grow into them”. And we loved our jeans. We looked forward to seeing what they looked like and how they fit each time they came out of the dryer, and we mourned their loss when, years later, time and Tide inevitably reduced them to a series of holes held together by mere threads. Jeans were a journey, not a destination; a promise, not a product. In the way they shrank, faded, and eventually ripped and disintegrated, they reflected the accumulation of our life’s adventures, our authentic experience.

Nowadays, of course, we often don’t just buy jeans, we buy “fashion jeans”. We buy them distressed, weathered, acid-washed, stone washed, sandblasted, belt-sanded and otherwise intentionally worn the hell out. We buy them already ripped and torn (perfectly of course) in the most stylish yet functional of locations. Like so much else in our post-modern smorgasbord of infinite choice and empty meaning, with our jeans we have traded the journey for the destination, the promise for the product. We want our jeans, and by extension ourselves, to look like they’ve been somewhere without the inconvenience of actually having to go there. We want them to look that way NOW and at whatever cost. With our fashion jeans, we are buying our own back story.

I call this phenomenon “Simulated Character”, and I was recently reminded of my fascination with it when I received a message and an attached photo from my friend and former student Swami. He was enrolled in the Street Photography workshop at NESOP, and was intrigued by his instructor’s Holga camera.

A Holga, for those of you who don’t already know, is a $20 toy camera made in China that accepts medium format (120 size) film. The body of the camera is made from flimsy black plastic that leaks light like a screen door, which is one part of its appeal to photographers. The other attraction is the camera’s plastic lens, which creates images that are somewhat sharp in the center, softer at the edges, and heavily vignetted. Each camera/lens combination has its own unique characteristics, and the result of all of this unpredictable optical and mechanical imperfection are photographs that can have a somewhat dreamy, distressed quality. Character, in other words, at least in the minds of some, but character that is imparted by the nature of the tool. Authentic character, if you will.

Swami loved the look of the Holga images, but being a digital photographer, he was not crazy about the idea of buying a film camera. One of the great advantages of digital technology is how completely it has replaced the need for chemical photo processing, darkrooms, color labs, everything. But the best way to appreciate the special quality of Holga images is to process and print the film yourself, and Swami really wanted nothing to do with any of that.

So he went a’googling, and, sure enough, quickly came up with a set of Photoshop actions that apply a “Holga effect” to any digital image. He sent me the first image at the top of this post, and asked me if I thought it was truly “Holga-like”. Attaching one of my own “real” Holga pictures in response (the bottom one), I sent him this:

“Yep, it sort of looks like a Holga shot, soft and vignetted at the edges... I guess one question I would ask myself is, ‘do I want to make my digital images LOOK like they were shot with a Holga, or do I want the experience of actually SHOOTING with a Holga?’ For me, it would be the latter.”

... to which he responded

“I'm actually happy with my Holga-like pics processed through Photoshop.”

...to which I responded...

Well, I didn’t respond. I didn’t quite know what to say, and I’m still not sure I do. I’m left with the unsettling realization that either Swami is missing the whole point about using a toy camera in the first place, or I’m missing the bigger point that “it’s the picture, stupid”. I’m beginning to think it’s a little of both.

But since I’m the seasoned professional photographer and teacher, and since it’s my blog, let’s say I’m right, and Swami doesn’t get it. In my workshops, I try to make the point that shooting film is about guessing, and shooting digital is about knowing (at least it is after one learns how to do it properly). A Holga is the ultimate “point and pray” device. It delivers no guarantees but lots of surprises, exactly the opposite of what should be coming out of your digital camera. In other words, let’s say that the whole reason to shoot with that silly little kiddy camera is its “ANTI-DIGITALness”. When we get a cool picture out of a Holga, it’s FUN, it feels like a gift from the photo gods! If we accept all that, then we also have to accept the fact that a Holga image looks the way it does because it just can’t look any other way. Now, to my pea brain at least, that is a whole lot different than taking an extremely high quality digital image (which, incidentally, also looks the way it does because of the tool that made it) and running a software action on it that tries to make it look like something it isn’t. Both of the images you see here have character, maybe even similar character, but from a process standpoint (and process is really what this all comes down to) one is what it is and the other is what it isn’t. Or it is what it wants to be, not what it has to be. One is authentic, one is simulated, but both are photographs and both are interesting.

So, then, here's the big question: should we really care about HOW a picture was made, or is it better to care THAT a picture was made?

Think about that, will you? And do get back to me with your answer. I need to figure this out, and fast.

I should go now. My new jeans are in the dryer.

The one that got away

Here’s a story about three pictures, the two above that I did take, and the one I’ll tell you about in a second that I didn’t but that I’ll try to show you anyway.

I’ve always thought that, at its core, photography as practiced by me and by those whose work I admire most is simply about being able to show people things I’ve seen, and if I'm really successful, maybe a bit about how I felt about them, too. It may mean something entirely different to you, and that is why photography is so damn cool. It’s a big tent, and there’s room for all of us to do whatever we want to with it.

The workflow goes like this. You see something that for whatever reason looks interesting, and may even strike a chord in you somehow. You grab a camera, fiddle with it, try a few angles, snap a few shots, and if you’ve truly seen something interesting and you’ve done everything right, or right enough, you make a print or attach it to an e-mail or upload it to a website and proclaim to the world “Look at what I saw!” Simple, right?

But what about the pictures you see, sometimes with painful clarity, but that for whatever reason you don’t capture with a camera? What about the ones that get away? Is the act of seeing pictures with photographic precision but with only your memory and your words to fix them in time and space sufficient? For that matter, are photographs really any good at all at conveying our unique take on what we see and how we feel about it?

I hope you’ll agree with me and all the other photographers, writers and storytellers in the world that, if you try real hard, the answer to both of those questions is a resounding YES.

There have been many, many incredible pictures over the years that I recorded with my eyes but for one reason or another was unable to capture with a camera. Those failures don’t usually bother me all that much, but they do make it harder for me to share what I saw with others. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why writing has become such a big part of my creative life, I don’t know. In any event, though, the pictures that get away are often the big ones, the money shots, the ones that tie the loose ends together and make you either slap your head in frustration for missing them or just stare slack-jawed in amazed gratitude for witnessing them at all.

If you’re a friend of mine, or if you’ve taken one of my classes at NESOP (that actually makes you both), you’ve heard me tell the story behind the pictures at the top of this post and many others like them at least once before, and I trust that hearing it one more time won’t kill you. If you’re stumbling across me here for the first time, listen up. It’s a good one.

In the first one, the guy in the right foreground is Noel Paul Stookey. You may know him better as the “Paul” in Peter, Paul and Mary. He and his band mates were famous for a song called “Puff The Magic Dragon” which sounded like a kid’s fairy tale but probably was really about the drug culture of the 1960’s. The guy performing on stage in the background is my friend Al Stewart, the Scottish singer-songwriter. He’s famous for a song called “Year Of The Cat”, which sounds like it’s about the movie “Casablanca”, but also has something to do with Vietnamese astrology somehow.

How I came to be standing there backstage in the middle of a muddy field on a rainy Saturday afternoon at an outdoor music festival in Brooklyn, Maine photographing one aging pop star watching another one perform is a very long story, the details of which I won’t bore you with here. Let’s just say that, once upon a time, way back when I was in high school in the 1970’s, a friend loaned me one of Al’s records to listen to. I loved the music, a brilliant folk-rock concept album about some of the pivotal historical events of the 20th century. But it was the black and white photograph on the cover that really left a mark on me; it actually made me want to be a photographer. Years later, after I had managed to do just that, I met him, and eventually shot one of his CD covers, and most recently art-directed and designed another. We became friendly, and nowadays I even get to drive him around to shows every year or so when he’s in Boston. On one of those roadtrips a picture presented itself to me, one that I was unable to capture, but one that will stay clearly in my mind forever.

In early 2002, I drove Al on a 5-day tour of the Northeast, starting in Northhampton, MA, heading south as far as Philadelphia, and finally winding up in New York City. Seeing that our route on the last day would take us through the Holland Tunnel, the approach to which through Jersey City has a long, close proximity to Ground Zero and the ruins of the World Trade Center just across the Hudson River, I mentioned it to Al. Like a wreck on a highway, I thought it might hold the same dark fascination for him as it did for me.

“I don’t want to see that,” he said.

I was a little surprised to hear him say that. After all, this was the same guy who had made a career out of writing songs mostly about the ebb and flow of history and civilization. If anybody would be interested in seeing evidence of a seemingly apocalyptic clash of ideologies, I thought, it would be him. But then I realized that I was probably being a little insensitive. Al would be flying back home to San Francisco the next day from Newark International Airport, precisely where United 93 had begun its flight to infamy only six months earlier. Perhaps if I flew back and forth between New York and the west coast as often as he did I wouldn’t be all that interested in rubbernecking, either.

So we made our way north on the New Jersey Turnpike Extension toward the tunnel in silence. The Statue of Liberty rose from the harbor on the right followed by Ellis Island, the setting for one of Al’s more obscure story-songs. Then, a shock in the middle distance; that horrible pile, still steaming in places, glittered in the cold, bright morning. The musician who for so long has woven songs about the threads that tie civilizations together dozed in the seat next to me, arms crossed and head down. I just stole glances out the side window across his silhouette at the remains of the event that will most likely shape history for the rest of our lives. The juxtaposition of the two was striking, to me at least. My camera was in the back seat, just out of reach. I thought about trying to grab it somehow and committing the scene to film, but doing so at 70mph probably wouldn't have been the smartest move at that particular moment with that particular passenger. And besides, the poignancy of the scene had already been composed and captured by my mind’s eye. The resulting photograph, had I managed to grab it, would have only meant something to me and a few other people who know the whole story. It was one of the ones that got away, sure. But to me, seeing what I saw in that moment was perfectly sufficient and absolutely priceless.

Now, about that second picture up there, the one that obviously didn’t get away...

Like I said, I drove Al up to the Flye Point Music Festival in Brooklyn, Maine last year. He griped about having to do the gig the whole time, mostly because by the time he factored in all of the costs to fly from LA to Boston, hotels, meals, agent’s commissions, child support, etc., he had calculated that he earned about $85 for a 90-minute gig that ate up 5 days of his life. But then he would always end his rant by saying, “So what are you going to do? I figured it’s a good reason to come to Boston to have dinner with you”. Al always finds a way to make me feel pretty important in the grand scheme of things.

After his set, we hung around for awhile in the backstage tent eating and chatting with some of the other artists warming up to go on stage. One of them was Paul Stookey, and as unlikely as it may seem, in 40-odd years of performing these two guys had never met each other. They seemed to admire each other’s work and career, and at one point I asked if I could shoot a picture of the two of them together.

And that’s when Peter, Paul and Mary (minus Peter and Mary) pinched Al Stewart on the hiney. And I was pointing a camera at them when he did.

Top that one if you can.

Arriving the wrong way

Not all that many years ago, my ex-wife and I made one of our many trips to Holland to spend Christmas with her mother, sister and brother-in-law Gerard and their new baby. The whole lot of us then jetted off to Nice for a weekend (not quite the European equivalent of a $69 round-trip special from Boston to Orlando, but close). Once there we decided to head up the coast to Monte Carlo for an afternoon. We arrived by bus in a rather nondescript section of what is probably the most storied seaside principality on the planet. Our little entourage (complete with baby carriage) wound slowly along the main drag toward the older part of the city, then unexpectedly came off a side street onto the Place du Casino. The spectacularly infamous Beaux-arts facade of Monte Carlo’s casino towered over us.

“Wow,” I said.

The girls, being girls, went shopping. Us men found a table at an outdoor cafe on the square and tried to look sophisticated. We ordered drinks, lit up some Dutch cigars, and took it all in— and there was a lot to take in, most of it having to do with ridiculous wealth.

“I grew up in South Jersey,” I said. “I never thought I’d see this, but I kind of feel like the bus is the wrong way to arrive in Monte Carlo.”

Gerard grunted, then gestured with his cigar as a red Ferrari 360 Modena roared into the square, navigated expertly around the ornate fountain in the middle, and growled to a halt at the foot of the steps leading up to the grand main entrance. A perfectly groomed middle-aged man climbed out of the driver’s side, handed the keys to a valet, and opened the passenger side door. A perfectly groomed young blond woman emerged, took his hand, and they walked up the steps into the casino.

“That’s the right way,” Gerard said.

I mention this here because, should you decide to visit the new Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston’s Waterfront District (which you should), don’t take the Silver Line to the World Trade Center stop. That's the wrong way. Sizing up this architectural masterpiece while approaching on foot through Anthony Athanas’ vast parking lot is a lot like trying to appreciate a cancan dancer from backstage. One quickly feels somewhat ripped off when one realizes that all of the good stuff is pointing in the opposite direction.

The building's big, pallid, blocky backside, as it addresses Northern Avenue, is simply butt-ugly. And it is apparently arrogantly so, since its location and scale dominates everything in its immediate vicinity (as of this writing, Anthony’s Pier 4 Restaurant and several acres of asphalt). I was thinking how a nice “Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco” mural might dress up the place a bit, or, better yet, draping that huge inflatable padlock and chain from the self-storage warehouse on the Southeast Expressway around the unnervingly massive HVAC plant on the museum’s roof. The building is nothing as advertised until it is viewed from the business end, which is how we would have seen it had my friends and I de-bussed at the Courthouse station (our bad). Once we traversed the parking lot, found an opening in the chain-link fence and made our way around to the museum’s proper face on Boston Harbor, the brilliance of the structure revealed itself to us in all of its impossibly-overhanging glass-encased beauty.

“Wow,” I said.

We went to the ICA to check out the terrific Philip-Lorca DiCorcia show. I know this is supposed to be a photography-related blog, but I will leave it to you to either visit the show while it’s in town (through September 7, 2007) or discover more on your own about an artist the ICA anoints as “among the most influential and innovative photographers of the past thirty years”. Under another set of circumstances, I might even have had something to say about that. But right now I can’t get the image of that 4-sided white box with 2 good sides, its back turned on what is quickly becoming the hippest, most vibrant corner of the city, out of my architecturally-untrained noggin. Am I missing something here, like maybe the master plan for the site? Probably. But this humble first time visitor had the very distinct impression of arriving at the ICA “the wrong way”, an impression that really doesn’t make sense for a high-profile building that is standing in the middle of a parking lot. It wasn’t exactly like arriving in Monte Carlo “the wrong way”, but it left me with a similar vague feeling of not being smart enough (or rich enough) to appreciate the place the way the really smart (or rich) folks do.

Speaking of Monte Carlo, by the way, just as that perfectly groomed couple was about to disappear into the casino, the gentleman turned around to watch as the valet climbed into his Ferrari, started it up, and proceeded to grind the gears and stall the thing over and over until its owner interceded and parked it himself. Gerard and I got a kick out of that.

Right way? Wrong way? Le plus ca change, le plus c'est la meme chose.

Don't get me started...

My pal and colleague at NESOP, Heratch Ekmekjian, took me out for breakfast at the Deluxe Town Diner in Watertown yesterday. We pulled into a spot on the street, he turned off the engine, and the automatic door locks engaged. I made an exaggerated attempt to get out of the car by pulling on the handle rapidly and repeatedly, and, seeing that this didn’t seem to bother him much, I upped the ante a bit.

“This is what’s wrong with everything. We’ve let technology complicate the simplest of processes. This is just like image-stabilized lenses and autofocus. I can‘t get out of your damn car.”

Relax. This is not another middle-aged neo-Luddite rant. I do have a point. Or at least a destination.

I love digital photography. I love the fact that the camera confirms the technical and aesthetic quality of what I’ve shot instantly. I love the fact that I can go from recognizing a picture opportunity to admiring a big, beautiful print in about as much time as it used to take me to drive a roll of film over to my color lab. I love the fact that for the first time since 1975, I do not have to own and maintain a darkroom. And I love that red racing stripe on my Nikon D200.

But something has always bugged me about autofocus technology in general, and image-stabilized lenses in particular. I mean, how hard is it to focus a lens?

“It’s pretty hard.” Heratch replied. We were seated in the diner at this point, looking at menus. The pancakes are so good they’ll reduce you to tears, so of course I went for the ham and cheese omelet. Heratch went sunny-side-up, as usual. Our coffee mugs steamed.

“It’s tough to manually focus a digital camera, because the focusing screen is clear, not like the ground glass screens we had on our film cameras. They’re usually also smaller and sometimes dimmer, too, so I’m glad to have autofocus, since I mostly shoot events in low light.” He waved to somebody he knows. Heratch knows everybody.

“I shot weddings with a Hasselblad and a manual flash for five years.” I said, pausing to let a momentary bout of nausea pass— it happens every time I remember those dark days. “You couldn’t focus that camera visually and still get spontaneous-looking candids. I hyper-focal focused everything from 7-10 feet away [this means I used the lens’ depth-of-field to establish a zone of sharp focus], made sure I stayed in that range, looked at people over the top of the camera, and, Voila! Perfect exposure, perfect focus, perfect ‘decisive moments’, all in very dark rooms with the most basic technology. We don’t need no stinkin’ autofocus!”

“Sure we do. It all works together now. Focus, exposure, flash, everything. It’s all integrated, and once you have it all set up right, it’s a wonderful thing.”

Our food arrived, and I dug right in. Heratch, however, poked an egg with the corner of his toast, then paused with the dripping bread suspended in one hand and a fork in the other. He continued.

“I could never get the hang of hyper-focal focusing. When’s the last time you saw a usable depth-of-field scale on a digital lens, anyway?”

“Those great new Zeiss ZF manual-focus prime lenses all have D-O-F scales.”

“New? They look like something I couldn't afford back in 1978. And they’re made by Cosina in Japan. They’re about as much ‘Zeiss’ as microwave ovens are ‘Polaroid’. C’mon, you love the digital stuff as much as I do.”

“Maybe.” I sulked. I was half-finished with my breakfast while Heratch was still grinning at me with his soggy toast hanging halfway between his plate and his mouth. “But I won’t buy an image-stabilized lens. Never, ever. No way. No how.”

“You would if you were shooting a night game from the pit at Fenway Park. There are a lot of world-class photographers using IS glass, and you know it”. He finally took his first bite of toast, triumphantly. Like I always tell people, Heratch is not a man. He's a state of mind.

“It’s hard, all of this stuff is, you know?” he said, suddenly uncharacteristically solemn.

We sat quietly for a bit. I thought about how, if I ever found myself in the pit at Fenway, my image-stabilized lens would pick that moment to malfunction. That little vibrating lens element would refuse to shut off, and in frustration I would rip it off my camera and toss it on the dirt in front of me and watch it vibrate out onto the playing field and I’d wind up getting banned from baseball. I thought about the new consumer cameras that recognize faces in a picture and automatically focus on them. I thought about plenoptic technology, which someday may allow photographers to focus a picture AFTER it’s taken, with software. I thought about it all, about how many years I’ve spent learning how to make interesting pictures with a camera, and about how difficult it had been to face the fact that much of it became irrelevant with the advent of digital photography. Then I smiled a little bit.

“We changed, though. We learned it, and we continue to learn it. I’m more turned on by photography now than I’ve ever been. We don’t have to buy into all of it, just the stuff that helps us do what we do better, right?”

“Right. Let’s get out of here. I have to go into Harvard Square to buy some chipboard. It’s good for mailing high-res photo CDs to clients.” I wondered if Heratch had ever heard of FTP.

As we approached his car, he poked the button on his remote door release and the car alarm chirped loudly. I immediately thought of the commercial I had just seen about the new Volvo that has a “heartbeat detector” on the remote control, so you can get a heads-up about whether someone has broken into your car and is lurking in the back seat ready to brain you with a sledgehammer. But don’t get me started.

“I hate that alarm,” he said. “Whenever a truck goes by the house at a certain speed the damn thing goes off, at all hours of the night. I want to see if they can disconnect it somehow.”

Welcome to what I think!

You’ve landed on Amalgamated Idiosyncrasies and Intangibles, my blog about photography, the creative life, and whatever else happens to pop into my head at any given moment. I have a lot of stories to tell, and I hope to bring some of them to life here.

I teach an “Advanced Digital Camera” (ADC) workshop at New England School of Photography (NESOP) in Boston. I am also about to start a gig writing camera reviews and video tutorials for a great new digital photography site called digitalcamerainfo.com (DCI- so many acronyms!). Prior to that, I was a commercial photographer for 25 years, the last 11 of which were at Filenes, where I was a digital advertising photographer and assistant studio manager. I’ve been around the block a few times and pretty much lived to tell about it, always with a camera in my hand. And I’ve suffered the growing pains of someone who learned photography the old-fashioned way, then had to learn it all over again to continue working professionally in the digital age, and then had to REALLY try to learn it in order to help other folks learn how to do it.

I hope to use this blog, in part, as a teaching tool for my NESOP workshops. My intention for this is twofold; first, to be used by me as a way to expand each week's classroom discussion, and second, for current and former students (and their instructor) to continue to contribute to and benefit from the learning experience.

Starting with the Summer 2007 semester, in addition to this blog, the workshop will be supplemented by a new Flickr photo-sharing site. You will be able to see all of the photos from each week's shooting assignments, make comments on your fellow students' work, and even link your own Flickr account to the workshop's site if you'd like. Current students will receive information on how to use the site during our first classroom session; former students will be invited to join the site by e-mail. Many thanks to Jenny Chang (ADC Spring 07) for helping me to get all of this started.

The summer semester starts June 25, and ADC meets every Monday night for 10 weeks. Remember, parking is a challenge in Kenmore Square when the Sox are at home (July 2, July 16, and August 13), so plan ahead— arrive early or take the T!

I'm looking forward to the new semester, new students and sharing stories and information on this new blog. Thanks for reading.

--Randy