Relevance, Reminiscence, and Teaching Smart People

When I left the freelance world and took a job as a catalog photographer at Filenes in 1995, I made a sign for the top of my computer cart that said “Just an analog guy trapped in a digital world”. It stayed there until a bright August day 11 years later when the merger with Macy’s shut the place down forever. My sign started out as a smug statement of defiance and skepticism toward the intrusion of cold, hard digital precision to what had always been, for me at least, a soft and wonderfully quirky craft.

But by the time I flicked off the studio lights that last day, my feelings about digital photography had changed completely and irrevocably. Filenes’ parent company had been an early adopter of high-end digital photography and had equipped our studio with state-of-the-art gear and first class imaging support. Even so, most of our photographers and designers seemed to be unwilling or unable to overcome the inertia resulting from years of working with film (and I definitely included myself among them, at least at the beginning). We were shooting digitally the way we had shot with film, and what we did often seemed pretty crazy and ass-backwards as a result. Seeing that, and seeing how much of the rest of the photographic industry was finding new ways of doing the same old stuff better, I challenged myself to fully embrace and even champion “digital thinking”, often to the consternation of many of my colleagues. I just couldn’t understand why everybody else wouldn’t be itching to take the dive with me. But never one to doubt the righteousness of my position in the face of overwhelming lack of popular agreement, I hung tight and managed to drag anyone working with photography at Filenes kicking and screaming into the present. The advisory “Grow or Die” never seemed more prescient than it did among the ranks of photographers and other creative professionals in the 1990s. Reluctantly or not, we all grew, but inevitably, Filenes died.

Then I started teaching, and I found myself standing at the front of classrooms packed to the rafters with smart people. Doctors, lawyers, authors, Harvard and MIT professors, software engineers, web developers, even a “user experience designer”; you name it and they came to my workshops. But regardless of their backgrounds, every one of my students loved photography and the majority of them were way more digital-savvy than me. I was faced with the awkward challenge of teaching technology to people who, in many cases, wound up explaining it better right back to me.

At Filenes, our problem was not proactively updating the skills that some of us had spent a long time acquiring, partially out of laziness, partially out of fear of the steep new learning curve, but mostly because the nature of the work simply didn’t require it. There was no directive from senior management to “be more digital”; in fact, there was moderate opposition to it. I eventually changed because I wanted to remain intellectually and creatively challenged in an otherwise numbingly routine environment and, frankly, because I felt I owed it to myself to remain relevant as a commercial photographer.

But the teaching thing is different. First at NESOP and now at CDIA, I’ve been very surprised to learn that most of my students, regardless of age, know very little about film photography at all. Their exposure to the medium is entirely through digital cameras and computers, the result of which seems to be equating photography with hardware and software instead of with images and ideas.

So what do I do? I teach them photography. Photography the way I love it and learned it, but with digital cameras and computers instead of film and darkrooms. Photography that is primarily about pictures, not pixels. For every lecture about bit depth and color management there is an assignment to make photographs that illustrate how the students think and feel. For every Photoshop video tutorial by Scott Kelby and Jeff Schewe, there is a slide show about Duane Michals and Robert Frank. Old school, maybe, but I try to remember that even old schools eventually wind up with shiny new wings, and the good teachers are the ones who do their best to stay relevant.

Drinking the KoolAid

I showed Jenny my Leica the other day. It’s a modern M6, but other than some cosmetic changes and refinements, it’s essentially the same camera that many photographers have relied on for well over 50 years. She looked at it, held it in her hands, and acknowledged its substantial heft, obvious quality and sheer coolness. She raised it to her right eye, worked the aperture, the focus tab, and the film advance lever and dry-fired a shot. The shutter went “tick”. We both smiled. She looked up at me and said “you can’t sell it”.

The Leica camera came into being in Germany in the years prior to World War One as a pocketable alternative to the bulk of plate cameras and tripods in common use by serious photographers at the time. Alessandro Pasi, writing in “Leica: Witness To A Century” noted that the birth of the first still camera to use 35mm motion picture film brought with it “a new way of telling the story of the world with images. Without it, the twentieth would have been a truly shortsighted century.” I bought my M6 in 1997, just prior to a trip to Holland to photograph my then sister-in-law’s wedding. Owning a Leica rangefinder had been a dream of mine since my teenage book-learning days spent staring in awe at what Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank had been able to do with Leicas of their own. Perhaps foolishly, I associated the quality of these great artists’ work with the camera that they used. It wasn’t until I started learning to use my own M6 that I realized that there was something about it that actually did change, if not improve, the quality of my photographs. This small, simple, yet extremely robust camera nearly begs to be used close-in with a wide angle lens and both eyes wide open. By doing so, photographers learn how to be unobtrusive participants in the scenes we capture, and that way of thinking about picture-making made me a better photographer almost overnight. Prior to my being born again as a digital photographer, I carried that camera for years through the streets of Amsterdam, Antwerp, Paris and many other strange and familiar places and never felt more in touch with the artists who had first inspired me.

Regardless of all that, however, I have been considering selling my beloved but under-used little film camera to help finance some new lenses for my digital Nikon. Leicas are almost prohibitively expensive but manage to hold their value pretty well, even in the digital age. I’m not a wealthy man, and the only way I managed to buy the M6 in the first place was by trading a 3-lens 4x5 view camera outfit for it (and even then, I had to throw in a check for $700). The nature of what I do these days calls for me to be all digital all the time, and the nature of my bank account calls for me to either dig for loose change between the sofa cushions when new equipment becomes necessary, or sell stuff that I’m not using. The Leica unfortunately sits at the front of that pile right now. Selling it would almost certainly pay for the lenses I need for my D200, but it would also be selling out, completely and absolutely. The romance of photography, for me at least, resides in that perfect device and the adventure it invites. The day I sell my Leica to buy ANYTHING relating to digital photography is the day I finally drink the KoolAid all the way down and lick the disgusting dregs from the bottom of the Dixie Cup.

Or so I thought. The circles close, at least mine usually do. The other night, a colleague at CDIA showed me his DIGITAL Leica, an M8. It looks and feels exactly like my M6, and works more like a simple film camera than any digital camera should be expected to. It’s not perfect, but considering the relentless march of technological overkill that has already made it an oddity a year after it hit the market, it’s perfect enough. As crazy as it sounds, seeing that camera makes me want sell everything I own, buy one of the things and go back to Amsterdam and Paris again. The day after I saw that guy’s M8, I fired up my MacBook Pro and opened a scan of one of the many Leica negatives I shot on that first trip to Holland in 1997. It was a nearly-forgotten shot I made at Amsterdam's Sex Museum that Jenny seemed to really like, so I worked it up in Photoshop a bit, then I made a gorgeous archival digital print for her apartment.