The word inspiration comes from the Latin word meaning ‘to breathe life into’. Inspiration breathes life into our ideas. Inspiration comes from a well-fed imagination. We all need to feed our imaginations by exposing them to the creative work and culture of others.
‘Take inspiration from everywhere. Be aware of everything, take inspiration from the street, from popular culture, from music and from comedy.’
Lee Widdows, art director and teacher.
Be inspired by cameras
Be inspired by cameras and technology. Cameras surround us – look at their fantastic creative possibilities. As well as digital cameras and cameras that use film, you can create and be creative with images from photocopiers, scanners, webcams, X-ray cameras, satellite cameras, infrared and night-vision cameras, CCTV, speed cameras and security cameras. Each has its own unique creative character.
Be inspired by the history of photography
Find out as much as you can about photography. With photography you never stop learning – there is no end to how much you can know and absorb.
Be inspired by looking at other photographers’ work
Seek it out in photography bookshops, libraries, magazines and on the internet. Collect great pictures and try to work out why you like them. Go and look at some original photographs in galleries and museums, and handle prints. Seek out films and documentaries about photographers. Assist an established professional photographer. (See Being an assistant – the sorcerer’s apprentice, p. 243.)
Be inspired by the process of photography
Some photographers are inspired by particular photographic processes and become passionate about evolving them in their own way and discovering new ways of using them. Visit photo labs and darkrooms and witness the processes of photography.
‘To physically handle the prints of any photographer’s work is a much greater experience than viewing their work in any other way. It’s as close as you can get – your vision with their vision – one degree of separation from what they saw.’ Alan Latchley, photographer.
Be inspired by old black-and-white movies
Richard Avedon was inspired by the tight close-ups, radical crops and stark white backgrounds in the 1928 film Joan of Arc. William Klein learnt from the films of Fritz Lang and Erich von Stroheim, while Bill Brandt was inspired by Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. Henri Cartier-Bresson learnt about composition by assisting film director Jean Renoir and the great potency of film stills was exploited by Francis Bacon and Cindy Sherman. Be inspired by film lighting, in particular the lighting used in film noir, a term used to describe the great movies made in the late 1940s and early 1950s that were dramatically lit in high-contrast black and white, and had dark, brooding, doom-laden plots. Films such as Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and Charles Laughton’s extraordinarily inventive The Night of the Hunter can be a fine source of inspiration.
Be inspired by colour movies
Some films have used colour in an amazingly dramatic way. Particularly outstanding are the films created by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger including The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death and Powell’s Peeping Tom. Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz is another good and familiar example.
Be inspired by painting
Be inspired by painters, particularly those obsessed by colour and light and who have created their own distinctive palette of colour.
Be inspired by locations
Be inspired by places you find that possess a special quality created by nature, architecture or light.
Be inspired by your mistakes
‘It’s only a mistake if you tell someone it’s a mistake.’
Kitty McCorry, photographer.
Making mistakes can lead to great creative discoveries. Mistakes happen to every photographer, when film or paper is incorrectly exposed or processed, for instance, or when errors are made in scanning or printing images. These accidents can create great results or reveal a previously unthought-of process that can be built upon. Photographers need to possess the awareness to capitalize on creative mistakes and exploit them.
Great innovations in photography have been discovered by accident and great pictures have even been created by photographers who have been inspired by images created by malfunctioning equipment.
Daniel Alexander, Kim, 2005
From a series of images created using a broken photocopier.
Seeing things
Photographers are keenly observant and constantly seeking visual treasure on their daily travels. They search for juxtapositions, sequences and new viewpoints, and look out for reflections, refractions, symmetries and shadows.
They experiment widely with cameras new and old, with film stock and printing, with focus, long exposures, double exposures and light. This section looks at photographs that are the product of this creativity.
Seeing things – shadows
Seeing things – from a new viewpoint
‘When I was commissioned to take pictures of these dresses [below] I talked to the designer of the clothes who described how they were layered and how he wanted them to move on the body. When I saw them on the clothes rail they were just hanging flat and straight and the challenge was how we could make them come alive photographically. I thought of the idea of putting the models underwater and I went out to find a purpose-built tank for working photographically.’
Sandro Sodano, photographer.
More of Sodano’s work can be seen at www.sandrosodano.com
Jazz band The Happy End dynamically viewed from below.
Seeing things – long and multiple exposures
Seeing things – at night
Ted Croner, Central Park South, 1948
By moving the camera during a long exposure, Croner creates an image that reflects the energy of New York (below).
Seeing things – reflected and refracted
Lee Friedlander, Hill Crest, NY, 1970
Friedlander’s pictures often feature fractured images seen in mirrors and shiny surfaces. (See The self-portrait, p. 41.)
Silhouettes can be created by controlling exposure.
Seeing things – in sequence
‘Photographers need a mission, there must be a reason or agenda why you take pictures, you must want to communicate something. The hardest thing is finding that thing that you want to photograph.’
Dave Hendley, photographer.
Many leading photographers have established their reputations through self-driven projects. They begin with a passion for a subject rather than a commission. Self-driven projects can lead to work being published and exhibited. You can create your own projects with subjects that are easily accessible, perhaps even on your own doorstep. Young photographers often focus on things that surround them, such as youth culture, fashion and music.
Kjell Ekhorn: Classmates project
Ekhorn decided to photograph everyone in his class at art college. Shown on this page are two of the resulting pictures. Ekhorn explains: ‘I was seeking an original way of taking pictures. I photographed people on white backgrounds and then put the negatives onto a light box and masked out areas before reshooting them in a series of exposures which allowed me to emphasize different things in each picture. I love the accidental possibilities of multiple exposures – I sometimes use up to fifteen exposures on one frame. You can do all the planning and calculations but by just tilting something just a little bit more out of focus all of a sudden something happens which when you pick up the film has created something unexpected, lively and fresh. These pictures were the pinnacle of my pushing multiple exposure in portraits and created something that really looked like my own work.’
Dave Hendley: Jamaican roots reggae project
Hendley’s passion for reggae records led him to make a series of visits to Jamaica to seek out the performers behind the music. His great interest and appreciation of the then-underground scene caused many doors to be opened to him and his camera.
Hannah Stanton and Vanessa Marisak: Photographic behaviour project
Stanton and Marisak are partners in a project that examines photographic behaviour in which they photograph themselves in different guises – as macho fighter pilots, meat porters and mechanics, grieving widows, teenage mums, tourists and even babies.
Steve Harries and Mel Bles: Locations project
Steve Harries and Mel Bles traced the locations used in the making of famous 1970s films – including Taxi Driver, The Godfather and The Last Picture Show – and then photographed these places which, owing to their appearance on celluloid, have been strongly imprinted in the minds of millions of moviegoers. They shot on Kodak colour negative film using a Mamiya 6x7 medium-format camera. More of this project can be seen at www.steveharries.com.
Will Brook: Pinhole project
Will Brook pushed pinhole photography into new territory when he built a very large curved multi-hole pinhole camera. It can take over 100 pictures of the same scene from different angles.
Jamie Dobson: Sound project
Jamie Dobson is fascinated with the ways in which photography can be used to portray sound. His experiments include building machines that interpret music into waves written in light that can be photographed, and picturing frequencies inaudible to the human ear as they cause liquid to vibrate – he then photographs the pattern formed by a spinning laser that projects a circle of light onto the surface of the fluid. Dobson uses cameras steadied on tripods and long exposures in order to create his work. More pictures can be seen at www.jamiedobson.com.
The camera in the hands of artists
By calling yourself an artist, you are declaring that you are answerable to no one but yourself, fearlessly following your own vision and passion, deciding on your own subject matter without commission or client, and earning a living through the sale of your work. Artists have greatly broadened the reach of photography and today it is common for them to use the medium to express their vision in the way that they once did by creating paintings or sculpture.
Artist/photographer, photographer/artist
Many modern artists who choose photography as their medium are frequently described as ‘photographers’. The word ‘photographer’ has now come to embrace those artists who use cameras, as well as those who take pictures commercially or for pleasure.
The exciting work produced by artists using cameras and the wholesale acceptance of photography by galleries and collectors have created great opportunities for all. As well as creating their own self-driven work, many artists undertake commercial commissions that once would have been the territory of photographers, while photographers are finding new audiences for their work beyond the commercial arena by exhibiting it on the walls of galleries. (See Exhibiting, p. 251.)
Bohnchang Koo, In the Beginning #10, 1995–96
Bohnchang Koo creates gallery installations made from hundreds of photographic prints stitched together. The son of a tailor, he discovered this method of working after he had been unable to obtain large sheets of photographic paper. To solve the problem, he took his father’s sewing machine into the darkroom and used it to stitch together many smaller sheets. He leaves the cotton threads hanging from the surface of his work. Bohnchang Koo is one of Korea’s leading modern artists; his work has been exhibited widely in East Asia, Europe and America.
Seeing photographs in a gallery
History and the passage of the years can give pictures a value unforeseen at the time of their taking. A photograph can gain special meaning when printed tiny or at giant size, by being framed, placed in a sequence, displayed in a gallery or by having text or sound added to it.
Framing a photograph tells the viewer that it should be taken seriously as an image, that the photographer considers it a successful and meaningful picture worthy of scrutiny and exhibition. Showing photographs in a whitewalled gallery can give pictures an impact unobtainable in other arenas. The pristine gallery environment, coupled with viewers’ expectations that what they are seeing will be worthy of their attention, causes the content of pictures to be amplified and focused.
The partnership between art and photography
Ever since the invention of the medium, there has been a mutually inspiring partnership between art and photography. From as early as 1850 artists commissioned daguerreotypes as studies for their paintings, while the first photographic portraits, still lifes and nudes aped the composition of paintings.
Many painters have been inspired by the new vision of the world achieved through photography. Marcel Duchamp used Etienne-Jules Marey’s photographic studies of movement in the composition of his famous painting Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), and Muybridge’s pictures of humans and animals in motion have influenced countless artists, including Francis Bacon, who used photographic studies of wrestlers as source material for his paintings of violent sexual encounters. Bacon also used film stills as a source: he reworked a close-up of a screaming mouth from the film Battleship Potemkin in his series of paintings of screaming popes.
Many famous photographers trained initially as painters, including Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson and William Klein, and many artists best known for their paintings have experimented widely with photography, for example, David Hockney and Chuck Close. Picasso used fashion photographs as a canvas for wonderful drawings.
Many art movements have inspired photographers – in particular Surrealism, which stressed the role of unexpected juxtapositions, chance effects and the power of the images we see in our dreams. Photographers who have created Surrealist images include the Hungarian André Kertész, whose pictures featuring visual coincidences parallel the paintings of René Magritte. The influence of Surrealism is still prevalent in advertising and fashion photography, where the use of startling and unusual juxtapositions can be very effective.
Pioneering artists with cameras
Julia Margaret Cameron was a pioneering creative photographer who considered herself an artist who made photographs, rather than a photographer. Born in 1815, at age twenty-three she married a man twice her age and then settled into a comfortable life as a colonial wife in India, where her husband was one of the ruling British elite. On his retirement, the couple came back to Britain where Cameron, her children now grown up, found herself with time on her hands. Looking around for a hobby, she took up photography at the age of forty-eight. After months of experimentation she mastered the cumbersome equipment and processes, converting her glass henhouse into a studio and her coalbunker into a darkroom. With joyous enthusiasm Cameron cajoled her family, servants and friends into acting as her models. Using rugs and hanging velvet as backdrops and with a huge array of home-produced props, she created beautiful photographs influenced by Pre-Raphaelite painting, biblical art and romantic myths and legends. Within a year she was showing her work in major exhibitions.
In the 1890s a group of photographers sought to elevate photography to an art form with a capital A. They decided to define themselves as a ‘movement’ and called themselves the Pictorialists (see work by Frenchman Robert Demachy and American Frank Eugene). Influenced by the Impressionist painters, they created soft-focus pictures, clouded in mists, shadow and texture. Using techniques including gum-bichromate printing, platinum printing and photogravure, they created images that look like etchings or drawings.
At this time many different groups, societies and camera clubs sprang up in major cities – some calling themselves by grand names and all organizing exhibitions and making proclamations of their aims. Members often moved between the groups, which followed a typical cycle of flourishing briefly before subdividing and finally collapsing. One group that thrived was an American offshoot of the Pictorialists, who formed in 1902 and called themselves the Photo Secessionist movement.
Members included Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Clarence White. They had grown frustrated by what they saw as the poor standard of American photography exhibitions and founded a gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue, soon known as simply 291, where for the first time photography was exhibited alongside works by leading painters including Matisse, Picasso and Cézanne. In doing so, photography allied itself with the creative avant-garde for the first time.
Julia Margaret Cameron, Sir John Herschel, 1867
Although she was criticized at the time, Julia Margaret Cameron renounced the accepted technical standards of photography as an interference and hindrance, transcending the limitations of the medium under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite painters – many of whom she photographed. Cameron preferred to use exposure times of up to ten minutes in order to achieve her wonderful dream-like pictures. Her subjects included celebrated Victorians such as Lord Tennyson, Charles Darwin and Sir John Herschel (above), mathematician and astrologer, who was a major contributor to the early development of the chemistry of photography.
Group f64
‘Photography is the strongest way of seeing.’ Edward Weston, artist.
Another famous group of artist photographers was Group f64, which included Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham. They first exhibited together in 1932, taking their name from the smallest aperture available on the lenses of their large-format cameras. The name was intended to indicate their passion for the clarity of image given by this tiny aperture, which created pin-sharp photos focused from the foreground all the way to the horizon.
Group f64 were pioneering artists with cameras who contributed to major gallery exhibitions in large museums. They earned a living by selling their prints to collectors and by the support of fellowships, grants and awards. Each member pursued personal artistic growth rather than commerce.
Andy Warhol’s work has inspired many people, including this group. This photograph was found by the author in a photo album discarded in a rubbish skip in New Orleans.
Man Ray – wizard of invention
Man Ray was a great experimenter who worked as a painter, filmmaker, and photographer. Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890 in Philadelphia, he studied art and design before setting off for Paris – then the world capital of art – without speaking a word of French. As he was totally unknown, he began to work as a commercial photographer to subsidize his career as an artist. A wizard of invention, Man Ray was determined to create pictures that looked like no others. He broke new ground, creating experimental portraits, fashion photographs and nudes including the extraordinary images Glass Tears and Le Violon d’Ingres. (See Naked abstraction and distortion, p. 68.) Ray also experimented widely with photograms made using 3D and opaque objects and with solarization, a technique he embraced for its unpredictability.
In the late 1940s and 1950s Aaron Siskind and Minor White took close-up photographs of details of nature and crumbling buildings – weathered boards and stones, peeling paint, crystals of ice and swirls of surf. In the process they created abstract works as powerful and moving as those of the Abstract Expressionist painters working at the same time, who included Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning.
Found photos provided inspiration for artists Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. They took photos from newspapers – the same ones that readers looked at then threw away – and turned them into provocative and still-potent works of art. Warhol tore pictures of car crashes, riots, executions and appearances by film stars and pop stars from the pages of the tabloids.
After enlarging them, he boldly silkscreened each image repeatedly in muted, acidic colours and the brash colours of cheap advertisements, leaving any accidents caused by overprinting or clogged screens to add further rawness to the images.
Rauschenberg blew up news photos of presidents, astronauts and soldiers, and roughly collaged them with iconic American images of the Statue of Liberty, skyscrapers and the American eagle. He smudged, overlapped and painted over the images to create pictures the size of billboards.
David Hockney, Pearblossom Hwy., 11–18th April 1986
Hockney created this incredible collage using hundreds of photographs taken from many positions and angles during an eight-day shoot.
David Hockney
British artist David Hockney has experimented with photography, as well as the photocopier and iPad, in his work. He came to photography by chance after a visiting curator left some Polaroid film at his California home with which he took some pictures of the building. He glued sequences of the images together to create a larger picture. Beginning with this thirty-picture collage, he continued to experiment, creating full-length portraits of friends and family members, including one of his mother at home which used over 100 close-up Polaroid prints. Each large picture is bound together by the strong white grid created by the borders of the individual prints. He called these pictures ‘joiners’, referring to the first exhibition of these photo-collages as ‘Drawing with the Camera’.
Hockney also created collages of groups of his friends using colour photos taken with a 35mm camera, processing his pictures cheaply at a local one hour lab. Rather than joining the prints edge to edge, he overlapped them, collaging many pictures of the same person taken at different moments and angles. The results echo the Cubist paintings that Hockney loves while at the same time breaking the convention that photographs should be rectangular – the final collages are disjointed blocks that spill towards the viewer.
The culmination of Hockney’s photographic experimentation is a massive collage entitled Pearblosson Hwy., 11–18th April 1986. Using a 35mm camera, he photographed the highway for a period of eight days in order to create an incredible, massive ‘joiner’ image with every inch in sharp focus – a depth of field that would have been the envy of Group f64 – from the crushed Pepsi can at the front to the mountains on the horizon.
Modern artists using photography
Many modern artists combine photography with other media and working methods. For instance, the British potter Grayson Perry fuses pottery, drawing and photography; the Chapman Brothers, best known for their sculptures, sold rolls of exposed but unprocessed film at a gallery show of their work; and British artist David Hockney has used computer-tablet painting applications to create artwork for a gallery exhibition.
Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat creates unforgettable photographs of veiled women which are symmetrically composed on white backgrounds, and lit and tightly cropped like advertising and magazine cover images. Her aim is to express the spirit and strength of contemporary Iranian women. Neshat draws onto her images with black ink, tattooing the faces with Arabic calligraphy. The texts she uses are by women novelists and poets banned in Iran.
Catherine Yass uses intense colour effects in her work. For her series Descent she took photographs from the top of a high building in Canary Wharf in London. Focusing on the office blocks opposite, she panned her camera down the length of the buildings during long exposures. In the pictures the buildings disintegrate in urgent abstract trails of light, giving the disorienting sensation of falling out of control. Yass presents her pictures as huge transparencies lit by the beautiful, soft luminosity of light boxes.
Artist photographers
Artist photographers have traditionally produced photographs using fine-art methods and were able to cite the quality of individual or small-edition prints that cannot be perfectly matched, so adding value because of the work’s unique quality. Other fine-art photographers have embraced the digital process, creating images that would be impossible without postproduction retouching, often of many exposures. Gregory Crewdson is someone who employs a production team, including retouchers, to combine his complex images, producing work of great intrigue.
Andreas Gursky
German-born Andreas Gursky creates massive large-format colour pictures in which humans are dwarfed by the commercial environments we have created for ourselves – supermarkets, stock exchanges and offices. Gursky uses subtle digital manipulation to strengthen the flat compositions and enrich the colours.
Andreas Gursky, Rhein II, 1999
In 2011, a print of the Rhine from a limited edition of six by Andreas Gursky sold for $4.3m (£2.7m) at Christie’s in New York. Photography has become the new darling of collectors and is seen as a good investment. This is possibly a reaction to the astronomical prices of other art forms such as painting, and the long-awaited recognition of photography as an art form.
Digital photography has changed photography forever
Photographers have always embraced the innovations that camera, film and paper manufacturers develop. However, for the generation of photographers who only knew film and the chemical process, the transition to digital photography has been a very difficult one. Photography shot on film worked so well for over a hundred years, so why change now?
Digital photography now dominates the way pictures are captured, the way they are stored, the way they are printed and the way they are displayed. From a camera on a smartphone to the most sophisticated professional camera, the digital revolution has taken over and only a small but important minority of photographers continue to use film.
The ever-present camera
With smartphones, compact cameras and DSLRs becoming more popular, the way people react to cameras is changing. Many more people are unconcerned when a camera is pointed at them, but others see a camera as an invasion of their privacy, and the reaction of subjects can be anything from a welcoming smile to outright aggression.
Digital photography has changed professional photography
The professional photographer today has either changed to digital or ceased working in a commercial arena; there are very few exceptions. Today’s professional photographers have to follow the digital process, from the commission to the delivery of the completed work. Every process is digital, as clients require their images in a digital format – even the exceptional photographer who shoots film will have his images scanned and converted to a digital file so that it may be distributed or used to print from.
Digitization has empowered photographers, who can now create incredible images that are only limited by the imagination and Photoshop skills of the individual. No longer do they have to wait hours for film to be processed before finding out whether they have got the shot. The great skills that traditional film photographers had are no longer required; now instant exposure checks and point-and-shoot cameras ensure that a result is captured. This also means that there are many more people who call themselves ‘professional’. To survive and make a living today, a professional needs additional skills in computer and digital applications, as well as a practised and creative eye for a shot.
Digital cameras have changed the rhythm of photography – images can now be viewed on screen and instantly reviewed.
Marketing in the digital age
As with all businesses, it is easy to have a web presence and to declare yourself a photographer. Google lists 250 million sites. Websites such as Flickr offer image hosting, free photo and video sharing, with billions of photos uploaded from all over the world. To shine through the fog of web content, photographers have to work hard at marketing themselves. It is essential for photographers to have a website showcasing their work and to create a digital portfolio that can be viewed on a variety of platforms such as smartphones and computer tablets. These days it is not enough to wait for users to land on your web page; marketing your work through social media sites such as Facebook and micro blogs such as Twitter has become a matter of course. At the end of all this, however, producing great photographs will always be the path to success.
Good enough – in the digital age
Basic digital cameras and even phone cameras produce images that are good enough to be used on websites and computer screens. With assistance from digital post-production software such as Photoshop, images can be prepared for use in magazines and the press. This has given non-professional photographers the opportunity to supply material direct to the media market. While opening up opportunities for non-professionals to sell their work, this relatively recent development could be seen to undermine the photographic industry by driving down prices. ‘Good enough’ has become an expression meaning ‘not to a professional standard’, but the images are used regardless.
The impossible is possible
Computer-generated images (CGI) have made many areas of photography redundant. Car manufacturers often produce their advertising photographs using computer-aided design (CAD), a design and computer modelling software that can create cars in locations that do not exist. This is highly technical and very expensive work, but compared to making a prototype car and transporting it around the world, it is a much cheaper option and has now become commonplace.
Digital fog
With millions of images being produced every day, it is very difficult to see through the fog to find good photography. Even with great ideas and lighting, images have to be exceptional to grab the viewer’s attention and to be visible to potential clients. Self-promotion and presentation can often be key to getting your work noticed.
Convergence
As technology develops, it has become possible to produce broadcast-quality HD video using a DSLR. This has impacted the way photographers work, as clients – from publishers to advertisers – now expect a photographer to produce moving stills or mini movies as well as the photographs they require. It is almost as cheap to display moving images as it is to show a still image on a website, so the two disciplines are converging in commercial photography output. Creating audiovisual material for many applications, such as website or social-media adverts, offers exciting opportunities for photographers.
Deletion – an option radically at odds with photographers’ traditional desire to preserve what they see.
Digital photography has changed the control of photographs
Photography and design have become more closely intertwined. Designers use various software programs such as Flash and Photoshop to integrate images into designs for websites, advertising, packaging and many other media. The photographer often just supplies the images that are integrated, manipulated and processed by designers into the various applications. However, a photographer may benefit by mastering certain design skills to provide clients with a complete service.
Cost of digital technology
The cost of equipment and the need to update cameras are practical and financial concerns for a photographer. There seems to be an updated new digital model announced every month, and keeping up with the latest in digital equipment is all part of the cost of producing digital images. New generations of cameras produce photographs of great quality (resolution), but every generation requires new software. The need for better, faster computers with colour-corrected monitors makes digital photography as costly as film, or at least not as cheap as it is perceived to be.
Archiving
Today a photographer seems to be able to take unlimited numbers of pictures without being burdened by the costs of film and processing, but this is a fallacy. The image files have to be processed correctly and archived, which costs in terms of time. The cost of storage is a ‘hidden’ cost, but for the photographer the cost of hard drives, DVDs and server space cannot be overlooked.
Stock images
Many images used commercially are supplied online through major stock or photo libraries such as Getty Images, Corbis and Alamy. These libraries have acquired whole collections of photography, for which traditionally they have charged high permission fees. The quality of images produced by reasonable DSLRs has made the market available to all photographers and this competition has driven supply prices down. New libraries such as Pocketstock are crowd-sourcing (collaborating with users to supply and aggregate content) and now accept images from mobile phones to supply to customers.(See Stock libraries p. 249.)
Digital future
Digital technology will continue to develop and the future is very exciting for photography and its new associates. Photographers producing moving images will become the norm and 3D will become more widely available. As the technology surrounding digital photography evolves, a new generation of photographers will be there to enjoy and experiment with the fascinating creative possibilities.
Digital photography – the case for
• ‘Film was horrible. Grainy, soft, totally unreliable and now waiting two seconds to see my photo seems slow. Film took two hours and with couriers was interminable, and that’s not to mention the cost! I’m so happy to see the back of all those clip tests, loading rooms, Polaroids, bulk film orders, assistants mixing up rolls, 10M filters, push a third or push a half angst and the lab saying “we’ve had a rush”. Now I can push the shadows half a stop, cut the highlights two-thirds and add 20R, but only in the yellows if I want, and I can go back to square one in one click. Another disadvantage with film: when you shot a transparency you had to give the client the original, you would probably never see it again. Now with digital you can supply AND keep the original file.’
• ‘Digital has changed my life 100 per cent for the better! In fact I’m curious to see if anyone can say ANYTHING in favour of film….’
Colin Thomas, advertising and publishing photographer.
• ‘Digital photography has allowed anything to be done – technology has liberated ideas by allowing them to be created with perfection.’
Blaise Douglas, art director.
• ‘Photography is about communication. Digital photography allows me to communicate quicker. If a magazine or record company on the other side of the world wants one of my pictures they can now have it in minutes. You can cover huge geographical distances so quickly, it’s fantastic.’
Dave Hendley, photographer.
• ‘I don’t have to worry anymore that someone’s going to mess up the film, I don’t have to wait for film to be processed or worry about booking darkroom time – I know if I’ve got a picture instantly.’
J. Beauchamp, photographer.
• ‘Digital photography gives every photographer a chance to reinterpret a picture after it has been taken. Many people have never had this opportunity before.’
John Myers, photographer and teacher.
• ‘The debate about film and digital is exactly the same as that about vinyl records and CDs. Some are passionate about the quality and range of film as some are passionate about the quality and range of sound on vinyl. Others just see digital, like CDs, as progress.’
Ed DeSouza, art director.
• ‘I photograph in a way I would never have dreamt of before because of the expense of film and printing.’
Tom Clive, art student.
Digital photography – the case against
• ‘Film actually makes us better photographers because it hones our senses. It makes us look a little closer at what we are shooting before we click.’
Conor Masterson, photographer and filmmaker.
• ‘I appreciate the advantages of digi but it has a lot of negatives, not least the amount of time I now spend in front of a £2k monitor I never used to need.’
Martin Brent, advertising photographer.
• ‘Digital is the rule of thumb, but it needs to be used as a tool, not a crutch. There are too many lame photographers using it as a crutch, thus diluting its primary use as a tool. “We can fix it in Photoshop” is heard every day on a shoot and is valid, unless you’re talking about lighting. You can’t fix lighting.’
Vic Moss, owner of Moss Photography.
• ‘Digital photography has totally devalued the worth of photographs. When the majority of photos were taken on slide film each image was a unique and precious sliver to be treasured. It was an original, a one-off, only able to be reproduced by printing. That slide offered the supreme possibility of the image. Digital pictures have none of this preciousness.’
Alison Smithee, photographer.
• ‘Once you have released a digital file it’s gone for ever, it can be instantly distributed, reproduced or altered by anyone, anywhere. Photographers have lost control of their images through digital photography, which has eroded ownership and a photographer’s ability to protect their work.’
Eric Daley, photographer.
• ‘The trouble with digital is you can edit far too quickly and delete and erase pictures that would later prove to be great. Contact sheets sit, mature and ferment over the years. The image you choose instantly is almost always different from the one you choose after a period of time, when you spot things that are much more interesting.’
Johnnie Shand Kydd, photographer.
• ‘Digital versus film is like choosing between a virtual world and the actual world. I know which world I like to live in.’
Alan Latchley, photographer.
• ‘Some of the magic is lost by seeing an image at once. Part of the joy was the trip to the lab to see what had come out.’
Alex West, photographer.
Digital photography – neutral
• ‘Film: look first then shoot.
Digital: shoot first, then look.’
Adrian Turner, advertising photographer.
• ‘What is really interesting to me is the vast range of choice we now have and why we choose to work in a certain way. The pressure of commercial work forces the self-initiated, perhaps experimental project and in one way allows us to move in a different direction. The usual constraints of time, money and pleasing yourself and the client still apply. 10x8 film or iPhone? The choice is still ours and let’s hope it lasts a good while yet.’
Steve McCoy, advertising and environmental photographer.
• ‘Advertising clients want moving images for their websites, it costs as much to show a small movie as it does to show a photograph. Photographers now have to provide both.’
Steve Stretton, creative director, Archibald Ingall Stretton.
What makes a great photographer?
Despite the inevitability that one generation’s revolutionaries will become the establishment figures of the next, the work of great photographers always seems innovative. They see their subjects and use camera, lens, film or computer in previously unimagined ways. Their work is instantly recognizable as their own, often demonstrating a unique handling of composition, tone or colour palette.
Great photographers push photography to its extremes, into new terrain. Harold Edgerton wanted to find the shortest possible exposures, Hiroshi Sugimoto appears to want to find the longest. Although David Hockney followed a route trodden by every art student in sticking different photos of the same subject together, he went way beyond any previous exploration of this technique in his massive photo-collage Pearblossom Hwy., 11–18th April 1986. (See The camera in the hands of artists, p. 134.)
Great photographers defy being labelled as a portrait photographer, fashion photographer or war photographer. They are simply photographers with their own vision of the world. A great photographer takes us somewhere new, creating not just single great pictures but a great body of work. They act as catalysts for changing how the whole medium of photography is perceived. Great photographers possess a hunger to take pictures. They are restless and driven, never settling for anything less than the best. They make us want to take pictures ourselves. There are very few of these visionary delinquents in any one generation.
Great photographers have an unstoppable passion for their art. Australian photographer Frank Hurley was described as ‘a warrior with his camera’ who ‘would go anywhere or do anything to get a picture’. Hurley travelled on Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated Antarctic voyage in the ship Endurance, producing dramatic and incredibly innovative black-and-white pictures in the most extreme conditions, using up to twenty flash exposures. Hurley even defied Shackleton’s orders by diving into freezing water to retrieve his glass photographic plates that had fallen overboard.
Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge were so determined to photograph movement that they invented their own cameras, creating the first shutters to take exposures of fractions of a second. Erwin Blumenfeld went to extraordinary lengths to create a world of impossible beauty in his fashion pictures, as did Angus McBean in creating make-believe fantasy in his portraits. Man Ray undertook unrepeatable experiments in the darkroom, playing risky games of chance with how he processed his negatives and prints where hours of work could have been destroyed by exposure to too much light.
Great photographers follow Madame Yevonde’s manifesto: ‘Be original or die.’ They have gained immortality through their pictures.
Harold Edgerton, Milk Drop Coronet, 1957
Edgerton brought time to a standstill in photographs (opposite) taken with flash tubes that he created himself.
What makes a great photograph?
‘For a photo to be great, the photographer himself has to be part of the picture. I mean by this that the more of himself, his views, his prejudices, his nostalgia, his love life, his background show through, and the more the photographer is committed, the more the picture will have a chance of being unique and beautiful.’
Henry Wolf, writer.
Photographs can be more than just a composition on a piece of photographic paper or yet another image in a newspaper or magazine. Great pictures make a person or event live in front of us and offer an intense experience to the viewer. Great pictures speak for themselves. They are loaded with emotion and a sense of history. They jolt us at once and each time we look at them. They have the ability to connect with new audiences.
‘A great image will somehow have encoded in it things that mean a great deal to a lot of people personally. It is able to speak to them all individually.’
Sandro Sodano, photographer.
Erwin Blumenfeld, Marua Motherwell, c. 1941
Fifty years before the launch of Photoshop, Blumenfeld created incredible images in the darkroom that look both modern and innovative today.
The world’s best-known pictures
There are a small number of images that are so imprinted in our consciousness as to be unforgettable. When a German art gallery held a show entitled ‘Pictures in Mind’, in which a series of blank squares were exhibited on its walls, each complemented by a caption such as ‘The footprint of the first man on the Moon’ and ‘Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue’, it was assumed that visitors would be able to supply the images in their own mind’s eyes.
Many of the best-known photos have such power that their compositions are reused by other photographers, artists, printmakers, filmmakers, cartoonists, caricaturists, mural painters and graffiti artists as the basis for further images, building on their potency. Unforgettable pictures become iconic and pass into popular culture as T-shirts and posters. They so obsess us that they frequently become the subject of books, documentaries and films.
We live in an age in which we are numbed and desensitized to pictures of famine, disaster and the pain of others, in which at the turn of the page most photos are instantly erased from our minds. Truly great pictures, however, can stop us, provoke our imagination and pierce through our emotional defences, engage us and make us think. Some pictures have great consequences and can affect or change events.
Films and documentaries inspired by great pictures
The film The Wild One was inspired by a picture story about biker gangs in Life magazine. The ‘search for the Afghan girl’ followed the attempts to track down Sharbat Gula, the subject of Steve McCurry’s stunning 1985 National Geographic cover. Robert Capa’s photographs of the D-Day landings were recreated by Steven Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan and film director John Ford used Dorothea Lange’s pictures as the inspiration for his screen version of John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, set in the American Depression. The participants of Old Glory Goes Up on Mt. Suribachi were swiftly celebrated by Hollywood in the movie Sands of Iwo Jima, starring John Wayne (left) as a sergeant who turns a bunch of raw recruits into a killing machine.
The girl fleeing a napalm strike
The Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of children fleeing a napalm strike in Vietnam is a picture that changed events. It was taken on June 8, 1972 on Route 1 at Trang Bang by Vietnamese Associated Press photographer Nick Ut. A naked nine-year-old girl named Kim Phuc runs towards the camera; she has been burned by the napalm dropped from a South Vietnamese plane piloted by a US airman and her skin is beginning to peel from her back. Two of her brothers have been killed by the napalm. In unspeakable pain, her face is like that in Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, while the soldiers behind her show total indifference. One is casually lighting a cigarette rather than helping.
The photo shocked the world and caused the US to reconsider its involvement in the war. The picture, like the girl, begs you for help. Life magazine later reported that in the infamous, secretly recorded Nixon tapes, the American president is overheard wondering whether the ‘napalm thing…was a fix’.
The hooded Iraqi prisoner in Abu Ghraib jail
Arms spread in crucifixion, a man stands balanced on a box, electrical wires trailing from his fingers. This digital snap taken in Abu Ghraib jail, Iraq, 2004, is an image of evil, echoing images of racist lynchings, executions and electrocution. It is the most haunting image of the early twenty-first century and it sent shockwaves around the world.
Che Guevara
In 1960 the Cuban photographer Alberto Díaz, popularly known as Korda, took photographs of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara at a service for slain Cuban revolutionaries. One picture showed Che gazing to left of frame, his beret – bearing the revolutionary star – slightly askew, his hair windswept. Korda chose the picture from the many he’d taken and titled it Guerrillero Heroico.
After Guevara was captured and executed some years later in Bolivia, gigantic ten-storey-high prints of the image were hung in tribute on government buildings in Havana. Korda’s picture came to symbolize martyrdom, revolution and the desire for equality and has been described as ‘the embodiment of idealistic longing’.
Forty-five years later the picture of Che is a common sight on T-shirts, badges and computer mouse mats. It is so strong as an image that it is still instantly recognizable even when it is reduced to a line drawing or cropped, altered or sampled.
Sightings of Che
A student sketchbook collection of found and sampled images of Che Guevara.
Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936
One of five images the photographer took of Florence Thompson and her children, considered to be one of the most powerful images of the twentieth century.
The migrant mother
Dorothea Lange was driving home from a Farm Security Administration assignment when she passed a migrant workers’ camp in Nipomo, California. Stopping on an impulse, she took just five pictures, one of which subsequently became one of the most well known of all time. The picture – entitled Migrant Mother – became instantly famous following its publication next day in the San Francisco News. Some readers sent food to the camp, though by the time it arrived the family had moved on.
The subject’s name is Florence Thompson. She is thirty-two, married, with no permanent address and children to feed. She cradles a dirty sleeping baby. The photo echoes religious images of the Madonna and Child. While two other children turn away from the gaze of the camera, the mother’s face expresses determination to persevere through the hard times. It is a picture that cries out for something to be done.
The photograph of marines raising the American flag in Iwo Jima, Old Glory Goes Up on Mt. Suribachi, is said to be the most reproduced picture of all time. The photo was taken by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal on February 23, 1945 on the tiny island of Iwo Jima during the Battle of the Pacific. It won Rosenthal the Pulitzer Prize. This image of American victory was so evocative that work began at once on a lifesize statue of the scene in Washington – the Marine Corps Monument.
Life magazine later wrote that it became ‘a picture that symbolized American dominance in world affairs’. The potency of the image and its status as a national icon meant that over half a century later its composition was used in many illustrations depicting the bravery of firefighters and police following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001.
Although three other photographers were present to record the event in Iwo Jima, the drama of Rosenthal’s picture captured the American public’s imagination. The flagpole appears frozen as the six men work as one, driving it into ground strewn with the debris of war to raise the flag against a clear sky.
Marilyn Monroe on the subway grille
Marilyn Monroe pauses on a New York subway grille as a train whooshes by below, causing her white skirt to billow up around her. She luxuriates in the sensation, creating an image of total glamour. The image was staged as a publicity stunt during filming of The Seven Year Itch. It only appears in close-up in the final movie. Many famous photographers were present at the shoot outside 590 Lexington Avenue, including Garry Winogrand and Elliott Erwitt, and many versions of the picture exist. Andy Warhol amassed a collection of them. The rest of us mould the different pictures in our minds to form a single, iconic one.
Ambiguity in great pictures
In many of the world’s best-known pictures there are elements of ambiguity that add to their strength, allowing viewers to read their own meanings and associations into them. This is the case, for example, in Joe Rosenthal’s Old Glory Goes Up on Mt. Suribachi, Robert Doisneau’s Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville (The Town Hall Kiss) and Alfred Eisenstaedt’s A Sailor’s Kiss, Times Square.
In Joe Rosenthal’s picture the marines’ faces are all invisible, hidden by their raised arms and camouflaged helmets, which turns them into symbolic unknown soldiers.
Doisneau’s picture became a worldwide symbol of Parisian romance while Eisenstaedt’s came to represent the joy at the ending of World War II. Numerous people have claimed to be the kissing couples. Since their faces are obscured in embrace, the images have a kind of universality.
Marilyn Monroe, The Seven Year Itch, promotional image, 1955
This image is a composite of the many photographs taken of Marilyn Monroe at the photocall for the film A Seven Year Itch. It is a distillation of many images, but one that we instantly recognize as iconic. It was used extremely successfully to promote both the film and the myth that was Monroe.
What happens if you are lucky enough to take an iconic picture?
If you are lucky enough to take an iconic picture, it could earn you a great deal of money, but it can also bring problems. Robert Doisneau is calculated to have made £50,000 a year from worldwide sales of posters and cards of his picture Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville. It also landed him in court after a couple claiming to be the subjects demanded a share of the royalties. When Doisneau revealed that the picture featured not the couple in question but a pair of models, the models in turn tried to sue him. Both cases were thrown out. Korda went to court to contest the commercial exploitation of his picture of Che Guevara after it had been used without his permission to promote a brand of vodka. He won a $50,000 settlement which he donated to a hospital.
The Hand of God – sport’s most infamous picture allegedly showing the Argentine footballer Diego Maradona punching the ball with his hand as he heads it – was taken by Mexican photographer Alejandro Ojeda. Shortly after taking it, he sold the picture to another photographer who syndicated it to a news agency. The picture is reckoned to have made millions in fees – for someone. When interviewed, Ojeda commented: ‘I got nothing out of it.’
During a twenty-minute shoot at the Dalmasia Hotel in Notting Hill, London, Martyn Goodacre photographed the band Nirvana. As is customary, he took group pictures, then individual shots of each band member including the singer Kurt Cobain. ‘He wasn’t talking much at all. I think he wanted to get back inside so I quickly shot a few frames and let him go.’ One of those few frames that Goodacre shot off quickly has become ‘the’ picture of Cobain. ‘When I came to print the picture I couldn’t believe how well the neg printed and how soulful Cobain looked. I instantly realized it was a great rock and roll image.’
Goodacre’s picture – taken in seconds, with no lights and no make-up – gained worldwide exposure following Cobain’s suicide. ‘Maybe because of what happened to Cobain the picture has taken on a life of its own. You can read into the shot and see a great brooding rock star but you have to know the story attached to Cobain… I own the picture and get royalties from agents that sell it to magazines. It’s also been stolen and used against my wishes and without me being paid. It sells for T-shirts and posters but I don’t get anything. I’m trying to sort this out but it is a long process. Images are hard to protect when they are used as much as this one and are so well known.’ (See Syndication, p. 250 and Photography and the law, p. 254.)
We have learnt to trust photographs without question. Photography offers us proof that an event has happened or that someone or something exists. We trust news photos to tell us the truth. Our understanding of world events of the last century and a half has been shaped by photography. In order to maintain this trust, photographs have to be used with honesty.
Photographs continue to have an authority that cinema, TV and video images now lack. Digital special effects are now part of the language of almost every movie. Actors appear to fly, we see convincing visions of life in the future and ‘virtual’ performers created by computer programs do impossible stunts. It could be argued that television has lost its authority through the proliferation of channels, reality TV shows, infotainment programmes and the marginalization of hard news and analysis. Pop videos are routinely squeezed by 20 per cent so that performers appear taller and thinner, and locations and backgrounds are combined seamlessly with studio images.
Although there have always been heavily manipulated photographs such as those by Angus McBean and Erwin Blumenfeld, they have always been seen as fantasy, never pretending to portray real events. While we know that glossy fashion, beauty and celebrity magazines retouch the odd spot or saggy jowl, we still think of photography as a largely factual language. But this value is now in danger of being undermined by the ease with which photographs can be manipulated digitally. Digital photography may totally devalue the authority of photography in the public’s eye. Will we trust any image any more? Will we see the death of truth in photography and a time when every image will be altered as a matter of course?
Behaviour behind the camera
Is it correct to restage events or manipulate objects in a picture? Is it wrong for a news photographer or photojournalist to ask someone to repeat a small action they have made that will help them better tell the story? TV reporters might use a second or third take to deliver their story to camera if they mess up the first time, so why not a photographer? Portrait photographers often tell their subjects how to pose, where to look or to move into the light in order to get the strongest picture. Should it be any different for other kinds of photography?
The lying camera – defacing history
Under Stalin’s dictatorship in Russia the photograph lied, history was falsified, enemies vanished, pictures were defaced. People like Leon Trotsky who fell from favour were airbrushed from history, their faces removed from all official pictures issued for publication. Some of these manipulations were done very crudely and it has been suggested either that the retouchers wanted viewers to sense that something was wrong with the pictures or that signs of retouching were left to serve as a reminder that anyone could be removed from history.
In 1999 an official group picture issued to the press to celebrate a royal occasion in Britain had the head of a despondent prince digitally replaced with a smiling version. Although done from innocent motives, this created a dangerous precedent for tampering with pictures in today’s newspapers.
While they have routinely darkened bright skies in pictures, burnt in details in the darkroom and retouched processing and printing faults, photographers have traditionally not altered key elements that affect the portrayal of events.
During the recent war in Iraq in 2004, the Los Angeles Times sacked its staff photographer for doctoring a picture that had been used on its front page. He had amalgamated two different pictures of a British soldier in Basra directing a cowering crowd of Iraqi civilians. The goal was to create a more dramatic composition, but identifiable members of the crowd clearly appear twice in the picture. Like most newspapers, the Los Angeles Times has a policy of not altering news photographs.
We need to be able to trust news photos, just as we need to be able to trust what we read in a newspaper. The idea of ‘making up’ a photograph was considered the equivalent of a news journalist making up the facts in an article, and the incident sent shockwaves through the newspaper picture desks of the world. Roger Tooth, picture editor of the Guardian newspaper in Britain, commented: ‘It was good for the industry that an example was made. We have strict rules at the Guardian. Our photographers are told they can’t manipulate a news picture. We needed to have that line drawn.’
Doctoring images
‘Slice the hips’, fashion photographer Cecil Beaton was once heard to yell at his retouchers. British newspapers have a code of conduct that obliges them to credit combined images as ‘photomontage’. This is not the case with magazines. Some pictures undergo major surgery before publication, and we are none the wiser.
Used creatively in fashion stories, the effects of digital photography can be magical, though the artificial creation of superhuman models who appear thinner, smoother, fitter and clearer-eyed is morally questionable. Who can tell the effect that these images may have on the minds and bodies of (particularly young) viewers who continue to see the images as real?
Superstar celebrities now often appear in magazines looking frighteningly perfect, like a bland new human species with impossibly smooth, glowing skin, twinkling bright eyes, unwrinkled brows, perfect dentistry and glossy hair – all thanks to post-production rather than nature. How much retouching and manipulation of this sort is acceptable? It’s a difficult question to answer, but it might be noted that the rise in the 1990s of the raw snapshot approach to portraiture and fashion – the antithesis of the retouched image – came at a time when exaggerated manipulation of pictures was rife. (See The snapshot, p. 157.)
A photographer’s responsibilities
‘By its nature photography is exploitative. It is after all called “taking” pictures. You’ve been trusted, and you take something.’
Alan Latchley, photographer.
Photographers have a responsibility to those they have photographed to ensure that the pictures they have taken are seen in the correct light. They should not exploit the privilege the camera has given them and should ensure that pictures are used appropriately when published, in particular in news photography and photojournalism where captioning can totally change the meaning of a picture.
News agencies and agencies that specialize in photojournalism distribute all their pictures with captions. Photographers and editors have a responsibility to ensure photographs are accurately captioned so that viewers have the correct information to help them interpret what they are looking at in an image. There have been instances in which the opposing media of warring countries have used the same picture for their own propaganda purposes, totally changing an image’s meaning through the written captions they have attached to it.
When should a photographer stop taking pictures?
When war photographer Don McCullin was asked, ‘How would you cope if a girl was on fire in front of you?’ he is said to have replied, ‘Round 5.6 at a sixtieth at a guess.’
When should a photographer on assignment no longer think of their responsibilities as a professional observer with a job to do and instead think of their responsibilities as a human being, and intervene?
A news photographer is our paid eyewitness. Shouldn’t they just do their job and never not take a picture? Newspaper editor Harry Evans, in his classic book Pictures on a Page, recounts the case of a group of international press photographers offered a gruesome photo opportunity in Bangladesh – the bayoneting of some prisoners. ‘Some walked away without taking a picture and others stayed to record “the event”’, he writes. One of the photographers who stayed won the Pulitzer Prize for his pictures; those who left in disgust felt that on this occasion it was possible to change events by not taking pictures. What would you have done?
The snapshot
Snapshots are photographs taken with little or no delay between the camera being aimed and the picture being taken. They record moments of spontaneity. Snaps are taken with handheld cameras – often amateur or compact cameras – with little regard given to formal composition, the photographer generally letting the camera focus and decide whether to flash automatically. The word ‘snap’ was first used in conjunction with photography about 130 years ago when picture-taking was described as ‘snapping’ because of the snapping sound made by the camera shutter.
Snapshot behaviour
At best the speed and casualness of snapshots can produce pictures that are gleeful and uninhibited, full of life and movement, though some amateur pictures show people standing stiffly, embarrassed and with forced smiles.
In many snapshots people grin, play up to the camera or make gestures. Japanese snapshots display different gestures from Western snaps, with young people particularly favouring the victory ‘V’ hand sign. Children everywhere poke fingers behind the heads of their friends and stick their tongues out when snapped, a pose made famous in the snap of the great physicist Albert Einstein.
Snapshooting to fame
Andy Warhol helped bring about the acceptance of technically unaccomplished photos when he exhibited and published Polaroid portraits with harsh shadows, flat and acidic colours, and blinding, bleaching flash lighting. Warhol was unconcerned about his lack of technical expertise – he loved the look that the camera and film gave when used in this way.
William Eggleston was the first photographer to receive acclaim for his casual snapshot approach to picture-taking. He snapped almost everything he saw – roadside motels, the inside of his fridge, bar-rooms, the sky, stray dogs and stray people. In Eggleston’s pictures no chance meeting or place passed is given more or less attention than any other.
Wolfgang Tillmans photographs wherever he happens to be, whatever he happens to see – his friends, the chaos of his apartment, nightclubs, reflections, windows, passing planes. His book If One Thing Matters Everything Matters is a manifesto for the snapshooter – and features 2,400 pictures which together offer a fluid visual diary of his entire life, created using every roll of film he had taken from the age of ten. American author Hunter S. Thompson pioneered a style of writing known as ‘gonzo journalism’, in which he recorded his adventures in a stream-of-consciousness fashion; likewise Tillmans is a gonzo photographer, recording what he sees in an uninterrupted stream of unedited pictures.
The snapshot album
During the cardomania craze for collecting photographic cartes-de-visite, manufacturers produced books with slots pre-stamped in the pages into which the standard-sized photos could then be inserted. These were the first photo albums, allowing the owner to arrange pictures in order and look at them repeatedly. Most families now have a snapshot album. The London Times newspaper speculated that ‘the average household contains around 1,500 non-digital photographs’.
Snapshot behaviour
Snapshots often display gestures or types of behaviour unseen elsewhere.
Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki is another prolific artist who has created numerous books, obsessively photographing not only everyday scenes of the streets and sky but also sexual encounters, all snapped with the same casualness of a passer-by.
One for the album
Richard Billingham took the pictures in his famous book Ray’s a Laugh using an inexpensive camera and cheap film processed at his local chemist. Some of the pictures are grainy, poorly exposed and badly printed, others are harshly lit by flash or blurred and chaotically composed. They are snaps, blown up and bound together in a book designed to create the sense that you are looking at someone’s very intimate family album. (See Telling a story in a book of pictures, p. 100.)
Nan Goldin’s pictures are her personal snapshots. As in anyone’s photo album, the snaps show personal and private occasions – groups of friends, parties and weddings, foreign holidays and new babies – moments in which the presence of her camera is clearly accepted and unintrusive. In addition to these everyday scenes are other casual pictures showing sex, drug use, violence and transvestism shot in exactly the same way. With her snapshots Goldin reveals her own and her friends’ lives – chaotic, often brief, violent, passionate and tragic. Her snaps are now seen on the walls of international art galleries and in lavishly illustrated books.
Snapshot chic
Terry Richardson brought gonzo snapshot photography to high fashion, using $4 disposable cameras to photograph supermodels. He’s said to buy his equipment from the corner store on the way to a job. Richardson’s approach creates fashion pictures that are fresh and very, very funny. He even manages to get himself into many of his own pictures.
German photographer Juergen Teller shows the wrinkles, roots, crooked teeth and scars of models and the fashionable, finding raw beauty where others see only imperfection. Teller takes pictures for Vogue magazine and creates campaigns for Jigsaw, Hugo Boss and Calvin Klein. His book Go Sees shows the hundreds of would-be models who have turned up at his studio hoping for work. Teller took a quick, unconsidered snap of each girl on his studio steps and in the street, creating an album of one of the cruel pageants of the fashion industry. Teller never plans shoots, preferring to figure out what he’s going to do on the day after he’s met the person he’s been sent to photograph. He simply snaps what he finds.
The professional snapshot became popular in publications as a backlash against the digital age, which has made it possible to smooth away all imperfections on the computer, often causing any sense of reality to be lost. The grittiness and imperfection of a snapshot convey an impression of authenticity lost by the use of professional lighting and the staging of pictures. A photograph of a person stripped of make-up and styling can appear refreshingly honest.
‘When I use a Lomo, I don’t look through the viewfinder. Instead I concentrate on what’s happening in front me, then when it’s right I press the shutter, bang! – it gives you a real image. I believe photography is about real life. I hate being in the studio and setting things up. To get an image of real life you have to be part of it. You can’t be a photographer standing there with a camera. As soon as you do that everyone starts posing or behaving in a different way. The Lomo is perfect for taking pictures without interrupting the flow of life.’
Fabian Monheim, Lomographer.
The Lomo compact camera has become the camera of choice for many photographers, sparking a worldwide craze for snapshots. It’s pocket-sized and easy to use; you simply set one of three focus distances, then point and shoot.
The Lomo has a passionate following of devoted users who call themselves ‘Lomographers’. They promiscuously photograph everything, taking vast numbers of snapshots. Their manifesto proclaims: ‘Take your Lomo everywhere’ and ‘Lomography is not an interference in your life, but part of it’.
The camera – the time machine
Photography is not solely about preserving incidents we have witnessed or recording compositions we have created or found by chance. Photographers can also be the controllers of time. Cameras have the ability to see time in far finer slices than our eyes. They can also record the passage of time in a way impossible by any other means. Photography allows us to see our lives at many different speeds: it’s a time machine.
Early war pictures taken on long exposures shocked viewers not only because they showed the brutality of battle but because the immobile dead were recorded clearly while the soldiers aiding them (and therefore moving about) were only visible as blurs; the dead appear solid and the living as ghosts. The longer the camera stares at a scene with its aperture open, the more fleeting our lives seem. In exposures of minutes or hours, humanity’s presence totally disappears even from the busiest streets: we are simply not present for long enough to be recorded. The hands of clocks vanish too. Only the buildings we have created remain.
Different photographers have experimented with controlling time in different ways. Eadweard Muybridge mastered time in order to create photos that showed us for the first time exactly how we move. Harold Edgerton split seconds into hundreds of thousandths and brought time to a standstill, giving us visions of bullets in flight and of the beauty of drops of liquid as they fell. David Hockney created multiple-image portraits that tried to recreate the experience of seeing a person over time rather than once, at a single moment, as portraits traditionally do.
Exposures taken for many years
Every year for nearly thirty years Nicholas Nixon has taken a group photograph of the four Brown sisters: Laurie, Heather, Bebe and Mimi. Nixon is married to Bebe. The pictures are taken with the same large-format camera and are always similarly composed. As well as observing changing hairstyles and clothes, looking at the thirty-year span of images we see the subjects’ lives slowly ticking by. The series acts like a time-lapse film: instead of flowers growing and withering, we see four people ageing in front of our eyes.
For her series As Time Goes By Barbara Davatz took photographs of six friends with their partners in 1982, 1988 and 1997. The first pictures show the friends as fashion-conscious teenagers, the last ones show them approaching middle age. Over time the friends’ partners change, and the new boyfriend or girlfriend is photographed in the place of the foregoing one. These simple photos are mesmerizing.
Ross Cooper & Jussi Ängeslevä: the ‘Last’ clock
The ‘Last’ clock, invented by Ross Cooper and Jussi Ängeslevä, records a scene simultaneously with a one-minute, one-hour and twelve-hour exposure, allowing you to see how light and movement have affected a view over different passages of time. It produces images that are printed to echo the movement of a clock’s hands around a clock face, in seconds, minutes and hours, producing photographs in which you witness time travelling rather than arrested.
Dex growing, 1995–2005
Pictures taken at the same spot over the course of ten years (opposite).
Beyond the print
Photography now extends beyond the creation of flat photographic images. Many photographers create works in the form of installations that can be seen as three-dimensional objects as well as in the form of prints.
Isobel Brown, Les objets de désir, 2004
Isobel Brown created soft fabric caricature bodies for her installation Les objets de désir (above). ‘I borrowed two-dimensional glossy airbrushed images from “lads’ mags” to create new three-dimensional soft sculptures with which the viewer has a different relationship’, she explains. See also installations by Annette Messenger, Barbara Kruger and Christian Boltanski.
Makin Ma, Gazza, 1998
Makin Ma created this huge edible tribute to kebab-loving footballer Paul Gascoigne.
Tina Maas, Untitled, 2005
Tina Maas creates images on wax that has been sensitized using liquid photographic emulsion (left). Her pictures are exhibited floating in water tanks, illuminated by lights contained in the wax.
Brendan Walker, The Thrill-Sensing Auto-Portrait Machine, 2005
Walker designed a camera that is controlled by human emotion. During a fairground ride the shutter is fired at the thrill peak (left).
Patrick Richard Meny, Isolated, 2004
Meny experiments with images that contain messages that are only visible at specific viewing distances (below).