Humans belong outside

Some may have noticed the frequency of my posts has fallen off lately. This is mainly due to the fact that it has been nice out and I'd rather be doing things outside, like making photographs to take one f'rinstance, instead of indoors looking at a screen. Expect the sporadic posting to continue through the summer, with posts gaining momentum again in November...

Class Portrait

This came home with my son recently. It is his first grade class portrait:


It's nice. It shows what all the kids look like. I'll certainly save it. The only problem with it is that, well, it isn't really a class portrait. Instead it is a collection of individual portraits arranged into a grid. Seen together all of the shots give a rough sense of what the class looks like, but that still doesn't make it a portrait. In my mind, a class portrait looks like this


or this


These photographs show everyone together at once. They show not just faces but whole bodies, and interrelations between those bodies. They show a background which will probably be loaded with meaning when this photo is seen 50 years after the exposure. Above all they show one moment, just one, and by doing so they memorialize a gathering in a way that only a photograph can.

I suspect the trend is away from this type of portrait and toward the composite. Who knows, in 20 years the group portrait may be completely extinct. And why not? Group composites are easily produced, can be personalized by the enlargement of individual photos, individuals are easily reshot, and best of all the photographer doesn't have to hassle with getting everyone in the shot to look nice at the same moment. Honestly, getting a good group shot --memorializing a moment-- is a pain in the ass. Or, put another way, it is a difficult art. Someone like Eugene Goldbeck, who I've written about here, staked his livelihood on his ability to get good group shots. What would he think of composite portraits?

If the trend is real, it's fun to speculate about what it might symbolize. That society is increasingly atomized? That kids are seen as moveable, malleable cogs? That the focus of consumer society puts the individual above the group? That photographic elements such as background and interrelationships are seen as irrelevent? That kids are so hyperscheduled that it's difficult to get more than a few of them in the same time and place at once? Who knows? Maybe none of these are true. I just know that something is being lost here and we should be conscious of it.

Any other parents out there have experience with composite portraits?

Wow, reading back through this post I realize I'm turning into an old fogey. "Why in my day, let me tell you..."

Sabrina Harman: What the *&%# Was She Thinking?

When Chuck Graner took this photograph,

I'll bet he didn't expect it to become perhaps the most analyzed snapshot in modern times. Thanks, Errol Morris!

Print Swap Chain

As I've mentioned earlier on this blog I am a fan of trading prints. I've wound up trading prints with a few blog readers and I've been pleased with the quality of photography out there. I'd like to propose a more formal print trading system for any readers who are interested.

Here's how it works. You send me your name, address and email. I collect these addresses into a database. At the end of each month, I email one address at random to each person. You send a small-medium sized (somewhere around 11 x 14) gallery quality print to the name/address. You receive the same from another person in the database. So, at the end of each month you send out one print somewhere out into the world and receive one print. Within several months you've built a nice small collection, and your prints have found loving homes across the globe.

The prints can be old or new but whatever you send out must be your own work. I will change the order of addresses each month so that no one receives more than one print from anyone else.

Anyone who would like to join the print swap, please contact me either via email or through the comments field.

My arcane habit

My online photo viewing habits have changed pretty radically in the past few years. Five years ago my browsing was through photographers' web sites like this and this. Now it almost entirely through blogs such as this. I check in on a number of blogs through the week, including the ones listed in the right column and maybe 20 others on a more sporadic basis. I hardly ever check on a personal website more than one time. If the traffic to my sites is any indication, the trend away from regular sites and toward blogs is widespread. This blog, which I established just 6 months ago, receives roughly four times the traffic of my regular website which has had six years to generate readership.

There are probably a number of factors effecting this disparity but I think mostly what it comes down to is that the web craves novelty. Since blogs are more regularly updated than photosites, they attract more frequent traffic.

The king of frequently updated blogs has to be Jorg Colberg's Conscientious. Colberg is absolutely prolific, posting anywhere from 2 to 5 times every day. And unlike TOP, another prolific blog, it's only one person writing all the posts. I have no idea where he finds the time. In terms of influence too, Conscientious is right at the top. It has assumed somewhat of a curatorial role for online photography, pointing out worthy sites here and there as well as photo related articles. A mention on Consciencious is an instant vault out of obscurity and into the web's limelight (or, as the case may be, its soft LCD glow).

If Conscientious shows us the pulse of the contemporary fine art photo world, then it is pretty clear that black and white photography is passe. Color has finalized its slow 40 year trek from illegitimate form to complete dominance. A quick browse through the year's posts on Conscientious (2 to 5 posts per day, remember, for 130+ days) yields a scant 4 black and white images (excluding memorializing snapshots), three of which are not even contemporary (Civil Rights mugshots posted 2/6, an old Meatyard image posted 2/8 and an Avedon photo posted 2/11). Only one current image in the past four months, this shot by David Prifti, has been monochrome. That this last image is a wet collodian photograph tells something about b/w's place in the contemporary scene. It is seen of interest historically and to those pursuing arcane methods, but really its time has past. Now that color is just as cheap and easy as b/w, the general attitude seems to be why not shoot it?

As someone who shoots roughly 80% of my photographs in b/w, I find this a bit unsettling although not surprising. By this point I have succumbed to the probability of being permanently marginalized. Still, it wasn't until scrolling through Conscientious posts that I had such a concrete sense of how total was b/w's eclipse.

So why shoot b/w? I'll tell you why I shoot it. Because it injects a level of uncertainty that I can't seem to find using color. I can look through my finder at a scene, compose it, and get a pretty good idea of what the final photo will look like before I press the shutter. Yet when I see the image later, it is invariably different. It has been magically transformed into b/w, often in such a way that the raw structure of the image becomes more visible. If Ansel Adams preached previsualization, I subscribe to its opposite. If you can previsualize something, why photograph it? The whole reason to take the photo is, as Winogrand said, to find out what it looks like photographed.

Seen in this light, I can't help thinking that the general shift to color photography is a sign of some deeper societal shift away from mystery, away from uncertainty, and toward the staged and secure. Culture seems to follow a naturally reversed entropy toward order, dragging along with it all of the arts including, sadly, photography.