Docutrinity

Stop me if you've seen this before. Male photographer ventures through a region with a camera, sometimes over the course of several months or years, in search of Americana. The American West is a common target. Or the South. Or the North. Or Appalachia. Or whatever, so long as it has a mix of salt-of-the-earth types willing to stare broodingly into middle distance, forested vistas, access to an airport, and a strong whiff of pathos. Maybe the photographer lives with the locals, or frequents their watering hole, or whatever it takes to develop access. Photographer returns home with a carefully calibrated mix of landscapes, portraits, and interiors shot on color film. Usually the tool is a view camera, although a smaller body is allowed so long as it's a Mamiya 7.  The inkjet results are printed nice and big, mounted in the squared white frame du jour, no matting, with slightly desaturated color palette to match, then sent off on the exhibition circuit, where they present a statement about the place. Or about America. Or a nostalgic nod to the industrial cycle. Or something. 

The landscape/interior/portrait combination is something of an unholy docutrinity in contemporary straight photography. It's the photo two-fer, a way of expressing inner ruminations under the guise of outer world documentation. The photographer takes on the role of scientific explorer. Go out, trap some images, report findings to the photo community in the prescribed mix. 

That it's a formula does not proscribe excellence. Some photographers excel. But I think it's important to call out the style. Just as almost any piece music recorded in 1969 is easily pegged to the date by the mix, vocal arrangement, and instruments of the era —the stuff not generally considered creative content, in other words— when we look back in 30 years at the present era, I think docutrinity will be the visual motif which announces "2015!"

Of course docutrinity didn't begin in 2015. As with so many other current trends, I'm going to lay the blame on Sleeping By The Mississippi. No offense to Soth since I think the causal chain was spurred unwittingly. And maybe he would deflect it one generation back to Sternfeld's American Prospects, or two generations to Evans' American Photographs. But I hold Sleeping By The Mississippi mostly responsible. It was the Velvet Underground of photobooks. It only sold a few thousand copies but everyone who bought one initiated a similar photo project. Explore Americana —or is it the self? Mix cultural landscapes, portraits, and a few interiors, report findings. 

That's my natural bias coming through. I realize the docutrinity mix works for Sleeping By The Mississippi, and maybe it can work for other projects. But it's a very delicate mix, and tough to follow without it seeming formulaic. 

Ben Huff, The Last Road North

Newspace in Portland has established itself as a minor outlet for docutrinity, with shows in recent years by Daniel Shea, Jeff Rich, and Bryan Schutmaat, among others. Ben Huff's current show The Last Road North is the latest example. Huff spent five years photographing the 400 mile haul road connecting Alaska's northern interior to the Arctic Ocean. What did he find up there? About what you might expect. Beautiful scenery, desolate roads, snow, stragglers bearing flannel. The show at Newspace is entertaining and impressive, but I can't say it's very surprising. In Huff's defense, there isn't much cultural material up there to work with. But the onus is still on the photographer. Whatever is encountered, he or she must find a way to show something new, or in a new way. I'm not sure these do. 

Thomas Gardiner's current show at Blue Sky, on the other hand, offers a beautiful twist on the motif. And also more problems. The exhibition combines selections found in Western Canada and the U.S.A. That's plenty of raw material to work with, and Gardiner takes advantage. If Huff's photos recall Soth, Gardiner's model is Uncommon Places. His scene selection and camera positioning is exquisite, creating vistas with countless small details jigsawed perfectly into place. For example, look at the way the trash can interacts with truck shadows in this photo:

Thomas Gardiner

The prints are large with plenty of room to pour over. The photos shift as you look at them, with new small discoveries releasing like time-release capsules. This one captured me initially with the bizarre spatial dynamics, not to mention the social commentary. Talk about a boxed in living situation. It was only as I looked for several minutes that I noticed the diaspora of small posts, sticks, windows, and vegetation, each one holding down part of the photo.

Thomas Gardiner

This photo has been a personal favorite since I wrote about it six years ago:

Thomas Gardiner

It was a pleasure to view the full sized print on the wall at Blue Sky, even if the improved altered color palette leans toward the sanitized.

The cultural landscapes are great, and the interiors are interesting. For me there's only one thing holding them back: the portraits. If only Gardiner had followed Shore to the end and eliminated them from the series. But for whatever reason Gardiner's gotten caught up in the docutrinity zeitgeist, to poor effect. The portraits are sluggish, with cinema lighting on subjects staring off-camera. I suppose the subjects are meant to look thoughtful but to me they look bored, and worse, scripted. Instead of natural elements in the scene, they seem like characters or add ons. That's fine if you're Lorca-DiCorcia or Crewdson expounding on a dreamworld. But I'd rather see reality, or at least the impression of it. There are some docutrinity interiors on display as well, including a nice trophy shot, but I'll let those slide for now. Because for me the portraits were the main distraction.

Thomas Gardiner

I know what you're thinking. If a photographer can't combine landscapes, interiors, and portraits what can they shoot? Aren't those subjects the bread-n-butter of documentary tradition? Well, yes. 

Here's what I suggest instead. What if photographers focus their energy on finding tiny toy cars in the landscape? Not just the normal Matchbox ones, which are small, or the slightly smaller Lego cars. I'm talking about teeny teeny tiny automobiles barely large enough to see, on a scale with ants. With patience and a little luck you can find them anywhere, North, South, Appalachia, etc. Now, obviously they will be hard to photograph. But that's the point, right. Because very few people have photographed this world yet. It's wide open for anyone who wants to take a teeny tiny camera, get close enough to smell the tiny exhaust, and aim their tiny lens at all the teeny teeny teeny weeny tiny cars of every color. Present in a teeny tiny white frame, with teeny tiny engine drone soundtrack playing in the corner, and Bingo! You've created something new.

Martha Stewart's Craft Projects For Emerging Photographers

Hello Emerging Photographers! 

Martha Stewart here. I know life as a young undiscovered artist is dynamic and exciting, but sometimes in the pursuit of creative passion, simple domestic flourishes can get lost in the shuffle. I'm here to say you can have your cake and eat it too! Follow your dream wherever it leads...and convert the plentiful excess into domestic bliss. What follows are a few easy decorating projects for the home or office using old photographic ephemera. They require no special skills. If you're reasonably crafty you'll find them easy, fun, and beautiful.

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ID Badge Mobile 

An ID Badge w/ bold color scheme

After a few cycles through the portfolio review circuit, emerging photographers may accumulate a large stash of Identification Badges. I realize some folks may discard them, but I like to collect IDs in a desk drawer intact with their lanyards. I keep an eye out in particular for badges with complimentary color schemes and strong design elements. Every time the drawer hits capacity —After, say, twenty or thirty new ones have been added—  I cull the flashiest badges for craft projects. 

One traditional favorite project is the ID Badge Mobile. A metal tripod screwed into the ceiling provides the frame. This supports lanyards tied at random intervals. I knot the lanyards at varying lengths so the ID badges hang in a diverse, pleasing array of color. Set in a blank space, the mobile can activate ceilings and soffits, and brighten up any room. If you want to add variety, tie a few business cards or leave-behinds to colored string, then add them to the mix. Great for foyer, hallway, porch, or as the subject of your next social media announcement.

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Photobook Box Furniture

Photobook box endtable

If you're like many emerging photographers, you share a living space with dozens of boxes of unsold copies of your self-published photobook(s). Your monograph is bound to be discovered and touted by someone important eventually. But while you're temporarily care taking, why not convert the boxes into furniture? A carefully curated selection of cardboard boxes can tie a room together visually, while providing valuable storage and activating unused space. 

Paint selected boxes in bright hues to add a burst of color to any dark room, or leave as plain cardboard for a country downhome look. Stack boxes vertically into an end table or horizontally for an ottoman. A wide mound of boxes can create a custom butcher block for the kitchen or dining room credenza. If you have an excess of small light boxes, these make great building blocks for the children's play area. One treatment I've grown to love is a cozy bay window lounge platform. This one requires only 5 or 6 boxes laid end to end, with a few throw pillows on top (see pillow stuffing idea below). 

The possibilities are up to you. Try them all. Odds are you have plenty of material to work with. You can easily swap out selected boxes later if you change your room's color scheme down the road, or if you happen to sell a book and need to open a box.

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Show Call Mood Lighting

A show call with violet accent brightens any corner

Show calls are like catnip to an emerging photographer. They keep filling the inbox, impossible to resist. It's a full time job submitting to each one. No sooner is one application completed than the next comes right on its tail. And that's just you. You've got to keep track of everyone else's accomplishments too! Yikes!

One way to relieve the stress of the photo rat race is to convert emailed show calls into a relaxing slideshow. When a call for submission arrives, simply pull the cover graphic into your favorite slideshow program. Powerpoint works well or iPhoto for greater simplicity. Pull the folder onto an unused iPad, set images to cycle every 3 or 4 seconds, then find a dim corner in the house, and set the screen a few feet away facing in. A slightly upturned position works well. Corners often go neglected, but the effect of this mood lighting can be a dramatic improvement. 

I keep a rotating batch of 800 to 1000 recent submission calls in my slideshow. No particular order, just whatever has rolled in over the past few weeks, and I change them out every 10 days or so. My one nod to sequencing is that I try to separate strong colors so that bold splashes come every 5 or 6 images. It's an elegant arrangement which can change feng shui of the entire room. Who needs a disco ball when Show Call Mood Lighting brightens your corners?

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Digital Body Wind Chimes

Simple windchime using old cameras

If you're an emerging photographer who likes to push boundaries and is not afraid to experiment, you may quickly find yourself with as many as 15 or 20 various digital bodies lying around the home, plus all their accessories. But some of these camera systems are less functional than others. A few might be four months old or even older. In other words, obsolete. It's hard to part with them, but what to do? 

Why not repurpose old cameras into a beautiful Digital Body Wind Chime? Pull batteries to enhance acoustic properties. Spraypaint with your favorite color (metallic paint works well). Then glue small elements like rhinestones, glitter, or bold polka dots to the bodies to create strong visuals. Use camera strap eyelets to loop twine, which you'll then tie to sturdy frame. Place in an outdoor location which gets a nice breeze. Then let the wind blow that obsolescence away! The soothing sound of cameras clinging together makes a perfect soundtrack for quiet morning coffee with a partner, entertaining company over cocktails, or just a night in with family planning the next social media campaign.

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Portfolio Box Planter

Portfolio boxes stacked into four-ply planter

After a while on the review circuit, emerging photographers often accumulate a closet full of old portfolio presentation cases. These are typically black, made of leather, acrylic, plastic, or other archival rot-resistant material, and suitable to hold several gallons of contents. In other words, they are ideal planters for vegetables and flowers. 

To create your Portfolio Box Planter, open the top of the portfolio box, fill with soil to about one inch below the lip, mix in your favorite compost or nutrient amendment, then seed with your desired plants. If you wish, shredded portfolio prints from last month's project can create a nice top layer mulch. Now place the top back on. Use a 1.5" bit to drill holes in the surface, one above each seedling. The last step is a simple drip irrigation line into the interior. This allows efficient watering while trapping moisture inside. In cool north shade garden or patio, the black surface will retain winter heat and expand your grow zone. Once it's set up, Bingo! Your mini-greenhouse planter is now ready to be announced on social media.

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Throw Pillow Filling

Filling from material collected in a ten minute span
at the last portfolio review event

One dilemma for the emerging photographer is how to organize all the physical ephemera one collects from other photographers. Business cards, leave behinds, show fliers, chapbooks. If you're on the review circuit, the material snowballs quickly. You'd like to leave it behind but you can't afford not to keep tabs on your competitors. So you collect it. And then what? 

One practical application for these paper products is Throw Pillow Filling. After you've had a few days with the material and have culled any market secrets or networking benefits, toss cards in a shredder. Shredded photographic ephemera makes a colorful non-allergenic, archival fill material for your next homemade throw pillow. Sew two pieces of fabric together, stuff with shredded material, and voila! If you're handy, you can expand the possibilities to cushions, teddy bears, life size blow-up dolls, or any other soft household item.

20th Century Landscape Primer

Photography intake guide

Nuts Gathering

I sometimes search for old music at An Album A Day. The site is just what the name promises. Every day for a year an album is posted from the author's stash of retro, out of print records. It's a nice clean operation. The selections are sometimes hokey but often good, and they're almost always unfamiliar to me.

For each album posted in the past week there's a consumption option: Stream or Download.

Stream or download? Hmm. Stream or download? Well. Goddamn. It may seem a simple choice, but for me Stream or Download is fraught with baggage. Since childhood my default mode has been Download. But  —if you'll allow a metaphor of permanence— I can see the writing on the wall and it's a Stream. 

Most of the information I encounter daily online is delivered in a series of parallel and sometimes intersecting streams. Facebook and Tumblr are typical. They pull content from beyond and funnel it into a sequence which pass across my desktop before disappearing. It's more of a river than a stream actually, but you get the idea. Within an hour content is gone and forgotten. I've got a time machine called the scroll bar but I rarely use it. The view is usually upstream, toward whatever's coming next. 

Most content portals follow the streaming structure. I'm thinking of Twitter, Instagram, Spotify, Netflix, Vine, Wanelo, Slideshare, Shots, Ello, Reddit, and whatever other fifty companies sprang up yesterday. Things come and go like startups in the wind, and we aren't meant to latch on to them. Dip in the river, hop out. Done. Why grab hold of anything? Why get hung up over "stealing" images or music? Ownership is for old folks. Content lives in the cloud, from where it can be loaned out short-term on demand.

The Cloud

Since switching to Gmail I don't even download my email anymore. It lives in cyberspace, streaming to me when I need it, receding when I don't. At least that's what the young computer-helper dude tells me. And it's not just online content. The physical world has shifted too. Uber, AirBnB, Zaarly, SnapGoods, Liquid, and the rest of the sharing economy treat ownership as an anachronism. Why "download" (buy) a car when you can "stream" (share)? 

For the millennial generation the streaming mentality probably seems pretty normal. But I'm an old dog and new tricks come tough. I grew up owning stuff.  As I mentioned earlier, that's my default mode. All those CDs, magazines, and baseball cards gathering dust in the basement? It's stuff I grew up owning, and now, for better or worse, I still own it. That big library in the next room? That's material I've pulled from what might be considered the book stream. It's mine now. It's stationary. It's not scrolling anywhere. Those loose cards, souvenirs, and ephemera? They're stationery too. In a sense I'm not much different than the old homeless guy you see with ten garbage bags on a bike packed with all his worldly belongings. Maybe the millennial homeless can let that stuff go. Maybe they can stream their possessions. But the older homeless, and me? We grew up owning.

The Stream

But it's even worse for me. I'm a fucking photographer. I download material from the raw visual world every day using a camera. I convert it to negatives, prints and all those other documents of light on surface stashed in garbage bags on my bicycle. I think most photographers have a similar instinct, the downloading urge or whatever you want to call it. Non-photographers can let the visual stream pass by them. But photographers want to freeze, possess, own, and make permanent what they've seen, then file it away somewhere. Don't ask me why. Let's not go there. A squirrel has to gather nuts, ok? That's just how it is. And for the type of photographer (quickly vanishing?) who collects recordings of visual detritus, the downloading urge is fundamental.

I'm not sure if musicians share this outlook. Many seem to enjoy the process of playing even without recording. An hour later all that's left are memories, but it doesn't seem to bother them. They're a different breed. Their cousins the record collectors, on other other hand, are more like photographers. Possession counts. An Album A Day, for example, assigns different monetary values to streaming or downloading. You can stream all you want from the whole archive for free. Be my guest. But after a week's grace period, you need to pay to download. 

The Web

On the face of it that option doesn't make much sense. Why pay for something which you can stream free anytime? For the sake of collecting, that's why. If you're an old fogie like me, that pile of crap that you've downloaded over the past forty odd years isn't merely the discardable behemoth your wife claims it is. It's been carefully shaped by you. You've pulled some things into it, sometimes at great expense or energy. And you've kept many things deliberately out. Whether it's a series of photos, an old mix-tape cassette, or every issue of Spiderman, you treasure that selection. It's not just the material imbued with meaning. It's the act of shaping.

There's a word for this: Curation. At the higher levels of art, curation is what separates the museum wall from the bicycle junk pile. Unless you're Rauschenberg. But it can operate closer to earth too. For a photographer it's what separates your stash of photographs from the rest of the visual world. In a strictly visual sense, photography is curation. A camera is a decision maker. Every exposure is a choice to download material. 

Curation exists too in the streaming world. A Spotify playlist, Amazon wishlist, or well-organized Tumblr are examples. A series of likes or reblogs might be seen as a form of crowd-curation signifying or even guiding web behavior. That's curation for millennials, and I suppose it works fine for them. But I like physical aggregation. To me a streaming curation is just a list of arrows pointing here or there. The arrows are the curation, but the actual content exists elsewhere. Take away the arrows and the content recedes. 

It's all an illusion of course. Life is short. Every stream dies. Eventually the sun follows suit. On the cosmic scale streaming and downloading amount to pretty much the same thing. You move some cookies into a pile for a little while. Then things change and material flows back to a former site or shape. Or into stardust. Still I choose Download.