Field notes and late night rambing

Do not adjust your set … we are in control

As I have said before photography is about control and as such the photographer makes a host of decisions in order to make a successful photograph. When dealing with a human subject there are even more factors that come into play. When the image is a portrait and not a candid the photographer is taking control of the situation for the expressed purpose of making that portrait. One of which is getting the cooperation of the subject.

 

For me there is a clear line between taking control of your decisions to make a good photograph: choosing your settings, lens, light, angle of view and most importantly the moment, and then there is directly taking control of the situation outside of your head. One is documentation and the other is a portrait or illustration.

 

The joke that we news photographers have is that we know when the TV people have already been with our subject because when we arrive the subject asks us “What do you want me to do?” That’s because TV basically doesn’t just go in to a situation and visually capture what is already in progress. TV, because it needs a set of sequences to provide some kind of narrative, figures out while on location and in editing what it wants to see to produce the narrative that they want. You can just go in a shoot a lot of video and eventually produce enough footage to make a story but it takes a lot of time in the field and that basically doesn’t happen in any kind of deadline situation. So as I think of it, TV news is a name but just about everything that they show, except for spot/breaking news real time coverage, is in one way or the other an illustration and not documentary. When working for a newspaper or news magazine my response to the subjects question is “Do whatever you were doing before I rang the door bell”.

 

Now I was thumbing through the winners of PDN’s Topknots, which is their big wedding photography contest and instead of just looking at the pix I actually read the text that goes with them. Insert your “I read it for the articles” joke here. Anyhoo, what I found was that for every category all the winning photos except for just, I think, two the photographers explained how they set up the scene, directed the subjects and did usually heavy post processing to get the image. Ok these are wedding photos and not news so they are not trying to tell the journalistic truth for a Pulitzer. I will cut them slack on this. However they were generally shot in the “photojournalism” style and yet they do not show real moments. They are just as contrived and set up as the staid wedding photos of old, only with a different visual look. When you spend time to arrange the elements on a table and then enter it as a “details” shot it is a details shot that was designed by the photographer  to me more of a “still life” where all the elements are chosen for the image, some or all of which weren’t there to begin with. Ok let’s call that a quibble. But when the photographer admits to having an assistant whose job it is to tidy up things in the ready room to make for a cleaner image and then tells the bride and her mom to “do that over here and face this way” as part of general event coverage I’m speechless. Yeah yeah, that’s just me being the documentarian guy but I just think how that couple will feel in a few years when they are going through their wedding photos. Will they come to photo after photo and not think about the wonderful moments the photo shows or will they say, “Oh yeah, that’s when he had me go over there and do that with your uncle and then he had you get behind us and jump up and down …” I could not and would not ever let myself be that photographer.

 

It must be that way for the people on so many TV shows when they watch them afterwards. “Remember when the TV crew came and rearranged our furniture for that interview? Yeah then they had us sit on the bed pointing at things in our scrap book. Oh and they made us walk down the street holding hands looking sad … yeah what was THAT all about?” Ugh!

 

Now I have been enjoying doing portraiture where I put together a locale, props and such to evoke a particular look, mood and what not but I’m never going to call something that is manipulated to be “a found moment”. It may be a moment within the context of a contrived situation but that is different.

 

We are so used to seeing images that are in one way or the other controlled, manipulated or outright scripted that we have a hard time seeing wonderful little slices of life and time as uncontrived. Altered reality is almost normal to us now. (shiver!) As such, I will never do anything that will prevent me from sleeping well. Honesty is my policy. Both to my clients as well as my subjects. How quaint!

Copy cat, copy cat!

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.” Herman Melvile

I had a very interesting thing happen the other day. I went to my mail box, the physical one, and on the cover of a publication was an image that stopped me in my tracks. So I went inside and showed it to my wife whose eyes got very large upon seeing it. “How can they copy you like that?” she cried. She was rather upset at it all and I thought it was funny. Why?

 

Well the deal is that the cover shot was what appears to be a poor imitation of one of my images. How can I say that? Well it goes as follows: I have a photo in my folio that I produced a little over a year ago where the same subject, but not same exact person, is standing in essentially the same spot, facing the same way, posed in a very similar manner, shot with the same angle of view, from the same perspective only without my better and more dramatic lighting.  Big deal - it’s a co-inky-dink. I’m not so sure.

 

Ya see I know the publication. I know the editor who assigned the photo. The editor has seen my folio. The person who made the image may not be fully aware of me and my work but the editor is. I’m not sure whose idea it was but the person in charge had to have known in the back of their mind that the image was familiar.

 

Or it was intentional but not as a “copy” so much as an inspiration. I get that. I have lots of inspirational images that float around in my head. Inspiration is important. I never tried to imitate anyones work let alone copy an image. I did and do look at other peoples work and learn from it. As I’ve said before I will sometimes think to myself “What would Joel Sartore/Albert Watson/Joey Terill/some other cool photog/ do with this complete mess of a situation?” Then I’d put my twist on that bit of inspiration.  

 

Truth be told I’m just about to go to a shoot that was inspired by someone else’s work. Well not a single image, more like 2-3 different ones from different photographers, and what I’m going to be doing will not look like the shots that gave me the “Ah-HA!.” Similar kind of location but, different lighting, different subject, different mood and my own twist on top of it all. That will end up being a shot that is mine and not one where you can say “Mmm, didn’t Whatshisname shoot something like this?”

 

Still for the photog who may or may not have been inspired by my image: either way I’m flattered.