Mad Men ´The Carousel´ from Emilio on Vimeo.

I’ve been writing a lot lately about the purpose of photography, and how it might be shared with others. One of the ideas I just lightly skimmed on was the issue of permanence in photography, a quality that seems, to me, to be somewhat conflicted. 

On one hand, photography is a vital part of documentary. It serves a role in making permanent records. After all, how many of us have our memories of past times preserved through photos? From the Facebook photo album to the 1960s reel of Kodachromes that your parents made on their vacations, photographs have held a traditional role of preserving family history. Likewise, for historians, photographs have provided a vital record of past times, from the natural and built environment to labor practices to cultural norms. Examples of the latter range from landscape photographers like William Henry Jackson and urbanists like Paris’ Atget through to social reformers like Jacob Riis and FSA documentarians Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and others. 

At the same time, photographs are highly temporary. The most common popular outlets of photography were — and still primarily remain — newspapers and magazines. Both are publications that are produced frequently and have an implied shelf-life — many magazines even state on their covers the date when they ought to cease to be displayed. Both publications are frequently recycled after a very short duration of existence. Neither format is constructed robustly, as their temporal nature is an accepted part of their formats. Outside of media, prints are often lost, and film negatives often become aged, distorted, and un-useable. Digital images, in theory, are safer from degradation, but there’s some question of what will become of the massive number of digital images photographers — be they the family snap-shooter or the most seasoned professional — over time.

According to the old saw, a picture is worth a thousand words, but as precious as that makes them, they may not last nearly as long. I’m unsure where this leads, except that it reinforces one strong personal and artistic belief: that the photographs we create must have some relevant role now. As precious as documentation is, photography’s best defense is not preservation, but rather in how it can directly affect those who are exposed to it. The purpose may be humble — to record a favorite moment for example — or it may be a part of a grand attempt to alter the viewpoint of society. Or it might be somewhere in between. Regardless, it is purpose that ought to be at the forefront of each and every photographer’s mind — including my own. 

Should photographers think more like a guerilla?

Recently, I wrote here questioning the ways that photography is displayed and shared with the public. My basic premise: that the typical ways that photography is shared — the gallery wall, the publication, the web site — are not necessarily the best ways to serve the messages any given set of photographs is meant to undertake.  At the time, I pondered if there might be better ways, and here I want to outline some different possible answers. By no means are these definitive or complete. In fact many of them may be downright impractical. Still, I think that photographers would be well served to consider thinking outside the box, and maybe some of these ideas might spur some better ones.

Billboards. Imagine placing important photographs up on large commercial billboard space. What might the cost be? Would it run more or less than putting on a typical 10+ image gallery show, and/or last about as long? For that matter, how does it compare to the cost of most self-published book runs? And imagine, although only one image could be shown, it would be seen by thousands of people each day, of all walks of life and all sorts of positions in society. Before, dear reader, you dismiss the idea as crazy, consider: some artists are already doing this.

Online multimedia videos. Although I’m discussing the sharing of still images, multimedia presentations combining audio and still images — especially if accompanied by well done and appropriately crafted narration — can be a powerful effect. There’s a reason why Apple’s iMovie has a built-in effect known as the Ken Burns effect. Faced with making films about eras of American history that predated movie cameras, Burns found ways to combine still images, music, and narration to powerful effect. And video is one of the most popular methods of entertainment on the web, as evidenced by the strength of YouTube‘s hit counts. A compelling multimedia presentation has potential to reach audiences who would otherwise not feel engaged by a conventional web thumbnail gallery of still images. (I made one for the Portland Switching District Project.)

Temporary projection. Fellow writer Dan Haneckow mentioned this idea to me while we were working together on an architectural history project. Using a digital projector, images — in our original concept images of buildings that are now gone — could be projected onto structures or other large surfaces. Imagine a rotating series of images displayed against the blank wall of a building, or even downward against pavement. While temporary, such displays would draw huge amounts of attention from all manner of people, hooking them in to see what the image is and understand its significance. 

Guerilla publication. While the conventional bound book has a place and a value, it has limited reach, thanks in part to its high cost. Imagine instead publications of small size, but made free. Sure, printing and selling postcards has been around forever, but who says there has to be a price-tag? Imagine hundreds, even thousands of postcard sized prints, left randomly at bookstores, coffee shops, community centers, libraries — anywhere, really. No, nobody will make money off this deal, but free stuff gets taken, and maybe in the process those photos will live on in people’s homes or places of work, where they will be seen, appreciated, and perhaps understood. For a little more, small 4-8 page booklets could also be produced to the same purpose, with even greater likelihood of being kept and appreciated. 

What other unconventional ways might photos be shared, and therefore find meaning and purpose?

East Second Avenue, 2008. From the the Portland Switching District Project.

This April, I completed the run of my first photo exhibit, a short preview show of selected images from the Portland Switching District Project. The show was hosted at the offices of the City Club of Portland, one of the oldest and most respected civic institutions in the Portland metropolitan region.  

This exhibit did not happen as the culmination of (much less a part of) some larger planned process. Instead, it was an organic outgrowth of the switching district project. Having spent over a year of concentrated work photographing the subject of the disappearing traces of the city’s urban industrial past, I was faced with a conundrum: what now? What to do with all of these images, now that the project was completed? A series of developments — including a call for temporary art exhibits at the City Club — resulted in the show, and I hope will result in another, larger version next year, in the city’s Central Eastside Industrial District, where many of the images were made. 

Is this, however, serving the best interests of the photographs? And what really is their purpose anyway?

Photography is widely varied. Some people are photographers because they want to explore their inner selves, to express emotion or complex inward thought. Others want to document, to preserve in images traces of the world they see around them. Others want something in between, a hybrid mix that is all about telling a story. I previously outlined this basic tripartite theory of photography — expressive, narrative, and documentary — in a story I wrote about detail imagery and the railroad for Trains.com and the Center for Railroad Photography & Art.

For me it is that third, middle way of narrative that matters to me most. It may be no surprise, then, that the most seen photos I have made are those that were published, often beside text-based narratives I wrote, and (to-date) always in periodicals of one form or another. 

For the switching project, documentary is a bit more prominent in my motives than usual, and I am forced to consider what the best way of sharing them is. After all, if these photos merely sit in a box — in this case a hard drive — do they serve the purpose I intended? Do they reach out and tell the story of Portland’s heritage, of the city’s industrial roots? In some ways, storing them implies a value to the images that is more vain than if they were shared, as when something is shared it belongs to the beholder and not just the maker. 

So few images actually are shared, though. Far more photos die ignominious deaths as hard drives crash, orphaned photo albums get donated to Goodwill, or slide collections get tossed into a dumpster. The vast majority of them have their ultimate value to society unfulfilled. To have my photos sit on a hard drive, stored in some semi-altruistic hope that a future historian will value them, then that is in my view a personal and artistic failure. It’s like performing a play to an empty room. 

In this regard, the show at the City Club was a step in the right direction. Here, for a month, they were able to be seen by the public at large. Who, though, goes to gallery exhibits? A select few — even more so a self-selected few. Web sites? These images have been available on the Internet for almost three years, but such digital presentations generally are about as effective as tossing 3×5 prints of the images out third story window in the middle of downtown — the Net is just too vast, too full of competing eye candy, time waster, and the like to be effective on its own as a way of telling this story. What about a book? That would be even more self selecting, even more limited in its reach, although it would at least be less transitory than the former two options. 

This is a question larger than the switching project, and larger than my photography. This goes to the heart of what photography is, and what role it plays in society. Put another way, what is the ultimate intent of the photos we as photographers make? Might the gallery / web site / book formula not be the best way to use our images to tell the stories we wish to tell? And if not, what might be a better way?

There’s nothing like a regular job to clear your head and make you remember what it’s all for. After four days of burning my candle at both ends, I knew that I wasn’t going to be satisfied with a life that was just about cubicles and commuting, where my evening hours were spent sitting in front of yet another computer.

Then inspiration struck me. Go back to meaning, Alex. Find what is meaningful, go back to the source.

Back at the CRPA conference, Lew Ableidinger got a chance to give a presentation on his photography. Make no bones about it, I admire Lew’s work very much — you can see more on his Flickr page, where I swear I’ve favorited every fourth photograph he’s posted — but since Lew is of my generation, I had to give him a hard time during the Q&A. And although we aren’t close friend per se, I knew Lew well enough to know he had just picked up a new acquisition: a large format camera. For those uninitiated in the obscurities of pre-Digital SLR photography, the large format camera is that cartoon camera, the one with gigantic bellows up front and that requires a hefty tripod to hold. They can take a long time to set up, the film for them is expensive due to its size, and all in all they are a slowwwwwwww choice in cameras. So I stood up and I asked Lew if, because of this acquisition, he had gone crazy.

The truth of the matter, though, is that I understood Lew’s choice all too well. (Apparently I wasn’t alone; my crazy comment drew more than one attendee to inform me that they, too, owned and used a large format camera.) You see, for me, there’s just not much satisfaction in pixels. After a weekend of making random snapshots to promote the conference on the Center’s Facebook page, I was pretty sick of my beloved Canon G9. It was easy, sure. It was almost instantaneous. But it had none of the things that brought me to photography. It had no craft.

The source of photography, for me, was painting. For years, cameras were no more than mechanical sketchbooks that helped me produce works in watercolor. It was on the stippled, slightly acrid smelling surface of cotton-based paper that I learned the rules of composition, the way that colors compliment or clash, and the idea of visual storytelling.

And, perhaps, it is the tactile elements of painting that lead me to so strongly hold onto film photography. The act of printing under an enlarger, the sheer daredevil analog imprecision of the print, the multiple intangibles and unknowns that I must dance around for each image: these are the aspects of black-and-white photography I fell in love with. These are the reasons that I long for the day I have a darkroom of my own.

But, back to this week. Feeling a bit run down, a bit worn thin, and a bit lost, I realized that there was one place I could find myself in again. And so last night, all that was on my desk was removed, and then tonight, after I got home, out came the stipple-surfaced French paper, out came the finely sharpened Stadtler 2B, out came the kneaded gum eraser and the sharpener and the T-square and the ruler. Even without starting, even just seeing the paper laying there on the surface of my desk, awaiting the touch of my fingertips, I could feel the mood change in me. Painting is, perhaps, a kind of meditation all of its own. And then the pencil was out, and the lead laid down on the paper, and the smell of fresh wood shavings and graphite filled the room.

And it all began again.

One of the essential tensions of photography is that between a photographer’s style and the substance of his or her photographs.

I spend a considerable amount of time looking at photography on sites such as Flickr. Of those that catch my eye, many of them are stunning. Shimmering liquid colors, stunning effects, dramatic angles. Sometimes I think that everyone is shooting stills on the set of Kings of Convenience music video.

Perhaps I am imagining things, but it seems these honeyed images are typical of the direction of contemporary photography, an effect of the digital age. It is not, I think, that this is the only kind of photography that digital cameras lead to, but rather I think it is the thumbnail effect. Technicolor dreams attract your attention at 100×125 pixels, and look great on a computer screen with its typically dull whites and grays. Rich saturation, “HDR,” post-processed additions and deletions; it’s all eye candy in all of its intoxicating glory.

Digital photographers didn’t invent this sort of thing of course, they’re merely following a long trend of romanticism and fantasy. One of photography’s greatest, Minor White, made a series of photographs of seascapes. So did Robert Adams, which seems out of character given his far more rationalist visual sensibility.

I don’t dislike these images (or images like them), but I confess I don’t value them much.

A photographer is responsible for whatever goes into the frame of his or her image. Intention — the Big Why — is the first and most important thing any photographer can and should ask of themselves. When I look at pretty, windswept images of the sea by White or Adams — just as when I look at the Technicolor fantasies of Flickr — I am moved… for a moment. Once the moment passes, the value of the image fades.

For all the technical wizardry we as photographers are capable of, for all the gosh-and-golly eye candy we can produce, for all the golden moments on the shoreline, it must never be forgotten that photography is first and foremost a medium of making records. What we photograph matters as much as — no! More than! — how we photograph it. As beautiful as a day’s end against the Pacific can be, what are you, as a photographer, contributing to the world by making photographs of it?

Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time on sites like KEH and Blue Moon and eBay considering used medium-format cameras. For those unschooled in the arcana of film photography, medium-format (or MF as I sometimes refer to it) is a larger size (or format) of film photography. Rather than little negatives about three-quarters-of-an-inch by one (or thereabouts) as in a 35mm camera, the negatives are a little over two inches on their shortest dimension. With a much larger negative, grain is less pronounced, detail enhanced, and the size of prints (and crops) possible increases dramatically.

As a dedicated lover of film, I’ve wanted to use a medium-format camera for a good long time. This most recent bout of online window-shopping was inspired by my trip to Sacramento last month, during which I was able to meet (and see prints from) David Plowden. On the trip home, my traveling companion — a fellow photographer — made a rather evil pronouncement: “you should get a Yashicamat TLR. They’re probably the best value in medium-format right now.”

Ah, the Yashicamat. Made throughout the second half of the last century, the Yashicamat is a Twin-Lens-Reflex camera, or TLR. Cliff notes version: two lenses are on the camera, one to view the image through, one to capture the image. They are usually simpler than SLR-type cameras with their multiple lenses and their viewing prisms. Bottom line: they’re slightly limiting but quite capable within the limits they have; many of the images in Plowden’s latest book were made with a similar TLR made by Rollei. Those same limits also make TLRs like the Yashicamat less spendy than other MF options. For a couple hundred dollars, I could own a decent, functional, optically sound TLR.

I was tempted. In fact, I will confess, I bid in series on three on eBay. Fortunately, I lost each auction.

Fortunately? Why fortunately? Don’t I want one?

In photography, it is common to become seduced by equipment. There’s a collector’s mania that can set in, not satisfied until one of everything worth having is on the shelf. For others, it becomes a more temporal thing, a compulsion to try and/or own every type of camera and lens you desire, only to quickly become bored and sell them on again, a kind of photographic womanizing. And all too often — especially among newcomers and amateurs — there’s the false sense that if only one had this camera or that lens ones photography would improve drastically.

So yes, fortunately, I lost those auctions. In the process, I got the TLR bug out of my system for a while longer, and remembered there was something far more important: that little row of undeveloped rolls of PanF sitting on my workbench.

I’m not saying there’s no value to new or different equipment. I’m not saying the Yashicamat or other TLRs or MF cameras aren’t worth owning, or aren’t worth it for me. Some day, I probably will own one, when the timing is right. But for right now, what’s more important is spending my time, energy, and budget on making photographs, not collecting equipment. This is a lesson that should be learned early by aspiring photographers and never forgotten.: photos make the photographer, not cameras.

What gear has been tempting you lately?

Robert Adams is one of the few American photographers of note who also writes about the process of making photographs without becoming pedantic about it. He starts his essay on the photographing of evil with an example of a small colorado railroad town, a mining town. The example gives me pause: after all, I love the human-altered landscape. Evil? Sure, I understand why Adams disdains what mining has done to the Western landscape, but of all the things to start an essay on the photography of evil with, these seem like heavy, provocative words.

This is not to say that there isn’t negativity here, and one has to give credit to Adams: he is, after all, trying to build a case for a photographer making pictures of such negativity. In a medium that seems to have given itself over to populist romanticism — twilight vistas, coastal drama, the postcard or promotional or public-relations image — a bit of realism, a bit of negativity is a welcome thing.

For me, I cite negativity as one of the things that has attracted me back to making railroad images. The contemporary railroad has much about it that is regrettable. As part of a larger industrial rush towards ultimate efficiency, it has largely abandoned much of the rural West to decay. It asks employees to work farther and farther from home under far less stable conditions, as if unreasonable expectations become reasonable if the pay is high enough. The world of the railroad worker is increasingly isolated from society and from other employees, a place of inhospitable solitude which leaves little room for family much less friends.

While Adams was, I think, making a case for finding beauty in the negative, I would make the corollary case: that when a genre focuses too much on beauty alone, it loses some relevance to the world. Negativity is not something that one might strive to find beauty in, but rather is a necessary balance against the dangers of rampant romanticism. Negativity is needed, it grounds the photographer and the photographs.

On a related note, for anyone serious about photography, especially landscape photography and related sub-genres, I recommend securing copies of Adams’ Beauty in Photography and Why People Photograph. Both books contain essays on photography that are highly readable yet also highly thoughtful. You will likely find yourself frequently agreeing with what Adams says about this medium, but also on occasion disagreeing heartily. At all times you learn. They’re both relatively cheap and both worth picking up.

This month I have two articles in the Online Extras section at the website of TRAINS Magazine. Both of these stories were written for a content extra that promotes the activities of the Center for Railroad Photography and Art, whose excellent 2010 conference I attended (and impromptu got drafted into staff for) in April.

The first of these articles focused on taking a project-based approach to railroad photography. As with many genre-driven photographic subcultures, the railroad photography crowd has a tendency to try and “shoot everything” and to try and capture subjects before change wipes them from memory. One possible approach to dealing with this successfully is to try and make better predictions about what is likely to be gone in the near future.

My approach, however, is different. I believe capturing the present before it is lost is less important than being cohesive in what you, as a photographer, are trying to say. The piece which ran earlier in August advocated this approach and explained how and why it can lead to better photographic results.

Today, the second half of the two-part series was put up on the web. In this article, I share one of my recent projects and use it to explain how I apply the project-based approach to railroad photography.

This is the first public unveiling of a series I have been spending a considerable amount of my time shooting. By-and-large, this is my attempt to create a railroad photography project that doesn’t rest on the romanticism and Grand-Style traditions that dominate this genre. It also represents a much more distinctive personal stylistic voice applied to the subject. I have to say, using this series as a basis of a teaching moment was a bit… hairy. Showing a major project to the public for the first time can be a nerve-wracking thing.

One last note: my thanks go out to photographers Wes Carr, the Center’s Scott Lothes, and Kyle Weismann-Yee, for contributing images to both articles. You made me look good.

This week, a friend picked up a copy of David Plowden’s retrospective, Vanishing Point, a book I once wrote a Russian-novel length review of here.

I’ve come to be a great admirer of Plowden. His photography is simultaneously straightforward yet lyrical. Unlike the works of, say, the New Topographics movement, Plowden’s work doesn’t imply a value judgement. Instead, the reaction provoked is more emotional, and is usually described as loss. He has famously described his career as a photographer as being “one step ahead of the wrecking-ball.”

What does that have to do with this image? Many things. The subject itself — Portland’s Guilds Lake industrial park — is slowly fading from its railroad industrial past. More significantly, this image is part of an in-progress series, an intentionally unromantic take on the railroad world. Yet, precisely by being intentionally unromantic, this image (and its series kin) become about loss too, the loss of the romantic viewpoint.

Maybe loss is integral to photography. Cameras, after all, have always held the promise of extending the moment, of being an external memory device. First steps. Birthdays. Weddings. Friends. You know the drill. You want to capture memories, preserve them before they, too, become victims of loss. And besides, entropy is not only a lot easier to find than growth, it is required to precede it: the first sign of newness is usually the sweeping away of something old.

And in the ultimate sense of Time’s irony, it’s barely possible to stay ahead of the wrecking ball anymore. The wrecking ball is going the way of, well, the wrecking ball.

Since I’ve discussed both David Plowden and the New Topographics, there are a few more things I should mention. First, the New Topographics exhibit is together again, and on tour. The closest it will get to the Pacific Northwest will be at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, starting in July. There’s also a new book out, and I strongly recommend it to anyone with an interest in landscape photography or critical photography. Second, Plowden has a book forthcoming this fall, Requiem for Steam from W. W. Norton. Keep an eye out for it.

At the Lansdowne SkyTrain station in Richmond, B.C.

Sometimes I think that one of the main reasons I feel I am not particularly skilled as a photo journalist is that I’m just not enough of an a-hole for the job. On a recent trip to the largely ethnically Chinese city of Richmond, B.C., I realized that more strongly than ever before.

I had gathered only a few photographs that day, mostly of SkyTrain and of a few of the signs around the Richmond area, whose total lack of English turned the mundane into a visual feast, in the same way that listening to an opera sung in a language I can’t understand — say Italian — is far more moving to me than most songs sung in English.

Walking past a grocer’s doors, I peered inside to see dozens of families sorting through piles of fruit, looking for the best orange or persimmon. I had been just about to raise the camera to take the photo when I stopped. What was I doing? Why was I taking this picture? Oh, look, whole crowds of slant-eyed people!

Although their ethnicity served to make my actions more immediately felt, this wasn’t really an issue of race at all. It was more an issue of respect. I was a guest in these people’s community, and in my mind I had turned them into zoo animals to make picture postcards of. It was a sin I was sure, in that moment, I had committed numerous times.

I tucked my camera back into a pocket of my vast coat.

As a writer, I think you can say and do far worse things — slander is so much easier with the written word — but somehow, at the time, the invasive act so central to photojournalism seemed worse.