dispatches

This Year We Sleep

First lesson on Israeli travel: don’t arrive on Saturday.

The four of us arrived at our hotel, tired, bedraggled, travel-weary after 20 hours on the road. The lobby was full of people. "Your rooms, they are not ready. Please wait in the lobby." Well, for how long? "A couple of hours." Shabbat had just ended. People didn’t leave their rooms until sundown. The rooms were just now being made up. Apparently this happens every week at the Eldan Hotel.

The hotel restaurant was closed. The restaurant at the YMCA was closed, preparing for the New Year’s Eve buffet. We went across the street to the King David, crashing through the Bar Mitzvot photo session in the lobby, to the French restaurant downstairs.

Our rooms were nearly ready upon our return. For us, it’s next year in Jerusalem. Tonight, though, we sleep.

Previews of Coming Attractions

Tomorrow is the 18 hour travel day, SEA to TLV. Usually I travel alone. Less frequently I go someplace with Robin. To be responsible for travel arrangements for a party of four is unprecedented.

Elly let me go through her suitcase, as she could barely close it. If we allowed it, she would conclude a two week trip without washing a single garment. I looked askance at her eight turtlenecks, and at another equally large collection of short sleeved blouses. The discard pile grew. "I used to love you, but now I hate you," she said. I bought her the Annie Proulx short story collection to compensate, and to get back in the will.

I am a bit of a minimalist in the other extreme (two extra underwear briefs, instead of one, is my splurge), but I am careful to not demand compliance. It is not my job. "You could entirely rethink how you travel, but I think it’s a bit late for that," I told Elly. Robin travels with enough food and pharmaceuticals to stock a small third world grocery and clinic, while I have to hunt for an open Walgreens in whatever city I’m in when I need a Tylenol. With four people, though, I may need to rent a trailer for the hired car.

Stay tuned to the Daily Photo and the Dispatches for our Israel travels over the next two weeks.

Brokeback Mountain

What makes a film great? It is a fragile and subtle enterprise—one wrong note can pollute the entire experience. Brokeback Mountain is pitch perfect in this regard. There wasn’t an element out of place, a gesture that didn’t harbor important information, a scene that wasn’t exactly the right length. Every element of this film worked, and the accumulation of detail, of relationship building, of acting (there are several Academy Award's worth in this one) was absolutely exactly how it needed to be, and not a measure more. It is the best film of 2005.

I can’t help but notice technical elements in a film, even when I completely buy the reality I am expected to subsume myself to. The noticable feature of Brokeback Mountain was how slow it proceeded. There wasn’t a tracking shot in the entire film. The camera remained stationary, and life unfolded, slowly, and light lingered, and composition held, and one's emotional response to the held moment steepened. Imagery ruled, but so did character, and development, and poignant possibility. I have read that Annie Proulx, the writer of the originating short story, cried when she saw the film. The film got her characters spot on.

A gay Western? Hardly. A tragedy, yes. There is nothing more universal than this story of love and desire, and the damage wrought by both too little and too much honesty. We judge our art by the complexity and the truth of the telling. This story reads true in all its aspects. See this film.

Israel Subscription Print

"We have a new client that has a study-in-Israel program. Are you available in early January?"

The wrong answer is, "Sorry, my wife and I were planning our vacation in Oaxaca for then." The right answer is, "Hey, Robin, wanna go to Israel instead?"

As it turns out, the job failed to materialize—new client, new director of admissions, it’s too soon to book photography. This is not an uncommon event in my profession. You are tantalized all the time with wisps of rumors of jobs. The more desirable the gig, the less likely it will actually transpire. I’ve learned to not attach too soon. But the momentum was too powerful to resist. As soon as Elly heard, she said, "I want to go." She lived in Israel thirty years ago, and wrote for the Jerusalem Post. Our niece, Felicity, is joining us too. This will be a trip to Israel in the company of three generations of Jewish women.

We leave a week from today: next Friday. I will post dispatches from Israel here on the blog.

I’m taking the panoramic camera and that anachronism, film. There’s no client now paying my way over, so I am falling back on my standby funding mechanism—a subscription print offer. Here’s how it works. You pre-order a print that I haven’t made yet, from Israel. For half price. Normally I sell my editioned silver gelatin prints for $500. You pay $250. These are large prints, on 10"x24" paper, hand made, in a darkroom, like in the old days. You don’t need to pre-pay—a pledge is good enough. You have your pick of the litter some time after I return.

Operators are standing by.

ANWR Saved Again (Whew!)

  This just in. The Senate failed to overcome a filibuster threat, and has agreed to withdraw the ANWR drilling provision from the defense bill. Another last-second save for the Arctic National Wildlife refuge. More details here.

How many times have we been through this already? It feels like every other week we have to beat back another attempt to convert the refuge to an oilfield. Why is this so important?

I am one of the few people who can testify in the first person as to why. I spent 10 weeks camped on the refuge on a bird study, back in 1985. It is truly one of the remarkable places of the planet. For a few weeks in the summer, it is a lush environment full of birdlife. It is the last place in the entire continent where the original landscape is intact from ocean edge to mountain crest.

Oil development, no matter how carefully done, will mar and rip asunder this last great place. Oilpads may not take up much acreage, but they still need roads and pipes to connect them. The gravel to build them has to come from someplace, namely streambeds. These riparian areas were where all the life was in our bird studies. The propaganda about the infinitesimal fragment of the refuge to be directly impacted is a little like saying that a loose drift net, because the net filaments take up so little space, have an equally negligible impact on ocean sealife.

I have a memoir of my time in ANWR posted at http://www.dougplummer.com/anwr/anwr.html

A Year Later: Taking Stock of Digital

It has been just over a year since I picked up my first digital camera. I am now on my third. It is a good moment to take stock. What is different from a year ago?

First, I have become the sort of zealous digital convert that was so noisome to me when I was shooting film. It is not unlike what happened to me when I got my first computer. I can’t imagine shooting professionally in any other format now. Everything I have done on film now feels like my past, like another life. It is the sharpest watershed of my career.

Still, the process annoys me daily. I am handcuffed to computers now for everything that happens subsequent to clicking the shutter. A digital image can’t be processed, seen, altered, printed or stored except as an element of a vast technological grid. By itself it has no existence, no mass, no reality. My creative legacy rests on a tentative trust that this technology will always be there.

My workload is greater. I have absorbed the function of the photo lab, and then some. A day of shooting requires a day of file processing, and that’s just to deliver the work to a client for the initial review. I’ve raised my fees and developed a digital expense structure, but it’s not a profit center. I just recover my added expenses this way, marginally.

My learning curve is steeper. A large chunk of my time is now devoted to paying attention. I read books, computer magazines, product review columns I used to ignore, websites, I look for trainings and workshops. I always feel like I don’t know enough.

My creative process is only that now, a process, not a product or a project. I am not engaged in any long term work, in making a book or documenting something close to my heart. All my creative effort is used up in the process of making images in this new format. The outcome is not the point. I photograph every day, and I post a photo from that day on my photo blog. The rhythm of that is an organizing principle of my life now. It is my daily practice, this creation of images.

This process of making images on a daily basis is changing the work. I did not expect digital to have that impact, and I had always poopoohed the notion that the tool had an overiding effect on the content. But in this case it does, by the nature of how the image comes about. I take so many more photographs than I ever did with film. The feedback loop is so foreshortened that I feel closer to the moment of connection that results in the photograph. Images are no longer this mental abstraction that days later, when I see the film, I respond to with mental, emotional and physical distance from the moment they were made. That has its own rhythm and consequence for the work. The process now is often concluded within the hour, which also has consequences for the work. It is too soon for me to judge whether this is a good or bad thing, whether the work now has less judgement or substance in it. Right now I am engaged with the differentness of it.

I look at my portfolio and my website, and think of it as vaguely fraudulent. It doesn’t represent what I do or who I am now. I don’t have a good substitute, however, as I am so deeply engaged in the image making process that I have no attention to devote to an overview of my work. I trust this is a phase. I hope it is not an inevitable consequence of the digital realm.

Expert Witness

It is a boost to the ego to be considered an expert at something, and doubly so to be the designated fount of wisdom for a group of young photographers gathered for the purpose (from my perspective, alas, young is anyone under 40). A group of women photographers that meets monthly did so today around my dining room table. Ostensibly, I was the case example of a commercial photographer with a fine art bent for them to quiz about how that works.

I talked about trying not to construct too many barriers between the two realms. And to enjoy your assignments. I’m proud that clients are moved to send me emails about how much fun I seem to have. One of the women piped up, "The photographers I assist for are all bitter middle aged men. Can I work for you?"

Unfortunately I’ve seen that attitude among my colleagues. Photography is a hard gig to stay in top form for. That response to difficulty, though, is not pleasant to be around, and I try and edge out of the way when I encounter someone bearing the bitter residue of unfulfilled entitlement. Yes, everything changes. What I did for a living five years ago hardly resembles what I do now. I can say that for any given five year interval of my career. Two years ago things were so bad I wondered about the viability of continuing in the profession. I didn’t get bitter, though I pedaled really hard to keep from the cliff edge of clinical depression. I upgraded my cooking skills and threw dinner parties so I could feel like I had some purpose in life. I did the housework so my wife could write her book. I shot a lot of personal photography. I retooled. Then the market changed. Now I’m as busy as I want to be, and happy.

"Has my commercial work changed over the duration?" someone asked. At 50, I’m pretty set in my style. The wide open world of unlimited potential is for someone at another stage of life. I can’t overhaul how I portray the world, but I can bend to current sensibilities, and I would be a fool to ignore contemporary culture (much as I rail against it sometimes). I’ve noticed that I try now to simplify my compositions. Most photography is seen, and most stock photography is purchased, based on a 1"x1½" thumbnail on a computer screen. It is a format that punishes complexity. I save that for the personal work.

The group swooned over the acreage I had in my basement office (I basically operate out of the bottom half of the house, but I think of the space as overly cluttered and dense). We talked a lot about the digital divide. The cost of admission to the profession is rising, and so is the range of knowledge we’re expected to have. No one can keep on top of it all, but I told them some of the websites I regularly monitor. Here they are:

http://www.outbackphoto.com Good direction on the latest in digital workflow

http://www.d-65.com/workshops.html Whatever you think of his personality, Seth Resnick seems to deliver the best workshop on workflow for pros.

http://drycreekphoto.com/ Source of profiles for color managed output to labs (including Costco)

http://inkjetart.com/ Great source for materials, and they have a great newsletter that is worth signing up for. They have cheap ($25) custom profiles, that I’ll write a report on when I’ve tested mine.

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/index.asp News on latest developments in digital. Take his one-day workshops when it comes to your city. A great deal for a ton of information

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/ One of the main sites for everything.

http://www.adobe.com/digitalimag/ps_pro_primers.html Some great tutorials on PS technique and basic color management issues.

Blog Birthday

Hey, this blog is a year old, as of Wednesday, 12/7. Here's the first entry.

Photonica Denouement

A couple weeks ago I received two big boxes from Getty Images. They contained my entire Photonica archive, over 3000 images. It marked a closure of an important era of my professional and personal life.

In the early 90’s Photonica changed the look and trajectory of the stock photo industry. Before then stock had been a neglected stepchild of assignment photography, a place for unselected outtakes. The stock that was produced specifically for the market was, for the most part, cliché-ridden, over-styled drivel. Photonica, a Japanese agency, entered the US market with a look that was entirely novel in the business. Their catalogs were full of pretty fragments of things, glorious color for its own sake, objects, flowers (lots and lots of flowers) people that weren’t models, that would never look like models. It was mysterious, delicious eye candy. I saw one of these catalogs on an art director’s desk, and couldn’t believe that commercial photography could look like this.

I copied down the address of the New York office, and wrote them. Could I get a copy of this amazing catalog? And, by the way, here are some samples of my work.

They replied with a contract.

Photonica was vacuuming up images in 1991. I got in on the ground floor. It was a little like buying Microsoft stock in 1986, but on a smaller scale (why didn’t I do that? I had friends working for them, I knew what Microsoft was about. Oh yeah, I was broke in 1986.) Quickly I began making sales, and they started taking massive amounts of my work. At one point I was the single largest contributor to their files. Photonica became an industry trendsetter, and my style seemed to fit them to a tee. By the mid-nineties my quarterly payments were well into five figures. Stock was all I did. I indulged my long-suppressed foreign travel itch. Life was wonderful.

Photonica coasted in its reputation for too long, and other agencies superceded them in style. They tried to make their look "edgier." I called it the "Trainspotting" look. My acceptance levels started dropping. Then a new team took over, and the look changed again. Now they were mimicking every other agency, and by the end of 2000 my sales were in serious decline. 9/11 only hastened the demise.

The assimilation into Getty that occurred earlier this year was the natural conclusion to this trajectory. I still have over 700 images on the website though, and my sales immediately tripled. I’m still submitting, I have a Getty editor now, and they’re even more parsimonious in the number of my images they take. But, they’re Getty, and this ride may last a little longer still.

I am amazed and impressed, however, that I actually have my archive back. This is serious organizational ability. Someone had to disassemble and resort an inventory of hundreds of thousands of images. What I’m going to do with them now is another question.

Image #1 in my Photonica archive

Owl Wars

A war between birders and residents is brewing over the Discovery Park Snowy Owl. This from today’s Tweeters:

Yesterday was not a great day at Discovery if you are grading the relationship between birders and the folks living in military housing units. Many people were completely ignoring the signs about trespassing and walking right up to people's houses to see the owl. The residents resorted to shooing the owl away twice in order to get their privacy back.....unfortunately this owl seems to "hide" higher up on the houses....which in turns draws the people closer so that they can see better. I want to clarify that every single person who disobeyed these signs and caused problems were what I would call non birders. They just happened to be walking by and saw the commotion. I talked with 1 homeowner last night at dusk and he was really frustrated. He and his family really enjoyed the Owl and he fully appreciates the rarity and curiosity that this Arctic visitor brings. However, he does not understand why people are walking onto his porch, blocking his driveway with their cars and ignorantly parking on their street causing the recycling trucks and school buses to not be able to drive up to their houses and do their jobs or deliver their children safely to their homes. PLEASE respect the rights of these people! Yesterday they discussed removing the bird from the park to avoid this problem in the future and after they had flushed this bird 2 times yesterday it actually left the park to the North for an hour or so.

If it seems like we have a lot of owls this winter, consider this posting from Gene Hunn:

For us old timers the banner year was the winter of 1973-1974. On a day trip to the Skagit in March of 1974 I counted 54 Snowies (which seems to indicate that many if not most survive the winter quite well, thank you) and there were as many as 7 at one time on the roof of Hec Edmondson Pavilion on the UW campus plus a high count of 120+ on the Ladner BC Christmas Bird Count.