dispatches

The hazards of praise

12/4/09

I have been toiling on my Daily Photo project in near total obscurity for almost six years now. About a year ago I started cross posting my Daily shot on Facebook. Now, I had an actual audience. Sometimes with opinions. I am coming to grips with what that means.

I shoot daily for no other reason than that it is a habit I have cultivated, that has a continuing payoff in keeping my eye alert and fresh, and that it is where I can see the trail behind me of what is visually compelling and what photographic issues I am working through.

When you have a cheering section, this can be problematic. Now, most photographers, myself included, crave recognition. As a commercial shooter, I need people to know I'm a good photographer with a particular style and presence. That's why I have a website and portfolios in it. Thousands of people use Flickr as a social network site as much as a photo display venue, and you can detect a lot of pitching for that “Attaboy, good job” response from the group.

It's not that I mean to be contrary to using photography as a personal validation. Sharing photos is a social act, and I do it all the time myself with the albums I post on Facebook. Here's how I saw this event, this place. I think you might like to see it the way I did. And I get lots of feel-good comments.

However. Adulation does not help you grow. It can keep you stuck in a place where you know how to provoke the same, complimentary response. What you learn is how to get very good at doing the same thing. A useful skill in the right circumstances, but it doesn't get you to the next thing you're going to be doing when this one runs its course.

Since I started getting a steady series of comments on my Facebook posts of the Daily Photo, I have caught myself falling into the adulation trap. More than once I've gone, this shot's awfully strange, I'd better not post it. People will like this other one better. I found myself mildly crestfallen when no one commented on an image. Facebook was training me to make a different kind of image.

Which, on a commercial level, is useful. Sometimes I see that an image gets a disproportionate reaction for reasons I don't understand, and I pay attention. But the Daily Photo is a personal photographic venue that I want to start bending back to it's original function—a place for me to tally where my attention is drawn, and to get hints for what is to come next. 

But if you like what I'm doing, go ahead and say so. I'll try not to take it personally. 

 

 

 

A day at the museum

First time ever today at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Besides being lost in the labyrinth the entire time, I stumbled upon some wonder gems. The two photography exhibits could not have been more different from each other. 

 Nicholas Nixon is that guy who's been photographing his wife and her three sisters every year since 1975. The exhibit is intimate family work (his own), loving moments captured, somehow, on a 4x5. 

 Next discovery was the Richard Avedon fashion exhibit, a survey of his entire career. Technically stunning and totally controlled abstractions, emotionally remote and cold, the utter antipode to Nixon. 

 What's lovely about this museum is that photography is not confined to a curatorial ghetto somewhere in the basement. The shows are interspersed amid other galleries, and within period themes, say a room of etchings, will be an Alvin Langdon Coburn photogravure. In a room of modernists were Charles Sheeler and O'Keefe paintings with Ed Weston's Greatest Hits (Pepper 30 and Claris Nude) Paul Outerbridge studies, and Strand and Steiglitz portraits of their various female muses. 

I wandered through the new American wing, which had some miniscule Bierstadts and Churches (I didn't know there were any), a folk art gallery and a wonderful room of Sargents that didn't make it to Seattle. I got lost in Europe and West Africa for a bit, traversed contemporary Japan, and landed in a museum store at the end of a cul de sac, and got directions back to the coatroom. After paying an obscene fee to get my car out of the garage, I'm now in New Hampshire for three days of dancing. 

 

A photographer at work

 

I know nothing about this world--fashion photography--but I'm spellbound by the intensity of this practitioner's effort, and the clarity of the documentary. 

Pay attention to this quote: "My lack of knowledge in the beginning really helped, and made me refine what little I knew to make it work." It's the second part, the commitment, that makes it happen, that leads to a style. 

A private obsession

There is a kind of image I make that I pretty much keep to myself these days. It has no obvious bearing on my commercial work, and it has an infinitesimally narrow appeal that will not net many “Likes” on my Facebook page. Yet anytime I am in this kind of wintry, barren, brambly landscape, I make scores of images that look a lot like this. 

And, I've been making this image for a long time. One of my favorites from the body of work dates from 1985. As Robin puts it, I have a huge part of my brain devoted to seeing this image out there. It is, apparently, truly an acquired taste. 

As a committed formalist, I am agnostic regarding what I photograph. Or as my guru Frederick Sommer put it, “Subject matter is harmless, but it can be charming to the point of distraction from other elements.” Yet there are environments that I prefer to place myself in for the purpose of making photographs. If subject matter is irrelevant, then it doesn't matter where I take my photos. I might as well go where I like to be. 

These stick places are one of those places. It's not the subject, it's the feeling state I find accessible when I'm there, with a camera in hand. The images are a consequence of the moment. 

I've exhibited the work only a couple of times in the past two decades. I've failed to get any traction for the material at photo review events. It does not appear to be destined to have a life beyond my private concern. It also does not appear I will ever stop making them.

Here is the “Stick Pictures” portfolio, and a group from today's outing.