With the addition of three more series today my website has come fullsize, though ready for more. The number of photographs shown has risen to 123 now, so it’s a more varied look at my work, and since the boundaries between subjects are not strict, you will already get glimpses of other subjects yet to come. So keep coming back for more, and for now have a look at the newly uploaded photoseries Paris, periphery (of The Hague) and Egypt on www.tomstappers.com ! Accompanying texts on this blog.
“In photography the formal issue might be stated as this: How much of the camera’s miraculous descriptive power is the photographer capable of handling?”
(John Szarkowski about a Garry Winogrand photograph in “Looking at Photographs” ©1973, MoMA)
I’ve just been selecting photographs from the following series: Paris (1970’s-1990’s), Egypt ( January-February 1989) and Periphery ( June-November 1991). Only “Periphery”, an assignment by the town of The Hague where I grew up on the eastern town border (autobiographical), was on my former website already, although the selection may be slightly different. The other two are new on the net. There’s more to come, e.g. gypsies, tattoo, jazz musicians, London, Barcelona and other cities… If you want to buy a personal favorite from these added or earlier photographs for your collection (reasonably priced signed gelatin silver prints 30×40 cm.), be welcome to email me. The 3 current series have been scanned and will be uploaded to my photosite www.tomstappers.com in the next few days, probably soon after Easter. Do visit, I think they’re interesting allright, and keep an eye on this blog. I will comment on my photography in several more posts to come!
“Winogrand has made chaos clearly visible; he has disciplined it without breaking its spirit. It is not supremely difficult to make a clear picture of a truism, and it is easier still to hold up a mirror to the maelstrom and call it art. But to see and set down with acuity the flickering meanings that illuminate the menagerie we perform in – this is a creative miracle.”
© John Szarkowski (1925-2007), former curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, in his Afterword to “The Animals” (MoMA 1969); great mind, a master of language and one of the few real connoisseurs of photography- he taught us all because he understood…
You know the Diane Arbus photograph of the creepy kid with the toy handgrenade, looking as if he could kill his own mother? Someone once remarked -and I found it to be both funny and true- can you imagine some manager hanging that picture proudly on the wall behind his managerial desk in the big office room? He might fear the reaction from a visitor: “O, nice, your grandson, I suppose.”
Photographs with strangers on them don’t seem to be attractive as a decoration. Much too confronting, too personal. People who have the taste and the money to buy a good photograph will still prefer a landscape (in color most of the time) or something perfectly meaningless, but aesthetic, to the more problematic work of say, Robert Frank or Winogrand. So, if you want to make money from photography without having to wait for fame, forget street photography. Do it for passion or you will be disappointed big time.
The subject came up again some time ago: how many of the photographs you have taken on a certain occasion do you really use in the end? I remember talking about it one afternoon years ago with my friend Ed van der Elsken, looking at the peacocks outside his farmhouse near Edam. He was known to be a prolific shooter and wondered what my results were. His were about one “usable” (as he called it) picture for every film, so 1 out of 36. By usable he meant “worth publishing” by the way, not “technically o.k.” of course, and he had a good eye for catchy images! Neither of us used motor drives then, needless to say. I had to think of it, but thought that overall, my results matched his 1 out of 36.
When I did use motordrives for the house parties series, the numbers went up quite naturally, and after one of these many nights I came home at 4.30 a.m. tired, but with 14 exposed films in my pockets, my best result until then. As I had agreed that my hit score was about the same as Ed’s it was reasonable to expect something like 10 to 14 great pictures, for I had not even made excessive use of the motordrive (I never do, preferring the single exposure mode to sequences). This was not bad at all, but of course it’s only the “rough material” for laying out a series, and more than one perfect image gets edited out later. In fact, the more choice you have, the better the series will be in the end.
Plants surround us, nearly always. But most people don’t notice. I myself look at plants all the time; can’t help photographing them too. Whatever subject I’m working on. Their forms fascinate me, especially untamed. For we try to impose our shortsighted ideas about beauty and neatness upon them. We put them in straight rows, we clip their branches, we even use the chainsaw to cut down in a few minutes what took maybe centuries to grow. And for what, what ugliness takes its place? I like the way vegetation fills the spaces we leave to it, there’s drama and vitality in the way plants struggle to survive our combined efforts to select, replace or reshape them. They are our steady company. Living at a different pace they remind us of life and death. Their apparent chaos is just order of a different kind, not recognised by most of us…
Garry Winogrand, my favorite photographer and doubtless the greatest street photographer ever, nevertheless hated that term as he hated categorisations in general. Here are some more interesting quotes from his famous interview with Barbaralee Diamonstein: …”I think that those kind of distinctions and lists of titles like “street photographer” are so stupid. […] I’m a photographer, a still photographer. That’s it. […] People are just dumb. They misunderstand.”
[…] “I’m pretty fast with a camera when I have to be. However, I think it’s irrelevant. I mean, what if I said that every photograph I made was set up? From the photograph you can’t prove otherwise. You don’t know anything from the photograph about how it was made, really. […] The whole discussion is a way of not talking about photographs. [What is really important] is the photograph.”Asked what he wanted to evoke with his photographs, he answers: “I have no ideas on that subject. I’m not making ads. I couldn’t care less. Everybody’s entitled to their own experience.”
Garry Winogrand (tv interview by Barbaralee Diamonstein ©1981 “Visions and Images”, Rizzoli Int. Publ. Inc.)
When I started taking photographs of house parties I had to choose the right camera for the job. I had a long time experience with several Nikon models, so that’s what I took along. They were strong, easy to operate (I had practised changing films in complete darkness, which came in handy!). I used 2 identical FE’s with 28mm’s (the old type, which has a wider spaced and therefore more precise indication of close range on the distance ring). For use in the dark I later even added white paint markers on some close range distances that I used a lot. The 2 identical flashlights were preset for the same expected range. I also took care not to use the blinding full blast to spare my subjects. Not that many of them noticed the flash at all amongst the room lights and the occasional strobe…
I tried to use the viewfinder as much as I could for composing, but sometimes it was so dark that I saw nothing. In that case I put my eye as close to the finder as possible, and looked alongside it, using my experience in aiming to get the “framing” as precise as possible. Surprisingly, this worked most of the time. What I liked a lot was the extra grip provided by the motordrives, making up for their – considerable – added weight.
One time when the 2 cameras+speedlights+motordrives around my neck worked against me was the unlucky night when I slipped on the steep perforated steel stairs that lead up to the dj, causing their combined weight to make me loose my balance. In falling the stairs made a long cut in my forehead, causing a lot of bleeding. Fortunately that was all, but nevertheless I was rushed to a hospital, leaving my cameras at the club. When I collected them later, there was blood all over and I had to take them to the official Nikon repair department. They looked at me and then at the cameras, inquiring what war zone I came from… By the way, both Nikons were o.k. after cleaning, just a small scratch. Good camera for a war zone.
So you don’t wanna be seen on Google Street. Wear stuff with a lot of faces on – they’ll blur you out.