The term “inkjet print”, which is very matter-of-fact, sounds really plain and is no money-jerker obviously. The galleries liked “gelatin silver print” much better I suppose. After trying “Iris print” (better already, but has the annotation of industrial tryout or proof print, not the big seller either), someone must have thought of the beauty and snob appeal of the French language. He came up with the new name for the good old inkjet print and called it “giclée”… Genius. Giclée (notice the exotic accent adding some noblesse) means “squirt” in French. They have beautiful words for almost everything, I love French, and beautiful things. Having said that, I go for the gelatin silver if you don’t mind (no matter what you call it).
…when I see what subtle details there are in many photographs that I have taken in a split second. Have I really seen all of those details or are they just coincidental. It’s hard to imagine you can notice so many things in such a short moment, and put them to work in a chosen frame while taking care of the technicalities as well in – say – 2 seconds. Still it works time after time!
Yesterday, when photographing in a crowded street, I noticed some youngsters’ curious looks when I opened the back of my Contax, took out the cassette by the film end sticking out and put in an undeveloped film from my pocket stock. Is this already becoming an exotic sight in this digital world, I thought. And would they consider it old school, nerdy, maybe cool… Anyway I love working with these Leica, Contax or Nikon cameras and hope that film will stay around, so I can keep doing my photography the way I like.
As my film was nearing the number of 36 exposures I always hoped that I would not be running out of film at the very moment it “got interesting”. I also remember the horror of a camera malfunctioning or a film breaking inside because of the winter temperatures once. Good thing I often take a lot, and it happens very fast, so that I do not remember every lost picture. Those are the risks of analog photography, but I love working on film. Sometimes, when you want to make sure you don’t miss any opportunities, it helps to work with 2 cameras. It gives more certainty and you have another 36 to go before you have to reload. Winogrand’s remark “There’s nothing happening when I’m reloading” may sound silly but the fact is that the photograph you haven’t made does not exist, except maybe in your imagination. Better to concentrate on what must be done, i.e. reloading! To every other photographer who likes analog, I’d like to say, keep pushing that film.
“I look at the pictures I have done up to now, and they make me feel that who we are and how we feel and what is to become of us just doesn’t matter. Our aspirations and successes have been cheap and petty. I read the newspapers, the columnists, some books, I look at some magazines (our press). They all deal in illusions and phantasies. I can only conclude that we have lost ourselves […..], we have not loved life.”
© Garry Winogrand, quote from Guggenheim grant application 1964.
When there was only “film” photography, as it is nowadays called, it was normal to have every good negative printed. Only the negatives that were no good, i.e. blurred, out of focus, completely black or transparent were not included with the prints that most people got from the photo shop. So almost every person, and certainly every family had their albums with annotated or anonymous pictures. Many had shoeboxes full of unsorted photographs. And there were the professional archives with still more. Many millions of tiny documents, mostly with the only intention of keeping memories alive of family and relatives, children, women and men in their daily surroundings, but mostly on holidays. But in this unimaginably big mass of images lies the collective memory of a people, of peoples, towns, countries, in fact the whole world.
Even when most of this material will never be seen by others, and in fact simply disappears from the face of the earth together with the people it depicts, there is a growing interest for the preservation of at least a selection of the photographic material that is available from various sources. These sources should cover both low culture and high culture for a broader insight. Cultural historians and sociologists (present and future) will be grateful for this. In many parts of the world institutions, museums, libraries and archives are active in the field of collecting and preserving our photographic heritage and a lot of good work in studying and analyzing has already been done.
With digital photography almost completely taking over amateur photography and large sections of professional and let’s say “art” photography, the print is not so self-evident anymore. Few people keep albums with prints; and the image, with all its historical/sociological/whatever importance, only exists in its virtual form. And when photo albums may survive, and may even go all the way from the fleamarket to the museum or archive, and thus be saved, the virtual image stored away on disks or in other ways practically invisible and inaccessible to others will disappear with its owner. This age might be a lot less well-documented photographically than the previous one in spite of the fact that everybody seems to be taking photographs. But where are the photographs?
I spoke to Robert Doisneau only once. On the phone. I was photographing in Paris at the time and I happened to find a few old prints of him. When I told him he wanted to know which ones, and commented that they were possibly used for one of his books. When I told him that I was a photographer myself he asked what my subject was, and when I said, people mainly, the conversation became even more personal. At the time he was at home a lot, taking care of his wife who was terminally ill and he probably did very little photography. He really took the time to talk about photography; then wanted to know what I liked best of his work and to my surprise suggested the humorous photographs and the series of the man with the cello, which I knew, but never liked. He said he hoped he had made people happy with his photographs. I felt like he was testing me, but politely answered, I liked those categories “pas tellement” (not so much), quickly adding that of the books he made “La Banlieue de Paris” (with the beautiful text by Blaise Cendrars about the impoverished Paris suburbs of 1949) was my all-time favorite. There was a silence, of surprise maybe, then his friendly voice, “mais c’est si triste!…” (but that’s so sad…) The only reason – and it felt almost like an excuse – that I could think of, was that I grew up in a suburb myself and I was touched by the atmosphere. He liked that.
“The compelling clarity with which a photograph recorded the trivial suggested that the subject had never before been properly seen, that it was in fact perhaps not trivial, but filled with undiscovered meaning. If photographs could not be read as stories, they could be read as symbols. […..] The great war photographer Robert Capa expressed both the narrative poverty and the symbolic power of photography when he said, “If your pictures aren’t good, you’re not close enough.”
John Szarkowski “The Photographer’s Eye” (Museum of Modern Art © 1966)
I own this photobook “Italia” by Guido Piovene (ed. Carlo Bestetti, Roma, 1955) with rather nice black and white photographs, of which I recognized a few rightaway. Where or when I bought it I don’t remember. I looked at the index…Alinari, Bischof, Cartier & Bresson…..Cartier & Bresson ??… was he still so unknown then that they took his name to be a cooperation between 2 different photographers ?
I think of Robert Frank (bless his somber spells – I adore his work!) who was quoted to have remarked: “So I’m famous, now what…” So what indeed. “On…” Samuel Beckett would have remarked. Now there’s another genius for you. But who’s reading his books nowadays (and I don’t mean Waiting for Godot). Well, there’s me, for one.
When I started taking photographs, ages ago, Henri Cartier-Bresson was the photographers’ pope so to speak. He had three dogmas for the believers, I had understood from reading the photo magazines and his own books (fortunately my French was not too bad):
first, there is a “decisive moment” for the photograph to be taken. Up to a point, there is certainly some truth in it, but some indecisive moments will do very well, I have meanwhile discovered. And it’s so irritating that every nitwit art critic with some general interest, preoccupied with knowledge but not even looking, comes up with this term to show he “knows about photography too”, even if there is no use for it.
second, you always used the whole negative, and sometimes even proudly showed you did so by including a subtle black border around the image on the paper print. There were even “styles” in the shaping of the outside of the border – some photographers used hand-torn carton frames to replace the narrow and sharp-edged metal frames that went with the enlarger. I even understood that Diane Arbus photographs (mostly posthumous prints) can be categorized and dated by their treatment of the image edge, soft without black border, narrow black border, uneven borders etc.
third, and here comes the f….word, you should never use flash, Cartier-Bresson said, since it was “intolerably aggressive”, destroying the atmosphere, making the presence of the intruding photographer very obvious, and in fact, changing the whole action. That’s what he said and I was not unhappy to have an excuse not to use it for I did not have a lot of experience with it.
Then came house parties. I had done little work with flash and felt insecure about it. I had an electronic flash unit that was basic, but clumsy. Its head turned when I brushed against somebody’s shoulder and people froze like wild animals caught in car lights because it was blinding. This had to change. I bought two identical dedicated Nikon speedlights, since I worked with two identical cameras as well. Using also identical settings was the ideal solution. I soon found out after experimenting on a few films what the best combination of depth of field/stepped down lighting was. I had given up the idea of using the room lights, as there were unworkable extremes and strobes and lots of darkness, which did not go well with the detail that I strived for; I wanted to fill the frame with relevant information till it almost burst. Flash made it all possible.That is how I overcame my initial fear of flashlight. I know I can use it for my kind of photography whenever I feel the need for it. Certainly in a house club with all its moving and pulsating lights no one will object either.
Heard on WDR German t.v. (about the picturesque town of Monschau): “If cameras had a motif alarm, this town would have a serious noise problem.” That’s one way to put it.