Words to Images

When you put a new film into your camera, you take 2 or 3 shots after closing the camera back, to make sure that the piece of film sticking out of the cassette is wound up. No attention was given to the (manual) settings, like exposure or distance, while you pointed mostly to the ground while taking the necessary blind shots. Now a fresh part of film which has not seen any light was ready for the first take. 

After printing the whole film on a contact sheet when I had finished the 36 or so frames, I always looked at those first two unplanned images with wonder. These blind shots showed a strange world with light flares, blurs, unidentifiable objects, often unsharp, or my own feet on a variety of pavements, grass, lights and shadows. It kind of fascinated me always, but something told me not to use any of it, because I felt somehow that I did not really create these pictures.

Still I sometimes printed the occasional mysterious frame which preceded number 1 (which in those days - the 1960’s - came with the intriguing numbers 84 to 88 on Agfa film. If you were lucky it might even have a large film type perforation right through it, adding as it were something of an identification, some importance, to a piece of irrelevant reality that had portrayed itself.

Of course, I wasn’t the only photographer to notice the interesting film beginnings, so one day I saw a collection of prints made by a number of well-known Dutch photographers of such random images that had appeared on their first few frames. The chosen results indicated that not everybody was willing to show completely uncontrolled imagery, however. Some obviously insisted that even their “unintentional” frames were “part of” their output, potentially interesting, or that it looked like their known work, their “normal” photographs, but only a bit “off”…

Giving up all control, and showing the unpersonalised picture must have been asking too much of them. You have to be free and certain about yourself first, to get on friendly terms with coincidence, it seems.

How do you find your subjects? The question arises when people are really interested in photography, but cannot put themselves in the role of a photographer, especially not a street photographer. When I think about it, I don’t often go look for subjects myself. I go out and come across them sooner or later, if not today maybe another time. Other photographers may do so too. Obviously my all-time favorite Garry Winogrand made good use of what he called the omnivorous nature of the camera, pointing it at every interesting situation involving people, on a daily basis. He started with sports photography, stage photography, he photographed both the politicians of the day and his own family (it is said that he took a picture of his children every day he put them on the school bus, almost a ritual); he photographed festivities, parades, the zoo that he took his children to, and above all, street life: happy, lonely, indifferent passers-by, women, other women and more women, a life-long fascination. Walking the endless pavements downtown, as well as countless suburban streets, carparks, malls, airports, boardwalks, you name it… People blown like bits of paper in the wind through the inhospitable streets of life. People lost in thoughts, in love or phantasies, in pain, looking for meaning. He one of them… You ask me how to find a subject ? If you go out, it stares you right in the eye.

This morning I heard on BBC radio that there was an exhibition by what was announced as one of the most famous photographers in the world, Steve McCurry. The name sounded vaguely familiar , but did not immediately ring a bell. The interviewer asked the photographer what was it in a certain individual that got him interested enough to approach that person to start photographing him for some time, was it his or her behavior, the clothes, maybe the eyes ? The eyes ? Then I suddenly had the picture in mind: the Afghan girl with the light eyes !  The photographer started telling about a Sri Lankan fisherman that he made contact with, and how his own enthusiasm inspired his subject to cooperate in making beautiful pictures for National Geographic magazine.

Many photography enthusiasts around the world see the photographs of this magazine as sort of an ideal, because of their colorful aesthetics and idealized exotism in the “what a beautiful world” vein. Even when the subjects sometimes touch on the darker sides of life like poverty, natural disasters and human misfortune, it maintains a heroic and balanced colorful view of the world. When misery is shown, it’s hell without the smell, in other words coffee-table worthy. To many this imagery has come to represent how the world looks, a theme park for modern man to be explored, with interesting peoples to be met (and photographed) including their colorful traditions. An invitation for travel indeed.

Inevitably, the conversation comes to the girl with the eyes, the only photo I know by the man. The photographer tells the story again that we already know, stressing the fact that all was done with permission, and that the family had been compensated with a hadj to Mecca, their greatest wish, paid for by National Geographic. In a way I’m relieved to hear they really let them decide, and have not offered to take them to, let’s say Disneyland… The girl - now married to a local baker - also asked for education for her two children. Steve McCurry says that the response to the famous photograph varied widely, from people wanting to adopt the then young poor girl, and even people wanting to marry her after seeing her picture, to an amazing number of sales and publications.

This clearly raises the question, is this really all about “great photography”. Apart from recognizing beauty and skillfully portraying it - or presenting it to the world in a well-organized and packaged way (the cover of National Geographic no less …) the photograph is not a milestone in the photographic sense, it is the girl herself who is so enchanting with her wild beauty, unspoilt innocense, worlds apart from the pleasing sexiness that has become the standard pose we have become all too familiar with in our commercial culture. They even made a followup documentary, searching for the girl now grownup. Even with all the respect and compensation afterwards I have the feeling that this is marketing and hyping of the highest order. Great photography ? Not particularly, I think. The girl in the picture is stunning, her eyes are unforgettable, and we never would have looked at such beauty, were it not for Steve McCurry. But I don’t think I need to see the fisherman whose image was put in the “definitely art” category by the interviewer’s admiring remark that “the image made her think of a Dali”. The exhibition was ”worth a look”, she concluded. The least Steve McCurry might hope for, anyway the Afghan girl is a classic.

“…. most significant photographer of his generation, as his much-respected admirers claim. [....]  He revels in the camera’s unique ability to collect facts. His range is considerable and occasionally his talent is seamed with genius. There is no other way to describe instinctive reactions of such acute visual intelligence and wit.”

© Bryn Campbell in his Introduction to World Photography (Ziff-Davis Books, New York 1981)

I have been editing old contact prints, and quite a few at that. You can only do so much in one run, it’s tiring. After a few hundred you have to pause or you don’t really LOOK anymore - and you have to be aware of minute details sometimes!  It’s your second chance of making the right choice - educated and instinctive - from the material that you have brought together in the past. You lookthink and themes emerge; even though I never work in projects, there is a clear preference for certain subjects. The individual in the crowd, possibilities and difficulties of communication, the human condition. Those moments that some higher meaning shines through like a ray of sun on a cloudy day…

How to get content in an otherwise interesting picture. I have already decided that while taking the photograph (this is analog photography, what you see is what you get). It is the art of instantaneously choosing the elements that can do the magic within the frame, the personal symbolism. The old metaphors won’t do anymore, moreover it’s rare you encounter the white horse of freedom with its waving manes on mainstreet, so you find your own images to carry your thoughts. You may look for one thing, find another, and still be happy. Improvising, being open to the world around you is what street photography is about. Analog photography with a small camera is perfect, I’m sure it has a future. There’s so much freedom in showing your reality, no matter what others call it: humanistic, political, individualistic, poetic, religious, they are all only aspects of our appreciation of  ”the world”, but meaning and a growing understanding of it should be the criterium, not the fashion of the moment.

Some days ago I was seeking cover from the spring rain that came pouring down in the busy Amsterdam streets where I was photographing. Shoppers and tourists alike were huddling together in a covered passage between two streets, suddenly standing shoulder to shoulder looking at each other. I was holding my camera in my coat pocket, finger on the trigger as it were, ready for whatever was coming. As the small crowd was accumulating I spotted another photographer with his camera around his neck; I knew him because he has also been photographing  people in the streets of Amsterdam for a long time. From time to time I almost bump into him because I like to move around in the crowd while he often stands at a strategic spot like a rock in the sea, watching the passers-by. We don’t speak though, as I get the impression that he doesn’t like to as he avoids eye contact. I’ve seen some of his work on the internet, and have read that he wanted to photograph people’s activities in the streets and group these pictures into categories, which would eventually lead to some kind of encyclopaedia. He actually has a small book out with such pictures and categories. I looked it through and concluded that his approach is that of a collector. He adds pictures of eating people to more pictures of eaters in the streets, etc. He uses a digital camera, shoots a lot from the hip (therefore does not compose in the finder/on the screen), crops his photographs. A very different approach from mine, so it’s interesting for me to see if the results are very different and what these differences are. After all my approach is more like hunting, I don’t stand and wait, but I move continually, trying to find the hotspots looking for action or turmoil in the crowd, a technique I developed in the years I did my photography amongst the night-long dance parties of the house era. What I look for is that special moment that the banal suddenly shows something of a higher order which lifts the scene above the everyday moment. That’s what I am hunting for.

“Throughout his career, Brandt used photographs to tell stories, and London in the Thirties is a collection of three stories.” The well-known photobook by Bill Brandt from which I cite, contains 96 photographs, showing in 3 chapters his pictures of a vanishing class society in what was later to become the “A day in the life of…” -style. His observations of both high and low class Londoners are individually strong images of iconic value, which in their combination tell the story of a society holding on to old values and traditions which are bound to change. The photographs describe, their juxtapositions tell a story…

quote: © Mark Haworth-Booth, Victoria and Albert Museum, London: introduction to Bill Brandt: London in the Thirties” (Pantheon Books, New York 1984)

I looked up this old tape I had with a Bill Brandt interview. The sound had deteriorated some, but then he did not talk much. Bill Brandt, then already an old man, was not just a gentleman, but a gentle man. Soft-spoken, almost shy, he looked at his own photographs as if he had not seen them for a long time, reliving the moments of their taking, but without sentimentality. Looking at each picture for a long time he remembers the circumstances, the light mainly. Composition: that’s how it was, what it looked like - almost an excuse. “Decisive moment?” - there is a naughty boyish smile on his face - “sounds like Cartier-Bresson”, he says, “no, I don’t believe in that.” Several times he remarked that his nudes were his favorite photographs, but at the time nobody liked them. He was fascinated by playing with perspective, such as including the ceilings of rooms and the optical deformation of parts of the female body done with a special camera with a wide-angle lens. He tried color, but did not like it. When the portraits come by, he is surprised by the remark that almost every person is placed very excentrical: “O, really, I hadn’t noticed that” and starts checking. A very modest man indeed.

“Interestingly enough, the snapshot’s significance in modifying our attitude toward picture content and structure has been quite remarkable. [....]  [It] has contributed greatly to the visual vocabulary of all graphic media since before the turn of the century [e.i. before 1900, TS].

Friedlander on one rare occasion simply stated: “I’m interested in people and people things”. Winogrand in an interview with Mary Orovan in U.S.Camera suggested “For me the true business of photography is to capture a bit of reality (whatever that is) on film….   if, later, the reality means something to someone else, so much the better.”

I do not find it hard to believe that photographers who have been concerned with the question of the authentic relevance of events and objects should consciously or unconsciously adopt one of the most authentic picture forms photography has produced. The directness of their commentary of “people and people things” is not an attempt to define but to clarify the meaning of the human condition.”

© Nathan Lyons: “Toward A Social Landscape” (George Eastman House of Photography, Rochester, New York 1966)

[....]” categories are for sorting photographs, not photographers. Photographers tend to make certain kinds of images with some consistency, but they also make departures from their usual work. [....] Photographs may fit well in more than one category, and more than one category may apply to any single photograph.”

Terry Barrett (the Ohio State University): “Criticizing Photographs: an introduction to understanding images” 2nd ed. (Mayfield Publishing Company, Mountain View,  Cal., 1996).

When the great Bill Brandt learned about the poem that Ralph Mills had written about one of his photographs (the famous “Ear on the Beach”,1957)

© Bill Brandt

he wrote back: “This is my favourite photograph, and I thought I knew the picture, but your poem has taught me to look at it quite differently. I am delighted.” Everyone is entitled to his own interpretation. Happy 2010.

I got a call for my permission to use a certain photograph in an upcoming exhibition by a group of new documentary photographers. They had to choose an “old” photograph from the municipal archives for inspiration, and one of them chose my 1968 picture of some gypsy caravans on an open space near where I lived in The Hague. I looked up the negatives, and the four-digit number clearly showed the distance in time between then and now. Since I am now rapidly approaching the number of 80,000 negatives I’m suddenly aware of all the pictures I have taken in all those years, all the many different subjects. Maybe because it’s that time of the year again - everybody’s looking back, automatically you look back too, it’s like in a crowd - but it is a new experience that somebody now chooses one of my early photographs for inspiration. I was more used to thinking in terms of being inspired myself…

When William A. Ewing, the author of the the photobook “Love and Desire” (Chronicle Books / Thames and Hudson 1999, and a number of editions in various languages) asked me if he could use one of my house parties pictures, he wanted to know, did I perhaps have more photographs that could be grouped under this heading. O, sure, was my instantaneous reaction. Come to think of it, in fact most of my photography is about love and desire; especially when you think of it in the widest sense, apart from the purely physical or erotic connotations. Photography may well be seen as an act of love and desire; the love of life itself in all of its manifestations and sudden beauty, the desire to experience and partake, to observe and understand, to capture and share and maybe even own some of it.

This is what I also realized when I recently looked once again at some books by Garry Winogrand. To me he remains the greatest observer of life’s miracles at street level, but who elevated photography far above the business of making a buck or making an impression. His maniacal search for images of life going on all around him (he left a third of a million pictures at the time of his death) could only be stopped by his untimely passing away, and even his closest friends could only guess what he was striving for in the images that he had taken during his latest years, once they looked in bewilderment at the proofed and printed results from the bagloads of undeveloped films they found at his house. If you could call him an addict, he wasn’t addicted to photography, but to experiencing and getting to grips with life where he discovered it: on the very streets of his own life.

Original prints by well-known photographers have become very expensive. Many collectors have moved to collecting photography books instead, rather than looking for less famous names and photographers whose work is still available and sometimes just as interesting. Martin Parr’s publication The Photobook about what he considers to be the most important  photobooks did the rest. Personally I don’t care which photobooks are hot or not, I know what I like and I will buy the occasional book that I love (and if you read my blog or visit my website www.tomstappers.com  you won’t be surprised that it’s mostly black and white photography, of which a big part is street photography, and no digital). I prefer the original print, there’s nothing to beat it, and one of my own signed 30/40 silvergelatin prints for instance, is still cheaper than some of these collectable photobooks, so ….

© Garry Winogrand

When Winogrand seems a little blunt in his verbal statements and his answers during interviews it appears to me that this is a way of not showing his very sensitive nature. This sensitivity is clear from countless subtle hints in the visual content of his imagery and its psychological depth and implications. The clarity with which he shows us certain painful scenes isn’t cruelty, but respectful compassion, not inhibited by false shame and never shunning confrontation with what might shock us. Such is honesty - never mind the repercussions of the would-be preachers of morality who don’t even dare look at real life. Garry was a brave and passionate observer who doesn’t only show the triumphs of man, but also gives us a glimpse of human despair, failure and seediness. His endless quest for the facts (in his words “what things look like”) of his and our lives is as heroic as that of all the great artists of all times and places. It’s time people learned to see….

Cartier-Bresson showed us life as a graceful ballet, Winogrand gave us the backstage as well…

I have come across photographer’s sites where every photograph is accompanied by a price tag and a shopping cart symbol. Obviously the author of those images wants to make it very easy for a possible buyer and/or wants to give the impression that it is a commonplace thing to buy a print. This, however, is not my experience at all. I don’t have a shopping cart on my site (neither do I want to appear to be an image pedlar, it doesn’t even actually pay off…). Safe payment systems like PayPal and others make it easy to buy for (aspiring) collectors, but they seem to prefer to buy through galleries (and pay the extra amount). Being a collector myself as well as a photographer I am willing to go the extra mile if I want something. Fortunately my work is in demand with certain international museums, and you can see for yourself on my site that it does have quality. If I did not get the occasional collector visiting me too, like happened today - I might start to doubt whether any other collector reading this, after enjoying my site, would ever contact me for wanting to own some of my work. So if you do, let me know…

…Personally I was struck [by the image of]…young people showing a great sense of self-awareness of their own beauty. Christian Perring Ph.D., Metapsychology Online Review

…very striking and powerful… Susan Krane, University of Colorado

…lively documentation of the club scene in Holland. [...] The heat is almost palpable. Gordon Baldwin, The J.Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

…There are so many that I like (or should I say: that appeal to me)… Georges Vercheval, Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi (Belgium)

Whereas other photographers [...] seem to be mainly fascinated by the extreme and the bizarre [...] Stappers has consciously attempted to catch the deeper meaning of his observations [...] giving shape to a subjective experience… Joost Meesters, Het Belang van Limburg, Hasselt (Belgium)

I have been asked why my site is called Tom Stappers|Photographer instead of Tom Stappers|Fotograaf (in Dutch) and why the blog “Words to Images” is in English only. The answer is simple: I want to reach everybody who’s interested and my orientation is international anyway. What needs to be excused maybe, is that I have blocked any comments on my blog. This is part of the concept of the site, which incorporates the blog as the only textual content, making it possible to concentrate completely on the images that fill the frame (being “liquid”), and that you could even zoom into (your software allowing) as if you were looking from extremely close distance. Besides, I was happy to avoid comments of the type “Well done, lol !” or long academic -or otherwise boring- discussions. Deep-linking is also avoided on the blog and neither does the website have a links section. To those it concerns thanks for your understanding.

In the world of archives large scale digitizing of black and white photographic negatives is going on at the moment. Specialized companies are explaining to the experienced and unexperienced public alike that this is urgent business, because these photographic negatives would be deteriorating. (Question: doesn’t digital material deteriorate, and at what rate do both methods compare?). Moreover, they point out, “the negatives are often hidden in badly accessible archives, and the digitalized files are easier to handle for non-technical staff”. This being true or not true, the big problem is that much valuable and irreplaceable material has already been destroyed and this is ongoing…. No film photographer will want to throw away his negatives, and will be shocked to hear that others do. Only today a friend told me that she had thrown away a large group of old family negatives that supposedly were “no good anymore”, and the children had prints of most photographs anyway. Maybe people think it is, or soon will be impossible to have b&w negatives printed anymore. Another piece of history gone.

“Narrative” implies the passing of time, because change, a certain development, is taking place. Narrative photography would therefore look something like a photo novel (phantasy) or at least a flashburst sequence of a few seconds, capturing a movement (reality). You can guess “what is happening” in a photograph, but you can never be really sure, things may look like they do for that one single moment only  (and never before or after).  The suggestion may be a perfect lie, if we consider reality to be the truth.

Stop this Flickr nightmare, all the hundreds of thousands of unwanted, unnecessary extras that come free with the few undisputed good ones on all of the massive photosites - whatever their names -, where everybody’s an artist and volume is a virtue! Show us only your very best work - select, select, SELECT ! And don’t be so normal. Mediocrity is the norm.

I know by now what kind of images I want to make. Your eyes should dance with excitement exploring all the visual elements and points of interest that make up the image: light and dark, suggestions of closeness and distance, movements frozen into beauty of shape, possible symbols. Those are facts, is there a meaning? Discovering what’s inside the frame should be an adventure, not a checklist. There’s so little to go by, o.k., there’s the definition and the details - we feel assured by that - there’s the placement, the suggestions and hints. But there are no sounds, smells, colors or movement for me to include, yet I must create a little cosmos of interconnections, of possibilities and realities within or (suggested) without the frame!  This is all done improvising like a jazz musician, instantly and “onstage”, no second thoughts or withdrawals. This is it and this is exactly what you get. Don’t expect me to connect the dots for you (I may even throw in some extra dots); I can only do so much for making the picture alive, and relevant to your experience.

When house parties were still considered a new and exciting phenomenon by the museum world in the Netherlands (the famous “low culture”!), I heard that the Kunsthal in Rotterdam was planning an exhibition about this subject (doubtlessly with a new, young public in mind). So I made an appointment with the then manager/photography curator, who said he was very interested. I went to Rotterdam, taking a selection of my house parties series.  After looking at my series of photographs he seemed a bit puzzled - was it that he wanted this subject in “more contemporary” color I wondered, had he expected a wild kid with speedy eyes and uneasy manners? Or, since this was Rotterdam, a young stoner skinhead photographer from the gabber scene? -.  None of that, after a pause gathering his thoughts, came his verdict: interesting photographs but this is not how I imagine a house party looks(!). My slightly irritated reaction, something like - o, I’m happy I seem to have avoided the clichés then… - did not go down so well. He gave me his card, mumbled something about sending an invitation for the opening, blablah. I left, thinking about how people really only want to see confirmation of what they already know, or more likely think they know…. Why? And should it upset me…no, I couldn’t care less.