Jul 30
0

revealing

By | street photography

I came across a Dutch site called fotovisie.net announcing a contest for March 2009. Subject “street photography” – interesting maybe… Participants were asked to take photographs showing something “allowing the viewer to make up his own story about” [there’s the story-telling again!]. They also made some suggestions, which I will translate here, because they’re so revealing:

– people queuing at the subway or a building;

– old man on a bench reading a paper [an old favorite];

– someone feeding birds in a park;

– passers-by in a crowded street;

– loner on a bridge seen from afar [if that doesn’t do it!];

– child playing next to a parked car;

– animal feeding on the street;

– legs and bag on the stairs [seems a new favorite; very story-telling obviously];

– old car with new building in the background.

Where do people get this kind of inspiration? Looking at Photo Year Book 1937 or something? It’s 2009 for heaven’s sake, give us a taste of what’s going on. Don’t make a want list when you take your camera to the streets, show what’s there and open up to what you do not know already!

Jul 29
0

rain along the coast

By | photography

Why is it that we see so very few bad weather street shots? Does the sun always shine in your corner? It’s amazing what bad weather can add to your photography. Do go out sometime and take a safe camera. You don’t need an underwater or even an all-weather camera, my  good old Nikon FM (mechanical) will do fine for me, for instance. See how people react to bad weather, don’t be satisfied by just photographing the weather itself. It can be really inspiring…

Jul 29
0

you really wanna do street photography?

By | street photography

Street photography seems to be quite fashionable in some circles, judging from the heated debates about hipshooting, getting permission and using long lenses, that I occasionally find on the net. And when I look at some results of all these photographers who have overcome their fears, and proudly present their pictures, I see very little that was worth the trouble in the first place… I guess, with an urban mindset (whatever that is exactly) you can even do landscapes in street style (as the great Lee Friedlander proves), but otherwise the country boy/girl spirit will always show through in you images, most likely making them look like the day out in the big town that they probably are depicting.  So the thing to ask yourself is: do I really want to confront all these people, what do I want to show… Not the pitiful homeless beggar again please. Or the living statue in front of that poster.

Jul 19
0

say “Ali”

By | photography

Just saw part 10 of the “The Road to Mecca” by Belgian t.v. documentary-maker Jan Leyers, in which he meets Saudi Arabian female (the first ever!) photographer Susan Baaghil, who asks to travel with the t.v. crew. We see her taking innocent shots of colorful windows in a street and a woman making ornaments on the market, who willingly poses: “shukran” . She has studied in the U.S.A., but prefers to adapt to certain rules at home. Her doubts about her own profession possibly being a sin according to her religion become clear when she tells that she checked with a scholar during her hadj to Mecca. The answer was that photography is permitted because you don’t create anything new, it is only a reflection. Of which we all take notice!…

In her office (entrance sign: “women only”) we saw that Susan Baaghil had taken the necessary precautions, all the large portraits of brides had their faces covered with business cards of the photographer! One funny aspect, when we saw her taking some more happy-go-lucky pictures of a family on the beach, she asked them to yell “Ali” instead of cheese.

Jul 18
0

special delivery mystery film

By | photography

When I was in Egypt, in 1989, towards the end of my 5 weeks journey I ran out of film. No problem, I thought, after all I was in Luxor which is a tourist center with a lot of shops. I went to a local photographer, who said that black and white was a long gone item in Egypt, no one had asked for it for years!  I noticed that he cast a quick glance at my Nikons too see if maybe they were antique too… To my surprise none of the photographing tourists I had spoken to that day used Tri-X, let alone had some spare stuff to sell to me. The friendly Egyptian saw my disappointment, and said he could phone a family member who took official photographs for passports, and was bound to have some black and white film left. The only problem was that he lived in another town, I forget which, but if I paid a little extra for the trip if he could deliver them before tomorrow. At first I thought this was a clever con trick, but since he did not ask for a prepayment of the amount of money he asked – which was indeed reasonable – I agreed.

As promised I was contacted late that night at my hotel by the good man who proudly produced 5 or 6 refilled plastic cartridges with black and white film of mysterious origin. I was both glad that he had gone through all the hassle for me (for the little extra money) and disappointed by the fact that it was not sealed and packaged film (and so little of it) with no proper name and a date on it. After thanking and paying the man I inspected the material closer. The cassettes had probably had a long and fulfilling life of endless refilling because the felt entrance looked as worn, flattened and dirty as the hotel entrance carpet. After all I did not dare put them in the one Nikon body that had survived the desert sand storm of a few days back. So I rationed the few remaining Tri-X’s I had left…

Jul 16
0

for Vali Myers

By | photography

It’s July 1988, Paris is hot, very hot and tourists have taken over the town. The Parisians have left for the coast or their country house and the wooden panels are fastened in front of the shop windows. I’m glad I have found a cheap room in the Hôtel d’Alsace Lorraine, 14 rue des Canettes that my friend Peter, the African Art dealer from Amsterdam has mentioned to me. It is situated in a very old building in one of the streets of the rive gauche that leads up to the monumental Place Saint Sulpice, where I like to sit in the shadow of the trees. Going up the stairs of the old hotel I noticed the framed newspaper clipping, telling that the concierge of this hotel used to be Madame Céleste Albaret, the gouvernante of Marcel Proust. The whole place breathes history; I already bumped my head very hard on one of its mediaeval oak beams which runs right through the middle of my small room, which is entresol, halfway two floors, the toilet is nondescript with a door made of planks with holes. In the sunny morning I wake up to the unfamiliar noises of a Paris street. I make a good start of the day and take a few pictures of my bed: the pushed-back blankets are the rolling waves of a restless sea and the old faded wallpaper has a repeating pattern of a sky with hovering seagulls…

Back in Holland I visit my friend Ed van der Elsken, who likes to hear about my trip to Paris. He inquires about my photography and asks where I stayed. He reacts very surprised when I tell him about the Hôtel d’Alsace Lorraine. He urges me to describe the room. “But that’s Vali’s room!” he exclaims, and his light blue eyes stare at me, “Tom, that’s incredible, that’s the room where she lived 30 years ago! She always had the curtains drawn and lived in a dream world, addicted to opium, only came out at night during that period… What a coincidence… and you never knew?…” When I tell him about the photograph I took in that room with the imaginary dreamtime seascape he seems almost moved, says he wants to see it soon, “bring it next time”. In his book “Elsken:PARIS 1950-1954” (Libroport Co. Ldt., Tokyo, 1985) Ed, the Dutch photographer, quotes Vali telling how madame Céleste watched over her like a mother during that vulnerable time. She proudly said to a visitor “You are going up to see the strange one, my favorite jewel.”

I titled the picture “Sea of dreams (for Vali Myers)”  You can have a look at some of my Paris photographs from that period at http://www.tomstappers.com . The photograph “Sea of dreams (for Vali Myers)” can be seen at http://www.photogalaxy.com/photo/tomstappers/2/?m=0.0.0.tomstappers.az

Ed promised to introduce me to Vali, but I only saw her at his funeral in the old church of Edam and standing at his grave afterwards, in thoughts. She was smaller than I had imagined her, fiery hair, tattoos, quiet, unapproachable, almost shy. It was such a sad day, I did not talk to her. One look – all. There’s a photograph of her on my wall that I often look at in passing.

Jul 13
0

hipshots, horizons, and eye levels of dwarfs and giants

By | street photography

In earlier posts I have argued that hipshooting is simply bad street photography. Now you probably know that your horizon is always at eye level, no matter how high or low you’re standing. This means that unless you’re a dwarf or a giant, and given the fact that you should look through the finder at the moment of exposure to do your framing, the horizon will just about go “through” the eyes of the people coming at you on a crowded pavement. This will give away many of the hipshot-type photographs, that is, if you had not already noticed the clunky or haphazardous framing!

I know that Garry Winogrand said on several occasions that he did not advocate shooting from the hip. He was very much in control of his framing, in spite of what some (obviously bad) observers of his work conclude. Nevertheless I used to be puzzled by a number of his better-known photographs that have very low horizons, shot from the hip? He certainly would not have been sitting on the curb!  And he was a tall guy… A friend of mine, who is a remarkable street photographer himself, has one such original Winogrand print on his wall, which I was studying. It was certainly taken from a low vantage point! Did Garry not practice what he preached… Then I noticed a vague dark line at the bottom. Problem solved: no hipshot, but one of his occasional “drive-by shootings”. This one was taken from a car window at a street corner. Perfect image, what incredible timing.

Jul 09
0

gotcha

By | photography

There it was after all – suddenly this afternoon the Google Street View car crossed my way, thoughtlessly adding my image to the world inventory on the internet. I was very close to home in Voorburg, Netherlands, but I will be almost unrecognizable, since (untypically) I had no camera with me… It was a strange moment being registered for the world to see by a traveling set of cameras on top of a car, without the conscious intervention of a human. (I noticed myself mentally checking what I would look like.) In fact its haphazard machine-generated definiteness and the prospect of a long-time unwilled worldwide visibility is quite a different experience from gracefully moving through the field of a surveillance camera which is by its nature more ephemeral. I’m not so much thinking of the privacy implications; a lot is already being said about it, both false and true. What really interests me – apart from the personal experience – is the suggestion of absolute objectivity, which is nonsense, come to think of it: you will see no traffic jam, because the Google car can’t get through, busy streets may be empty at certain hours or during the holidays, there will be no parades or demonstrations, no dirt roads or tracks, no twilight, no nights, no bad weather even! And most unreal, all these blurred texts and faces; it must be said: fascinating, but so unsatisfactory an image of an incomplete world. Keep taking those photographs yourself, put your soul in your images, it does take you to do it.

Jul 08
0

Szarkowski misquoted on Capa

By | photography

“Every picture tells a story, don’t it”, Rod Stewart sings… Well…no, not if it’s a photograph. Garry Winogrand says there isn’t a photograph in the world that tells a story, and consequently he doesn’t have any storytelling responsability. He should know, he has taken a few in his lifetime. A photograph shows what something looks like…to a camera. Szarkowski agrees; the great MoMA scholar was a personal friend of Winogrand (it was him who first recognized the photographer’s importance, and in fact genius), and must have discussed this subject with him.

In “Photography: a Critical Introduction” (third edition) edited by Liz Wells there is an almost Freudian misquotation of the text written by John Szarkowski from “The Photographer’s Eye”: “The great war photographer Robert Capa expressed both the narrative property [sic] and the symbolic power of photography when he said “If your pictures aren’t good, you’re not close enough.”  This should have read “narrative poverty” since this is the point Szarkowski is making! To a lot of people it really remains very hard to believe there is no story in the photograph, and we don’t find the clear cut truth most of us seem to find so comforting. “Your photograph is like a little story” is still considered a compliment, since people assume that’s what you are striving for; and it’s not nice to ask, “what story…”