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Since around late 2009, I've picked up a new hobby -- photography.
Apparently it is one of the most popular hobbies in the world.
In the mid-1990s, I used to take a lot of pictures. This was with a
Minolta X700 that I found in my Mom's closet, usually with
Kodachrome. The lens was a 50/1.4. I took some good pictures with
that combo. Some of the prints are still on my wall in frames. The
originals are around somewhere, but I haven't found them alas. I
would like to scan them and make some new/better/bigger prints. Lots
of very nice frames were never printed. Unfortunately, that camera
was stolen, and for the next decade I just used a point-and-shoot
digital camera, mostly for selling things on eBay.
In late 2009, mostly inspired by the example of Galen Rowell, I
decided to get back into it. Not like I need more hobbies. But, I
think I wanted something that was artistic in nature.
Like many things, photography has a lot of pitfalls and dead-ends.
Maybe more than most. I've learned this over the past three years.
I would say that 80% of serious photography hobbyists are
gear-twiddlers. They don't actually like taking pictures, but rather
playing with the possibilities of different gear. They follow new
camera releases assiduously, and have an impressive collection of
expensive lenses. Often, they take pictures that look sort of
artistic -- often "street photography" -- but they never really get
beyond filling their hard drives with these shots.
Of the remaining 20%, 19% are snapshot/record photographers. They
take thousands of pictures of their kids and vacations, often with
impressive camera setups costing upwards of $3000. In the past, they
would fill boxes with prints, mostly unedited, or carousels of
slides. Today, they fill hard drives with thousands and thousands of
unedited shots. The process tends to stop at the taking and storing,
and never gets to the editing, presentation or display. Nobody looks
at these photos, and nobody would want to, because they are very
boring. Who wants to see 267 photos of a kid's soccer game or
grandpa's 70th birthday?
If this sort of thing appeals to you, as it appeals to 99% of people
who carry cameras and are sort of serious about it, then go right
ahead and join the masses.
It doesn't appeal to me. Gear-twiddling and record-keeping are not
exactly unpleasurable, but mostly a waste of time as I have plenty
of more worthwhile things to do.
So, now we know what we shouldn't do.
What should we be doing?
Use your camera to make art.
What is "art"?
Ever since Marcel Duchamp stuck a bicycle fork on a stool and called
it "art," we've known that "art" is, basically, anything that you
treat as "art." For some reason, people
still seem to be amused by this, but Duchamp had already
followed that path to its end when he displayed his urinals as
sculpture in 1917. It figures: World War I led to a lot of cynicism
in Europe.
Thus, "art" is not defined so much by what it is, but rather the
role it plays in our life. Duchamp turned the urinal into
"sculpture" by treating it like fine sculpture.
When people say "that isn't art," what they usually mean is: that is
very bad art. Most contemporary art today -- I would say 97% -- is
crap. Probably you noticed this. But, if you treat it as "art," then
it is art.
Thus, what I mean by "making art," is: making things that serve the
role that art plays in our life. Ideally, good art.
In photography, this basically means: framed prints on a wall, or a
book. An "eBook" can be fine, but it has to be something like a real
printed book, not just a gallery on Flickr.
Ten thousand prints in a box is not art. They might be very good
prints, but until you put it in a format that serves the role of art
in our life -- traditionally, present it on a wall in a frame -- it
is just raw material of a work in progress (if indeed there is any
progress).
A photo album is not a book. It is a print storage device in a book
form.
Most photo books are really extensions of gallery shows. You have
twenty prints on a wall in a gallery, and eventually this is
expanded into a book with perhaps eighty prints. So, in a sense,
they are two aspects of the same thing, with framed prints on a wall
really taking the primary role.
One thing about books is that you can combine with text. This is
less common in a gallery show of course.
Thus, when I say "make art," what this tends to boil down is: make
gallery shows or make books.
I really mean make them. Make them physically. Make a physical
gallery show, or make a physical book (or eBook).
If you have a bunch of pics on a hard drive, and you say "yes, I
could print these and frame these and make a gallery show," that
doesn't count. That is like Marcel Duchamp, sitting in his workshop
with a urinal on the bench, and saying "I could display this as
sculpture in a gallery show." It is an idea. It is raw material. It
is a work in progress. The urinal didn't become (bad) art until he
actually put it in an actual gallery show. Marcel Duchamp did this,
and you can read
about it on Wikipedia today, nearly a century later. If he
just left the urinal on the workbench, he would have been just a
chump with a urinal.
You can make a physical gallery show in your house. It is an easy
matter to set up one or two rooms in the house, such as a hallway or
living room, so that you can hang a dozen or so photos. Ideally, you
will make them pretty big, at least 10" on the short side. Be sure
to light them well, using gallery-style track lighting for example.
I recommend traditional mats and frames. Don't just stick prints to
the wall with tacks.
Now you made art. Maybe bad art. Maybe art that only you can
appreciate. Maybe art that you will laugh about later as being comic
dreck or mediocre sewage. So what. Unlike 99% of photographers, you
made art.
If you take your two-year-old's fingerpainting, and put it in a
frame on a wall, you made art.
If you stick it to the refrigerator with magnets, you are a proud
mommy. It's the mats and frame and hanging on the wall with good
lighting -- treating it like art, so that it serves the role of art
in our lives -- that turns it into art.
No matter how dismal it is, it is probably better than Marcel
Duchamp's stupid urinal. And he is a Famous Artist. It is probably
better than 80% of the work of today's "serious artists," that sells
in New York galleries to suckers with too much money for five
figures and higher -- stuff that I wouldn't allow to pollute my
living room, even if I bought it at a garage sale for $4.
So give yourself a pat on the back. You accomplished something. Good
for you.
Today, I see very talented photographers, with careers as
commercial pros, who have all the gear and technique anyone could
ask for, and who sort of talk about things in a vaguely
artistic fashion, but they never make art.
In my opinion, they are wasting their time. But, that is because I
have higher ambitions than them, if only 10% of the skill,
experience and talent. Maybe they are having a good time doing what
they are doing, and what's wrong with that? So, maybe I should say:
if I were doing what they are doing, I would consider myself to be
wasting my time.
Photographs can serve other roles in our society and lives.
Commercial photography is mostly about selling something. You can
make editorial content for magazines. You can make snapshots, which
you can use later to recall memories, or send to your friends via
email or Facebook or tumblr. These can be worthwhile, but they are
not art, because they are not serving the role of art in our lives.
Annie Liebowitz is an extraordinary photographer, who makes magazine
editorial content and images for advertising. It is not until you
take the image made for a magazine, and put it in a frame on a wall
in a gallery, or in a book, that these photographs become art. Until
then, it is just an ad for perfume.
If you did put a photograph made for a perfume ad in a frame on a
wall (without the ad copy), you might find that, although it is an
extraordinarily skillful photograph of a ravishingly beautiful
woman, it doesn't make good art. It doesn't engage you artistically.
It is more like decoration. Just pretty stuff, like a pillowcase. It
is supposed to give you a big charge for a few seconds, while you
are reading a magazine, so that you are inspired to buy some
perfume. After those first few seconds, you might find that it
doesn't have much to say.
If you make a book, then literally make a book. Construct it
physically. Blurb can be good. However, I suggest making regular
prints, maybe around 8x10, and mounting them in something like a
12x12 blank-page scrapbook, maybe with some nice text. Aim for
twenty to eighty prints. Eighty is a lot. Even a great photographer
might take ten years to make eighty good prints for a book.
The quality of real prints is way better than Blurb.
Once you are in the habit of Making Art, then you realize that
"cameras don't matter."
If your two-year-old child can make art with his bare fingers, and
if Marcel Duchamp can make art by shopping at Home Depot, then you
can certainly make art with your iPhone camera, or a disposable film
camera, or a pencil or the snot from your nose.
Of course, cameras do matter. But, they matter in the sense of
allowing you to achieve your artistic vision. If your vision is to
use a Holga plastic-lens toy camera, or a pinhole camera, or a 20x24
Polaroid camera, or whatever, that's fine. You might really love the
subtlety of 8x10 film. So, that's the path you take. Or, you might
like the character of wet-plate colloidon. Or, maybe you like the
throwaway grunge of the original one-megapixel iPhone camera. You
can use a wide variety of lenses, or be a just-one-lens guy. You can
even use a modern digital supercamera, like the Nikon D800. Or,
maybe you realize that the cheapest Nikon D3200 actually does 95%
the same thing, at one-sixth the price. It's all about what path you
want to take, not what is "better" from some engineering standpoint.
Often, it is about the way you use the camera, rather than the final
product. You might find that using 4x5 film slows you down and makes
you take every shot seriously, in a way that digital doesn't allow.
I even use old Nikon manual-focus prime lenses on modern digital
bodies, because I like having to focus and do all the exposure
manually, while getting all of the resolution of a 24mp body. Plus,
I just like those beautifully crafted all-metal lenses, instead of
today's plastic motorized robot lenses. It looks the same as if I
used an autofocus zoom lens with automatic metering, but the
different process of making the picture creates a different result.
You might love the feel of a manual-focus Leica body. Whatever
floats your boat.
I would even suggest that the most important thing to do is to set
aside some part of your house as a photo gallery area. Buy the
frames, install the lighting, and so forth. Buy just six frames to
start. It doesn't matter if you have no prints to put in them. Make
the gallery, because the gallery is the necessary tool that makes a
print into art. Then, go through your photo archives, or take new
pics, to fill the frames. (You can just have a few frames here and
there, like most people have art hanging on the walls in their
houses, but I think you will like it better to have a more serious
gallery-like area.)
This is a more worthwhile use of a few hundred dollars than any new
gear purchase, workshop, photo travel tour, etc. etc.
Over time, six months perhaps, you will probably decide that you
like two of your six prints, and the other four are kinda blah.
Replace the blah ones with something new.
Just make art.
Once you do it a few times, you will realize that 99% of photography
hobbyists are just wasting their time.
For some reason I keep coming back to this one.
Over time, I got more interested in landscapes
with built elements.
Sunrise.
A genre shot I suppose.
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