Reestablishing Connection, Attempt 1/x

I see I haven't posted here in over a year (my last post was a discussion of Fantasy back in June 2019, which I've referenced to in several Twitter discussions since then).

I occasionally update my Instagram feed with photos I feel are passably interesting. Tumbler gets updated from time to time, both automatically (via Instagram reshare) and manually (back in October, most "recently").

I could retire this blog entirely, as I've generally stopped doing regular casual media criticism. Most of my current production is Poetry. This has been true since 2017 -- I've been persistently exercising this skill, picking up occasional publications in online literary outlets, and becoming more involved with the online poetry community.

The Twitter poetry scene seems to be the most productive. Established personalities join the discourse with more emergent authors and publications, and it's used broadly for discussion and announcements, both poetry-related and adjacent thereto. For a more consistent window into my sparse attempts to social engagement, visit me there at @miksimum.

Before we leave the topic of poetry, I'll post my most recent placements. For the full list, see my Publications page on my website.

February 2020:

Downtown Office as Abscess in Juke Joint Magazine

Being a Thing in the Fall in Neologism Poetry Journal

April 2020

2 poems in 3 Moon Magazine, vol. 1 issue 3

July 2020

Foot Bridge as Bowstring in Bodega Magazine

Forthcoming

3 poems in Praxis Magazine Online

Recently, I've been trying to prime my engine for visual art, returning to photography and pen/ink drawing. As compared with poetry, these don't have as obvious a career path for amateur enthusiasts like myself. I'll be posting sketches and photos (often heavily treated) on Instagram, but I don't have a lot of hope that I'm going to successfully connect with some kind of alt/art community that fits my style and skill level just right. I want to be more serious than a fairweather comics/fan-art dabbler, but I don't have the training or time investment of the excellent concept or semi-professional artists I see out there.

Even so, I'm still inspired by, and toward, certain forms of visual art, so if you want to keep track of that, follow me on Instagram or Tumblr -- always @miksimum.

Tonight I will be doing something. Maybe I'll watch the not-so-well-received Dark Tower movie, which I just acquired in Very Cheap Blu-Ray form. Maybe I'll keep reading something I picked up at my family's old farmhouse, the Robert Graves autobiography "Goodbye to All That." Maybe I'll write another poem in my drafts notebook.

Maybe I'll even get around to writing about it.

Later!

Ideas about Photography, part 2: the practical space

On the heels of my last post about photography, I've thought a bit about modeling the relationship between photographer, camera, and subject, and I took a shot at plotting it in classic two-dimensional space. I wish I could make some exciting claim... like, this is the decisive way to model the photographer's art, and all other theories can be reduced to this structure... but obviously none of those things are true. This is just one theoretical shot in the dark, the type of thing that Marshall McLuhan might have called a probe... which is the most creative and least rigorous way of doing theory and analysis.

I've perused some of the key literature on photography, like Flusser's Towards a Philosophy of Photography and Susan Sontag's On Photography. I know that the former theorist really emphasized the black-box nature of the camera itself, claiming that the essence of photography was to be found in the photographer's relative ignorance of the physics and optics that actually capture his image. Sontag seems to take the idea of "capturing" the subject more literally, claiming that photographs possess an inherent aggression, and that photographing a subject is appropriating it, certifying it, collecting it, and at the same time protecting the photographer from its full psychological force.

My own ideas are a riff on my last post, that in photography, the key issues are 1) choosing our subjects, and 2) determining our final products, whether by composing the images or by carefully curating them. These are the two axes of the conceptual space. The vertical axis is the choice of subjects: we either find subjects by discovering them out in the world, or we create subjects on our own terms, employing craft and artifice within a controlled space. The second axis, the determination of the image, is centered around the idea of CAPTURING, and it's split between composing images before the shot, or curating them after the shot.

Here's the basic quad:

Interesting to note: the spectrum that goes from "curate" to "compose" correlates to the shift from film photography to digital photography. When you only had 36 shots in a roll of film, it was extremely important to frame your composition carefully, and manage your exposure with precision, so you didn't waste a shot. Those were the days of Ansel Adams, zones, and the rule of thirds. Most of the image-determination took place before you clicked the shutter button.

The inverse of that is the curation model that's come to prominence in the era of infinite storage, crowd-sourced galleries, and snapshot Polaroid kitsch. These days, you shoot as many photos as you can, using a few loose rules of composition... know your aperture and shutter speed, experiment with exposure, and try to isolate and differentiate your subject. Once you take hundreds of exposures, you've got a new job: go back with a severe critical eye and figure out which ones are actually worth further attention. Intensive curation (and post-processing) has taken the place of obsessive composition, rendering the latter an anachronistic fetish.

I think the various traditional "types" of photography can be differentiated by their position within this space. I've plotted them, below, and it makes for a nice little constellation of techniques and approaches. Here they are:

There are some exemplary types, mapping to each of the four quadrants. Landscapes are the ideal case for the traditional craft of film photography: you, the photographer/explorer, go out into nature to discover a stunning vista or a sublime subset, and then you put all your technical skills and craftsmanship into composing a single perfect photo, captured in your 35mm frame.

Fashion portraits are essentially the opposite: instead of discovering the landscape in its natural state, you create a scene and sculpt your models, and you direct them in their gestures and positions. Then, like a vigilant moon, you orbit around them, trying to capture a natural moment or a sharp glance, taking as many shots as you possibly can (as a fashion photographer, you should always max out your camera's capacity). You'll depend on your curatorial skills to select the best exposure after the session is over.

The most artificial type of photography is the food photograph, in which the photographer creates a perfect sculpture of the food (often inedible) and then painstakingly composes the shot to bring out the shapes and textures, with grave attention to depth of field and isolation of the subject. In the opposite quadrant -- discover and curate -- is the street photographer and photojournalist, the visual scavenger who scrounges for the perfect, fleeting moment, and then pursues it like a hunter, hoping beyond hope to catch it and harvest a perfect exposure in the heat of the moment.

Last time I wrote about photography, I said something rather silly, which went like this:

"Street photography has a sort of visceral thrill, and a sense of purity, the very honest and unadorned ethos of aestheticizing the gestures and postures and details of everyday life. At times, it feels like this is what other types of photography (especially Fashion Photography, the most glamorous of the photographic disciplines) aspires to."

This was an honest sentiment, but it was also the result of my recent interest in street photography, so it's a bit self-validating. It completely short-sells the creative and compositional aspects of photography... the act of arranging a scene to be shot, and the act of composing the actual picture within the frame, both of which were part of photography long before ye olde point-and-snap. Oddly, looking back at my quadrant, I've decided that there is a different type of photography that really exemplifies the spirit of the medium, and it's not one that I expected. It's actually the high-speed photograph, like those amazing shots of bullets going through light bulbs! Imagine that!

After all, it's both an exercise in perfect composition (choose the right light, arrange the elements, organize the frame) and an exercise in perfect timing, which can only be achieved by sifting through thousands of imperfect exposures produced by the experiment. It's also a triumph of both discovery and creativity: the photographer creates a perfect scene, but then has to discover an elusive fraction of a millisecond within the physical unfolding of the action.

Also, it's aggressive, per Sontag: the photographer is forcibly extracting a cross-section from the middle of a lightning-fast burst of movement. And it's highly mechanized, as per Flusser: it's so precise, it can rarely be managed manually by the photographer, and usually requires an extended mechanical apparatus to initiate the action and release the shutter.

This is the essence of photography. Who knew?

Or maybe this is a great example of how rational over-analysis can lead an intellectual douchebag into a totally misguided conclusion. Contrary to the evidence, I still take all my claims with a grain of salt.

In conclusion, I leave you with two of the only high-speed captures I've ever personally attempted, which I think resulted in some of my better photographs. Thank you for reading this rumination on photography. Jesse out.

EDIT: Paragraph 3: That is obviously not the horizontal axis, it is the vertical axis.

Ideas about Photography, a practice rediscovered

From Henri Cartier Bresson, one of history's
greatest street photographers

I've rediscovered photography recently, and it's got me thinking again: how do I relate to this mode of production? What are my strengths, if indeed I have any? What have the masters and the rising talents discovered about this craft that's still obscure to me? Is there some necessary pivot point, beyond the useful-but-extremely-general 10,000-hour rule? Some solution to the rubik's cube of photography itself, both within the genealogy of artistic practice and in its essential difference from all other art forms?

As I was, as I called it, "rediscovering" photography, I went first back to Flickr, the old bastion for my curation and display of my photographs. Flickr still has some great features: a metric ton of groups that can provide some extra visibility; a very large community that all your friends are probably already a part of. Unfortunately, it's succumbed to some issues that tend to affect these kinds of specialized communities. For instance, it's got so many people on it now that it's inconvenient... nigh impossible... to filter out the noise, so there's no thrill of exploration and discovery. This is a crippling blow, because curation is a big part of this art form, and community and networking were HUGE parts of Flickr's appeal.

Enter: a new site, called 500px, which does a beautiful job of recapturing the freshness that Flickr once had. Its layouts are cleaner, and its population of artists is more streamlined and engaged. The "Fresh" photo page (containing an unfiltered stream of the most recent uploads) tends to have at least a few great photographs on it, waiting to be selected and appreciated by the growing audience of enthusiasts, among whom I count myself. Maybe 500px is just the beneficiary of a smart release and a rush of proficient early-adopters, and the glow will fade as more people discover it. Ideally, it never takes on the broad, middlebrow mass appeal of Flickr, and becomes something in relation to Flickr as Vimeo is in relation to YouTube. We can always hope, right?

At any rate, thinking thus about photography has turned up some new artistic concerns. There are two in particular I've been finding increasingly relevant, and they're not the standard technical considerations of composition, light, color, timing, or framing. They're more embedded in the process, and I'm trying to locate their unique position in the art form of photography. Maybe the best place to do that is in the realm of application and practice, but there's at least a part of this examination that can take place here, in words, on the digital page.

The first of these is curation, which I've already mentioned a few times in this mini-essay. It's the digital age that's forced us to think increasingly in terms of curation, because the steps between shutter-button and final product are so much more compressed in the point-and-click digital age. In many areas (coughTWITTERcough), self-editing seems to be an art in rapid decline. In photography, if you're to be taken seriously, even merely as an Internet personality, it's becoming more and more important, as your work is in danger of getting lost in the sea of Instagram snap-shots and photo-dumps. And if too few people seem willing to edit, temper, and critique their own output, it's because peoples' consumption habits are being blunted, along with their production habits. In curation, the two are merged.

Shot by my good friend
Rachel Mooney

You can see this in evidence, by looking at some of the most prominent photographers on Flickr. One of my favorites, Alex Stoddard, only posts a few photos each month. This could be partly due to the time he takes in production and post-production, but as far as my own experience, each session with the camera could produce five or six easily-postable shots, if you're not severe enough with your own work.

The other thing I've been thinking about isn't something that's specific to photography in any way. In fact, it's a key component in every mimetic art form, and arguably, in all creative production whatsoever. Nonetheless, it seems to be something that the well-regarded photographers have figured out, and (also arguably), it's the key threshold between being an amateur and a virtuoso. This is Choice of Subject.

There are whole artistic movements that seem intent on distracting artists from this very question. Classicism and modernism are both hung up on form, for instance... and in many arts, there's a preoccupation (or at least a transitional obsession) with technique, precision, craftsmanship, and operation of the apparatus. But with every art form, and with photography in particular, the choice of a subject is a critical threshold without much breathing room on the near side. The art form is fairly lenient in giving you the choice of a subject -- pretty much anything that can be captured with the eyes in three dimensions can be flattened onto a photographic print -- but this choice of a subject will feed back profoundly, influencing every aspect of your practice: your technique, your equipment, your audience, and your place in the community.

In my own research and practice, I've become particularly attached to something called "Street Photography"... or as I might prefer to call it, "clandestine portraiture." I don't think this actually needs to happen on the street, but photography taken on the street is what most people picture when they think of this type of lifestyle photojournalism. It's the photography of people, heedless of the camera, behaving and interacting in their natural environment. This is often (usually?) as simple as standing around smoking a cigarette, or drinking coffee. At times, it's a shot of somebody walking purposefully to their office, or a shot of two people talking heatedly about something obscure. It's the attempt by certain photographers to capture the living essence of life in some chosen environment. The first time you do it, you'll probably struggle with the idea that you're invading the privacy of your subjects, and it's certainly a valid ethical question... to continue with this particular type of photography, you've just gotta find a way to convince yourself that it's okay (for instance, that your good intentions excuse your methods and your subjects' lack of explicit consent).

Street photography has a sort of visceral thrill, and a sense of purity, the very honest and unadorned ethos of aestheticizing the gestures and postures and details of everyday life. At times, it feels like this is what other types of photography (especially Fashion Photography, the most glamorous of the photographic disciplines) aspires to. Where fashion photographers try to create an illusion of a highly stylized reality, the street photographer is attempting to allow the beauty, the style, the honesty of unconscious human agency speak for itself.

Of course, this carries with it some constraints: it's hard to frame a good shot, so the calculated composition of some types of photography (landscape, architectural) is out the window. To compensate, the street photographer is advised to get a LOT of exposures, and curate them aggressively. A high degree of external awareness is also important, because the photographer doesn't have time to sculpt and control the light, nor to attempt multiple exposures of the same shot. Timing is paramount, and the result is a "capture," rather than a "composition." Ultimately, the "composition" is largely the work of chaos and chance, and the photographer is merely a gentle guide, rather than an authoritarian hand. There will be a lot of bad shots, and the photographer won't feel much of a direct causal responsibility for the good ones.

All these terms -- capture, composition, curation, shutter speed, control, and chaos -- can be considered as part of the broader theoretical vocabulary of photography. I think I'll elaborate on this in a near-future post. For now, though, I'm going to try to keep shooting, and (along the way) discovering new photographers who can help me look on the world with fresh eyes. I have a long way to go to get to 10,000 hours, so I have to hope that part-way there is good enough for now. And maybe for always.

Where Photography is Going

Today I read something called "Is the Art of Photography Dying Due to Digitalization?"  It's not a particularly new idea, but it's part of a conversation that needs to be ongoing, as conditions are changing faster than discourse can keep up with them. And the concern being voiced in this essay is still urgent.

Man Ray

As much as I'd like to simply shrug, wave it off, laugh, dismiss it, and tell this author that (s)he obviously knows nothing about photography if (s)he can't appreciate its eternal artistic value, I can't.  Why?  Because the author is right in pointing out that photography is changing.  As the technology improves, it provides easier access, and it changes the value placed on images.  This, in turn, changes the expectations, the methods, the purview of the discipline as a whole.

Because, like this essayist, I've heard people play with my DSLR (the cheapest Pentax DSLR I could find) and say, "It's so easy to take great pictures with this!"  And as much as I hate hate HATE to admit it, their untrained golden-hour snapshots often look pretty high-level, as long as they're using a camera capable of capturing the light robustly. So part of me entertains, and fears, this idea: that maybe, for all photographers' self-importance about framing, and the rule of thirds, and being experts in "writing with light," blah blah blah, it turns out that there's nothing between a serious (potentially professional) photographer and a random person on the street, except for maybe a $600 camera.

The article seems to suggest that, in becoming automatic, fully democratic, and highly accessible, the process of taking a photograph is losing its artistic value. As thousands of people are able to buy high-quality cameras, and these cameras become very smart about automatically calibrating and manipulating photos, there is no barrier to creation, so millions of people are suddenly taking, and sharing, billions of photos.  Brilliant amateur work starts to appear, and people stop seeing great photography as the domain of specialists and professionals.

Diane Arbus

So maybe the democritization of photography is leading to the breakdown of the photographer meritocracy.

I think there's something else, though: photography is changing because it's becoming an art of selection, rather than composition. Good photographers in the digital age know: the key to getting a great photograph is getting thousands of bad ones. This wasn't possible when you had to pay for film, and it was clumsy and took time to load, and had to be selected for the light and the speed of the subject; at that time, a photograph was created like a story or a painting is created. The situation and the intended outcome were considered, creative decisions were weighed, and commitments were made before the shutter ever clicked.

Now, the shutter clicks a hundred times -- we try every exposure setting, every film speed, every focal length -- for every shot or scene that looks even remotely intriguing.  Composition isn't so much a concern any more.  Instead, the creative process takes place in the office, operating LightRoom or Adobe Bridge.  Instead of composing a single great shot, we're selecting the incidental great shot from the SD card full of random crap.  We're doing a lot of deleting, both on location and upon later review.

This is a significant change, because it makes the art of photography more like the general process of idetifying images you like.  And like it or not, picking out a great picture has never been seen as a specialist activity -- pretty much every person has the prerogative to say, "This shot is awesome!" and/or "I don't really like that one much." They don't have the training to recognize good from bad?  Who cares? Everybody has a right to an opinion. And this is now synonymous with the discipline of photography -- it's just selection from a gallery of snapshots.

I do think this is happening.  I think it looks like a bad thing, initially, especially to people who are invested in the meritocracy: photography professors, magazine editors, purveyors of extremely expensive professional photography systems.  But ultimately, it's not a bad thing, because the new democratic landscape will be built upon that meritocracy.  There will be specialization: portrait and product photographers, event photographers, artists who focus intensely on one technology, technique, or subject. The standards and the economic value of photographers' skills will change -- it may even take a big hit, as barriers to entry come crashing down. But we'll eventually find new ways to determine merit, and new ways to manage the flood of new talent at the lowest levels of the talent pool.

Sebastiao Salgado

One thing for sure: photography is on the leading edge of two cultural battles being fought right now.

The first is the wrestling match with Content, which has ballooned in volume over the last few years; photography, along with art and writing, has suddenly burst the dam of cultural access, and we're all desperately trying to manage it using little content delivery buckets, like blogs, and social networks, and self-publishing tools. It's the battle of finding SOME way of auditing and distributing all this content, however subjective, low-brow, or crowd-sourcey it is.

The second battle is the economic one, where we're trying to figure out how to deal with this excess of cultural production: who gets paid for this stuff? Has art, in its excess, dropped out of the need- and value-based economy altogether?  Is it going to be the test-case for a post-scarcity economic model?

The American: Clearly a Photographer's Film

Anton Corbijn (website here) is originally a music photographer and a music video director; now, he's a painter of place, a filmmaker who demonstrates, in his new film The American, a truly intimate sense of setting. This setting, a small town in the Italian countryside, provides the uneasy core of his narrative, which is severe and spacious, barely the scraps of a plot draped over the solitude and exposure of his remote locations.

The American (played by Mr. Clooney) is alternately Jack, Edward, Mr. Butterfly, and Clark; in any case, he's a lonely freelancer in the employ of shady European double-talkers. He's stripped of history, his past only peeking through telling details: he's fleeing from a gang of swedes, and he seems fond of open-armed European brunettes, and he's obsessively paranoid. His employer keeps dropping hints that he's outlived his usefulness. He knows a lot about butterflies, and has a tattoo of one on his back.

In light of these dim highlights of characterization, Jack becomes almost a formal construct, rather than a narrative one. He isn't given enough volume or detail that we feel we should try to decode him, or fill in his back-story; rather, like the subject of a photo, he's there to provide a focal point, a center of gravity for a story about a time, a place, and a mindset. It seems like Jack is paranoid, but he's not... the whole world is paranoid as it gravitates around him. It seems like he's stark and empty, but he's not; rather, he lives in an empty Italian countryside, in a vacuous world, where nobody (including his lovers and his associates) knows anything but the echoes of human contact.

This is why this is a photographer's take on the thriller. This paranoid international neo-noir isn't about the intricacies of personal and political intrigue, like the classics... like a spy or a military fantasist would write. There's no sense of confidence, investigation, revelation, or betrayal, and the twists are devoid of explanation. I suspect Jack is not the primary target of the plot being hatched in The American, but ultimately, because of the way the film unravels, there's no way to know; it may have been all about him, or he may have been a wrinkle that his employer needed to smooth out. A photographer doesn't concern himself with these details... for Corbijn, who seems to be cherry-picking archetypes and images and set-pieces from the history of espionage lore, all the meaning resides in the surface, not in the enigmatic but irrelevant histories of these assassins.

And so Corbijn does what a photographer does best: he choreographs a synchronicity between the subject and the setting. Clooney is framed and dwarfed by empty windows, and his car constantly appears as a flicker in the bottom corner of an epic landscape. In his first car-ride, a few minutes into the movie, he seems to disappear completely into a white fog, just as he vanishes from the sight of his pursuers. Jack is ruthlessly paranoid, always struggling to maintain awareness of the hiding places, the far corners, the twists and deformations in the landscape around him, and so, in many of the shots, we have to shift our attention from the foreground to the background, or respond to small visual and aural details. As we sense the tension created by the camera, especially in the back alleys of Jack's small town, so our gaze reacts more rapidly and our expectation heightens.

Corbijn's awareness of the photographic nature of this, his second film, shows through in Jack's choice of photography as a cover story. And Jack sells himself as an architecture and travel photographer, further reinforcing the theme of geography, of the film's profound sense of place. This Italian town has a texture and a shape, a pervasive rhythm and dynamic, that compliments Jack's quiet, tense demeanor. Control, Corbijn's first feature, has a similar sense of time and place... Manchester is a desolate industrial backdrop for Ian Curtis's hopelessness. We get little sense of the social scene surrounding Curtis, but as a tableaux, Manchester seems to embody his state of mind.

These are the virtues that somebody like Corbijn can bring to a film: the experienced lens to capture the space around a protagonist; the unique ability to create a strong main character from surface qualities. If Corbijn continues to use these talents to his advantage, and to refine his approach to narrative complexity, then film will benefit significantly from his contributions.