Going mobile (or loco)

Further to my big old moan about studio photography I thought I'd post about what I got up to on my day off yesterday.

I decided to go up to see my pal Trev and get some shots of him. I always like shooting Trev, he's an interesting guy and we're good friends. Trev doesn't live by life's rules, he pretty much does his own thing. That's not to say it's an easy ride, it isn't; It's a hard bumpy ride that he wouldn't recommend to many

Not unlike the two buses I had to get up to his pad. I took a light stand, my ezybox and camera gear with me. I had to wait 20 minutes for the second bus and as I maneuvered my three separate items to my seat I started to see the attraction of a studio*.

Another thing Trev tends to ignore is the concept of time ( I call it Trevor time). I had to wait 30 minutes for him to arrive at his pad. "I could have a cup of tea in a studio" I thought to myself. I always forget to arrive late as he's never on time, it's a lesson I never learn.

Two bus trips in the cold, lugging the gear around and waiting outside for half an hour. Why do I do it?

 Because it's  worth it

                                                                                     

                                                                            *It passed         

 I don't mind buses actually and my stand and ezybox's combined weight's about 4lb

Trevs pad my studio

I don't really like pretty pictures- well I don't like prettiness for prettiness sake. I'm the same with lighting really. I prefer natural light or available light but if I'm going to create it myself, I want it unobtrusive. It's an aid to let the subject do the talking the subjects not about clever lighting. It's just a tool and using it with restraint takes discipline.

I've by no means mastered it, I could have brought more lighting with me, but I  brought all I needed. What I really like is when I'm reminded that the best light's the one you take for granted. The next time you try to take a pretty picture of someone or something you care about. Take a step back and really look. sooner or later a photograph will emerge... You just have to be there to witness it.                                   

Not an easy ride

Two posts for the price of one, lighting and navel gazing. It's probably due to hypothermia from yesterday

The problem with studio photography

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts"

William Shakespeare


I'm not sure I need to add anything to that really. There are many valid reasons for shooting in a studio. It's a controlled environment, quick turnarounds (bums on seats and all that), the subject has to come to you, they're on your turf. And the list goes on...

"Photography today appears to be in a state of flight...The familiar is made strange, the unfamiliar grotesque. The amateur forces his Sundays in to a series of unnatural poses"

Dorothea Lange


Life isn't lived in a studio. It's not where we love & die, it's not where we struggle to make sense of our lives, it's not where you'll find the people who help to make that struggle worth while. It's not a natural habitat for us. And though I have seen worthwhile, powerful & moving photographs created in the studio, they are dwarfed by a sea of contrivances. Subjects drowned by a process better suited to a factory line than a medium that is capable of highlighting and defending the beauty and complexity of life.

So there


Sean

The spirit of place

Last Sunday some friends and I had a walk along the beach at Shoebury Garrison in Essex. Half way I came across a roll of exposed 35mm film, an unexpected find. I picked it up and looked for any images and found none. The film had been exposed and the natural elements had taken their toll. I put down the film and carried on walking.

I thought of what the roll would look like if I scanned them and I thought about Stephen Gill. Stephen did a book called Buried, a book I would love to own.

  

Buried

The photographs in this book were taken in Hackney Wick and later buried there. The amount of time the images were left underground varied depending on the amount of rainfall. The depths that the pictures were buried at also varied, as did their positioning. Sometimes they were facing each other, sometimes back to back or sometimes buried singly. When burying my first batch of photographs, a passing man spotted me and asked what I was doing. Not only did I not want to give the location away of some of my buried pictures, but It just sounded a bit weird to say that I was burying photographs so replied that I was looking for newts. As soon as I’d said that I looked down and saw a newt at my feet. Not knowing what an image would look like once it was dug up introduced an element of chance and surprise which I found appealing. This feeling of letting go and in a way collaborating with place – allowing it also to work on putting the finishing touches to a picture – felt fair. Maybe the spirit of the place can also make its mark.

Stephen Gill

The next three days that roll of film was playing on my mind, and today I went back in the bitter cold to find it again. I found it in the same place and tonight I scanned the images.

The very last scan

Is this the spirit of Shoebury Garrison? The spirit of place? Who knows, all a bit "strange" to me.

 

 Ken

Look prt ll

In Italy trainee detectives are taken to museums to look at paintings. They're told to study them and to try to deduce what the meaning might be . Symbolic clues hint to the those meaning eg the skull represents mortality. It's a lesson in observation that will aid the trainee detectives in their work

 I took the picture in my last post in London. I took what I saw for granted, I wasn't really sure it was worth capturing but things look different when photographed. On studying the picture at home my eyes gazed around the screen at the people I'd captured, I went round and around a few times. I then came to the small boy in the background and noticed he was looking at or calling out to something, so I followed his eyeline and there hidden in the bush like a flower, was the answer.

A little spooky. Nobody who's seen it has spotted it, it's demonstrated to me how people tend to look over rather than in to pictures.

Look

Click

&

really look

Sean

Lebanon's missing

I've seen the film and listened to the podcast.

Find the time to do both





More at Manchester Photography


Sean

To illustrate

Photography at its best is visual poetry. Both written and visual forms depend on insight, intuition, a love for and a deep interest in the world and the life within it. They're meanings are revealed and concealed at the same time, they're open to interpretation and offer fragmentary glimpses in to something we can never fully know. This enables us to bring our own life experiences to them and so they mean different things to different people. What you get out of a  poem or a photograph has a lot to do with what you bring to them

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost.


I've seen Robert Frosts poem photo illustrated many many times and always with a shot of a fork in the road or two paths in a wood. That's not visual poetry, that's illustration. Photography is more than that and it would never be two roads that I think of first when reading Frosts poem

                                                                                    More

                                                                 

Mark Steinmetz

Sean

"New morning"

Can’t you feel that sun a-shinin’?
Groundhog runnin’ by the country stream
This must be the day that all of my dreams come true
So happy just to be alive
Underneath the sky of blue
On this new morning, new morning
On this new morning with you

  

Bob Dylan

New morning

Ken

"Makes me wonder"

 Today, a flickr meet. What makes me wonder is my oldest ever friend. It's like being a kid again!

  

Ken

It ain't heavy

I went hiking yesterday with Diane. I've been up in Saddleworth many times before, shot up there many times before. The vast majority  of  shot have been the kind of shots you use a compact for only I don't own a compact, I have one camera and all's it does is take pictures, it's  all I want. I'm not interested in HD video, I guess in a few years times when I buy a new camera it'll be hard to find cameras that just take pictures.

My camera weighs about 3lb 2oz,  not a small weight for a hike. I stuck my 50m on and took my  flashgun & a set of pocket wizards which brought it up to about 5lbs. I knew that if I was going to shoot anything, it would be Diane. I wasn't going there to shoot pictures, I was going hiking, so why lob an extra 5lb in weight when you might not even take a picture? If you're only likely to be taking snap shots, why bother taking 5 grands worth of gear with you. You're not going to capture anything major

For two reasons.

1

I might do one day,  really I might. If I reached in to my bag and came out with just my hands, I'd be fucked right off. Once on a hike we came across a love letter in a plastic sheaf written by a bereaved lover. I don't know the manor of the lovers death, whether it had come early or late in life wasn't clear, nor were some of the rain damaged words. What was clear was the rain could not erase the the sense of loss expressed by the author. The placed where it was left meant something to them, it's a place we love and we felt for them. Alls I had with me that day was my hands which I used to place the letter out of the wind and rain.

2

It's my only camera

Sean

A Peek

We invite you to come and take a peek and hopefully enjoy our blog.

Ken & Sean

Knowing the Unknown

The Rose Garden, Southend. This is why I photograph.

Ken

Circles

This is the third year visiting the "loop" at Southend's airport WWII defences. Dave takes a break.

 

Ken

Mark Steinmetz Trilogy

Man this is a tough one...

How'd I use words to do justice to something that doesn't need them.
I'm pretty sure I can't but I'll try my best.

Mark Steinmetz trilogy was started in Knoxville (South Central) in 1991 and ended in Greater Atalanta in 2009. You will not detect the passage of time in these pictures, the 18 years between the first shot and the last could be 18 hrs (the books in the above shot are not in chronological order).  Photography is capable of putting a subject in to suspended animation, freezing them in the moment forever. Steinmetz has gone beyond that

"I want to show something of people’s inner lives"

 Mark Steinmetz.

The subjects Steinmetz focuses on do not give up their secrets easily.
They hint to a future,  past & present. A life of longing and the wish to escape,
of resignation & salvation, of broken promises and dreams unfulfilled.
But don''t think all this is laid on a plate for you.
There's more questions than answers here.

You'll wonder how they
are, where they are now and what their stories are. It'll prick you
as it has me. You'll try and fill in the blanks, inventing lives for them that
may or may not be true.

What is undeniably true is that Mark Steinmetz is a master in subtlety.
If as he said, he wanted to show something of peoples inner lives
he must be commended for attempting it, praised for achieving it and
thanked for the tender regard he has shown for his subjects.
Thanked because in some way they are stand-ins for us all

Sean

Recognizing the people you know in photographs

Sure you do! That's them right there!

But do you? see sometimes I don't. Sometimes I take a picture of somebody and put them in a situation where I think it would make a good photograph but says jack shit about them. That's not subject driven photography and though there's no crime in that it's not the photography that I care about, it's not how I remember the people I shoot when I stray from the path.

                                                                                          

                                                             23:39pm

I tend to take my favourite pictures when I'm pissed. Maybe I just stop thinking or maybe being pissed is just a much more interesting place to be especially when you're pissed with others. That's why I love shooting in bars so much

23:49pm

I took these shots pissed of my wife who was close to passing out, she's in her natural habitat when in bars. If I recall she was about to point at something, I'm not sure what. But she's funny when she's drunk, she's cute when she's drunk. We have fantastic sex when we're drunk (well-bad sex to). This was the last day of a three day bender to celebrate my birthday, the old girl did well. The last shot signifies that for her the war was over

Anyway that's my girl right there

Sean

Ross McDonnell's Joyrider

"The subjects of these photos are "kids who are willing to dive into a world of drugs and guns, kids without any fear of prison, of fatherhood, of violence," McDonnell says. "It's a short life, a joyride all the way."

http://rossmcdonnell.com/joyrider.html

I saw many I burnt out car as a kid. Twocing was never really my thing but I knew a lot of kids that lived for it. A pal of mine had a copper clinging on to car door for dear life as he sped off.  Ended up throwing the copper twenty feet down the street and in to hospital. All is fair in love and war. You make a copper chase you, you better not get caught. I've a false tooth to testify to that fact. You don't stop; you get stopped


Sean

Woods trees and critics

For my poetry loving blogger in crime

Sean

Molly Brice

A bit of a continuation with the previous post. Today I picked up a box of cameras from a local auction. The oldest camera was a Kodak No. 2 Brownie in mint condition, had the instructions and a special note left by the photographer. As I went through the box of cameras I realised I had a history of all the cameras 'Molly' had owned. They went from The No. 2 Brownie Box to Brownie 44a, then to Prinzflex 500E (Zenith E) with lenses and accessories and finaly to a pristine Yashica Electro 35 CC rangefinder. An evolution of a local photographer's equipment. What is exciting is that an exposed roll of 35mm colour film was found in the Yashica. The canister sounds hollow, but I am hoping for some magic, some latent images brought back to life. It's the undiscovered which fascinates me. If you look, you will find.

 

Ken

A nod to Vivian Maier

Where to start? When this story broke it truly moved me. It is the story of Vivian Maier . Her shots are only just beginning to emerge thanks to John Maloof. Like the latent images on her many rolls of undeveloped film, a magic will happen. The photography world is excited again. And rightly so.

Some old snaps I shot a couple years back of a friend and family, I'm guessing he has not seen these but I am sharing them here. It's a kind of nod to Vivian, the stuff that never gets seen, the shots we love.

 

Ken

Big Time Sensuality

"I can sense it
something important
is about to happen
it's coming up

it takes courage to enjoy it
the hardcore and the gentle
big time sensuality"

Björk

Today, I indulge. Things are looking up this year, this Blog for a start. My wife (Angie) is doing well and I have left the "Bunker Hell". It is a complete new start and I am glad to share this with Sean. This shot is from a couple of days ago (after NYE) and we were all . . . . well you know. It is a whole lot better than last years. The "cracker" was pulled and things are looking good! I hope they are the same with you.

Ken

The First Movie

I read a quote by the Photographer Stuart Freedman  this morning.

" I see so many photographers making work that purports to show an explanation of a subject but actually is little more than graphic cliche of a situation. That, at a time of crisis for visual journalism, isn’t enough. It isn’t enough to simply point a camera at someone and say ‘how terrible’

I have image fatigue from shots of Iraq and Afghanistan. Freedmans quote got me thinking about  Mark Cousins beautiful film The First Movie


How wonderful

"We tell stories not for revenge, but to find our place in the world.”

 Ousmane Sembene



Sean