A story for the Sydney Morning Herald on the expanding Google Empire - this was at the Mountain View main campus....around thirteen buildings I think...so large they supply free bikes to help you get around. You can read the story here http://www.smh.com.au/technology/google-world-20111121-1nprr.html
Just for fun really, I've taken to waking before dawn and dragging the old Sinar (I mention the brand only because I always wanted to own one but until digital killed film I could never justify the expense - now you can buy what is new an extremely expensive camera for a few hundred dollars. C'est la vie) down to the beach to photograph the piers...I'm not sure why beyond the obvious. I didn't grow up with them so I find them bizarre and strange and kind of wonderful....and I've always loved the polaroid palette...even though it comes courtesy of Fuji now. But you do have to put up with the weird magenta streaking. And its good for the soul to get away from the digital instant gratification thing. Strange to think that a sixty second wait can no longer be regarded as instant.
A long time ago, when I was an arrogant young man, I took what I thought was a perfect picture. I just couldn’t conceive that I could ever do better. It was a nude, whose shape and form I thought were beyond compare. I’m still not sure how I did it...well, technically I could tell you, but thats beside the point. I remember talking to another arrogant young man one night in a bar in Darlinghurst about this.I guess we were sharing ambitions, and I was young and arrogant enough to think I’d cracked it. I’d taken a picture that would stand for all time. I’ve nearly always had it in my portfolio. So it was quite humbling when I showed my work to the great photographer and critic John Loengard a few years ago and his reaction was, well, less than flattering.
And after that it did occur to me that perhaps it was time to move on from my pride in that picture. It didn’t really belong in my folio anymore. I wasn’t looking for that kind of work anymore. I wasn’t chasing naked women around studios anymore. Not that I still don’t love the picture - I do - its just not me anymore. The person I was is not the person I am....and its very important that your portfolio is about who you are. Not who you’ve been.
This is why your body of work is so important. It tells a story about you - what your passions are, your interests. What your story is. A portfolio that jumps around from genre to genre and style to style is really saying that you don’t know who you are, that you’re still trying to find that one thing that sets you on fire. People relate to passion. Energy and enthusiasm will take you further in this world than just about anything. Its not for nothing that saying someone is cold-blooded is really an insult. If you speak about your work with excitement it will excite the listener as well.
Human beings are hardwired to love stories - so much so that we seek to find stories where sometimes there are none. We are also hardwired to love beauty.
I think most photographers unfortunately get sidetracked by the beauty sometimes (certainly I have) not realising that a good story beats beauty most of the time. Of course, a beautiful story is a royal flush. And this goes to the heart of the matter.
All art is storytelling in one form of another. Great art usually survives the ravages of time and the changing of civilizations not because of its great beauty but because it speaks to us. It tells stories. Great art doesn’t have to be technically perfect (but it does help) but it has to be interesting. I’ve seen by now several thousand sunsets, some extraordinarily beautiful but I’ve never forgotten one.
The sun was setting into the Pacific Ocean (being from Sydney I cannot get used to that) and I was standing on Santa Monica Beach watching the colors change when I realized almost every one of the hundred or so people around me was photographing that same sunset - with their phone. Naturally, being a professional photographer I did not have a camera on me (yeah I know. sigh) because here was the interesting photograph - a Leunig cartoon come to life. The man watching the sunset outside his window on the TV in his living room. Its sad that people’s first response now to anything is to record it so they can relive it at a later time.
There are whole books of fancy french philosophy about this stuff. Yeah, I know, the French are weird.
And of course, I would assume, all their sunset pictures would be pretty awful, because phones mostly take awful pictures, and because you know, it was just a sunset.....beautiful maybe, but there’ll be another one along tomorrow. And the day after.
Richard Misrach, famous for his desert canto series, sandbagged a camera in place on his terrace of his house in San Francisco and photographed the view whenever he thought it looked good. Of course it helped that his house faces the Golden Gate bridge but the results are astonishing in the variety and complexity of the images he found within what is basically the same photograph over and over. Its the visual equivalent of great jazz, watching nature and light improvise endless varieties of beauty within the confines of a very straightforward composition. Anyone who’s ever been to San Francisco knows about its bizarre and unique microclimate (there can be a twenty degree difference in temperature between one side of the bay and the other) and in these pictures you can feel and experience the weather that this climate creates.
So when you take a picture, remember the purpose is to tell a story, whether its fashion or a nude or a still life or plain old advertising, the purpose is the story. It has to be interesting. People will forgive anything but boredom. Capture their interest and they will look at the most badly focused, exposed blurred bunch of pixels you can imagine.....bore them and they will just move on as if your work didn’t exist.
Beauty is just eye candy - it gets your interest but it can’t keep it. Beauty alone is a little unsatisfying. Its not enough. There has to be more. After all, anyone can write one good sentence. But think about, Stephen King can write a whole lot of bad sentences and still write something you can’t put down.
close comments