B&W Images and Cloying Sentimentality

I was recently discussing the virtues of B&W photography (and the use of grain in the image). The question posed was how well the images shown below would work if they had been shot in fine grain Kodachrome 100 rather than the high speed B&W stock used.  

'Shell Shocked Marine'; Don McCullen

I thought it an interesting question. My experience thus far is that in general if a picture works well in B&W, it is also likely to work well in colour even if the colour version doesn't work as well as the B&W version.

But I’m not sure that the reverse is not true; it's much harder to get an image to work well in B&W than colour and a good colour picture can lose all its value and impact converted to B&W. I think this is mostly because B&W is reductionist in its information and you therefore place much more emphasis on the balance between light and dark as being what makes the image work. You really have to be skilful with the light and that's probably the hardest part to get right, either because it's completely beyond your control or where it is in your control, it's actually really hard to do.

Landscape; Don McCullen

I've also noticed (and been guilty of myself) a trend towards people converting otherwise dull or boring images into B&W and adding some effects and grain to try and give the image impact and grit. B&W tends to have the effect of sharpening the image but neither this nor the 'gritty' look are anything other than superficial.

The McCullen shot of the Marine with thousand yard stare would, I think, work extremely well on fine grain Kodachrome 100 (assuming there'd been enough light to shoot it). I think the muted camo green combined with the dirt and grime of war would have given a very powerful palette and conveyed a greater sense of being there. I'm not actually sure that it being B&W adds very much since the image's strength is not on the interplay between light and dark, it's on the impact of the moment of human experience and the vacancy in the soldier’s eyes (it was taken after the batter of Hue, aka the Citadel where I think McCullen was also wounded).

The landscape shot though is quite different and I think only works in B&W (where obviously there is no colour version to compare it to but one can imagine). It also works best with the course grain high speed film used. The image works on a number of levels but the interplay between light and dark; the shimmering of the wet road leading into the horizon, set against the dark ground and the light of late winter sky is perfect. It's just the kind of landscape I love. Interestingly I think the landscapes that McCullen's been doing in his later years are perhaps among his best work. I love how the sum of his experiences are being distilled into the images and reflected back. I've read interviews and watched the brilliant documentary about him and it's very apparent that he does not want to be remembered as a war photographer. Landscapes as a genre have developed into something of an over romanticised subject lately, a fact underscored by the dominance and popularity of colour landscapes and the cloying sentimentality of over processed HDR images or even just well balanced images made using graduated filters. Personally I much prefer there to be ‘too much’ shadow on the lands in order to preserve the clouds in the sky (where by too much I simply mean more than might otherwise be considered perfect).

Anonymity in Street Portraiture – The Book of Strangers

Download a copy of 'The Book of Strangers' here

I’ve noticed a pattern of behaviour in taking street portraits. While the majority of people I approach are willing to be photographed, albeit with some degree of persuasion, very few of them ever get in touch afterwards. Despite me giving them contact details and promising them both a hard and soft copy of the final image for free as a thank you, the rate of contact is probably only around three in ten.

Given that the person has invested their time to stop and talk to me, has listened and engaged with the idea I am presenting to them and then been brave enough to let a complete stranger take their picture, you’d think that they would be curious enough to want to see the result.

And yet I wonder whether the answer is that it’s precisely because I was stranger that the subjects behave this way. The preservation of anonymity is what drives this behaviour but it is also what allows the subject to be photographed in the first place.

A lot of people, perhaps most you might know, seem to hate having their photograph taken. Certainly in my experience, both of wanting to photograph friends and, in the past, having my own picture taken, I’ve experienced resistance. The painful refrain of ‘I hate having my photograph taken’ is so familiar and has been the cause of many a family argument.

When a person’s image exists constantly for everyone to see, everywhere they go without restriction, it’s strange to think that the simple act of creating a two dimension photographic image of that person would cause such stress and anxiety. It’s true that the frozen moment is in some way lie; it’s only a facsimile of the person in that one moment and we do not experience people in such frozen states; we experience them on a continuum. The old adage that the camera never lies isn’t might not be quite accurate then but we are getting a little too metaphysical. It still doesn’t explain why people are so reluctant to have their picture taken.

I suspect that the more likely explanation is that the act of taking a picture forces you to confront the fact that you are indeed being very closely ‘looked at’ and that the existence of the photograph forces you to also look at yourself, an act that is deeply uncomfortable for most of us even if there is an inbuilt pleasure associated with the act of looking, what Freud called Schauluast and what was subsequently interpreted as scopophilia.

This project started out as an exploration of self through the exploration of engaging with others. I have previously written about Laing’s argument that we are ‘all strangers to one another’; that we cannot know each other because we cannot experience each other’s experiences. Be that as it may, I wonder whether the greater obstacle is actually that of being a stranger to our own self. Looking at our own image us is a challenging experience; it forces us to look at who we. So when a complete stranger approaches us and asks if we can take our picture it is precisely the anonymity between the subject and the photographer and the subsequent distance between the subject and the image that is made that allows that process to work. It is the anonymity that is important.

Why then agree to be photographed in the first place, what does the subject get out of it? I suspect that the process appeals to our in built altruism, our desire to do things that please other people because that makes us feel good about ourselves. I also believe that the subjects share the same process of engagement that I as the photographer experience and crave. Which side of the camera you are on then becomes immaterial to the experience; it is the temporary unravelling of the inherent strangeness between people that is pleasurable. An exploration if you will but one where ultimately the preservation of anonymity is critical to the success of that experience. Once the image has been made, photographer and subject part company, the strangeness between them is preserved and so the experience is a safe one.

That picture of the guy with his son in the shower

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-36322279

I'd already seen this article elsewhere on other photographic sites. In this article by the BBC, the text refers to 'dual standards' contrasting the reception this image had with an almost identical one that featured a mother and child. This is less about dual standards and more clearly about unconscious gender bias; it reveals to us the way we encode paternal relationships as being pejoratively different to maternal ones.

As for merit of photograph, it is at once both sensitive and revealing. It shows the vulnerability of both parties in the shot; the child who is seriously ill and the father, who is aferall naked and revealled to the world.

Leica Summarit 75mm on the Sony A7rII

There are always things that are so vastly expensive compared to what most people are prepared to pay for them, that they confuse and befuddle those same people by their very existence. But the existence of expensive products is not difficult to understand. There are always going to be people with very large personal fortunes and they are always looking for things with price tags commensurate with their purchasing power. At the extremes, price becomes as irrelevant in all regards, by which I mean it ceases to be an inhibiting factor in decision making or in assessing relative quality. All that matters is that a thing is expensive enough to justify you, the super-rich, buying it.

I don’t struggle with how much things cost. It is almost certainly a character flaw of mine (which I could unpick but wouldn’t be terribly interesting in a photography blog) but the idea that for example, you can spend over £100,000 on just a pair of hi-fi speakers doesn’t bother me and if I was a billionaire I wouldn’t hesitate.

In the world of cameras we are to some degree similarly indulged. Five figure systems are readily available from Phase One, Hasselblad and, of course, Leica and in particular Leica’s lenses seem to defy all others in their ability to be incomprehensibly expensive, especially in their M-Mount range.

Oddly however, I have a feeling that the most expensive Leica lenses are perhaps the least usable. I’ve never tried to produce critically sharp results with a wide open 50mm Summilux and while I have seen other photographers post such pictures, I am pretty sure it would be beyond me to do consistently. Similarly, shooting a 90mm Summicron at f/2 would be equally tricky, even on something like the A7 series with focus peaking and magnification turned on, I would find that hard and would always be stopping down a little for fear of getting it wrong and losing a great picture.

Until the new Techart focus adapter for M-Mount lenses on E-Mount bodies starts to filter through and be confirmed as a reliable product (I had ordered and pre-paid for one but cancelled the order when I learned that it would not be delivered until June) the more interesting choices for Leica lenses on Sony E-Mount bodies remains, I believe, their more affordable range of Summarit and Elmarit glass.

Which bring me to my ‘review’.

I love the form factor of Leica and other ranger finder lenses; I love the simplicity of a manual focus lens and the sense of connectedness you get from that process. I do think that photography is infinitely better served by having fast and reliable autofocus but I also believe it is enriched by having a choice.

I chose to buy a second hand Leica 75mm Summarit for a number of reasons. Firstly because I couldn’t get over how ‘cheap’ it was, both outright when compared to the equivalent Summicron and relative to the new price. The second hand lens I bought was maybe one or two years old and looked like it was new and it cost me 50% of the new price.

Secondly, because it was so small compared to any other option. Yes, it is ‘only’ an f/2.5 (the latest version is billed as f/2.4 but dealers have told me that the older version itself was ostensibly also f/2.4 but some technicality meant it was sold as an f/2.5, a little bit like how the original BMW 316 was actually a 1.8l engine), but at 75mm, I would be very nervous of shooting at anything larger than this anyway. It would be nice to shoot at f/2 for portraits but as I said earlier, I would be very nervous of nailing the focus.

So f/2.5 is just fine and if I was to go longer, probably the 90mm Elmarit would be similarly fit for purpose.

Thirdly, while the 75mm focal length might feel like a bit of an orphan compared to the standard 50mm real world view and 85mm portrait view set up, it actually works really very well for street portraits. Most of the portraits I shoot are a three quarters to one half presentation of the person because I am interested in how posture and stance adds to the story and presentation of that individual in the final picture. Composing this way with an 85mm lens puts you too far away from the person to enable you to continue to build rapport. 50mm works really for this and most of the portraits I shoot are done with my A-Mount 50mm f/1.4 Plannar. But sometimes I would like to have just a little more perspective compression and while I love the way that the Plannar lens renders colour and contrast, sometimes a subject needs something a little softer and more forgiving.

This is not to say that the 75 Summarit is ‘soft’ in its resolving power. Far from it. It’s as sharp as anything else I’ve used, including Zeiss 55mm FE 1.8 Sonnar and the 35mm FE 1.4 Distagon. But in comparison to those lenses, the Summarit is a little less aggressive with colour and contrast. It’s more soft pastel tones than full bodied oil paint. You tend to see where it will just naturally work in a more complementary way with the light and the subject. Generally speaking it works best with softer light (as do most things), with more gentle and faded colours and lower contrast situations. The portrait ‘Parent’s Evening’ show this very well, with the pastel yellow hoodie rendering in a lovely soft way against the grey concrete pillar.

It’s also a lens that works very well for black and white, especially in early evening light or where you want to soften the skin tone and give a slightly ethereal look.

It will still give strong contrast, but that strong contrast will not feel overly brittle; the experience is more like high cocoa content dark chocolate rather than raw sugar between your teeth, which some lenses can feel like. The images ‘Stand a Post’ and ‘Shutters’ show what I mean; pin sharp, strong contrast but still with a warm, slightly organic feel to them.

Overall I am very happy with this lens. It represents a ‘sensible’ choice both overall and for the specific use of street portraiture. Focusing at f/2.5, still requires a degree of concentration, but is nevertheless easily achieved.

There are a few things to be aware of though. The older version is now being sold at a substantial discount and can be found for under £1000. While it is ostensibly the same as the new one, a key difference is that it does not come with a lens hood; this must be bought separately and will cost around £60 new (the same hood is used for both the 75 and 90 Summarit). I first tried to find one second hand on eBay but had no luck. Which is odd because the lens itself is readily available on eBay. Expect to pay around £750 for one, almost regardless of age and condition. The other thing to bear in mind is that they don’t sell that well second hand. The price of £750 seems to be the absolute max they are advertised for, but they also seem to hang around on eBay for quite a while; their doesn’t seem to be much demand for longer length Leica lenses in general so if you do buy one and then want to sell it on, you might have to wait a while for it to sell or sell it for less than you paid for it. I bought mine from Aperture in London and though this was several months ago now, the other 75/90 Summarit/Elmarit lenses they had in are all still available now. This means you might be able to get one for maybe £600-650 on eBay with a best offer. Given that there is nothing to go wrong with a manual lens this might be the more prudent way to purchase one.

You want to know how he's choosing them don't you.....

'Graeme'

This post could be as concise as ‘I know it when I see it’, and it would mostly be true as that’s more or less how I got about identifying and approaching someone for a street portrait. But more than one person has commented that there seems to be a theme in the portraits, albeit one that’s hard to pin down and so I started to think whether the process of ‘curation’ itself could be revealing, if indeed I could explain it, after all, this is as much a part of the artistic process as actually making the portrait.

Selecting a stranger for a portrait is a delicate thing. By choosing one person over another we are (hopefully) revealing to the world something about them and something about us. What does it say about me for example that I choose to present the portrait of person A over person B and what can I learn about myself by trying to understand something that so far I have done largely on instinct.

'Becky'

There are a three dimensions that govern the process. The first is who I choose to approach; person A versus person B and is the focus of this blog entry. The other two dimensions include the degree of engagement I experience with the subject and how the final image turns out. I will explore these separately. The process of curation is perhaps the most revealing part of the process in terms of understanding self but also the most difficult to explain (and interestingly be honest about).

First there is the potential artistic interest. I really try to steer away from the obvious; I’m far less interested in making the kind of images you might see in any glossy magazine or TV advert because I don’t think that tells us anything interesting outside of commenting on popular culture. A well composed, beautifully lit portrait of a fabulous looking model with perfect hair and makeup is just, and only, that. A model is paid to look the way you direct them; the more you pay, the more likely it is that they will be able to present you with precisely what you are looking for. Of course there is always a balance, a tension between what you’re looking for and what they chose to show, or indeed how they choose to show it. But the engagement is still professional and therefore transactional. OK that’s probably not completely true but it’s certainly less visceral than working with a complete stranger who isn’t a professional model.

'Dave'

And of course, it’s not to say that popular culture isn’t present in any of the portraits I make, by definition it must be. But more important is how that person has chosen to present themselves to the world. We all make a choice about how we want to present ourselves to the world. The way we dress, the way we walk, our choice of language and what we choose to share with people are all how we determine we want the world to experience us. If you can try to see what that person wanted you to see then you can learn something about them.

There is then a ‘look’ that I tend to gravitate towards. It’s something out of the ordinary, a little bit different, something edgy or outré. It’s more or less in the category of ‘I know it when I see it’ but is most readily codified by someone’s dress, style, gait or posture. It says that the person really did think about how they are presenting to the world and that this process was important to them because they wanted to be noticed or needed; to be different or the same; to be affiliated or included or separate. To be accepted or even rejected. It’s not the ‘look’ that matters, which is why I have no interest in fashion photography. The clothes only matter when they are being worn because the person is trying to tell you something and it’s the something that really matters. It’s also why a person’s gait and posture are of as much interest, if not more interest, as anything else. How a person holds themselves is a fascinating and revealing subject and I’ve chosen a lot of people on this basis.

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'First Date'

What I see might not warrant more than a casual glance anywhere else but when you select that person and present them to others, specifically for the purpose of looking, then you demand that the observer pay more attention. I’m still not comfortable using the term ‘artist’ to describe myself (or the word ‘art’ to describe what I produce, but I will cover that in a separate discussion), but if we can have an agreement to use the word purely for expediency for a moment, then the art begins and ends with the gaze. There’s a lot of stuff in between, certainly a lot more that transcends our sensory experience, but it starts and ends with our looking. So presenting something specifically for purpose of being looked at, the signifier, reveals something more than you might have otherwise seen, the signified. And when what you are seeing are people then you (and I) will, hopefully, come to understand more about the nature of our humanity in the process.

'Ian, Homeless'

This is where the more complex and slightly uncomfortable dimensions come in to play. I try very hard to divorce the act of looking from the process of desiring or coveting. It’s the easiest thing in the world to simply select the most attractive person you can find and persuade them to pose. It’s easy because those are the images that are probably going to be most readily accepted and applauded by your audience (I’ve really noticed that the portraits I present on social media sites such as Flickr with the most ‘likes’ are the ones of young, pretty females closely followed by young handsome men!) It’s also easy because the more attractive a person is, the more likely they are to be at least vaguely aware of that and therefore the most comfortable with their own image and thus the most likely to agree to be photographed. I see this time and time again, especially when approaching older people. Their initial response is to ask why on earth you would want to take their picture followed quickly by making excuses for their own appearance, presentation or looks. They wouldn’t possibly make a good picture.

'The Humanity of Friendship'

And yet this selecting out of those that I find attractive is incredibly hard to do. Talking to someone we find attractive is incredibly reaffirming; it makes us feel good about ourselves (unless of course they are rejecting us in which case it has quite the opposite effect) so why wouldn’t you do it?

What makes this an uncomfortable truth is the question of motive and authenticity. If the only reason I have asked a person to be a subject is because I find them attractive then it calls into question my motives; is this less about the important and more complex commentary of the portrait and more about flirting; about making me feel good about myself by engaging with someoneI find attractive? If that were the case then the authenticity would evaporate and the image would be reduced to voyeurism (where specifically voyeurism is the process of looking or watching without the knowledge or consent of the other party; this can happen even if the subject is aware of you if your motives for doing this are less than honest).

I don’t believe that something that is voyeuristic can be art because voyeurism is about power, not art. None of this is to say that you can’t take a meaningful portrait of someone you find attractive; just that it runs the risk of being superficial.

Despite all this (rambling) by far my most compelling and consistent reason I ask someone to be a subject  is because I see something that I think represents a set of experiences that are vastly different to mine and that consequently there is something more insightful and profound that I can learn from. That difference is usually represented by age or, and I am being very delicate when I say this, social standing or class. I know that the environment I grew up in was one of relative privilege and comfort (my experiences at primary school notwithstanding), and I know that however I’ve got to be where I am now, that relative privilege and comfort has been maintained. But I’ve always been drawn to engage with people from any and all backgrounds but in particular those whose backgrounds have meant that life has been more difficult than my experience.

Street Portraiture – Composition, Technique and Message

Composition and technique should reflect what you’re trying to communicate; it shouldn’t be the other way around but it’s taken me a little while, and a lot of trial and error, to both realise this and learn to prioritise what I’m trying to communicate first and then use composition and technique to achieve this.

I suspect that this is a common experience for those relatively new to using photography as a communicative or expressive medium (as I am). Photography does after all require a certain degree of technical capability even if modern cameras will largely do much of the thinking for you.

Composition

As I’ve previously stated I’m primarily interested in people, specifically the nature of people and their (our) humanity (see the post ‘What Kind of Photographer Am I?’ on the About Me page). I think you can do that with any kind of portrait (indeed you should be doing that), ranging from a pure environmental portrait all the way through to a studio made tight facial composition.

But for me personally, a lot of the interest I see in my subjects comes from their posture, gait and stance as it does anything else. Indeed, it is often this that I notice first when selecting subjects to try and shoot. There is so much personality on display in the way we move, the way we hold ourselves and in particular what we do with are hands, especially when simply standing or sitting for a photograph.

'Georgie'

50mm at f/2.8

So my strong preference is to compose with more of the person in the frame than less and in particular to try and compose the image so that the subject’s hands are visible.

This is a balancing act though because I still want the image to clearly show the subjects facial expression and in particular their eyes (which as we all know are the windows to our soul). Our face is the thing that people most readily connect with and for many, the part of our body that we are most (self) conscious about. It is the part of the body that we use to look and the part of the body that is seen most readily and so it’s connection with scopophilia is deeply embedded in our psyche and this fascinates me. To look and be looked upon, to see the person in front of you, is an act of deep humanity since in doing so, you acknowledge the person. It can also denude our humanity if done in an unequal way, for example if done in a voyeuristic manner or in a situation where there is a significant imbalance in power.

Most of my portraits then, both street and formal, will be composed as three quarters length shots so that I can best balance showing the person’s posture and what they are doing with their arms and hands, with clearly illustrating their facial expression and their eyes. It is interesting that even if you cannot see the person’s legs, if you can see their arms and hands, you have enough information to know what their legs are doing, so for this reason, I balance the composition as three quarters.

That in turn requires the photograph is made in portrait rather than landscape; if you shoot a three quarters portrait in landscape, you end up with a lot of situational space around the person. This will work if what you want to show is the person in their environment or for example if they are sitting rather than stood, where the person’s form is taking up much less vertical space. But if they are stood then this changes the dynamic of the picture; it makes it less about the person and more about the person’s environment. This is a fine subject to explore but it’s a different subject.

Focal Length

'Milly'

85mm at f/1.8

While 85mm is more classically associated with portraiture, my preference so far is to use a 50mm lens for street portraits and reserve the 85mm for studio work. I have limited experience of doing studio shoots (and when I say ‘studio’ I mean inside with an off camera lighting set up), the images I’ve managed to make with my 85mm lens are very pleasing. The problem with using this length for street portraits is that it puts you too far away from the subject, especially if what you want is a full length or three quarters composition. That distance makes it hard to communicate especially if it’s noisy, which being outside it will be, certainly relative to a studio. And since my technique involves building initial rapport to gain consent and the continuing to build that rapport in order to elicit a more interesting response from the subject, the 50mm allows me to keep close enough to make this possible without needing to be so close that the perspectives start to break down and make the subject’s face look ugly.  

Aperture

Both my 50mm and 85mm lenses open all the way up to f/1.4, which can give fabulous isolation from the background, but the problem is that at the distance you’re shooting, even on a 50mm lens, at f/1.4 the depth of field is so narrow that the subject is only partially in focus. And if what you want to do is capture the person, then having half of them out of focus seems a bit pointless. It might look ‘dreamy’ but again that’s a different photograph. Apart from anything else, it’s too easy for the camera to miss the focus point if you’re using autofocus and very hard to focus precisely at f/1.4 if doing so manually.

On a 50mm lens I tend to stop down to f/2 or f/2.8 depending on the background or even stop down to f/5.6, if I’m under time pressure and think that the shot is too important to miss (and assuming I’ve got enough light).

Background

This goes hand in hand with aperture and composition but I’ve noticed that it makes a big difference to the overall result and it does also determine some of the other variables.

'Elaine'

Waterloo Station, London

Street portraits done with lots of activity in the background look messy and uncomfortable even when you’ve shot at a very large aperture and tried to isolate the subject from that activity. And when you’re using that approach, the risk is that the shot becomes more about the ‘dreamy bokeh’ than it does the subject, which I don’t think works well in portraiture.

My preference then is to find a complimentary or interesting background against which to frame the subject and to use enough depth of field to integrate the background without it overtaking the composition. This is hard to do because you’re then looking to combine two variables in the street; finding an interesting subject and finding an interesting background. What I’m finding is that I’m developing preferred locations, places where I know there are good backgrounds to use and where there will be plenty of interesting people. Berwick Street in London’s Soho is a great example of this.

Metering, ISO & Shutter Speed

'Tallulah'

Spot metered shooting into the sun

My preference would be to meter for the face using spot metering. The challenge with this is that the spot meter point in the view finder is slap bang in the centre, not where you would want to put the face for a traditional composition along the rule of thirds line.  I could use the focus and recompose method, but since I also use back button focus, this would mean focusing, then half pressing the shutter button to manage the exposure, then recomposing and then shooting. That’s a little too much for me to manage just now when I am still feeling a little under pressure when taking the shot. Over time I think I will gravitate towards that approach but for now, I rely on matrix metering and the cameras incredible sensor combined with PP to get the metering right. 

I set the shutter speed to about twice focal length and the ISO to vary according to every other variable. The A7rII and the A7s I had before it, will both happily go up to ISO 12,800 without issue so the ISO becomes a variable I don’t even think about anymore.

The Vulnerability of Self

'The Bike Messenger'

Over dinner with some friends recently I was introduced to someone who, while having a successful business career, also described herself as ‘an artist’. The deliberate use of that moniker was interesting and I asked at what point in her creative journey she had finally felt comfortable using that title.  She acknowledged the validity of the question and explained that it had taken her completion of an under graduate degree in Fine Art before she finally felt justified in calling herself an artist. Ironically for me as an observer, all it took was a look at her work (she’s a sculptor and an incredibly talented one) to see the artist and not just the person.

Self-doubt has long been a feature of the creative process and of artists in general. For sure I don’t consider myself an artist and until recently the word ‘just’ was quite deliberately used before the self-description of ‘amateur photographer’ on the front page of this website. When asked why by a friend, I explained it was deliberately self-deprecating; I didn’t consider myself good enough to call myself an amateur photographer just yet. That term, to my reading at least, connotes some degree of proficiency and talent I wasn’t sure I possessed. We agreed I would remove after her reassurance that I was more than talented enough. As a graphic designer, she routinely works with and appraises various photographers work so she should know, and yet the doubts still linger…..

'Tina'

I started this project as a way of examining the concept of the person and the three manifestations of any individual. The more photographs I take though, the more I realise that I am exploring that concept from the perspective of self as much as anything else and that process is similarly tinged with self doubt and vulnerability. I guess I’m exercising my own demons such as they are; the little boy at Catholic primary school who while not subject to physical abuse, was exposed to prolonged and painful emotional abuse. It has an effect that is carried through to adulthood and at various stages in life is processed through different lenses, if you will excuse the pun. The current lens I am using is both metaphorical and literal.

There is a certain irony with using the camera lens to explore that vulnerability and self-doubt. Traditionally, it is the subject that is more nervous of the lens because it’s their vulnerability or self-doubt that is being observed if not exposed. For me, the fear and doubt is as equal behind the lens as in front of it, it’s that mirror phase again with the subject looking back at me, being me.

'The Film Producer'

The three portraits on this blog say a lot on this subject. In the first, ‘The Bike Messenger’, the pose is relaxed but the cigarette and the off camera look show tension; he’s relaxed but not completely. The tension is probably the reflection that he’s just agreed to have his picture taken by some random stranger in Soho. I imagine he’s having second thoughts but isn’t sure how to get out of it. This is self-doubt brought about by the sudden vulnerability of the situation.

In the second, ‘Tina’, we see a very different story. It was her tattoos that immediately caught my eye and why I asked if I could take her picture. Her immediate response was to ask for spare change in return, as she was homeless. I agreed and she posed quite freely but her pose is at once both vulnerable and defiant. The way she holds her head shows strength, you can see the muscular structure of her neck suggesting that physical strength, the look in her eyes and of course, the obvious hand gesture, which I confess I did not see at the moment I took the picture and initially cropped out. And yet she is intensely vulnerable, after all she has just asked for money because of her situation.

The last picture is the polar opposite. ‘The Film Producer’ shows a man consummately at ease with himself. He knows who he is, he knows what he likes and he is very comfortable with that. There is not the slightest hint of vulnerability here or at least, any vulnerability or self-doubt that may have once been has long since been forgotten.

Of course, all this could just be complete nonsense. The pictures could well be no better than something you’d have developed at Happy Snaps and my reflecting on them over intellectualised nonsense (actually that part probably is true; I hope the pictures are a little better than snaps though).

Visual Pleasure and Narative Photography

The title of this post references the famous essay by Laura Mulvey on the principles of viewing pleasure in the cinema titled 'Visual Pleasure and Narative Cinema'.

'The Man In-Front of You'

I recently did a photoshoot with my dad ('Dad') who suffers from ‘frontal lobe dementia’. It’s a difficult condition to have in someone you love, someone who inspired you and who you want to remember as the great man in your childhood. The condition means that while he is still present and lucid to a relatively high level, he has lost the ability to perceive how others perceive him. He sees others but he has no ability to conceive of how others see him. It can make his behaviour very challenging (it’s not unlike dealing with a three year old) and as a result of the conflict that arises he has retreated quite a bit. It’s almost as if his coping strategy is to not engage in order to avoid the conflict. I’ve no idea if this mechanism is correct or not, but the reality that he is more ‘vacant’ these days certainly is.

In taking his portrait I wanted to achieve a number of things. Primarily I wanted to try and connect with his condition and with his experience of it. In doing that, I wanted to gain some insight into his experience (him as he sees himself) and thus reconnect with him myself. That’s a deeply uncomfortable proposition though and so it’s no surprise that no one seems to like the pictures I’ve made, not least my family.

My brother challenged my directly on this, saying that it would have been far better to capture the last sparks of who he was. There is a lot of merit to doing that. I think it’s a different project though there were one or two images from the session that did do just that. But the discomfort my brother experienced in the other images, and felt the need to (rightly and justifiably) comment on is perhaps more interesting.

It is part of a general trend I’ve noticed in attitudes towards portraits that dictates there is a formula for how these should be done; that a portrait of someone you know, for most people, should be something warm and positive. I’ve noticed this especially when I post self-portraits on social media and I get the usual round of comments about looking grumpy, or stern, or too intense or something else other than the clichéd happy/warm/positive you would expect from a picture you share of yourself with the world.

'Mother'

People are very uncomfortable with seeing something other than that. Maybe they are OK with it in an art gallery, where there is an understanding that you might see something you’re not comfortable with and even if you experience that discomfort, you know it’s temporary and therefore of no consequence. It’s different when it’s someone you know. There is nothing temporary about it. Whatever it is that you see, even if you put it out of your mind it’s still there.

I had a similar conversation with a friend of mine who is at the start of exploring gender transition. We’ve talked about making a series of images of him as a record of that process. His motivation is documentation and mine is the creative process, which naturally means I would want to ‘publish’ those images at some point. In discussing that with him, he commented that he wasn’t sure there would ever be a time when he was comfortable with that (which then seemed to limit my interest in the project – a subject for another post about the creative process). He said that having the permanent record of something painful like that was both a risk and challenging to him. My point was that there is always a permanent record and the existence of a photograph is irrelevant to that fact. You exist in the world and people experience you in it and in doing so, that creates a permanent record that can never be erased. A photograph might add to the collective memory, but it doesn’t solely define it.

It’s not difficult to understand where this discomfort comes from. It’s tied into Laing’s ‘I see you, you see me’ concept. We see ourselves. We know other people see us but we cannot experience that experience. We also know that there is us as we really are and that this reality probably sits somewhere between the experience of self and the experience other people have of us. The perception of self is usually built to help us feel good about things. Whatever someone else might think of us, we can put that away as less important because we know we can’t experience it. But the photograph breaks down that invisible barrier. It shows us what other people might see and therefore creates some discomfort if the images shows something other than the warm, positive, comforting image we have created for ourselves.

'Rememberance'

This explains why people react badly to their own picture which might then contradict that self-image, but why does the same thing happen when you show them a picture of someone else that they know?

Jacques Lacan described the process of ego creation in a young child as being greatly stimulated by the recognition of self in a mirror. That recognition usually takes place at a time when the child’s ambitions greatly outstrip their motor development and so they see the reflection as being far more capable than they really are. That process creates a sense of comfort and satisfaction that stimulates the creation of ego.

This theory has been developed to explain some of the principles behind the pleasure of cinema. It states that the act of observing the capable, all conquering hero on screen is akin to this process of self-recognition. It reminds us of that moment and in doing so, we see ourselves in the hero and we are comforted.

The same could apply to the viewing of portraits and is perhaps even more powerful in a portrait of someone we know and love so that when that picture is not one that conveys the positive aspects we associate with them, it actually serves to remind us of our own insecurities. It is if you like, the inverse function of watching the hero on screen.