PixelatedImage Blog

Self Portrait, iPhone.

There are rules for engineering bridges, and flying airplanes. There are laws about how you drive a car and file your taxes. There are no rules or laws in art. Art is a beautiful anarchy, a place wherein we express – or try to – the inexpressible, to “eff the ineffable” as author Nick Hornby once wrote.  Art is a place where we play and do and create, and share, according to our will, our whim, and our stubborn determination. It is the one place in which we can ask the question “What if?” with near total abandon, and (mostly) free from consequence. There are no art police, and no authorities, and those who would be should be eyed with suspicion or torn from their high places.

Your art, the thing that stirs from your heart, mind, and soul, the thing that moves you, and I hope, moves others, is a free agent, and the moment you begin to ask “What should I do? or “How should I do this?” you allow you art to teeter, to lean towards conformity and away from authentic expression. Unless it’s the muse herself to whom you direct the question. The same is true of your path in the creative arts if you make your living there; why do we do this at all if not for the freedom to beat that path into whatever direction that suits our fancy, or to paint the cobblestones any damn colour we please? To do what we should in art is bondage. To tell others, with our art, what they should think or feel or do, is propaganda. And to tell other artists how they should do their art is presumptuous, and unkind, and tells the muse we’ve learned nothing at all under her influence.

We need more anarchists in photography, more people willing to abandon the stupidity of megapixels and brands and red stripes on their lenses and get back to making beauty for the sake of its joy. We need more people that make photographs that surprise us, not mimic others, and more people creating simply to create, and to share their work as a gift, not a request for praise. We need a resurgence in pinholes, film, wet plates, and any damn technique that makes you happy and in which you find your muse. We need to scrap the word “professional” because it implies authority, and simply allow everyone to be an artist, their work judged by its own merits not the camera used to create it or the clients that paid for it. We need people who understand how composition and light makes us feel, not which third of the frame to use, or which light is “bad light.”

Photography is still young. As an art it is still in its awkward, beautiful, childhood, but we stunt its growth, and our own, when we seek and follow the so-called rules, instead of just getting on with it and doing our work: making and sharing photographs that please our eyes and our hearts, that say – even imperfectly – the things we can’t find words for.

I’m about to get on a flight to Milan, via Frankfurt. 3 days of private lectures in Switzerland, a week with an old friend and my camera in Stockholm, then to Italy for 2 weeks of Within The Frame Adventures. If I’m quiet, that’s why. Maybe just sign out of Facebook, close the browser, embrace your inner anarchist, and go make some photographs…  See you soon!

Emily, just back from the final trip to the outfitters and ready for February.

A friend once told me to watch the Pixar movie UP. Aside from the fact that I was crying like a little girl within the first 10 minutes (be warned), there was something about it that resonated powerfully with me. Part of that was the exploration of the idea of adventure. The phrase “Adventure is Out There!” is sounded often in the movie, like an anthem, and while that adventure generally refers to the journey of the unlikely heroes to Paradise Falls, South America, it’s also clear that, for at least one of the characters, the greatest adventure was love. It’s touching, and it should be no surprise to anyone the comes here once in a while that I’ve come close to having Adventure is Out There tattooed over my heart.

In February, a year after I started the adventure that went wildly off the rails, I’ll resume my road-trip, but it is not a resumption of the adventure; the adventure never stopped. No adventure ever goes to plan, and if it was adventure I wanted when I set out in my ’93 Land Rover Defender, JESSIE, it’s adventure I got. I made photographs in the rain all the way down the Oregon coast with my friend Dave Delnea, until he got into the Poison Oak, became so hideously deformed he was scaring children, and had to leave the country. I photographed and camped in Death Valley with my best friend and manager, Corwin, and then through Monument Valley and Zion, and into New Mexico, camping the whole way, and photographing as we went. I drove to the Gulf of Mexico. Spent time in New Orleans. Hung out with friends in Atlanta. I flew to Italy and fell in love. I also fell off a wall and shattered my feet. I came home and crawled my way through healing until my bones mended and I went to rehab. And then a couple days after they let me go home I jumped a plane for Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand, where, among other things, I joined 8 new friends as we floated down the Mekong River in a long-boat. And then there was Oaxaca, and Roatan, and then Antarctica. So much of it was unexpected, so much didn’t go to plan. And all of it was gloriously life-giving. And as strange as it sounds, I truly wouldn’t change a thing. This has been one of the most extraordinary years of my life.

I don’t want it to end. Being nomadic is teaching me so much, and while I’ve been sojourning at my family home for the last few months, and while I learned to walk again, I got more time with my family than I’ve had in 20 years. You can see why the idea of returning to so-called normal doesn’t really appeal. So on February 01, I return from travels in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania, and pack EMILY (above. I’ll do a Jeep-geek post some other time) and head out.

Adventure is out there, but it’s also in here. It’s an inner game. What separates adventure from the mundane is an openness to the unexpected and a willingness to embrace it, laugh your way through it when you aren’t gritting your teeth, and learn from it. It’s not a freedom from fear, it’s an unwillingness to let it have even one day of your already beautiful, short, fragile, one-of-a-kind life. It’s being present, 100% in your art, your relationships, the way you raise your children, and the way you open your heart to strangers. You can do that from a hospital bed, unable to move, and you can do that from the base camp of Everest. It’s a choice, a posture of the mind and heart. It is not the exclusive domain of the privileged, the healthy, or the strong. It is for all of us that, if you’ll pardon the worn cliche, are willing to hear the music and have the courage to dance without shame.

Tonight we launch Vision Is Better 2, the follow-up of the first one of the same name. It’s 44 essays, almost all previously published here on this blog, about the photographic life and craft. It includes much of my own adventure from this year and lessons learned. And it includes a couple un-published essays. Essentially it’s a sweet re-design of the best blog posts from the last year, available in one place, off-line, and always available. It’ll be available right here on the blog, with discounts as usual during the first week after launch. Whether you chose to buy the book, or not, thanks to you all for being part of this amazing adventure. Some of you were with me, in this blog, Twitter, and FB, through my darkest times, and made them lighter. Some of you were with me in Italy when I fell, in Laos when I made my first scared steps back to traveling, or in Antarctica as I experienced what it feels like to create work I love for the first time in a long while. Thank you so, so much. You remain my fans, friends, and family, but more than that you remain, in the most sincerest terms, my heroes. Thank you.

Hello from Roatan, in the Bay Islands of Honduras. I’m limiting my movements to snorkeling and reading in the hammock and foraging for nuts and berries at the bar, so if this is all you hear from me this week, that’s why. Please don’t send search and rescue, I like it here. Yesterday I left Oaxaca far earlier than I’d have liked to. Here’s the stuff I scraped off the inside wall of my heart while I reflected on this trip.

Last year I traveled back to Kathmandu, a place in which i feel very much at home. Despite this ease-of-being in that visually rich place, I wrestled with finding anything remotely close to a vision of the place. I wrote about it publicly here on the blog and was flogged by at least one reader who felt my angst was exhausting. Generally that kind of feedback discourages me, can even flatten me for a day while i regain my perspective, but in this case it’s given me something to laugh about for over a year. Man, if my angst exhausts you, you should try being me. I need a nap just writing about it.

I don’t do angst. I do hope. But I understand, too well sometimes, what it feels like to be an artist. If you pick up a camera in order to simply play with large lenses, make perfect exposures, or gather material for your latest cookie-cutter over-texturized HDR photographs and this week’s Flickr love-fest, then I understand why you might find my honesty about my own life as an aspiring artist a little wearying. But I hope to one day be a visual poet whose work echoes more clearly the voice in his mind and heart. And that journey isn’t easy.

In the six months since my fall in Italy I’ve had high moments. My photography is not among them. I’ve now been back in the field, walking through the world with tentative steps, in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Mexico. What I had hoped would be journeys of renewal have been anything but. I’ve had long days of pain, fallen over gravestones during the Day of the Dead in Oaxaca, had my cane stuck in the mud of Laotian rice-paddies. Mostly I’ve just laughed, because I get a little stronger every day. What shows no evidence of strengthening is my nerve. I’m slow. I can’t move the way I once did. I can’t squat or kneel on one knee without looking like a slapstick performer and falling over. I can’t get where I want to be to make the photograph, or easily carry the gear I need to make it.

But if this sounds like a building storm of pity, it’s not. It’s simply the recognition of a new reality. A reality, like yours, that is full of constraints. But while art flourishes in constraints, it does not do so easily. I am slowing down. I am back in school. And like many of my own students, having a melt-down on the first day of a workshop, I’ve come back to that place where nothing – nothing – comes easily. What has this new reality given me? Time. It has slowed me down. It has forced my hand to the making of the photographs I truly want to make, and while I’m still failing in those efforts, I’m learning.

I was in Oaxaca last week for the Day of the Dead. I don’t think I emerged with a single photograph of the festival. Instead i made some still-lifes, and a few portraits. I shot less than 500 frames, almost none of them even close to my hopes. In the past, I might have judged this a failure, but in the face of feeling like I might not be able to do this anymore, like my best work is behind me, or that I just won’t make the same photographs again, these few portraits are new, faltering steps back towards my art. And I’m right: I won’t make the same kinds of photographs. They’ll be different, because I am. And as long as they’re honest, I’m hoping they’re also going to be stronger. Slowing down isn’t a bad thing. Less so-called “keepers” isn’t a bad thing. Honest photographs matter. Hard-drives full of images don’t.

My friend Fernando. (I can hear the drums…)

Everyone I know rides the ups and downs of creative life, beaten around by our circumstances, our failures, the latest work of that photographer whose talent we secretly envy. Sometimes it’s just the disparity between what we see in our mind’s eye and what we’re capable of creating with the camera in our hands. I don’t know a single so-called pro whose work I respect that finds this always easy. Rewarding? Profoundly so. Difficult? Also so. Your work will be judged on what it is, not what it isn’t. It will resonate beautifully with people who don’t know how hard it was for you to make it, and even more for the few who do.

Huge thanks to the amazing people and new friends who shared last weeks adventure in Oaxaca with me.

Agra Fort. Agra, India. 2008.

I rediscovered this sequence of photographs while putting together Photographically Speaking. In the book I discuss one of these images and explore the elements and decisions that make the photograph what it is. But looking at the 3 together I think there’s a lesson along the lines of the stuff I’ve been talking about lately, specifically the idea of inspiration coming from work, and my more recent post, Do The Work.

It’s easy to see something, to photograph it, and to move on. But you can photograph even the most amazing scene – the one where you’re sure you “got the shot” from an almost limitless number of angles. Add that to a variety of focal lengths, and you’ve got your work cut out for you. This is the photographer’s equivalent of the writer sitting down at her laptop to write the next chapter. This is the process of experimentation, muttering to yourself, then trying something else. It’s creating 100 sketch images to get to the next one. It’s why we need to understand the elements of the visual language; so we recognize them when we see them and put them to good use. Because, frankly, there is no “got the shot.” There are thousands of potential photographs in these scenes, not one, and how long you’re willing to explore, how receptive you are to what is in front of you, determines how many of them you create. I thought I had the shot when I took the top photograph. I was giddy. I nearly ran off to show someone how amazing I was. My (misguided) ego nearly ruined this series. Sure, you could stop at one. But sometimes the good gets in the way of the great, and I think this series together is more powerful than the first photograph alone, but even on their own, these three – and making them – brought me more joy than I’d have had to simply stop at one and call it a day.

The writer doesn’t stop and pat herself on the back when she’s written a really great sentence. She keeps writing. She does the work. Because she knows there’s a better sentence around the corner, and they’ll fit together brilliantly and the combination of the two will be even better than both alone and no amount of patting herself on the back will create that next line. Just work. The work. YOUR work. Being open, receptive, and observant, comes with practice, not as a stroke of luck. Keep at it. I shot this, still struggling (I know, my angst is exhausting) to get comfortable with my craft, after 20 years as a photographer. I’m getting there. So are you.

All the technique in the world doesn’t compensate for the inability to notice. ~ Elliott Erwitt

A week ago I left what might have been my shortest post ever: Originality is Overrated. It generated some good discussion, and from the comments it seemed to really resonate and get some thoughts going. My own thinking has been stirring too, but before I tell you where those thoughts have -for now – settled, I wanted some ghosts to have their say:

“Insist upon yourself. Be original.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Originality is the art of concealing your sources”
~ Benjamin Franklin

“Originality exists in every individual because each of us differs from the others. We are all primary numbers divisible only by ourselves.”
~ Jean Guitton

“What moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.”
~ Eugene Delacroix

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
~ Herman Melville

“Millions of men have lived to fight, build palaces and boundaries, shape destinies and societies; but the compelling force of all times has been the force of originality and creation profoundly affecting the roots of human spirit.”
~ Ansel Adams

“Originality is merely an illusion”
~ M.C. Escher

“The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.”
~ Thomas Carlyle

“Utter originality is, of course, out of the question”
~ Ezra Pound

“Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself.”
~ James Stephens

Not all of them appear to agree. But I think all of them are right in one sense or another.  There are three apparently different things being said by these voices. The first is that originality does exist, and is desireable. The second is that no true originality exists.  The third implies originality is in fact possible, but is not relative to what already exists, but to the artist himself. I think we’re using the same word to mean slightly different things.

So here’s where I’m at on the issue, without over-thinking it any further. And if it seems I’ve flip-flopped on the issue, I don’t think I have, just looking at it a little broader.

I think the search for originality burdens artists. Does it exist? I think so. But I need to qualify that, and that’s hard to do without being prescriptive. But in general I think that making the pursuit of originality our primary pursuit as creative people, results in work that is different, but not necessarily honest. And for many it is crippling, because imitation and influence are among the first steps to learning our craft. Originality is not the greatest good.

I believe in originality in this sense:

Sense A. Creativity is about combining existing elements into new combinations and there are nearly infinity possibilities out there. Yes, all art is derivative, but that doesn’t mean borrowing influence & inspiration, from, say, Monet, Leonard Cohen, and a turnip, can’t result in something new. Something that is, in a real sense, original (even though we’ve not defined the word.)

Sense B. While the basic truth of being human is that we share profound commonalities, we are all different. That makes us, as creators, unique, with the possibility of creating unique work. Being true to that uniqueness and creating work that is honest and imaginative, opens us to the possibility of originality.

My friend Anita, a woman with an artists heart and inquisitive mind, used a great word recently in a discussion about this. The word was possibility, and that’s why I’m using it so much here. We’re trying, in debates about originality to pin things down without defining our terms, all the while avoiding the possibility that originality and uniqueness exist. She said, “I think it should be less about defining originality or debating its existence, and more about being open to possibility, creativity, imagination.”

And that’s where I end up in my thinking as well. Do I believe in the possibility of originality? For me that still depends on how we’re using the word, but yes. I like to believe in infinite possibility. It allows room for my imagination. It implies creative freedom is possible. But it’s still a by-product of a search for something else and not the goal itself. Our creative minds and hearts will flourish more, and create with greater faithfulness to who we are, if we stop making originality the goal and allow ourselves to be overtaken by the pursuit of  honest expression, play, and imagination. Be yourself. Do the work. The rest will follow.

We all do things for different reasons. For me the goal is to create, express, and communicate, my reactions to this life and this world, in a way that is faithful to who I am. Whether it is ever seen as original doesn’t matter. I’d rather it be faithful. I like how C.S. Lewis expressed it:

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
– C. S. Lewis

“The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.”
~Emile Zola

Lately I’ve had nothing but time. My feet are still weak and the closest I come to walking is fearful crutch-work across the kitchen floor as I put more and more weight on the feet. I have visions of the screws and plates popping out. It’s scary as hell. But if there’s one thing I know about physiotherapy, it’s this: recovery doesn’t show up on your doorstep. You don’t say, “I’ll do the exercises after my feet heal.” You do the work, the healing comes.

The same is true of photography, writing, or any creative endeavor. You do the work. There is no muse; at least not one that is beckoned by anything but work. There is no amount of talent that compensates for lack of work. Everything I have read about creativity echoes the same thing. And it is that we do the work. Our work. The work that others will call art, or for which they’ll credit us with genius (or not). But however highly we think of it, or don’t, it remains simply work.

There are frustrations aplenty in the creative life. We work within constraints. We have highs where not a soul could touch us if they tried, and lows where the same is true. In other words, it’s hard enough without on top of that worrying about the size of our talent compared to others, or whether the muse will show up, or if we’ve thought our last creative thought, made our last beautiful photograph. When you get frustrated, just begin. Pick up the camera and do the work. Sit down at the laptop and start the edit. Do the work.

Don’t worry about getting inspired, being original, or any of the other things that haunt the creative mind. The muse will show up, she always does. It’s she who’s waiting. Just start. Do the work.

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.”
~ Picasso

“Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.”
~ Igor Stravinsky

There is much talk in artsy circles about being “original”. I’m not even sure I know what that means. (Or if it exists.)

Of all the places to put our energy, I think this is among the more futile. It’s the wrong answer to the right question.

Is desiring originality (insert vague personal definition here) a good thing? Yes. Of course. If we can agree on the meaning. But however you define it, it’s merely a by-product.

You are already unique. If you do the work you do with honesty, integrity, curiousity, boldness, and courage, you will find your work as unique – and original – as you are.

If you aim for originality you may produce work that is indeed original. It’ll be unlike anything else, including you.

Impression I, II, III
All three photographs were made with my iPhone 4, cropped to 4×5, and processed with the Magic Hour filter, all in the Camera+ app. I tweaked curves slightly, and added borders in Photoshop after import.

One of the first things I did when the Ottawa Hospital finally let me have a Day Pass to go wreak havoc in Ottawa was make a bee-line for the National Gallery with a friend. What I most wanted to see, and hadn’t for a few too many years, was the work of the Group of Seven. I could stand in front of them for hours. I’ll let you look them up when you have a moment, but I strongly recommend you do. They were my first love affair with impressionism, and if you have time, and ever find yourself in Kleinburg, Ontario, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection has what I believe the largest collection. But I’m getting off track.

There’s something about the impressionists, and I’ll as happily spend a day in Paris’ Musée d’Orsay which houses a lot of European Impressionist paintings, because they feel like something. More than mere illustration they illicit, at least in me, stronger emotions. I never studied Art History; I probably should have. But I know what I like; I know what moves me. And standing in front of paintings of Algonquin and the north shore of Lake Superior, I wondered how I could put that kind of mood into my own work, in ways beyond the obvious. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks.

And then last Friday we drove Corwin, my manager, back to the airport and it rained and rained. I spent the entire drive with my iPhone pushed up to the window, having more fun creatively than I have had since the moments before I fell off the wall in Italy. I don’t know that I’ve accomplished what I wanted, but I’ve found clues. These three photographs feel the way I feel about the countryside I grew up in, at least on certain days. And to me, the ability to express those things is increasingly important.I’ve said often that photography is a way of pointing, of saying “Look at that!” It’s also a way to to say, “I feel ___________about that,” in the hopes that others might see it, and feel it that way too.

______________________

Tuesday is June 28, and we’ll be releasing A DEEPER FRAME, my first eBook in over 6 months. Everytime we release an eBook, we offer discounts for a few days. Well this time the discounts are, um, well, deeper, I guess. Join us here tomorrow for that announcement.

This March, I spent more time making photographs with my iPhone down the coast of Oregon than I did with my D3s and Pelican cases full of gear. Many of the images I made in those days are among the best of my recent photographs; unobstructed by all the gear I was more able to play. But not once did I simply point and shoot.

Point and shoot is an attitude, an approach to photography; it is not – nor to my mind should it be – a category of cameras. So while this post is more of my usual hair-splitting over semantics, I believe it’s important. It’s important because it says something about how we think about the tools we use and – more importantly – perpetuates the same kind of nonsense as the trumped up importance given to Pros. As in, Buy This Camera, Shoot Like a Pro. The implication is that we should want to shoot like a pro because to be a Pro is to be at the pinnacle of this art. I call bullsh*t. But that’s not my point.

When the Fuji x100 was announced there were mixed reactions, as they always are when a new piece of gear is released. We polarize so quickly on some of this stuff. Many of the reactions could most easily be summed up in a comment from a friend on Twitter this evening.  The x100 is just a $1200 point and shoot camera.

It struck me as a funny thing to say. And the more I thought about it seemed completely irrelevant. Not the comment, so much, but the fact that that comment should even mean something to me. And that something is: that’s serious money for a camera that’s not serious. Might not be what my friend meant, but it’s what I inferred and I’ve heard it elsewhere unambiguously.

So what makes a camera serious? Must it be a $3200 body with a $1800 lens? Does it need a certain sensor size? Must it be a DSLR? At the most basic our tools are boxes with a hole in them. Our media are time and light. We use optics to create a quality of focus and manipulate the geometry in the frame. We need to control the amount of light coming into the box, knowing that doing so with aperture and shutter allows other aesthetic effects. But as far as I know, beautiful photography has been created with pinhole cameras, antique rangefinders, and iPhones, as surely as a Ltd. Edition gold-plated Leicas and $10,000 pro-bodies have produced an astonishing quantity of crap. The recent enthusiasm towards plastic lens cameras (eg Holgas) is a great example. I’ve seen some incredible work created by photographers using the Holga and I’ve seen work I think we’d all agree was junk, even with a gracious and liberal allowance made in order to avoid being called a “snob”.

My x100 is a beautiful camera. It does everything my Nikon D3s does in terms of creating a simple, compelling photograph. It has constraints, to be sure, but I see those constraints as an opportunity for greater creativity, not less. I’m unlikely to serve clients with this camera, but I’m very likely to create work that I’m most proud of with it. And at no point would I describe my approach to photography, regardless of the camera I hold in my hands, as point and shoot.

Point and Shoot. The words imply automation. They imply a lack of intention and care. And to me those words trivialize the efforts to create something beautiful with these fundamentally simple and elegant boxes. To me it’s about the way we approach the entire art, however it is we do that. I guess my point is this; you can point and shoot, if you choose to, but your camera can not. Having a serious camera is not the point and never has been, because in the hands of an artists, a child’s toy will create beauty. Client needs aren’t the issue, that’s different. That has to do with the best tool for the job argument. My plea here is that we alone accept responsibility for creating something great, and we do it with the camera we most enjoy.

I suspect I’m naive and idealistic in hoping we’ll see an end to some of this nonsense anytime soon. It’s perpetuated by the same engines of commerce that want to convince every still photographer that their career is in peril unless they learn video – a completely different discipline and language. I’m probably banging my head against the wall, and I’m OK with that. Where I take it personally is when my friends, readers, and students -  people new to the craft and so full of enthusiasm – are convinced every 12 months to part with serious money because they’ve been convinced the newer, bigger cameras, are more serious. And they go from promise to promise. Red herring to red herring.They learn to divert what was once an enthusiasm for making photographs to an enthusiasm for better and better cameras. God forbid they should be caught making photographs with a point and shoot camera.

Get a camera you love to use. Make photographs you love. If that’s a simple, used, $50, beat-up 35mm camera, or a $700 iPhone, or a $10,000 Mamiya, just do what you love: make photographs. Leave the pointing and shooting for others. Your photographs are judged on their own merits, not the tool you used to create them.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a good, proper, rant. Part of that has been the adventure of this year; i think it’s softened me and given me more patience, made me a little more graceful. Another part of it, probably closer to the heart of the matter is that I’ve been busy doing other things and a good rant takes time to incubate.

Well if there is one thing I have had lately it’s time. And somewhere in all that time a rant’s been building. Actually a couple rants have been building, two of which may never see the light of day because when I finally release them to the wild it’ll be me that has to pick up the pieces. One of those rants is about HDR. I’ve finally snapped on that issue and if I hear one more supposed teacher post a ludicrously over-processed HDR image and tell the world it’s closer to what the eye sees things I might re-consider my reluctance to rant about it. Over-processed HDR robs us of shadows which we require to interpret the real world, which is why subtle use of HDR effects can be amazing and over-use sucks. If you teach photography and you tell me that HDR is closer to how the eye sees then it damn better be an image that looks even vaguely realistic, and it sure as hell better be a decent image to begin with. Layering 9 weak photographs together doesn’t make the original weak photograph better, it makes for a bucket filled with 9 layers of suck.

Dammit, I said I wasn’t going to go there.

The second rant has to do with finding a happy place in between the two toxic poles of mediocrity and snobbery. In the last couple years I attended a photography conference that I ended up referring to as a celebration of mediocrity. Presided over by so-called leaders and teachers and Explorers of Light, etc, I was astonished and disappointed that the bar was set so low. So, so, low. I would never advocate exclusivism nor snobbery. Never. I am the first to acknowledge that we all learn at different paces and in different ways and that art, such as it is, is meant to be about expression and that gives us enormous latitude. However, it’s time we all focused more on growing as artists and less on our egos. When we get serious about our art we’ll start looking for critics, not fans, and right now too many people are Without using the strong language I’d like to, it’s really, really, really, overdue for us to stop the lunacy about gear. Choose your tools, enjoy them, then make something amazing. We need to stop the feeding frenzy. We need to stop patting people on the back for derivative, repetitive, imitative work and lovingly encourage them to move forward. We need to lovingly tell people – and give the same people permission to tell us – when we’re stuck, lazy, or boring. We all do this for different reasons, so not for a moment am I suggesting we become a group of photographic vigilantes. I’m suggesting we ourselves settle less, over the long term, with work that is less than what it could be. But I don’t want to rant about that.

Shoot, I did it again.

The third rant, the one I very much want to give in to, is probably not much more than a re-rant. But Oh Lord am I tired of the discussions about going back to film because it’s better. Finally transitioning to digital or medium format because it’s better. Using wide angle lenses because, “they’re better.” And when one photographer knows his 35mm camera is better and one knows his DLSR is better and they get to squabbling, well, just shoot me now. There is no better. In fact, you know what’s better? Art. Expression. Forgive me  but the rest of it is merely a photographic wank; a substitute for actual photography. The best camera is the one you enjoy using. Right now I’m using my iPhone and loving it and straining at the bit to get the Fuji x100 that I’ve ordered to use while I recover. I’ve got 3 DSLRs, a 35mm Pentax, and a Hasselblad 500C/M. I love them all and use them for different things. Is one better than another? What does better even mean?

Might it not be time to stop worrying about the meaningless and overly-vague questions of which cameras, lenses, formats, computers, even photographers, are better, and return to the ongoing attempt simply to make photographs that are better and better at expressing ourselves and moving other people? That’s the only better that matters.

I know it’s all been said. But I don’t write my blog to disseminate new information but to hash it through for the sake of my own brain. Where this all – and by all I mean the last rant, not the first two, which, as I told you, I refuse to discuss – touches me is in the need to embrace more widely the photographic world, to try new techniques, new formats, to change my preferred lens or  aspect ratio once in a while in search not of better gear but a better process that leads me to stronger work.

** Ooops. I just got back from lunch with my father to find this had been published. Dang. I was going to sit on it a couple days, maybe do a re-write. Should probably learn to avoid hitting that publish button. Anyways, I’ll leave it sit as it is. But please know these are unedited thoughts. Might need to interact a little more in the comments to clarify things…