New Series: A Happy Happy Man

So I have a new series up finally. Actor Dillon Birdsall brings us a look into A Happy Happy Man. This is a standalone series that isn’t currently a part of any of my larger projects (though I have contemplated eventually making a series out of my extensive bow tie work), and represents everything I love about collaborative shooting. I had e-mailed Dillon after deciding to contact some actors of different looks to be in my work. He moved to NYC six months ago and came all the way from Queens for the shoot, and both the sock monkey hat and shirt were part of the wardrobe he brought with him. (The bow tie is mine).

The moment I saw the hat, I knew we had to shoot in it. Sock monkeys are always an interesting visual, and they hold a special place in my heart for two reasons. Firstly, they creep out a close friend of mine, and I always delight in sending him a picture of one. And second, I have visited and photographed the Sock Monkey Museum in Rockford, Illinois, so I know just how and why these odd creatures came about in the first place.

I keep my fridge stocked with non-alcoholic drinks for water, ranging from water to tea to soda. I also had a half-case of PBR from a recent party (every fridge should have PBR, if you ask me) and Dillon made a beeline for it. I figured we might as well include it in the shoot, and the next 20 minutes were some of the most fun shooting I have done in a while.

I hope to work with Dillon again, and in the mean time, present some of my favorites from the shoot.

Click here for the shoot on my website.

 

Photographers I Like – Harold Feinstein

I’m a Kickstarter fan. I’ve backed 31 projects and counting. And among the most significant I have ever backed is one that finally just came full circle.

I speak of the effort to finally get a published monograph of Harold Feinstein’s classic black and white photographs.

Harold Feinstein is awesome. Awesome, awesome, awesome. You’ve probably never heard of him, because the world is filled with noise and sound and general lunacy, but please, please, please listen to me when I say this:

If you can tell me who Optimus Prime, Sheldon Cooper or Honey Boo Boo Child are, and you cannot tell me who Harold Feinstein is…well, you know what? That makes me sad. That’s what.

The good news is, you can correct this injustice and have a great time doing it. Head over to the (also awesome) Panopticon Gallery in Boston, or check out their web page. Only 1,000 signed copies of his monograph were printed and signed, and I have one, so there are a limited number left out there (if any). If you find one, snap it up. It’s sublime. And if you don’t find one, go ahead and contact Panopticon and buy a signed print of his. It is worth it.

Photographers I Like – Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Ralph Eugene Meatyard was an optician who bought a camera to photograph his son, and ended up becoming heavily immersed in the world of improvisational black-and-white images. He died in 1972, at the age of 46, and as such left behind a truncated career. That said, what he achieved in his years with a camera is widely admired.

His most famous images, to my knowledge, are from his series, ‘The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater’, which featured friends and family posing in grotesque dime-store Halloween masks. A few examples:

Romance (N.) from Ambrose Bierce #3
© Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Untitled (Boy in Old Man’s Mask with Doll)
© Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard

All scans courtesy of Masters of Photography

If these two images are not from the series itself, they are at least representative. The first one is not my favorite…I find the composition jarring and ultimately am not able to draw much from it. The second, though, I consider a brilliant image. The boy’s pose is perfect for the composition, and the lighting really helps to bring out the pose by focusing on the mask, doll and socks. There isn’t much more one can make of this image, unless one ties it to the larger series or just begins to deconstruct it along one’s own lines of interpretation. For my own part, I just like that it exists.

That said, Meatyard did not limit himself to grotesque mask work, and worked with everything from landscapes to portraits of family, friends or neighbors. These portraits, even at their simplest, carried a dark and serious feel; sometimes it was enough to simply have everyone standing in a yard at various depths, dolefully regarding the camera. In other cases, it might be an image of his wife and son in the doorway of a tomb. And yet in other cases, it could simply be two children:

Untitled (Michael and Christopher)
© Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard

There is so much I could say about this portrait, that I barely know where to begin. From a composition point-of-view, I consider it magnificent. The boys are in the image together, but the natural contours of the house and yard have been combined with their poses to essentially place them in separate worlds altogether. The bizarre hand gesture and intense gaze of the older child in the foreground seem to sharpen the innocence and distance of the child in the background, whose gaze is directed placidly out of the shot. With a bit more study, the younger boy’s expression is (to me) inscrutable, and his bat and legs fall out of focus in a way that indicates some buzzing movement that perhaps helps to further foster the sense of possible menace in the image.

Meatyard took the photograph above in 1959; the following year, he took the two images below. In both, the camera’s ability to negotiate focus around movement is used to extraordinary effect.

Untitled (Michael and Christopher outside brick building)
© Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard

A child seems to hang ephemerally in mid-air, with such a sense of motion as to disturb strongly the otherwise stationary wall and child that seem in a separate world.  These are actually the same two boys as in the prior shot, and even two examples seem to be enough to create a series that contrasts the possible personalities or interpretations of each subject.

In contrast, we have the image below.

Untitled (Michael in front of a deteriorating wall)
© Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard

This is arguably my favorite of Meatyard’s images. The composition is brilliant, putting into full effect the splotches on the wall and the subject’s flailing arms, which appear to blend him into the wall while making him seem remarkably free and distant.

When I began my own portrait photography, I had never heard of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, but I knew I would sooner or later stumble upon someone who achieved results that would resonate with me where portrait photography was concerned. I love his work because the images seem to exist in some cross-over zone…they are not entirely portraits and they are not entirely free-standing works of art. Layers of complexity and changes in interpretation are numerous, but you don’t have to know the subjects to benefit from the images.

Eve Arnold, Yousuf Karsh, Philippe Halsman, Edouard Boubat, Henri-Cartier Bresson…one could start naming extraordinary photographers who captured the deep and complex richness of people in their own special way. But Meatyard will always resonate with me as one of the most unique and original photographers of the 20th century when it comes to people and lighting, and those are the two things that I feel make photography so much fun.

 

All scans courtesy of Masters of Photography

Oh Fiddlesticks; or, the man who wanted a quick photo feature and instead got a fricking ‘concept’

It was supposed to be so easy.

I was passing through Pennsylvania and needed a shoot to serve as my site’s next exhibit. It didn’t have to be a show-stopper, either. I would put it up, write some mumbo-jumbo about why I chose my compositions, and then in a few weeks, I would put up a better gallery from either my upcoming travels, or an old trip I just hadn’t featured yet.

All I needed was some fresh content to pass the time.

I stopped at an antique store, saw some things I liked, and took some photographs after obtaining the proprietor’s permission. “Fine,” I thought. “Here’s my series. All is well.”

The Problem

This is the image that started it all. It more or less captures what I saw in the store, that inspired me to get my camera and do photography inside.

The wooden carving of a horse. Placed high up, on top of an old door, which was also for sale (separately). Although you can’t see them, there are other horses in this area. A wooden toy horse, a plastic carnival horse – it is a theme in this particular corner of the store. The door here leans against the wall, and the two items serve one another. The door provides the horse with an interesting way to stand out and be easily viewed, and the horse provides the door with a better marketing strategy. “Oh look, I don’t have any empty doorways at home, but I could lean this against the wall and put something on top of it. Huzzah!”

Let’s quickly look at some other images from the same store. In each, notice that objects have been clustered together for one reason or another. It is entirely evident in the first case (a few unrelated magazines or sheet music covers, and a dresser with a mirror). In the second case, it is less evident (a chicken marionette, some cast iron coat hangers with numbers on them). In the third case, it is entirely not evident (the dressing gown, and the dummy on it, are sold separately). In all cases, the items have been brought together as a form of organization or for some purpose of mutual convenience.

The dummy gives the dress form, and the dress  gives the dummy something to do.

The hangers hold up the chicken, and the chicken gives the hangers something to hold.

The papers are a bit less obvious, but the general area was strewn with items that seemed to create a unified sense of 1920’s-1940’s romance and mystery. Nearby items evoked a sense of a long-abandoned dressing table still waiting for its owner to return.

So What’s the Problem?

The problem is that my brain – which is normally on permanent vacation – began to think. Why do I find antique stores interesting? Do I find photographing them interesting, for the same reason I find them interesting in general? 

And I had a long drive home to think it over.

One reason I love antique stores is simply that they give you data. Pure, new data about other people, places and times. You can learn about a company that existed a hundred years ago and only sold shirt collars. You can see the amazing artistry and genius of design that once was expected even on inexpensive, run-of-the-mill products. There are corkscrews and butter churns out there that appear to have had more time, thought and care put into them, than many of the buildings in which I spend my time.

But beyond that, they also bring together items (almost all of them old or used) that are essentially in an unrepeatable point of transit. They are clustered together by design (for example, a group of dolls) or chance (a sickle laying next to a book on engineering) and it is almost guaranteed that once they are sold, they will never encounter one another again. They are formed into dynamic microcosms by any number of things – what can start as the organizational will of the store owner can break down as people come along and handle or move the item in question. Items that appeal to more collectors or to children may get moved more. Thus, when you encounter the cluster of items, you are seeing them as almost no one on Earth has or will ever see them again.

This is where the photograph comes in and adds value (I think). When you stand in an antique store, you are bombarded by all these microcosms. There could be a dresser with a hat on it, and next to that a pile of books, and next to that an old dresser’s dummy, and so forth. And if it is a good antique store, there are probably aisles or rooms filled to the brim with such items, in all directions around you. By photographing interesting combinations of items, you can focus your own eye (and the eye of the viewer) directly – and only – on a specific set of things, giving it true power as a microcosm all its own. You also document the ‘moment’ at hand. The scene that you are recording may cease to exist five minutes after you walk away; all someone need do is move something, let alone buy it. You are finding a way to catch hold of a moment.

Portrait Photography and ‘The Scene’

This has been a larger area of interest to me ever since I began to take photography seriously. Much of my portrait work is built around the idea of creating entirely self-contained moments or worlds within the photograph. They usually do not explain themselves, nor do they apologize for themselves; they simply are. And often, those combinations of things (the subject, the prop, even the lighting) can come together at the shoot itself, free of any plan. They can be the result of the mix between plan (buying an item) and happenstance (realizing suddenly it works with some other item in your collection).

This is not some mysterious theory that only I know; it is logically inherent in portrait photography itself. You capture something about one or more people, and you do so trying to provide more than the sum of the parts. But even if you do, when all is said and done, you are simply capturing a moment, and there is a nearly infinite amount of data that isn’t going to be available to the viewer. Some of it is available to you as the photographer (for example, seeing what is outside the boundaries of the composition in your viewfinder), and some of it is not available to you (such as what the subject is thinking).

So now I want to photograph in multiple antique stores, and try to really go after multiple themes, to get a larger sense of how former possessions of other people speak to us. Will one be able to tell that the items in a given photo all belonged to the same person, whereas the items in another photo did not? Will it change the feeling if an item is gathered with others like it, versus put on a shelf with unrelated objects for no particular purpose?

Just like that, I had a frickin’ theme. A project. Another stupid project on my long list of projects. And that meant I would have to hold off on the photos, until I had more and could present them in this new context.

Bah. Here endeth the rant.

Photographer I Like – Eugène Atget

One of my sneaky, lazy ways to keep this blog fresh and active, while not doing all that much work, is going to be an occasional post about a photographer that I like. In some cases, these folks have consciously inspired me. In other cases, I blundered across their work and realized that something I do is very similar, and thus, I am a photographic descendant of them whether I like it/know it or not.

But then again, that’s the way with creative works, isn’t it? As a self-taught photographer, part of the journey is finding out about all the folks who thought up first all the things I have stumbled across accidentally (or, occasionally, through actual focus, craft and attention). To make it more useful for readers, though, I will usually focus on someone who is the focus of a new book, upcoming show, or something else meaningful.

Eugène Atget falls into the ‘had not heard of him, but now that I have, I feel I definitely owe him something’ category.

Atget

This guy was awesome.

Very little is known about Atget. He kept a low profile all his life, and preferred to think of himself as an author-producer or document-maker. The now-famous sign outside his studio read ‘Documents pour artistes’, and his general thought process was that he would sell his photographs to artists, who would then use them as the inspiration for, or direct basis of, their own art. As such, a landscape painter might be inspired by his take on Paris and interpret the print he bought into a similar watercolor or oil painting.

He also worked with equipment that was, at best, behind the times. By the end of his life, it was positively ancient. For technical reasons, this caused him to frequent places and situations in which I share a great deal of interest: quiet, out-of-the-way corners of town where there isn’t too much going on that would disrupt a long exposure. To the best of my knowledge, no one is sure if he used this equipment to indulge his love of these places, or shot these places because they were the best match for his photo equipment. This last one is a common approach; there is no question that my style has been partly influenced by the types of photos I have found my camera and lenses handle well, through years of experimentation.

Like so many folks who care more about production than promotion, Atget was largely unknown at the time of his death, except among a small crowd of friends and gallery owners who had come to see his talent firsthand. Still, he went on to inspire a host of great artists, including Pablo Picasso and a number of surrealists.

In my case, I only learned of him fairly recently, but when you examine my work, some of it is so similar as to appear essentially derivative – often, down to specific pieces. Not only have we photographed similar things, but he did it way better than I did. This would frustrate a lot of creative folks, but since I long ago came to accept that I was a bumbling twit who hasn’t the faintest idea what he is doing, I just see this as a fun connection to a photographer who was far my superior. As such, the images below (all shots of mine), are presented here as retroactively inspired by the hard-working determination and amazing eye of Atget.

For those who want to get to know Atget a bit better, his work is held at a number of prominent museums. MoMa in New York has what is likely the best collection (in the US or possibly the world) and is holding a temporary exhibit about Atget from February to April, 2012. If you are in the area, stop by and check it out. I am positive it will be a worthwhile experience. http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1216

DISCLAIMER

The brilliant photography of Atget is above the word ‘Disclaimer’ here. My own ballyhoo follows below this line. Nobody who knows photography could confuse them, but I wanted to be clear here for some of my friends who are just discovering Atget.

Photo Holiday Cards, and Help-Portrait

Photo Holiday Cards & Why They Exist

I received a number of photo holiday cards this year. In almost all cases, they came from people who I see during the year either not at all, or on such rare occasions that the photographs actually serve as very useful markers for how much their children have grown (I only receive these from people who have children, and increasingly, only the children are featured on the card).

These small, annual photographs are a timely way of keeping these children visually updated in my mind, and generating some good will for them beyond the default level I would have for the children of any of my friends or relatives. If an unfortunate situation were to arise for one of the children – say, they broke their leg in a bad fall – I would attach a visual to the person who has been hurt, courtesy of the last time I ‘saw’ them.

In essence, these photographs help keep these children a part of my ‘community’, even if I never see them at all. This is a very helpful way of preserving that sense of community (a reminder of sorts) even if I live 3,000 miles away from the people in question.

This phenomenon exists elsewhere in life as well. I work for a company that has many employees who work from home full-time. I see many of them once a year or less, but when they do come in to the office, even for a half-day, it is like pressing a ‘reset’ button (or perhaps an ‘update’ button) and pleasantries are exchanged that never would be over e-mail or the phone, because I usually only speak with them on business-related matters.

So what is Help-Portrait, and how does it relate to what I’m talking about above?

Help-Portrait

Help-Portrait is (according to its own website):

a community of photographers coming together across the world to use their photography skills to give back to their local community…finding people in need and taking their picture. When the prints are ready, the photographs get delivered. This is about GIVING the pictures, not taking them. These portraits are not for your portfolio, website, or for sale. Money isn’t involved here. This holiday season, you have the chance to give a family something they may have never had before—a portrait together.

This year, Help-Portrait was held on December 10, 2011. I had prior obligations, made before I had ever heard of this cause, and thus was unable to participate (I hope to do so next year). But quite a number of other photographers worldwide did participate, and though the 2011 statistics are not yet available, we do know that in its first two years, this service delivered more than 100,000 portraits, thanks to more than 10,000 volunteers in 54 countries.

I have always been a fan of creative causes that provide direct services. There are many fine charities where money is the best gift, and while often it is money used for volunteers or low-paid idealists who are doing important work in critical places, there are a number of situations where professionals are being called in to work on issues. Doctors without Borders is one such case. In the case of Help-Portrait, though, the middleman is cut out entirely. It is the photographer doing the leg work of taking the photographs, creating prints and making sure they are delivered.

Perhaps because I am so bombarded once a year with nice-looking, usually professional portraits of kids from my family, friends and co-workers, I had never much considered the idea that some people have never had a portrait taken of them before. After all, when I was in school, we had to sit for yearbook photos every year from Kindergarten until senior year of high school. In addition, my mother routinely took us to Sears for portraits as children, and cameras abounded on every family holiday and event.

Why Do We Take Pictures?

This phenomenon has only expanded with the advent of inexpensive digital cameras and camcorders. My nephew and nieces are all better documented than most historical events. Any birthday party or other major life event is a flashing frenzy of light. If there is one thing these children can say, it is that they will have photographs of themselves to look back at when they are older. They will get a sense of how they looked, and how their family looked when they were young. They will get a sense of the community that helped to provide and care for them. In some cases, this will be the only way they get to see and remember people who either died or moved out of the social circle before they were old enough to truly remember them.

Quite a contrast to not having a single family portrait, or even a single portrait of oneself.

Next week, my Facebook  news feed will be awash in countless photos of countless acquaintances and their families ripping open presents, enjoying holiday cheer, or simply smiling for the camera as they have done twenty thousand times in their lives. It is an automatic action, and so common that most of them will never give a second thought to seeing the final results. It is only on occasion at family events that anyone says, “Let me see the photo” after it is taken; in most cases, it is simply a recording of a time spent together. It exists, and sits on a hard drive ’til kingdom come, just as the old holiday prints mostly sat in albums or drawers.

Why go through the trouble? Why take so many photographs if we are never going to look at them?

Perhaps we seek that perfect portrait of ourselves or loved ones. Or perhaps we just do it because we have been bred to do it; we fundamentally recognize its importance as part of our life and community-building, and need no further explanation.

Either case is a powerful argument for participating in Help-Portrait. The next one is December 8, 2012. It’s on my calendar.

 

New website up. Might as well have a blog.

Meanwhile, tonight we congregate in a bar and wear hats. I normally wouldn’t wear a hat at dinner. But tonight I shall.