One Subject, Many Approaches II

The Wall and The Bright Side of the Moon

This past summer I wrote a post called "One Subject, Many Approaches" where I looked back on the results over the years of my efforts to photograph the same subject I'd photographed many times in the past, all the while trying to keep the images fresh enough to avoid the creative dead end of making essentially the same photograph again and again. In this sequel episode I'll be presenting another one of those well worn subjects I keep returning to. It is the crumbling remnants of a concrete break wall that once helped still the waters for revellers at the long defunct Erie Beach Amusement Park. Now if that sounds a bit familiar it's likely because the original One Subject, Many Approaches centred on another ruin, the concrete base of a carnival swing ride, from that very same attraction of yore. It is just a quick jaunt, about 300 metres, from this disintegrating nautical structure that is the focus of today's episode, and it wouldn't be at all unusual for me to come away from a little afternoon stroll with images of both. 

Proximity aside however the number of appearances these two subjects have made in my photographic corpus can be attributed to two simple virtues both posses - I find them interesting, and they are convenient. If I only have an hour to kill, if I'm testing new equipment, if there's interesting weather or lighting conditions that could disappear anytime and I need to find a subject now, I know I can get something if I take the five minute drive to old Erie Beach. Still, it's hard to shake the notion that it's really too easy, an almost guilty sense that another trip out to the wall somehow falls short of doing something photographically worthwhile. In spite of this, I often come away with results that surprise me a little. Maybe it's just the low expectations I have for the results.

Here is one from my early days with the RB67, a time when I was still a bit giddy to finally own such a camera. I was smitten with the works of a host of photographers known for their work with long exposures. Lacking a proper neutral density filter at the time I would set up in the fading light of dawn when, if I timed it right, I might be able to make two or three exposures with shutter speeds of one then two then several minutes before they finally became unworkably long.

My first experimental roll putting 35mm film through the RB67, yielding panoramic sprocket hole images. Obviously I wasn't so careful levelling the camera but tilt the film a bit and it almost looks like I meant to do it that way.

An example of the classic leading off to the horizon composition I see as a metaphor for our ceaseless journey into an unknown future that beacons us to a destiny at once fearful and full of promise. Others have suggested images like this are straight up phallic. Hmpf... Freud.

Here's one from this past October that I could have included a few episodes back in The Cool Colours of Autumn. Not a great success but I was just a tad too late to catch just a brief few seconds when the setting sun burst through the clouds casting the wall in a bright warm glow. Even though I had the F80 set to auto focus aperture priority, by the time I realized what was going on and managed to compose this shot it had all but faded. 

There were days this year when water levels in the lake have been unusually high, the changing water levels at times seeming quasi-tidal.  Here a driftwood log serves as foreground interest as the wall, nearly level with the waves, is barely noticeable. There was a workman from the town at the beach that day who, seeing me pull out the camera informed me that I was too late, that there had been a rainbow out over the water that had faded away only minutes before. Looking at that cloud I can't I've lost that much sleep over not having arrived earlier.

Finally here's one from my most recent roll out of the Bronica S2A. Obviously water levels were much lower this time and I decided to chance a stroll along the wall itself. I had been out exploring new locations but with a bit of time yet to kill made a quick side trip on the way home to blow off the last few frames on the roll. Figuring I would travel light that day I left the tripod at home, an unusual choice for me. Regrettable as I could have used it here. With the short days the late afternoon sun was already beginning to fade on an already bleak day and shooting hand held forced a shutter speed/aperture trade off I just couldn't get the better of and I wound up sacrificing foreground sharpness I would have sooner kept. Negotiating the crumbling sections of the wall is a bit tricky to begin with and doing so with a bag containing prized cameras and lenses always feels like a calculated risk, It looks like I may have to do it again though.

Abstract

When I was posting the above image on my Flickr page the other day I stopped myself short of tagging it with the term "abstract". In practical terms it was a good tag to use, a word a lot of people might search on, drawing more eyeballs to my image. It made me uncomfortable though, so that even after I finally decided to use it I went back and took it out. Heaven forbid I do anything myself that might lend credence to a photograph, one I took no less, being referred to as "an abstract."

 Before you jump to any conclusions though let me hasten to add that that "abstract" is not something I find objectionable or in any way wish not to be associated with my work. Quite the opposite. What bothers me is that when a particular image is deemed to be "abstract", especially "an abstract", the implication is that it possesses some quality that distinguishes it from all those other images that aren't abstract. The problem is there are no such photographs. If I could point to a single realization I've acquired over the years that is most critical to who I am as a photographer today it is the understanding that when I make a photograph, especially one with any sort of expressive intent, abstraction is, without exception, the whole point. That point only gets lost when the term is used to single out only some images from all the rest.

To be clear here I'm not imagining that acquired any special talent that allows me imbue my work with some subtle abstract quality that I'm surprised others don't see. What I'm suggesting applies equally to anyone who has ever made a photograph whether or not they had any notion of this. While this may not be of much interest to those who do photography practical documentary purposed, but even here images are occasionally seem to posses a compelling visual appeal purely by accident. The reason is simple, a camera is a tool of abstraction, that's what it is, that's it's very nature. In short, if it's a photograph, it's abstract.

By this point I am imagining most if not all of you are thinking something along the lines of "But that's ludicrous. I know what abstract art is and that beautiful shot I took of my nephew standing by the window that everybody loves so much is not it!" So if you are thinking something along those lines, given that we're all intelligent, reasonable people here, it's probably safe to assume that I'm not using that word abstract in quite the same way you are. If this were a mere semantic quibble though I'd have done you a disservice allowing you to read as far as you have. The understanding I've come to of that word abstraction though is how I make sense of the fact that the some of the most mundane sights, things you might have passed right by and never even thought to cast a glance towards, perhaps a row of dishes drying on a rack or a clump of trees lying across a soggy field of barley, can become the subjects of photographs we find absolutely captivating. Not incidentally I also find it immensely helpful in the way I understand and approach my own work. When you're trying to make a interesting photographs it can't hurt to have an idea about what it is about photographs that can make them so interesting. If you have a notion to read on then I'll try to make it worth your while.

First, let's talk about the way the word abstract is usually used with reference to art. I think it would be fair to say that whatever the particular usage it is meant to convey a sense of the intangible. We might call the work of a surrealist like Dali abstract because what it depicts defies our sense of how we've come to understand how the world works. Or it could be used with reference to "installation art" such as that pioneered by Marcel Duchamp who used very concrete objects to represent and invite the contemplation of abstract concepts. Perhaps more than anything however it calls to mind non-representational art epitomized by the work of Jackson Pollock whose expressive paint dripped canvases bear no relation or resemblance to anything found outside the world of the psyche. All are abstract, certainly, in obvious though different ways.

The only trouble with this in my view is that when a painting, photograph or any other piece of art is only referred to as abstract when it incorporates some unusual element of abstraction that makes it stand out the message is that when art doesn't have these elements the word abstract doesn't apply. The reason that's not trivial is that it can keep us from appreciating how the element of abstraction is at play throughout all art. As I see it, it is the very essence of art. So how can we ever understand art if we think the word only applies when, for example, a painter is attempting to depict a state of mind without reference to some external "thing"?

Having said that let me take a moment to reel things in a bit. I'm a photographer, this is a photography blog so let's get back to talking about photography more specifically. To me the central mystery of photography and why I even bother with it boils down to the following question:

 How is it that, finding myself before some rather pedestrian scene or object, something I might otherwise have walked right by without a thought, point a camera at it, trip the shutter and end up with something beautiful and engaging enough to want to hang on my wall so I can look at it everyday for years? 

Objectively that thing on the wall is just a pale reflection of whatever it was that I photographed in the first place. To start out with it's been removed from the context of its surroundings to be confined within the rectangular borders of a print. There's no motion, no depth, no hint of the sounds or smells that were present when it was taken. If it's a photograph I made chances are very strong even the colour has been left behind. Given that the thing photographed was often not worth a second glance to begin with this whole endeavour sounds like a profound waste, a good quantity of time material of effort gone to take something that may not have been all that interesting to start and make it even less so.

Except that it isn't. A photograph can be so much more than a poor substitute for the thing photographed, a mere memento. It can become a new thing entirely, not despite the loss of context, dimension or motion but because of them. When we remove these things we make them less specific and therefore more universal. This is how that old pair of shoes in the front foyer you just haven't gotten around to throwing out yet can, when photographed, become all things that have been cast aside and forgotten about. We may not even be aware of the symbolism when we see it, but w well conceived and executed photograph can make you feel it even though those actual shoes in the foyer strike you as a pair of meaningless inanimate objects that would be cause for embarrassment if they were still laying there when company stopped by.

What has happened here is abstraction. That may not seem like it has much to do with the way we usually hear the word abstract use. Commonly understood abstract is sort of the opposite number to that which is real and concrete such that abolishing slavery is a concrete action while freedom is the abstract notion behind it. Fair enough, but it doesn't really help much with our understanding of how a photograph of a thing can possess engaging qualities that even the thing itself lacked. For that I want to go a bit deeper at what that word I keep batting around, "abstract", means more generally. It's comes from the Latin "abstractus" meaning drawn or pulled away. It would have been used mainly to describe some sort of material process such as separating, or drawing away, the wheat from the chaff, the metal from the ore and so on. More simply it means to take a pile of stuff that is a mix of things you want and things you don't, pull away only bits you're after, and leave the rest behind.

Now as a photographer, if you hold it in mind that this is what abstract means you'll see at first that it's a process that's at play in every photograph you've ever made or ever will make. On a foundation like this it now becomes simple to understand how all of the camera's inherent limitations - the way it flattens a three dimensional scene, severing its connection to limitless surroundings to imprison it within a tiny rectangle, all motion arrested, all sounds silenced - these are not limitations at all but the source of its power, the means by which we draw the photographic wheat from the chaotic chaff of the world around us.

I believe any photographer possessing even a modest talent will have some intuitive sense of all this, and even if they go on to great mastery may never put their now highly developed sense into these terms. When we reserve the word abstract denote only work of a more experimental nature the developing photographer (i.e. any photographer not on their death bed) is left to grope in the dark on their own for this understanding. Nor is it enough to save the word to mean "especially abstract" or "abstract in an unusual way". For example, photography has been called an "art of subtraction", where subtraction means something very close to what I mean by abstraction, so why don't I just say subtraction and leave those who want to talk about abstract photography as a special category alone? The answer is that used this way the new word "subtract" in no way fails to apply once we start talking about the things people like to refer to as distinctly "abstract", such as an image in which we have subtracted the cues that normally allow us to clearly identify the subject, thereby introducing one more abstraction.

The problem isn't the choice of terms, it's that we're trying to use terms to draw a distinction between things for which no fundamental distinction exists. Pretending they do only obscures things more, stifling our understanding along the way. The kinds of abstraction we use - the more abstract black and white rather than colour or more abstract still photography rather than motion pictures - are creative choices and asserting that the choice to photograph the more abstract distorted reflection of a subject (thereby creating "an abstract") rather than shooting it straight on is somehow different in kind from all the other choices does nothing but put up additional barriers to understanding.

And if the word abstract makes you a little uneasy because you fancy yourself someone who goes for literal interpretations in photography, remind yourself that, in photography especially, the idea of being fully literal and the idea of interpretation are inevitably at loggerheads. As is true with so many things, in photography abstraction is inevitable. Learn to embrace it, to use it. It will bring you greater understanding and make you a better photographer. And if you're not sure how, imagine yourself standing in front of a print by a one of the great photographers who's name you would never think to associate with the idea of "abstract photography". Let's say it was Ansel Adams, and he was standing there with you so you could ask him how it was made. I don't know what his real answer would have been, but a perfectly true and valid answer could be... "I simply cropped away, desaturated and tonally compressed everything that wasn't Moonrise Hernandez."

See... abstract.

Keep It Real

Browse the photography related offerings in the app store on your phone and you'll find not just a few of them specialize in taking your straight camera phone images and imparting upon them qualities meant to make them look as though they had been taken with film. This could mean imbuing them with punchy Velvia like colours, giving that new selfie the characteristic of an old snapshot that's been sitting neglected in a shoebox for 40 years complete with fake scratches and dust spots, or simulating the appearance of a 19th Century ambrotype. I certainly don't begrudge anyone the enjoyment playing with these apps can bring. They're a nifty tool for those looking to get a bit creative with digital slideshows and the images they post on social media and aren't even beneath the needs of some more serious photographers.

The thing I find a little bit disturbing about this little trend is the perception it has created with a good segment of the population that this kind of software is a viable substitute for the real thing. I have on more than one occasion fielded questions that in one way or the other amount to "why bother fiddling with those old cameras when you could just run a filter to give you the same look?" My answer is that no matter how good an app is at making the latest output from the iLife camera on your phone look just like a scan from a 1968 Kodachrome, it will never give you a slide. No matter how indistinguishable the results may be from a cracked and faded old family snapshot on screen it will look nothing but fake printed onto a clean sheet of photo inkjet paper. There will never be software that can simulate an historic process well enough to give you a print out that can hold a candle to a real wet plate image.

Somehow the notion of a photograph as an object, something complete in itself, is being swamped like so many other things by an experience of the world that comes to us via a screen. It's easy to forget that this can only go so far. What would it even mean to be simulating the look of actual physical photographs if we had no experience of the real thing?

Lest you think I'm just talking about using software to make new images look old there are plenty of digital tricks aimed at simulating the look you would have gotten if a digital image were shot recently on fresh film as well. It could be argued that prints made through such means can be indistinguishable from a photograph shot on film and printed in a darkroom. Well, if this is what someone wants to do, it's their art. For my money and my time however keeping heart in the process is a worth while endeavour, and part of that is being genuine. This isn't an anti-digital stance or even a suggestion that I'm above using digital technology myself where it makes sense. It's a necessary part of producing this digitally delivered blog let's remember and I'm grateful the technology is there to do it. I do however believe that any expressive medium should be allowed to be what it is. If saying what you want means pretending to be some other media then to me there are serious questions to be answered about whether you've chosen the right media for your vision.

While I can't say I feel starved for reassurance that mine is not a lone voice crying in the dark it is never the less heartening to not only see that same sentiment being expressed by others, but that it has some resonance out there. This little rant started out as a short introducing those who may not already have seen it one such message. It's a little graphic that Ilford has put up, available for download on their website, and it seems to have struck a chord with many photographers, myself included.

http://www.ilfordphoto.com/photocommunity/featurearticle.asp?n=48

Ostensibly an ad for HP5+, an excellent film that I happen to use quite a bit myself, the main message is more about keeping it real, whatever film you use. Ilford will be adding to the collection with more "reasons" featuring other film, but it appears all of them will feature this same theme. Even when it's just a shot of the dog playing in the back yard, what we do as photographers always has an expressive element. Because it matters enough to us, because of all thing things in this world we chose to photograph that, somehow we create art with our cameras even when it's not what we set out to do,  So when we're putting a piece of ourselves into it, isn't it worthwhile to make it genuine?

One Subject, Many Approaches

A recent image of this old concrete relic I have photographed so many times before. Though it's really what's left of a
century old amusement park ride, here it seems to take on the feel of a forgotten ancient temple.

You may recall that last week one of the images featured, the crumbling "legs" of a concrete structure along the Lake Erie shore, was yet one more image of a subject I have photographed many times before. It's in fact just one of several features of potential photographic interest along that local stretch of lake shore I've mentioned here so many times before. Useful as it is as a place I know there will be a few images to be made if I'm testing a new lens or camera, or when I just don't have the time to go looking for images further afield, the decision to head down there has long been accompanied by the sense of going for the same old same old, the photographic equivalent of having no better idea than to order takeout pizza again. Yet as often as I have revisited the place and as much as it seems I must have completely exhausted that crumbling heap of concrete as a photographic subject, I find myself surprised again and again when a new way of approaching this humble subject presents itself even when, sure I have all the images that old thing could ever warrant, I'm not really looking for it.

First of all they may be those of you wondering just what this concrete monstrosity is. To get to that though a bit of the history of that whole stretch of beach is in order. Currently known simply as Erie Beach Park, or occasionally as Waverly Beach to Fort Erie locals, the area was from the latter part of the 19th Century to around the start of the Great Depression the Erie Beach Amusement Park. The area included rides, a casino, dance hall, roller skating rink and of course swimming areas, drawing many visitors from the United States via a ferry boat that brought them in from Buffalo NY. It was superseded by the Crystal Beach Amusement park about 10 kilometres further west to which some of the attractions were moved, while what remained was left abandoned. In recent years there has been a restoration of sorts. The crumbling path of the old promenade has been revamped as part of the Friendship Trail project running parallel to the Lake Erie shore linking my home town of Port Colborne Ontario to Fort Erie where I currently live. Included in the revamping are a series of information panels that detail the beach's former glory and go some way to explaining the mysterious concrete remnants that are visible along the shore.

Information panels on the walkway overlooking what remains of the old
amusement park now provide context for the curious on the various ancient
concrete edifices strewn along the shore. 

This brings us to the structure in question. This platform, supported by four outer legs plus a central column is the central support for something I have only ever heard described as "the swing ride". There are several photographs of what this looked like back in its day, perhaps none more telling in terms of what you'll find there today as one of the images from the info panels from the walkway overlooking the beach.

From this image it's clear not only what the function of the structure as it appears today was, but also the original purpose of all the toppled concrete columns that are strewn about the surrounding area.  According to the panel this image was from the 1914 Shredded Wheat annual outing, 101 years ago nearly to the day. It also appears that water levels were dramatically lower in Lake Erie a century ago. The remains of many of the other features in this photograph are still visible today including the foundation of the fun house tower on the left and the old pier walkway in the background.

Though I've lived in Fort Erie for the past 18 years or so, and only grew up just a 20 minute drive up the Lake Erie shore, I really only discovered this structure for myself less than ten years ago. Though I had no idea what it was at the time the photographic possibilities it suggested were obvious enough right from the start, and I'm certainly not the first to think so. Over most of those years I thought of this as a subject I had already covered, no need to return to it again. Somehow I always found a reason to. Ansel famously revisited subjects like Half Dome many times and we are all the richer for it. Apparently he saw value in returning to the same subject time and again. Maybe I should relax a little and see what more I can make of this. It may be difficult to tell by the roughly chronological sequence of images I present below but the structure is crumbling year by year and it may not be long before someone declares it unsafe and it gets pulled down for good. I'd hate to realize then that there were other ways to approach it.

For completeness sake I'll start with one from back in my digital days. All HDR'd
up I remember being quite proud of it at the time. I dialed the colour saturation
back some and made the contrast a bit more realistic to make it presentable here. 

Even in my digital era film was still part of my repertoire. This is image is even
older than the one above, but shot on 35mm Kodak HIE infrared film. I thought
this film was long gone but recently found a roll at the bottom of the freezer.  

In silhouette with the old pier and the Buffalo skyline in the distance.

My favourite image from a long expired roll of Vericolor.

Under a November sky, the clouds of autumn seem somehow different
than at any other time of year.

Taken just this past winter when I was drawn to the beach by some mysterious
looking clouds, here it appears as though transported to a whole other landscape.

Shoot Like An Amateur...

...advertised no book or photography course ever. Not in the past hundred years anyway. The word amateur has become shorthand for one who dabbles, piddles about and thereby possesses little real skill. Obviously if their skills were up to snuff someone would be willing to pay them for what they do, and they would no longer be an amateur. Thus, no matter what field of endeavour we might be talking about, one of the highest compliments we can pay is to say that someone is a real pro. Conversely it's a dig against someone to call them an amateur, or their work amateurish.

Shot like an amateur. In my life as a professional wedding and portrait
photographer when would I ever have the chance to do something like this? 

Would it come as a surprise then to learn that there was a time when if you wanted to be taken seriously as a photographer being an amateur was considered the ideal? In the 19th century amateur photographers were widely seen as the people who were pushing the new medium forward, driving the technology, promoting it as an expressive medium to be taken seriously, one of the beaux-arts on par with painting and sculpture. The earliest professionals with their crass commercial motives weren't often considered allies in the struggle for recognition.

Noble perhaps, but not entirely fair. In photography's earliest years being a photographer could mean one of two things - either you were a member of the landed gentry and had the money and leisure to take up the expensive, difficult and time consuming discipline that photography was at that time, or you made it your trade. If you were drawn to the magic that was and is photography and weren't born to the privileged classes becoming a professional was your only choice. 

Nelson's Column, an image by photographic pioneer Henry Fox Talbot, grandson of the 2nd Earl of
Ilchester, heir of Lacock Abbey where many of the interior scenes were shot for the Harry Potter movies. 

The situation changed as advances in photography over the following decades saw a continual decline in the level of privilege it required until eventually there was a camera in virtually every middle class home. As the Twentieth Century dawned, taking a serious interest in photography for the love of it no longer required titled ancestry. Photographers like Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz oversaw the transition of the painterly romanticism that characterized the work of the leading photographers of the previous century to the modern approach of photographers such as Paul Strand and Ansel Adams that made no apologies for photography's unique realism. Different though their approach had become, this new breed of photographer could in a sense trace a direct lineage back to the amateur elite of photography's early days. Somewhere along the way however even these leading lights of the idea of photography as art started making a living at it. Even these greats, icons in many ways of photography for the love of it, were by definition professional photographers. At the same time, as cameras came to outnumber electric toasters in households everywhere, nearly everyone had become in at least some sense an amateur photographer. The reversal of status was now complete.

In the heady day following photography's introduction there were those hoping to find in it a way a way to cash in. Once it became established, and ever since, it's been is a love of photography that by and large leads people to take it up as a profession. Anyone who looks at photography as an easy way to make a few bucks is either a scheister or sadly misinformed. At the same time, depending on how far you're willing to stretch definitions, the 344 selfies that constitute my daughter's camera roll might be considered a fairly typical amateur portfolio these days. When the term amateur photographer could mean anybody who takes a picture that isn't a professional, no wonder everybody wants to Shoot Like A Pro.

Here's the thing though, I've been a pro and I'll tell you gladly I'm grateful not to be shooting like that anymore. Not that it was a bad gig, and I even did some work I'm still proud of, but it's not what I got into photography for. I've spoken to any number of working professionals over the years who've admitted they've lost nearly all interest in doing photography outside of work. It's almost always a love of photography and the idea of being able to do it all the time instead of working that leads people to profession in the first place. I sensed myself heading down that same path myself a few years back. It took a while, but it all came back. The problem wasn't that I was tired of photography, it's that I spent too much time shooting like a pro. The only reason I still care enough to sit down and write about it every week is that I set that aside to once again shoot like an amateur.

 Of course I use the term amateur more in its 19th century sense here with all the connotations of passion and dedication that go along with it. I don't mean it entirely the same way though. That tinge of snobbish elitism can be left in the past, as can any notion that being a professional takes any less passion and dedication. Though I'm happy with the role photography now plays in my life I know first hand what life is like on the other side of the aisle and still admire the work of many pros. There are even some working professionals I still envy a little. Not the ones doing up wedding albums, or making the same soggy lump you find in a fast food burger container look like something appetizing or even getting field side access at professional sporting events. They're the ones who manage to make enough publishing books, selling prints and doing workshops to allow them to go on shooting like amateurs. Uncompromisingly skilled, fiercely dedicated, unwaveringly passionate amateurs.