Catch me in tinytinygroupshow #6: simultaneous

A while ago, Kevin Miyazaki e-mailed and asked if I’d be interested in participating in his next tinytinygroupshow. The goal: Take a picture at noon Milwaukee time (ten o’clock in the morning here in California) on Sunday, August 17. I was thrilled to be a part of one of Kevin’s tinytinygroupshows (see them all here), but it was made even better because I was participating with photofriends like Andrew Hetherington, Shawn Records, Allison V. Smith, and Amy Stein. You can see the results here. Thanks, Kevin!

Collect this: Sexworker with Client I and Shahi Mohalla III

Lucked out and snagged the following two images from Kate Orne at 20x200. Get them here and here.

Copyright © Kate Orne

Copyright © Kate Orne

Paolo Morales

Photographer Paolo Morales got in touch with me last night and offered some suggestions of photographers who photograph their own relationships. He also mentioned his own project, which I find completely charming. It’s called There’s Something about Franny, and, well, I’ll leave it to Paolo to explain what it is. Here’s a bit from his site:

I have a crush on a girl. Her name is Franny. We met in prep school. She is pretty and popular. I am awkward and geeky. We developed a working relationship based on scheduled “photo-dates.” My images chronicle our relationship existing within photographs and the struggle for power between the two players. Portraits idolizing Franny as favorite model and muse compliment self-portraits sitting between fantasy and reality: gazing into each others eyes as we pass in the halls, park photo shoots, and me staring at her in class while she pretends not to notice. It is through these photographs that I want to understand my infatuation and obsession with Franny, a girl I adore and have no idea why.

You can see the project here. My favorites from the series are below.

Copyright © Paolo Morales

Copyright © Paolo Morales

Copyright © Paolo Morales

Peter Kearns

In the comments on my last post, Aline Smithson mentioned the work of Peter Kearns, whom I’d seen in Vewd recently. I spent some more time looking at his work and we exchanged a couple e-mails about projects of this sort. He’s a good guy, and I really dig his work. Check it out.

Here’s some of what he says on his site about the project:

I met Krista on Labor Day at a friend’s Jell-O wrestling party in 2004. It was lime flavored and she was wearing a pink wig. After getting most of the Jell-O out of my hair, we spent the evening drinking, laughing, and flirting. She took me home to her apartment where we shotgunned cans of PBR and listened to old country records. Sometime that evening, probably when she was dancing around in her red cowboy boots while singing along to a Hank Snow record, I fell in love with her.

And here are some of my favorites from his series Krista, about his wife.

Copyright © Peter Kearns

Copyright © Peter Kearns

Copyright © Peter Kearns

Copyright © Peter Kearns

Copyright © Peter Kearns

Photographers who photograph their own relationships

I’m looking to come up with a list (not necessarily exhaustive, but at least a jumping-off point) of photographers who, in their work, explore their own relationship to another person (or people). So, to clarify, not photographers who focus on other people’s relationships to one another, but photographers who focus on their own relationships. Relationship doesn’t necessarily mean “romantic”; it may be a familial relationship or some other type. The key is that the photographer is an active participant in the relationship. The photographer may or may not be in the photographs.

I have some in mind, but I’d like to open this up as a blank slate. Have at it. And thanks!

Jennifer Loeber print sale

Copyright © Jennifer Loeber

Jennifer Loeber is the latest photographer to throw her hat in the ring with a blog-based print sale (here). I think it’s interesting to see different photographers try different models for this. Her print is in an edition of fifteen, and she’s selling for only forty dollars, as opposed to my edition of one hundred for twenty dollars. She’s also taking pre-orders, for only one month, at which point it’s closed. If my image didn’t do it for you, maybe hers will. Go, Jennifer, go!

Ben Huff on format

Be sure to check out Ben Huff’s post on format, much of which is from an e-mail exchange we had after my recent post on the same subject. He writes eloquently about two exhibits he saw recently at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts—one of Alec Soth’s work and the other of Lee Friedlander’s—and the beauty of both, proving yet again (to me, at least) that personal e-mail exchanges trump blog comments every time.

I won (something)

In a month where my prints are bombing and at least one reader is telling me I should hang up the blog, I have to look for consolation where I can, and believe me, Andrew Hetherington’s I Heart Photographers is no consolation prize. I won a copy on Shoot! The Blog for correctly identifying Juergen Teller. Not bad.

Copyright © Andrew Hetherington

On format

I spent much of last year fawning over large-format work, putting photographers like Alec Soth and Richard Renaldi and Joel Sternfeld and Stephen Shore on a higher level than others (and can you blame me?). A few months ago, I bought Stephen Shore, edited by Christy Lange (Phaidon), and realized that with all my focus on Uncommon Places, I had overlooked American Surfaces. The paperback version of the latter is available from Amazon.com for less than thirty dollars, and spending time with it and the Lange-edited book has had an effect on me: I’m thinking more seriously about format.

In Image Makers, Image Takers, by Anne-Celine Jaeger (Thames & Hudson), William Eggleston says, “I don’t think about what camera I should use that much. I just pick up the one that looks nicest on the day.” That may work for Eggleston, but I think for most photographers the choice of format is more conscious. Alec Soth wrote on his blog that he specifically chose to start working in large format because,

At one point, I looked at the photographers I loved and there happened to be an unusual number who use this format (Nicholas Nixon, Sally Mann, Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld, Roger Mertin, Joel Meyerowitz). Since it worked for all of these people, I figured it was worth a try. And as it turns out, there is something special about the format. Beyond the resolution and tonal purity of the negative, the 300mm lens renders the world in a really unique way. But what I really love is the viewing process. The image on the ground glass is just so beautiful. While the format is pretty impractical, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to give up on the view.

I’ve been told by more than one photographer that I should really change to medium or large format. It reminds me a bit of people telling short-story writers that they should try the novel. There’s the assumption, among some, that you get your start with 35mm and then when you’re serious about photography, you move up. (I know there are photographers like Zoe Strauss—and Eggleston, for that matter—who shoot 35mm, but the overwhelming majority of photographers on my bookshelves and in my link list are not shooting 35; a notable exception: Helen Levitt.)

Looking at American Surfaces, though, I was blown away—not just by the photographs, but by how much I preferred Shore’s early 35mm work to his later large-format photographs. I find his 35mm work more compelling, more intimate. It grabs me in its imperfection.

There’s a place for all these formats, of course, and some photographers successfully move from one format to another, like a writer changing pens. But most photographers seem to stick with one format for years. I don’t think this is just about getting in a routine. And I don’t even think it’s entirely about the end result, the photographs. I think it’s also about the process. Some personalities are just better suited to working with a large-format camera, hauling around all those glass plates and the massive camera and tripod, patiently working to get the image they’re after.

Which comes first: the project or the format? You’d think the project would—that the photographer would conceive of a project and then choose the tool, the camera, that would best execute his vision. But I wonder if it isn’t a little fuzzier than that. Maybe the projects a person is drawn to are the ones that are also best suited to the camera he likes. Maybe the two decisions are nearly inseparable. So someone who’s naturally drawn to a larger format might also naturally be drawn to a project for which large format would work best. And the projects that are most successful are the ones where everything comes together—the right photographer, the right format, the right project—like lines intersecting in some kind of improbable way.

I don’t know the answers to these questions—everything I’m saying could be bunk for all I know. But I do know that, as I’ve gotten some distance from my In Store project, I’ve started to wonder if one of the reasons that the project doesn’t feel right to me is the format. (This is the second key reason I referred to but didn’t elaborate on here.) Nothing is ever that clear-cut. But the lines aren’t intersecting, and I want to figure out why—and learn from it.

Art world etiquette

After I posted about my print sale (which is still going, by the way—more on that in a bit), quite a few people commented—some favorably, some not—about the idea of doing an edition of one hundred for twenty dollars. I was curious about what other people thought of this, so I e-mailed a handful of photographers, gallerists, and art collectors to pick their brains. I’m still waiting on responses from a couple people, but I think I can safely give a synopsis.

The overwhelming consensus was that, though the issues raised by some of the commenters regarding edition sizes and prices, are important ones and worth considering, it’s not a black-and-white issue.

On the issue of print size and whether the artist can produce an edition of the same print or from the same series at a later date, at a different print or edition size, one person I consulted pointed out that the Museum of Contemporary Photography sold an edition of 9¼-x-11½-inch prints from Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi series for three hundred dollars, and that it hasn’t hurt the big prints at all (or kept Alec from commanding a much higher price as his reputation has grown). The same person pointed out that Creative Time sold an edition of 11-x-14-inch Marilyn Minter prints for five hundred dollars. Yes, three hundred dollars and five hundred dollars are more than twenty dollars, but I’m hardly in the category of Alec Soth and Marilyn Minter (yet!). Plus, I’m selling my prints through my blog (which several people pointed out is different from a gallery), and I’m doing it to raise funds for future projects.

Someone also pointed out that Zoe Strauss, who’s deservedly earned all kinds of recognition for her work, sells five-dollar photocopies of her photographs under the I-95 every May, and she’s also held print sales on her blog.

One person said that the marketplace determines the value of a person’s work, and that the value changes as the person’s standing in the art world changes. Another said that the artist herself determines the value, and that if the “value” of a particular print is that it enables you to get it in the hands of more people or to fund a photographic project, that’s just as valid as selling it in a gallery to a limited number of collectors. She added

[I]t’s fully up to you and that’s why these “serial monogamy” editions are great ways to make some cash and to allow someone to own a piece of work that marks a specific time. I do agree that as an artist you do need to think long term and short term at the same time, but only you can determine how you want to put your images out into the world and figure out a way to have it be beneficial. It‘s a struggle to figure out how to do it, but there's not really another option because we don‘t have an economic framework that everyone can just plug into and make work.

More than one person said that, at this very early stage of my career, I have nothing to lose by selling prints in this way. Even if it is a “mistake,” every artist makes mistakes as they negotiate the system and try to find their place in it.

As I said, I’m still awaiting responses from a few people, and if they have different perspectives on this that will deepen the discussion, I’ll be sure to post them. Feel free, as always, to leave your comments.

In the meantime, my goal with my current print sale is to use the proceeds to produce a zine in a few months. I’ve gotten quotes on the upfront costs of the kind of zine I want to do, and it’ll be close to two thousand dollars. If I sell out of this print, I’ll have enough money to produce the zine—but I’m not there yet. So if you want to see a zine from me in the coming months, you can help by buying a print. As Barnaby from the U.K. said of this image, “It has grace and seems honest. I like those things.” And when have you ever known Barnaby to be wrong?

UPDATE: Another photographer got back to me and was more in line with Christian’s viewpoint, saying, “I would say that the benchmark is set with the editions. If you do high editions at the beginning, your prices will always stay lower. This has to do with the supply-and-demand issues of the secondary market.” The photographer added, “[V]enue probably matters. But commercial galleries will become aware of those high-edition prints.”

Paul Fusco: RFK

My copy of Paul Fusco: RFK arrived today. These photographs are what I love about photography.

Copyright © Paul Fusco

Copyright © Paul Fusco

Copyright © Paul Fusco

Copyright © Paul Fusco

Choosing projects

Yesterday, I posted a few pictures from a project I’ve been thinking about for a few months: a series of portraits of kids with their babysitters. Melissa Lyttle commented and said, “But why?” Good question.

The idea for the project came to me in the car with S. (where most ideas come to me). We’d been listening to This American Life (Episode #351: “Return to Childhood 2008”), and in the first segment of the show, Alex Bloomberg tries to track down Susan Jordan, who babysat Alex and his sister when Alex was nine years old. Here’s the bit that grabbed me:

These are the things that I remember about Susan Jordan. . . . Me and Susan flipping through one of those Time-Life books: Rock ’n’ Roll through the Decades: The Sixties. She has long, brown hair. She’s incredibly skinny. It’s 1975. She’s wearing bell-bottom Levis, a faded jean jacket. She points to a picture of a bloated man in a powder-blue rhinestone jumpsuit, sitting cross-legged on a stage, before a crowd of crying women. “That’s my favorite picture of Elvis,” she says. This information seems somehow personal, and important.

This transported me back to the seventies and eighties, back to super-skinny Debby Jones standing in front of the full-length mirror in my parents’ bedroom, wearing a bikini, pinching herself, and saying, “Don’t I look fat?” Lisa Piaskowski, who had a crush on the cousin of one of our neighbors, and who gave us a love note to run over and put on his windshield when he was at our neighbors’ house. Suzie Dragoo, sitting on the deck, with the phone cord stretched from the wall in the kitchen, crying to one of her friends about a boy.

The years when you babysit are tumultuous ones. Everything is drama. Feelings are extreme. And you bring that into the lives of the younger kids who you’re charged with watching. If a teenager babysits for one family more than a few times, the kids usually feel a connection to her. And she tells them things she might never tell her parents or her peers. Teenagers think kids don’t listen, or don’t understand. But kids are like sponges, especially when this exotic creature called a teenager comes into the house.

I like the idea of trying to look for that connection in a series of portraits. As I said in my response to Melissa, I’m just getting started in this, and I’m not sure whether it’ll go anywhere. But I usually have to try things to see if they’ll work. Maybe the portraits alone won’t do it. Maybe I would need to incorporate words or kids’ drawings. Or maybe I’d need to change it up and, instead of doing more formal portraits, take more candid shots (the way I did with my sister’s wedding). I don’t know yet, but I like posting things that are in progress, not fully formed or defined, because I think there’s something to be gleaned there about the process.

Rob Haggart posted today about the importance of choosing a subject. He quotes from a Guardian article in which Elisabeth Biondi, visuals editor of The New Yorker, talking about photographer Pieter Hugo, says, “Some people have said to me that Pieter’s subject is so dramatic that it would be hard to take a bad picture . . . but, you know, a photographer chooses his subjects, and that, too, is an important part of having a great eye. Photographers go where their instinct leads them and then try and work out their fascination for the subject through the photographs they take.”

What we don’t often see are the starts and stops, the missteps, the things that don’t go anywhere. I work out what I think by writing. I work out what I feel by photographing. I don’t know yet what I feel about this subject, or whether the depth of my feeling will be substantial enough to take me anywhere. But I’m interested enough to try.

For what it’s worth, I’ve been thinking a lot about my In Store series, about why it doesn’t work for me, why it’s stalled. I think there are two key reasons. One of them is that the idea occurred to me as a concept, a theme, something I could get my hands around. I do think the proliferation of storage facilities says something about our culture. And I think it’s an interesting story. But I have no connection to storage facilities myself. I don’t have stuff in storage. I have a tiny apartment and comparatively little stuff.

This is not to say that all photographers must have a personal connection to their subjects in order to make great photos. It’s just that I think I’m at my best—in writing, in photography—when I make it personal. If I’m not feeling anything, something’s wrong.

Jack Radcliffe

Via photo-teacher extraordinaire Aline Smithson’s blog, I came upon the work of Jack Radcliffe, who, since his daughter Alison’s birth in 1975, has documented her life. (The July 13, 2008, article by Radcliffe in the Los Angeles Times explains the project.) This is the kind of project I’m into right now. Something about a relationship, something deeply personal, something where the photographer and subject are connected in a way that makes all the difference. Below are some of my favorites; you can find more of it here.

Copyright © Jack Radcliffe

Copyright © Jack Radcliffe

Copyright © Jack Radcliffe

Copyright © Jack Radcliffe

Copyright © Jack Radcliffe

Copyright © Jack Radcliffe

Copyright © Jack Radcliffe

T.A.

In case you didn’t know it, Timothy Archibald rocks.

The cart and the horse

Reading Heather Morton’s blog last week, in the 30-square-foot “business center” of the Comfort Inn in Guilford, Connecticut, I came across this, from Sandi Gidluck (Associate Creative Director at Young & Rubicam in Toronto):

fine art = solving personal challenges and issues in a creative way. Expressing personal ideas. And the public sees the final complete piece. Then they critique it.

commercial art = solving business challenges and issues in a creative way. Expressing targeted ideas. And everyone sees the birth, process and final piece, the whole time critiquing it all the way through. And then again when it goes public.

And I realized that, in beginning the pursuit of editorial work, I have been putting the cart before the horse.

Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball

At this point, let’s be blunt: Why would a magazine hire me, when there are a thousand other already experienced editorial photographers out there and/or up-and-coming photographers who are committed to the concept of shooting editorially? Don’t get me wrong: I fully appreciate the professional editorial photographers, the ones who can take an assignment and turn it into something miraculous, or at least something worthy of tearing out and taping to the wall. But I spend 40+ hours a week executing someone else’s vision in my day job; I don’t want to be doing that in my photography. The photographers I look up to are everyone from (oh, you know I’m going to say it) Alec Soth to Nick Waplington to Jessica Dimmock, along with a whole slew of others.

I loved seeing Alec’s photos in the Telegraph (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4).

via Colin Pantall

And I loved Nick Waplington’s work and Jessica Dimmock’s work in Wired.

But take Alec as a case study: He was shooting portraits of sheep in Minnesota before he started working on Sleeping by the Mississippi. The bulk of his first book project was made in 2002, ten years after he graduated from Sarah Lawrence. That means he spent a decade working at projects that didn’t go anywhere before the Mississippi project really took off for him. He wasn’t shooting editorially during this time; he was working on his own projects (and at a day job). Now, having achieved remarkable success with his art, he’s doing some editorial and commercial work.

I’m not suggesting that there’s one right path, or that those like Kate Hutchinson (who supports herself with her editorial work and teaching, and does her personal projects, too) aren’t just as admirable. I’m just saying that I want to focus on my personal projects first, before I try to do anything editorially or commercially.

Rachel Barrett

Photographer Rachel Barrett’s project on NYC newsstands was featured in The New York Times yesterday, and there’s a lovely little slide show worth checking out. Also take a look at Barrett’s work on her site; I got lost in it, particularly the color stuff.

Copyright © Rachel Barrett

Copyright © Rachel Barrett

1000 Words Photography

Copyright © 1000 Words Photography

Tim Clark, editor of a new online magazine called 1000 Words Photography, e-mailed to tell me about the magazine’s launch, and I’m really glad he did, because the site is fantastic! First, just in terms of design and presentation, this is a magazine I want to read. But beyond that, there’s a diversity of images here that’s refreshing. I love Naoya Hatakeyama’s Slow Glass series.

Copyright © Naoya Hatakeyama

And Paola de Grenet’s Albino Beauty/Aicuña series stopped me in my tracks. There’s also a nice interview with the photographer that’s worth checking out.

Copyright © Paola de Grenet

The final highlight for me was Martin Parr’s Luxury/Parrworld.

Copyright © Martin Parr

I’m looking forward to seeing how the magazine evolves and which projects they feature next. Be sure to check it out.

Patti Hallock

Patti Hallock purchased a print from me, and she was kind enough to send me a free one of her own. So beautiful.

Copyright © Patti Hallock

Thanks, Patti!

Interview: Allison V. Smith

I’ve heard Allison V. Smith’s name in the blogosphere here or there, and I finally spent some time on her blog and ordered her zine, and I am officially a huge fan. She’s seriously good. I had some questions for her, and she was kind enough to let me post our conversation here.

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

Liz: So, looking over your résumé, it seems like you had your start in journalism, and you’re now working as an editorial photographer and doing your personal projects, too. What’s your background? What’s your story? Where’d you go to school? How did you get where you are today?

Allison: I’ve known I wanted to be a photographer since I was fifteen. I’m the youngest of five and it wasn’t very easy finding my voice within my large, active family. As soon as I discovered photography, I had my own way to communicate. My tenth-grade photo teacher exposed us to Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, Lee Friedlander, Walker Evans. She would give us assignments specifically based on photographers—“Go shoot a Cindy Sherman portrait,” etc. I could not get enough of photography.

Frustrated with college, I took a year off and studied at the Maine Photographic Workshops in the fall and then interned at the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald in the spring. It was a very important year for my photography. It was that year that I knew I wanted to make pictures for a living. Newspaper photography seemed to be the answer. It would feed my need to photograph daily and to be published. I finished college at SMU in Dallas and immediately started working for newspapers. I worked as an intern and full-time at seven newspapers over fifteen years. It was an amazing time to be a newspaper photojournalist—experience and knowledge that I will never forget! But I knew I wanted more.

In 2004, I quit to pursue freelance photography and my own personal artwork. Today my freelance work for magazines and newspapers supports me as a fine-art photographer. I’m represented in Dallas at the Barry Whistler Gallery, known for showing contemporary Texas artists. The Dallas Museum of Art and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, both purchased two images from my last show at the Barry Whistler Gallery in 2006.

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

L: Do you find that living in Dallas (i.e., anywhere outside New York), it’s harder or easier to get work? Does location even matter?

A: I am a half-breed. I am half-Texan, half-Maine. I hope to live both places someday. For now, Dallas is a wonderful place to live and work. I’m a laid-back Texan, and it definitely suits my personality—not to mention that the artists’ scene in Texas and especially Dallas is very supportive and a great place to be.

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

L: Do you shoot medium-format? Digital? Strictly film? Whatever works? Does that kind of stuff interest you, or is the equipment kind of ancillary? (I read an interview with Eggleston where he said he just picked up whichever camera was around when he walked out the door. Seemed really random.)

A: I shoot it all. I have digital for mostly freelance jobs. I shoot Hasselblad and Lomo and Widelux for myself. Occasionally, a client will ask me to shoot with one of my film cameras for an assignment.

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

L: I’ve been working a lot lately (in my mind, on my blog) on developing my vision (for lack of a better word), my style, my whatever you want to call it. I think this all relates to knowing what matters to me, figuring out what I want to photograph. It’s all tied together. Part of what I love about your zine is how cohesive it is. It includes a wide variety of photos, but they all hang together really well and seem to be talking the same language. Did that just happen for you, or did you work at it? Either way, how?

A: I think it is for sure something that has developed over time. I work hard at improving all the time. My ninety-six-year-old grandfather taught me that you never stop growing and evolving as a person or an artist. Part of my zine was an effort to loosen up my style, not worry so much about making the composition perfect. It has been a great exercise for me.

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

L: Do you feel like you get pigeonholed in a particular genre? I mean, are you known as an editorial photographer, or a fine-art photographer, or both? Do you feel like people are open to blurring boundaries? Maybe I’ve just been watching too much CNN, but I heard James Carville the other day talking about how if a politician doesn’t define himself, someone else will define him, so you need to control the message. I hate the way that sounds (Carville’s voice is ringing in my ears), but I think there’s something to be said for the fact that people do like to categorize and define each other. Is there a way to avoid that as a photographer? Or do you just say, “Fuck it,” and do what you want and screw what people think you are (or aren’t)?

A: I think about this all the time. You know people in the art world don’t quite appreciate newspaper photographers the way I think they should be respected. There are some amazing photographers out there—Damon Winter, Mona Reeder, David Leeson—all of whom I consider some of the best photographers in the country. Yet, you never see their names outside the newspaper worlds. Damon is hands down one of the finest portrait photographers there is, and besides seeing his credit in The New York Times, you never see his name. So this makes me mad and it kind of gives me the attitude of, “Fuck it.” I am just going to be who I am. I am going to continue working for clients who are wonderful to work for, who hire me for my vision rather than tell me how to shoot something. I am going to continue to shoot for myself, and I hope for more beautiful exhibits in the future. I am going to continue to make zines and postcards. I am going to continue to shoot for myself as often as I possibly can because, in the end, I love photography. I love photographers and photo books. It’s who I am, what I am.

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

Mel Trittin

Mel Trittin was one of the people who bought from me in my print sale, and she was kind enough to send me one of her own photos in exchange for the free prints I sent out. Here it is.

Copyright © Mel Trittin

Now that’s the kind of mail I like to get. Thanks, Mel!

Allison V. Smith: Superficial Snapshots, Zine 2: An Issue with Lomos

I got myself a copy of Allison V. Smith’s second zine and, man, am I glad. (The first issue sold out before I even knew it existed.) The zine as a mode of publication is my new favorite thing in the whole wide world, and Allison’s is as good as it gets, for sure. I love everything about this little thing: the photos, the layout, the design, the price. I can’t believe she even has any left, but you can still snag a copy here or here.

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

Excruciating

I am sitting at my computer watching as Auditorium, by James Rajotte, sells out on 20x200. I’m dying to buy a medium-size print myself, but forcing myself not to. It is excruciating. And, frankly, I’m shocked that I’ve held out this long. (This is a testament to just how high my credit-card balances have gotten.)

Copyright © James Rajotte

My angst and me

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of Joan Didion. She’s the one I go to when nothing else works. I’ve also been thinking a lot about my place in photography, where I fit in (or will fit in), what kind of work I want to be producing and why. The two are connected, in ways that dawned on me this afternoon.

When I do this, when I look at other photographers and try to find someone who’s doing what I want to be doing, I often come up empty-handed. The art world drives me crazy with its valuation of inane artist statements. Stock photography makes my eyes glaze over. Journalism doesn’t do it for me. Editorial has possibilities—but only if I’m hired for my style, my vision, not to execute somebody else’s. But what exactly is my vision? What kind of photographer am I? What kind of photographer do I want to be?

I sent out two prints to each of the people who participated in my print sale—and they’re completely different in style. If you saw the two photographs, you’d never guess they were taken by the same person. That’s not a good thing—it’s a sign (or a symptom) of my current lack of clarity.

Before you send me an e-mail telling me I’m being too hard on myself or I’m overthinking things or I’m focusing on my angst, and I just need to get out and photograph, I should tell you: This is who I am. I overthink things. I focus on my angst. That isn’t going to change, and I’ll be better off if I learn how to put my obsessive-compulsive control-freak tendencies to work for me in my photography instead of trying to fight them. As S. pointed out today over coffee, “I’ve seen you do this numerous times. You work things over, worry them, until you come to some understanding of what you believe. How many times have you talked for hours like this, and then said, at some point, ‘That’s it! I’ve got it!’ You need to work things out this way—that’s who you are.” (God, it’s good to be known like that, you know?) But it makes sense. There’s the noun form of worry—“mental distress or agitation resulting from concern usually for something impending or anticipated; anxiety”—and I’ve got plenty of that. But the worrying S. was talking about is a verb: “to shake or pull at with the teeth [a terrier worrying a rat].” I gnash at a thing over and over until I get to the heart of it. (That’s much of why I like Didion so.)

Anyway, in my worrying over coffee, talking this out with S., I came up with this:

• I need to not fight who I am (see above). Take Didion and Sontag. Both good writers, but completely different in their approaches. Sontag was all in her head, and Didion comes at things equal parts mind and heart. To read Didion is to have the very real sense that you know her; you can read lots of Sontag and never feel that way. Neither approach is better or worse—but they know who they are (make that past tense for Sontag). So when they approach a topic, they come at it in different ways. That’s what a good photographer has—a sense of who she is, what she cares about—and that’s what helps determine, even if subconsciously, the subject and the approach.

• I want to be in my projects. Not the way Amy Elkins is in hers—not in self-portraits. I don’t want to do projects that are directly about myself. But I want people who look at my work to get some sense of who I am, in the same way that Didion’s essays, though about, say, 1960s America, are also about her. I want to choose projects that I care about that much, projects that I have an emotional connection to, not just projects that are interesting or timely or that satisfy my curiosity. Those things are nice, but the most important thing is the connection, because if that’s there, it’ll show in the work. So whether I’m doing my own personal projects, or I’m doing an assignment, I want to come at it with who I am at the forefront. There are thousands of good photographers out there; the only thing that sets me apart from anyone else is my take, me. The voice, the vision, that’ll come in time. Until then, practice. And if I’m not in it, walk away.

More Mann

What Remains

I’ve had What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann in my Netflix queue since it came out a couple months ago, and it finally arrived this week. I watched it last night, and I think I might watch it again tonight and again tomorrow with S. when he’s over. It’s that good.

Mann was one of the first photographers whose work I fell in love with—particularly Immediate Family—and this film only deepens my admiration for her, as a photographer and a person. There’s so much in these eighty minutes to find inspiring, but here are the first couple minutes of the film, which are inspiration enough for now.



There is the temptation, I think, when you’re just starting out in something, to look for big ideas, big stories, big topics, because you think that if you find something important, your work will be important. But usually, the smaller and more personal you go, the more you pare things down to their essence, the more powerful they are.

Look for projects from me in the coming months that are more personal, less about the world outside my life and more about the world I inhabit. I’m planning to do a zine of one of them later in the summer. I’ll keep you posted.

Dalton Rooney

After my print sale, Dalton Rooney, one of the people who bought from me, e-mailed and offered to send me a free print of my choosing, since I would soon be sending him a free print of a photograph made with my new lens. I wasn’t about to pass up his generous offer, and his print arrived shortly thereafter.

This is the one I chose—I loved it on his Web site, but it’s even more beautiful in print. Thanks, Dalton!

Copyright © Dalton Rooney

Now is the time

A while ago, I turned off comments on my blog. I was sick of them, frankly. Sick of the reminder that people were out there reading my words. That seems naïve, I know. You publish a blog, you post regularly, and you get readers—that’s the way it works. But nevertheless, I started finding even the most innocuous comments an intrusion, as awful as that sounds. (I should be so lucky to have readers—how could I turn on them in this way?)

I realized yesterday—or maybe the realization finally crystallized—that my desire to turn off the comments was less about turning off the comments and more about stepping away from the blog and the world of blogs.

It is so easy, when your Google Reader is always full of excellent photographs, to feel as though the rest of the world is producing constantly, consistently, at a level you’re simply incapable of. It’s almost as if all the photographers whose blogs I read have become one photographer in my mind, and that one photographer never stops, never has to work, never gets sick or lacks inspiration. I know this isn’t true, of course—know that they all have their own struggles, that they all work hard to produce the work they do. But when all you see are the beautiful photographs, it’s hard to keep that in mind.

When S. and I were first together, I clung to him. Not literally, but so figuratively that it was almost literal. I was afraid that if I passed up one opportunity to spend time with him, one of two things would happen: (1) He would find someone else, or (2) he would die, and the last memory I would have would be of my saying no. The first fear came from years of insecurity, plus a cheating boyfriend or two for good measure. The second came from early losses in my life, as well as the very real fact that he’s simply an age at which people die without eliciting shocked gasps from those who read their obituaries. The why—on both counts—is less important than the what, and the what is less important than the effect it had on me, and on our relationship.

At some point in the past couple years, and honestly it’s been more of an evolution than the result of some turning point, I realized he loved me, and that I didn’t have to hold on so tight, that if he found someone else, well, that would be his loss, and if he died, well, that would be mine, but either way, I can’t control it. And it’s been so much better, in every way, since.

All of which is a way of saying that I’m feeling clingy with the blog. Feeling lucky to have drawn in some readers, and not wanting to lose them by not posting regularly. Feeling lucky to have gotten a tiny bit of attention for my work, and not wanting to lose that by not producing more. And not only that, but what if I don’t read all the other blogs out there? What if I miss out on something brilliant, something important, something crucial to my education as a photographer?

It’s time to let go. To stop focusing on the quantity of work that’s out there and focus on the work that matters to me. (Thanks, Ben, for that reminder.) To have faith that, if and when I start back up—whether that’s a week from now, a month from now, or longer—you’ll find me again. And if you don’t, I can’t control that. It’s time to focus on what I can control—my work—and nothing more.

I’m not sure when I’ll be back. Keep me in your Google Reader (or add me if I’m not already there), and chances are, my name will be bold all over again someday, and I’ll have something new to add to the conversation, some new light to shed, some new work to share. Until then, I’ll make like Alec and leave you with some words—Eastman, though, not Whitman:

Now it is day.
The sun is up.
Now is the time
for all dogs to get up.

“Get up!”
It is day.
Time to get going.
Go, dogs. Go!

—P. D. Eastman (from Go, Dog. Go!)

A very vulnerable thing

Thanks to a late-night e-mail from Susana Raab, I caught Jhumpa Lahiri on Charlie Rose last night, and that led me to reading some online interviews with her this afternoon. In one, at The Atlantic, she said:

It’s easy for me to think, Why am I doing this? There are so many great writers and great books—what’s the point? I can get into that mindframe pretty easily, and the more I see that this or that book is coming out, the more easily I go into a very scared place. I know that about myself. I feel protective of my work. And the ability to stay focused is a very vulnerable thing.

Blew my mind. In another interview, she said that she doesn’t have Internet access on her computer and has only really been online looking over other people’s shoulders. (The interview was from 1999, so maybe things have changed for her in the time since then, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they hadn’t