24/07/09
I’ve been doing very little shooting in this last month for the entirely necessary reason of developing this website – as well as making the picture selection for a new book, to be called The Art of Photography, and as well as working on the sequel to The Photographer’s Eye. In fact, the only serious assignment I’ve had time to do was a two-day shoot in Singapore for Sony. And when I say shoot, I mean that I spent most of the time on the other side of the camera, as we were filming a promotional video for the new Sony A900 (well, newish).
A break in the shooting, and I still get confused by the lens mount working in the opposite way to Nikon’s © Benard Quek
As video productions go, this was in a rather different league from my own teaching videos, which we’re just starting. A basic crew of eight, not counting client and agency people. When the agency said earlier that it would be a 13-hour shoot on the first day, I assumed they were just being cautious. But no, they were spot on — 13 straight hours of filming, beginning with Chinese opera (me in the act of photographing) and moving on to a house location in the evening. Somehow, even though I’d allowed an extra day before with nothing to do, and despite a luxurious flight on a Singapore Airlines 380, this enhanced the jet lag to the point where I managed 3 hours sleep in the three days since leaving London. I think in future I’ll stick as much as possible to my 6-week trips.
All done with mirrors, at least in the Chinese opera changing room
One valuable nugget of information prised from the filming is that it really makes all the difference to have your own make-up artist. Mine was Danny, and over a very long day he kept me from looking drawn and haggard! It’s not that I’m Richard Nixon (who famously refused make-up during his televised debate with John Kennedy and ended up looking shifty, uncomfortable and under pressure as he perspired), but Singapore in June is a trifle warm, and you need all the help you can get to stay looking fresh. After the director, who among other things decides whether or not you are going to actually look good, Danny was right up there on my list of important people.
That apart, my main focus has been preparing material for this site, analysing how it’s working, and planning improvements, as I mention on the home page. The Featured Photographer page has turned out to be the most time-consuming of all, simply because of needing to set up times to talk, look through images to select the most appropriate ones, and go through the normal to-ing and fro-ing of editing. Some photographers prefer to deal with the interview in writing. Others, like Mike Yamashita, an old friend, like to talk things through, and as he’s in New Jersey and I’m in London, it meant co-ordinating a phone interview. That in turn meant little things such as finding recording software that works with Skype and outputs an MP3 file.
And when I can find the time, it’s back to the sequel to The Photographer’s Eye, which my publishers want very much but which is going to take time. Sequels are tricky things, as you can see from any filmography. The studio, or in my case the publisher, understandably wants to capitalise on the success of the original hit. But this in itself is not sufficient justification to make a sequel work. It needs a reason, which in the case of a book like this means not just having something fresh to say (I do), but a structure — a clear theme that should be easy to follow. What I actually do is spend a considerable time researching and reading. The internet is, of course, unbelievably useful. It makes me think of all the information that I used to miss finding in the old days. But while it’s immensely practical, the core of my reading remains books. I like books in any case; for me they’re special and could never be totally replaced by wireless, paperless information. Funnily enough, in today’s Sunday paper (it’s the 12th of July), there’s a rant about how Britain’s National Archives are making it more difficult for the public to access records, with its new chief executive on record as saying “The public wants information and they don’t care if that information is in a book or online”. Well, this public cares, and I don’t imagine I’m alone. As a photographer there are really only two places where I want to see a photograph — as a print hanging in a gallery, and in a book. When I see an image on a screen, it makes me want to go and see it with the substance of paper behind it, which might sound strange, given how much I use the internet, not least here on this site. If I really want to look at an image that I’ve just processed, back from an assignment, I print it on the Epson 4800 down in the office, then carry it out to the conservatory to look at it.
The viewing room
Just thinking about this gave me another thought. When you look at a photograph as a print or in a book or magazine — in other words, anywhere else but on a screen — it’s always in movement. In a gallery, you walk up to a print, move past it; if you pick up a print and handle it, even more so; or turning the pages of a book. In fact, the only way that a glossy or semi-glossy surface works to the eye is by movement.
So I buy books. One kind is of photographs — favourite photographers, usually, or something new that catches my interest. This is the latest crop…..
Three Robert Franks (including one earlier edition) and a Werner Bischof
As it’s the 50th anniversary of the publication of Robert Frank’s seminal work, The Americans, the German fine art publisher Steidl has published a new edition. I already have one copy, the Aperture 1978 edition, but I justified buying it again because Frank himself had been involved in the new edition, and the negs were freshly scanned in tri-tone. Also, I intended to write about Frank and how he had re-vitalised photography and challenged accepted ideas about composition — see the accompanying Observations page here. Interestingly, he re-cropped some of them for the new edition. Quite significantly for one of my favourites, of an elevator girl in a Miami hotel. That’s the one that inspires Jack Kerouac to end his introduction to the book with, “And I say: That little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons, what’s her name & address?” Which were sort of my thoughts when I first saw The Americans.
What was unexpected about the book was its format, much smaller than the Aperture edition, and I hadn’t paid attention to that when I ordered it. But Steidl also publish more on Frank, and I bought London / Wales, which is from the beginning of his career — both locations marvelously handled by Frank, with freshness and an unconcern for the obvious, very much a preparation for The Americans, and also Peru. This last led me to buy another, very different style of book from the same publisher, on Werner Bischof, one of the earliest Magnum photographers, who died young in a car accident as he was in the middle of a self-assignment in …. Peru. Which reminds me that the last of his photographs, by now iconic, is of a young Peruvian boy walking along playing a flute.
