Telling Stories

Lights Out!

Cordele Drive-In Theater

U.S. Hwy. 41, Crisp County, Georgia

The thing I most like to do with my photography is tell stories. Early in my career I realized that, for me, photography is above all an art of exploration. Yet, it took a long time for this understanding to come to fruition. For many years I randomly clicked my shutter at anything and everything without any structure or purpose other than I thought it might make a good picture. My professional work was moderately successful, but I did not really know who I was as a photographer.  

In time, I gradually came to realize that in order to be fully engaged I need to be working toward some sort of story, whether a photo essay or a photos-and-words story. The best years of my career were the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when I was traveling around the country and internationally, developing and shooting A-V programs. Telling stories in photos and words. This kind of work was even more comprehensive than shooting for a magazine article, because it was like making a movie; telling a complete story, but in still photos rather than motion pictures.

Later, I moved on to creating books, which is also a great vehicle for photography; perhaps even better in some ways because books are more permanent.

I’m not an art photographer, except perhaps incidentally, or perhaps I should say accidentally. I’m always looking for visual puns, of course, but other than that I’m mostly not looking for stand-alone photographs, although I certainly take them when I find them. Some photos, of course, are a complete story in themselves and require neither context or prior knowledge. Most, however, work better when accompanied by captions or other pictures or text, and some are basically meaningless without that context.

Many of my photographs are not strong on their own, but gain strength from their context as part of a story or sequence. The thing I do, though, is photograph the “thereness” of things. Many of the photographs in Georgia: A BackroadsPortrait are like that, just “there.” Presented without art or artifice. A good example is the photo of Katie’s General Store on page 64. It’s just there and that’s just the way it looked. It bears quiet witness to a vanishing way of life in rural Georgia. As Wright Morris might have put it, it's "commonplace." Not a remarkable picture in itself, but stronger because it's part of the sequence of photographs that precede and follow it.

Katie's General Store

GA Hwy. 376

Echols County, Georgia

On the other hand, "Lights Out," the photograph at the head of this post, can stand alone, telling its story without need of a context. But it also adds strength to the sequence in which it appears, a story of time passing, a world fading away.

My domain is the old, the odd, and the ordinary; the beautiful, the abandoned, and the about to vanish away. I am a visual historian of an earlier America and a recorder of the interface between man and nature; a keeper of vanishing ways of life.

Georgia: A Backroads Portrait  https://www.blurb.com/books/4973943-georgia-a-backroads-portrait 

Minimum Equipment, Maximum Photography

The Bridal Veil

Leica M3, 50mm f2 Summicron

 An amazing number of the world’s greatest photographers have been Leica rangefinder shooters. The question is, were they Leica shooters because they were great, or were they great because they were Leica shooters?

Neither proposition is entirely correct, yet I suspect it may be closer to the truth to say they were great because they were Leica shooters.

The average well-equipped photographer who sallies forth laden with a pair of DSLRs and a battery of zoom lenses covering a range of 12 to 300mm or more is ready for anything. The problem is that the photographer who is ready for anything is really ready for nothing. In contemplating any subject, he must decide whether he should use a wide angle to encompass the entire scene or move in close for dramatic impact. Should he back off with a telephoto for flattened perspective and/or shallow depth of field, or should he zoom in to concentrate on a specific detail? The options are overwhelming and invite a terminal case of paralysis by analysis.

I once read an article about the travel photographer Gerald Brimacombe, who at that time was working with a pair of digital cameras that most professionals and advanced amateurs would consider too limited for serious work. Yet, he chose to work within the limitations of those cameras and concentrate on what they could do, rather than what they couldn’t do.

Although he happened not to be using Leicas, that concentration is nonetheless the essence of the Leica approach to photography. As Picasso said“Forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can’t even imagine in advance.”

Poverty in Rural Tennessee

Leica M3, 35mm f2.8 Summaron

 I think it is something like this that made so many Leica shooters great: since using a Leica and one or two or three lenses doesn’t make for a lot of options, they learned to photograph the things that could be photographed with their limited equipment and let the rest of the world go by.

Obviously, you don't have to shoot with Leicas (I don't) to practice the principal of limited means. The standard advice for budding photographers used to be to shoot with only one camera, one lens, and one film for a solid year before adding anything else to the kit.

Of course, all this makes me a voice crying in the wilderness of this gearhead world where some people actually list their photographic arsenals as part of their signatures on internet forums. To them, I would say, "Your cameras are great. Now could I please see your pictures?"

On Wedding Photography

Here, hold my flowers while we kiss!

Cathedral of Christ the King Catholic Church, Atlanta

Canon 5D Classic, Canon EF 702-200 f4L lens

Taking a brief break from talking about the philosophy of photography, let's talk about one of the practical uses of the art -- wedding photography.

Okay, I 'fess up. I photograph (or in the popular vernacular, "shoot") weddings. I use the present tense, because I have one coming up in March.

I've spent most of my working life as a small-market commercial photographer. So when I call my blog A Life in Photography, I'm not exaggerating. I photographed my first wedding in 1971 or '72. I forget which, but I do remember that I used a Rolleicord Va twin-lens reflex camera (because that was what I had at the time), two or three rolls of 120 Kodak color negative film, and M3 blue flashbulbs. Exposures were by the guide number system. (Remind me, and I'll explain it to you sometime. We had to figure things out for ourselves in the days before cameras became do-everything-for-you electronic gadgets.)

Since that was my first wedding, there were lots of questions I didn't know to ask in advance: such as, were there any divorces or any people I shouldn't place next to each other. It turned out that the bride's parents were divorced, both had remarried, and they were all still unhappy with each other. So I had to do all the parents groups twice -- once with her mother and her husband, and again with her father and his wife. Did I mention that people handling is one of the most important skills for a wedding photographer?

Because of the limitations of film, flashbulbs, and the patience of my subjects, I only took one shot of each grouping. Believe it or not, there were no closed eyes! Nowadays I take four or five shots of each large group and still someone in every shot has closed eyes.

Most commercial photographers in those days refused to do weddings and looked down upon photographers who did. But I never minded. I've always enjoyed being around happy people, and my camera gave me a brief but special entree into the lives of some very nice people.

The Happy Couple

Georgian Terrace Hotel, Atlanta

Canon EOS 6D, Canon EF 28-105 f3.5-4.5 lens

I never pushed wedding photography in my business, but if someone asked me if I were available, I was usually glad to say yes. Most years I did five or six, but after 2000, when I closed my studio, I began doing more and have done several hundred in my career. I quit booking weddings on my own around 2008, but got back into it in 2013 as what is known as a "second shooter" for an Atlanta photographer. She is now transitioning into another career, so we aren't doing many weddings these days, but as I said, we do have one coming up in March.

It will be a kick to be one of the few (only?) 82-year-old wedding photographers around. Why do I do it? My philosophy is that if I like doing something, if I'm able to do it, and if there's no reason not to do it, then why not do it?

Think young. Thinking old will kill you.

The Three Stages of Photography: Stage Three

Early Snow. McLemore Cove, Walker County, Georgia

Canon EOS 20D, 70-200 F4L lens

The third and ultimate stage of photography is involvement with the subject. 

The things we've learned about equipment and the photographic process in earlier stages are not forgotten or set aside; they are relegated to their proper roles as means to an end.  And that end is the presentation,  the revelation of the subject.

Dorothea Lange kept a quotation by the English essayist Francis Bacon on her darkroom door:  "The contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention."

Contrary to what you've probably been taught, photography is not an art of self-expression.  Photography is above all others the art of self-effacement. Photography reaches its highest plane when the photographer has so mastered its tools and processes that he is able to use them to take himself out of the way and allow the subject to speak, to reveal itself through his skill. Paradoxically, it is only then that the photographer fully and truly expresses himself.

Another paradox is the fact that looking at a photograph of something is often the best way to see it. "...the camera's innate honesty...provides the photographer with a means of looking deeply into the nature of things, and presenting his subjects in terms of their basic reality. It enables him to reveal the essence of what lies before his lens with such clear insight that the beholder may find the recreated image more real and comprehensible than the actual object." (Edward Weston, "Seeing Photographically," The Complete Photographer, January, 1943.)

The Watchers. Fayetteville, Indiana

Canon EOS 20D, Canon EF 24-85 f3.5-4.5 lens

Our work as photographers is to isolate and clarify so that others may through us see the things that are around them. Our expensive equipment and our skill at using the processes of photography are enjoyable in themselves, but are ultimately pointless unless they become the channels through which we empower our subject to reveal the essence of itself.

What subject?  I can't answer that question for you. Edward Weston found his universe in peppers, shells, and rocks. Steiglitz found his in clouds, Ansel Adams in the forces of nature. Dorothea Lange found hers in the faces of the poor and dispossessed, and Cartier-Bresson found his in the patterns of everyday life. I have found mine in the play of light across a human face, and across the face of the land. Ultimately, your answer will come out of your world view.

I believe that this world was created by a loving and sovereign God, and is filled with both beauty and mystery. I believe he created man in his own image, and although man has fallen and that image has been broken and marred, it still exists. Man is thus both savage and noble, and the world is a place of both darkness and light, of chaos and order. I want my photographs to show a world of beauty and mystery, of light and darkness, of nobility in the midst of savagery. There is chaos, but underlying it, there is order.

Rooted in the Past

Armuchee Valley, Walker County, Georgia

Olympus OM-D E-M5, Panasonic Lumix 14-140 f3.5-5.6 lens

Your way of looking at the world may be different from mine. If it is, your photographs should show that difference. Your photographs must be yours.  They must come from your heart, your way of seeing life and the world.

So what subject?  The whole world is before you.

What are you waiting for?

(This series of posts were originally published in 1999 as an article in Rangefinder Magazine titled The Three Stages: Photography as the Art of Self-Effacement.)

The Three Stages of Photography: Stage Two

Chicago Skyline

Olympus OM2n, 35-70mm f3.6 Zuiko lens, Fujichrome 100

 The second stage of progression in photography is involvement with photography itself.  For the more senior among us, it may have been learning to develop film and make prints. More recently, many have come into photography by way of computers and software. Either way, there's a whole new world of things to learn and do. Some people begin at this stage, rather than at the equipment stage, perhaps hooked by the magic of seeing a print come up in the developer for the first time or the gift or impulse buy of a digital camera. They may partially or completely bypass the involvement-with-equipment phase, intuitively understanding that equipment is only a means to a end.

At this level, pictures become more than a by-product.  Good photographs are an earnestly sought goal, and occasional successes whet the appetite for more.  We attend workshops, read books, and find it all endlessly fascinating.  Influenced by photographers we admire or who we have been told are masters of the art, we try to make photographs like theirs. There's a lot of emulation, imitation, and even some outright copying as we seek to master the medium and find our individual place it.

As our skills increase, we may find ourselves making photographs which are considered excellent by others.  They may even win prizes.  Yet, in the deepest sense, they are not really our own.  "Son of Cartier-Bresson," maybe, or perhaps "The Return of Arbus."  Excellent, but not spoken with our own voice, as it were.  Many technically-capable amateurs and not a few professionals arrive at this point and never go any further.

In fact, it could well be argued that professionals are especially susceptible to topping out at this level.  We are involved with photography on a daily basis, most of us are deeply in love with photography,  and some of us find that we can be reasonably successful by producing photographs according to rules and formulas.  In addition, any number of seminars and workshops stand ready to teach us to make photographs just like the hot photographers of the hour.  Imitative photography is actively encouraged by trade associations such as the Professional Photographers of America, with its print judging system which awards merit points to photographs made according to the standards they have established.

My Brother Steve

Olympus OM2n, 85mm f2 Zuiko lens, Kodachrome 64

A skillful promoter/salesman with moderate camera skills can have a financially successful career as a professional photographer without ever having an original thought or making an original photograph.

But that's okay.  It's all good fun, and harms no one.  Even if a professional sells hack work, what of it?  Are his customers harmed?  No, they're pleased.  Kathy the new bride is happy because her wedding pictures look just like Jennifer's and Karen's.

Involvement with equipment and with the photographic process itself  are necessary stages in the development of most photographers, but they are not what photography is all about.  To learn the true meaning of photography, to come to a place where we can make photographs which are truly our own, we must advance to the third level.

The Three Stages of Photography: Stage One

Canoes, Cumberland Mountain State Park, Crossville, Tennessee

Olympus OM2n, 65-200mm f4 Zuiko lens, Fujichrome 100

While some undoubtedly take up photography because they are attracted by the possibilities of the medium, I suspect most of us go into photography bass-ackwards: we fall in love with the equipment first.

No question, of course, that photographers have a deeper involvement with their tools than practitioners of most other arts or crafts. It's probably necessary in the nature of the case. Only in music, among the arts, is the art so inseparably linked to the instrument used to produce it.

I'm sure painters talk shop from time to time about brushes and paints, and writers may sometimes compare notes about their word processors. But nobody, except perhaps computer geeks, talks so endlessly about equipment as photographers. We have a love affair with cameras that just won't quit.

And that includes me. I love cameras. I can easily count more than a hundred of the critters I've owned in my lifetime, and I'm not even a collector. (Well, maybe a little bit.) I like using cameras, handling them, playing with them, even just thinking about them, imagining what I could do if I had a Fuji GFX100 with a hundred megapixels, or even a 100-400mm zoom for my garden-variety X-T1. But c'mon, tell the truth. Wasn't it plain old love of gadgets and tinkering that first got a lot of us hooked on photography? I mean, who could resist those miniature mechanical (or electronic, nowadays) marvels with their enticing whirs and clicks? A real grown-up toy for sure.

Christian woman, Madras, India

Olympus OM2n, 85mm f2 Zuiko lens, Fujichrome 100

In our equipment-happy stage, we search the internet and visit brick-and-mortar  camera stores, if we're lucky enough to have one nearby, to find the best camera for our money. We eagerly learn which lens does what. We search out blogs, online fora, and books to learn how to use our new cameras and master the technical aspects of photography, including learning to choose and use the necessary software. We believe the camera manufacturer implicitly when he says equipment makes the photographer. And fun...!? A little expensive, maybe, but man, what fun! In fact, it's so much fun that some stop right here and never go on to become photographers. We would never admit it, even to ourselves, but sometimes the pictures are only the by-products of the real fun: playing with our gear. There's a name for this phenomenon: it's called GAS -- Gear Acquisition Syndrome.

And there's nothing wrong with that. The people who make and sell cameras will love you and the money you spend keeps the ball rolling for all of us. To be fair, probably most photographers are at least slightly infected with GAS, and playing with photo equipment is good, clean fun.  But it's not photography. Photography is something else.

On Projects

All photographs in this post are from my book Georgia: A Backroads Portrait.
 

A small, country church in Dooly County, south Georgia

 People who take up photography with serious intent to make good photographs sometimes find that, after an initial period of excitement, things aren't working all that well for them. Their pictures seem bland and uninspiring, not at all what they had hoped to achieve. A photo-malaise sets in. They switch cameras and lenses, take workshops, perhaps experiment with film, seek to emulate other photographers -- all good things, but not the solution. They are part of the process of photography -- not the purpose. As the always iconoclastic and often perceptive Andrew Molitor says,

"Photographers, culturally, seem to have a terrible problem with looking for technical solutions to creative problems."  http://photothunk.blogspot.com/https://

The cure for photo-malaise is not process, it is purpose. Why are you taking pictures? If the goal of making pleasing photographs is simply to make pleasing photographs, your efforts will sooner or later run out of steam and lapse into photo-malaise.

Fayette County Courthouse, Fayetteville, Georgia

I was a photographer for many years, even a professional for most of that time, before I discovered who I am as a photographer. When I was photographing for clients I was usually working on some kind of project and toward a specific purpose. I often found that work satisfying, although I did not at the time understand why. When photographing for myself I sought to make pleasing pictures, but more or less at random.

Short's Mill, near Clarkesville, Georgia

It was while working on a project -- photographs for the book Rock City Barns: A Passing Era -- in the mid-'90s that I began to find a sense of who I am as a photographer. I think of it as "finding my voice." After the book came out it attracted some attention in the art photography community and I received a letter from a well-known art photographer who urged me to create an artist's statement, defining myself and my work. I thought about it, and this is what I came up with:

Manning Brothers Service Station, Glynn County, Georgia

"My domain is the old, the odd, and the ordinary; the beautiful, the abandoned, and the about to vanish away. I am a visual historian of an earlier America and a recorder of the interface between man and nature; a keeper of vanishing ways of life."

Susie's Sunset Cafe, LaFayette, Georgia

 While traveling to make the photographs for the Rock City Barn book, I began collecting pictures of other subjects that interested me, and now one of those "collections" is almost ready to become a book: Found on Road Dead: An Anthology of Abandoned Automobiles.

Since that time, I've been accumulating photographs for various projects in keeping with my statement of purpose. Photography is now complete for Lost Barns of Rock City -- a book of barns that were lost from Rock City's records and which I discovered on my various travels or in response to tips from people who knew of barns that were not in the first book. Other book projects in various stages of development include Old Houses of Georgia, People of Georgia, Tennessee: A Backroads Portrait, and Israel Today: The Land and the People. 

Danny Gandy and friend, Dooly County, Georgia. "This is not a fighting cock!"

Does all that sound ambitious? Of course it is! Will some (any) of these books see publication? Possibly. Georgia: A Backroads Portrait is complete and is making the rounds of publishers. And Countryman Press, which rejected Backroads Portrait because they no longer do coffee-table books, nevertheless assigned me to create a book in a different format, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, which was released in 2017.

 

Boynton Beauty Salon, Catoosa County, Georgia

Meantime, I don't have to worry about photo-malaise. I only have to worry about finding time and money (for travel) to work on my various projects. I am 82, in reasonable health, and have a reason to get up every morning. I will continue to pursue my photo-projects as long as I can.

Find yourself a project. Or several. Breath new life into your photography. The world is full of opportunities.

Bottoms Up! Berry College campus, Floyd County, Georgia

By the way, this is exactly the approach recommended by Magnum photographer David Hurn in his great little book On Being a Photographer (written with Bill Jay).

Check out Georgia: A Backroads Portrait at http://www.blurb.com/books/4973943-georgia-a-backroads-portrait

And if you should happen to have a friend in the publishing business . . .

(This post previously appeared in the Dear Susan blog dearsusan.net on January 10, 2020)