10 Things Garry Winogrand Can Teach You About Street Photography by Eric Kim

I found the link to this blog by street photographer Eric Kim via @BlurbBooks on Twitter. The piece is full of great information about Garry Winogrand and I find the personal, enthusiastic tone refreshing - Kim frequently mentions in the article how studying Winongrand has influenced and informed his own photographic practice and methods. The blog also provides lots of different suggestions for further research. At the time I read this I was researching workflow and thinking a great deal about my own ways of working and a number of points resonated with me.

Something that has stayed with me about Garry Winogrand for many years is a famous quote of his, "I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs." I think I read this before I  was consciously aware of Winogrand's work and it is a simple sentence that I keep mulling round in my mind and often use as something to spur me on and inspire me. On one level the sentence can be read as a flippant aside, I believe though the truth is much more than that. For me it suggests the self doubt a photographer can face and confronts critical questions such as 'why did you photograph that?' It is a rebuke to such statements and asserts the right of the photographer to work as they wish - it says 'if you don't get what I do why should I explain?' I often feel uncertain about what I should be photographing and the Winongrand's words spur me on not to overthink but to get out and do - the words give me such a strong sense of his drive and energy. 

In his article Kim states that a conservative estimate of how many photographs Winogrand took in his lifetime is over 5 million. (He does concede that there is some conjecture about this however with a commenter challenging that the true figure is between 1-1.25 million, without getting drawn on this he recognises that even this lower figure means Winogrand took a great number of photographs.) Something I am becoming increasingly aware of is that I do not shoot enough, I tend to have periods high activity punctuated by days or weeks when I do not pick up the camera. I have thought long and hard about why this is and there are many reasons; often I have a sense of self doubt or I feel unsure about what I should be shooting, if I do not feel in the mood for taking photographs I tend not to, I feel guilty if I am taking photographs for 'fun' rather than for the course are a few reasons. While the 455 images a day Winogrand took is somewhat on the extreme side maybe if I set myself the target of going out to take photographs twice a week that would be a more realistic approach. Again I go back to the previously mentioned quote - Winongrand seems to be telling me to put aside all these doubts and just get on with taking photographs.

Of course the problem remains of how to edit and select all the images taken, Winongrand had had a radical solution to this - he never processed his film straight away but waited up to two years believing he needed to almost forget having shot the pictures. He felt that emotion was the enemy of good selection and that he could be influenced by the way he felt on a particular day rather than the strength of a particular image: "You make better choices if you approach your contact sheets cold, separating the editing from the picture taking as much as possible." I recognise this as being true - I often struggle with editing my images because I make too many selects and therefore take too much time reviewing and processing. I need to find ways to be more decisive - it strikes me that Winongrand was extremely confident in which images to select and I guess this is something I will develop too over time. Still the doubt remains that I might not make the correct selections so I include images that I really know are not working - I need to find a way to divorce my emotion as Winongrand did.

Kim's blog contains other similar articles about other photographers that interest and have influenced him such as William Eggleston, Henri-Cartier Bresson, Walker Evans and Robert Frank. All photographers that also interest me so I will spend time reading further. I am beginning to realise that looking at photographers work alone is not enough but understanding there ways of working is also very important - hopefully this will help me develop my own strategies and ultimately help me find my own photographic voice.

"Its all in the edit (delete at your peril)" by John Macpherson on duckrabbit blog

I came across this article via twitter before starting DPP and when I was looking through my twitter feed realised it had a lot of relevance to the initial exercises of the course concerned with workflow and editing.

The piece was posted on Duckrabbitblog on 25th January 2012 by photographer and photography teacher John Macpherson. I like the open and personal tone of the piece in which Macpherson discusses what he believes to be the potential mistake of photographers deleting pictures in the field alongside his experiences of tutoring novice photographers.

He begins by explaining how he tries "to encourage a process of editing images on the computer"…."just like the contact sheets we used to make in the good old film days." He continues, "for many inexperienced photographers it’s actually quite difficult to determine what actually constitutes a ‘good’ or ‘successful’ image and that too often its the technical qualities that are the defining ones, overriding any other less tangible considerations."

He follows this with an anecdote of how one of his students failed to see the potential of one of her shots and apologised for not having deleted it at the time because it was "not sharp." Macpherson's experience and visual knowledge however told him differently -  to him the image was evocative and the lack of sharpness made the image timeless with a certain amount of 'emotional content.' This led him to conclude, "taking ‘good’ images is very easy, but the difficulty is that they are invariably surrounded by a mass of work of lesser value. How does one discern the good from bad? If you’re a novice photographer how can you tell the difference? I often wonder how many real gems never see the light of day because they are simply deleted?"

Another anecdote concerning a discussion about a students image that to her represented something very negative, (a photograph of her partners damaged leg after a serious accident which meant they were separated by hundreds of miles while he recuperated.) After discussion it was agreed that her feelings were based on the emotional force she placed on the picture and that disregarding this and focussing on the pictures actual content could lead to a very different reading -  that the image actually represents tenderness, caring and healing. After the discussion the woman changes her opinion which to Macpherson shows the importance of sharing your work:

"I think its vital that you share your work with people you know. Discussing why it was made, and what it makes you feel like, is a hugely valuable thing to do. It’s an even more valuable thing to do with people you don’t know, because they’re less likely to care about offending you by saying they don’t like a particular image."

After the article, in the comments section, Macpherson touches on a particular issue connected with digital photography - the ability to take hundreds of pictures at a time. He states that "It took me literally years to learn to ‘read’ and properly understand images in the editing process. It really is a skill to develop, separate from the button pressing that creates images." And on the subject of being able to "shoot 10 frames a second [and] to come back from an event with a huge amount of material" he adds this note of caution:

"[it's] a painful job if you want to consider every single frame, check the expressions on faces, where eyes are looking, all the little details that can make or break an image. I think a lot of people lose a lot of work because they just don’t have the time to carefully edit, and they probably miss some useful work. I know I’ve come across little gems I missed first, second and third time around because there was so much other stuff."

Lots of interesting food for thought for me in this article - I never delete images from my memory card (so a tick for me there!) but I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that my ability to edit successfully is something I need to work hard at. Often I am consumed with self doubt and disappointment when reviewing images. I have tried various strategies to combat this - editing as soon as possible after a shoot (which is not always practical) and also leaving a bit of time between shooting and editing as I sometimes find the cushion of time can help me be more objective about the images. The advice to seek feedback about images is one I will try to incorporate for example actively seeking feedback through Flickr. The problem with this however is that a certain amount of editing is required which does not eliminate the problem of good images being lost and not being selected at all. My overall feeling is that I need to create a schedule for both shooting and editing - I tend to have intense periods when I take a large amount of photographs which is often punctuated with inactivity. I need to arrive at a better strategy for managing my time which pushes me to photograph more regularly, however, this also needs to be reinforced with robust editing and taking my pictures to some sort of output - even if this is just posting on Flickr. 

'New York Times' Robert Frank article-February 2012

Link to the article: 'A Lonely Gaze on The Times and Its City' by Randy Kennedy, New York Times February 17th 2012

I came across this article on some recently rediscovered commercial photographs by Robert Frank via Twitter. Frank is not someone I associate with as a jobbing photographer such is his near mythical standing in photographic history, in fact Kennedy asserts in his article that his most famous work 'The Americans' (published just one year after this commission) went on "to change the course of photography."

The pictures were collected in a book titled "New York Is" which had the purpose of promoting the New York Times to potential advertisers. In the article Kennedy discusses how Frank was finding work hard to come by in the 10 years he had been in America and with a wife and family to provide for it is likely he was motivated by pragmatism to put food on the table. He asserts that although many of the shots are "arrestingly elegant" and typical of commercial work of the time others "snapped seemingly midstride; decidedly grainier and blurrier … defined by seas of inky black and oceans of shiny reflective surfaces – are unmistakably the work of only one man: Robert Frank."

In my view the images are interesting, but without the knowledge they are by Frank I am unsure whether they warrant more than a passing look. For me the beauty of 'The Americans' is that as a book and photo essay the pictures within are more powerful when viewed as a complete work. The images for "New York Is" seem more standalone to me. Personally, I seem to gain more each time I look through 'The Americans' and while these pictures are of note I would not say they are important. I feel the article is slightly carried away with the discovery of the pictures and biased because of the association with the New York Times. (How forward looking they must have been at the time to hire Frank just before he published his masterpiece and at a time no one else would touch him!) For me the power of Frank's work is that it is his own personal uncompromising vision - and the work shown here seems more functional to me.