On Photography II

Seems my little essay on photography touched some Gagaites in all the right spots. Thanks for you comments about it. I thought I'd show a few more annotated photos from the vast array of great works out there in this medium.

1


Eugene Atget was an amateur actor in his youth, and at the turn of the 20th century, he took it upon himself to document old Paris before it eventually was eaten up by modernity.

What is most remarkable about his images is that he made his own glass negative plates. That means he didn't run out to the local camera shop and buy a roll of film. No. Before any of that was available, photographers had to make their own photographic negatives and positives (that's what I was intimating about having to "make" a photograph in the previous essay: you had to make everything back when).

Mind you, things were becoming easier at the turn of the century with the advent of smaller cameras and roll film--certainly the "Kodak" camera and system was available when Atget worked. But Atget stuck with the old fashioned process of coating glass with emulsified silver halides in a gelatin [cow bones] base. It took great skill to ensure the coating was even and the right thickness. Any unevenness would make for a very uneven looking photograph. It was an art in itself to make the photographic plate.

Then he'd go out to photograph, lugging with him maybe 5 of these heavy and large 8 x 10 inch photographic plates. He used a large camera, which required a tripod for support. Being quite old and weak, it would have been quite a sight to see this old guy walking along the streets with all this heavy equipment (odd fact--when he reached a certain age, he decided to eat only things that were white. So his diet consisted of white bread and milk, and that's about it. No wonder he was weak).

If you look at his photographs, you'll notice that there are rarely any people in them. He would get up very early in the morning to photograph the streets of Paris, before most people would get up. It is a remarkable absence of life which he captured in his images.

You'll notice too the blurry effect on the periphery of the images. That's because large cameras had a moveable bellows which allowed one to swivel the lens and back of the camera independently of each other, which allowed for a wider range to capture an image. Some of this movement distorted the finished product, and for some, this sort of disregard for "perfectly"-focused images could have been a sign of
sloppiness. But Atget was conscious of what he wanted. He felt these sorts of aberrations were perfectly ok, as long as he captured what he was after.

He worked day in and day out, prowling the streets of Paris very early in the morning for the latter quarter of his life. Occasionally he'd sell a glass plate to the Paris archives, but the majority of his works lay around gathering dust and mould (after all, gelatin is a good source of protein, and is used to cultivate mould in the medical profession). Lucky for us, a young protégé to the avant-garde American artist Man Ray happened to see this old man walking around photographing. She was Berenice Abbott, and when she saw his works, she got enough money to buy them all up before they rotted beyond repair.

So now the world has a wonderful photographic record of the streets of Paris and environs before it became ravaged with war, modernization, and time.

2



Berenice Abbott
She became the assistant to avant-garde American artist Man Ray during the hey day of the expatriate "American in Paris" period during the 20s and 30s. It sort of romanticized now, but there is no doubt many of the greatest artists, writers, and musicians of the 20th century gathered in Paris during this time.

Part of the feeling then was a desire for change and a welcoming embrace for the future. Having suffered through the "War to end all Wars" (WW I 1914-18), Europeans had no where else to look but the future. So there was quite a lot of excitement.

Berenice sought out Man Ray in Paris, hanging around outside his studio doorstep until he gave her a job. It was during this period she discovered the photographic plates of Atget, and developed her skill at making photographs under the tutelage of one of the most gifted artists of his generation.

One of the elements of design to this new era was to capture the surreality of things. One thinks immediately of Salvador Dali or Tristan Tsara or maybe even Picasso when we think of "surreal"--but the meaning is not so obvious as only their art. The phantasmagorical dream of reality and its subsequent depiction of overstated and obvious chaotic styles, melting clocks, and so on and so forth, was but one interpretation of "surreal"

For Man Ray, Andre Breton, Luis Bunuel, Dziga Vertov, and a handful of others, surreal simply meant "latent" reality-- that which is there, but undeveloped. It is an incredibly subtle thing. Under the veneer of reality as we conventionally believe, there are forces at work which at any given moment display themselves... take nature for example... at one moment the sky in a deep clear blue, nice and calm, and in several hours it can change to dark clouds, rain, thunder, and lightning. Which is "more" real? It all depends on value-laden prejudices of reality. Latent reality is there, it just is, waiting for a chance to show itself.

Part of photography's greatest power is to capture how light hits objects. The art of photography is the art of noticing reality as it is. You don't create a photographic image in the same way a painter creates a painting. A painter starts with an internal idea, perhaps a synthesis of what he sees, or dreams--an "idea". But a photographer must look carefully. He must have a keen sense of sight perception. He must notice how light hits objects. It is the inside noticing the outside. The ability to capture the outside as it is or what it alludes to-- this is an important notion to the art of photography.

After her apprenticeship, Berenice eventually went back to America and worked in New York. She did wonderful portraits, but some of her most striking images are of the buildings of New York. She was obviously influenced by Atget's straight-ahead, people-less style of photography-- only her direction was not to capture a fading old city, it was to capture the powerful and optimistic newness of a city on the rise. In the images there is a latent sense of greatness and power—if not loneliness too. This is not simply a matter of pointing a camera and clicking it--as we all have experienced when we go on vacation-- you know-- we see a building, a beach, or a mountain and snap a picture hoping it will "magically" capture the size, weight, and effect these objects have on our minds. The latent reality, the surreality, is the powerful effect an image has to give you the sense of weight, size, power. It is so subtle we hardly ever stop to think about it. This is what these photographic artists work on. Abbott was probably as good as any of them in making photographs.

I had the good fortune of meeting Berenice Abbott in Toronto as a film student in the 70s. My girlfriend at the time (James will remember this ;-) arranged for her to come to speak to us at the school. She looked like an old grandmother. There was nothing remarkable about her presence. She was living in Maine then, and she explained her biggest challenge was to photograph snow.

Imagine that! Snow. That was the problem she was trying to work on in her photography.

It was so subtle and so out of my mind I had no idea what the problem was. But have you ever tried to photograph snow? Try it. Please notice what happens. Be very, very, observant. Note how color enters in. Go and look at photos you may have of snow. Look at the color. Is this what you thought it was--or did the processing or film make it look that way? Is that the way you remember snow?

So subtle. But this is the art of photography.


3



Edward Weston
I don't think anyone knows more about exposure than Edward Weston. He was one of the handful of photographers called the "Group f/64" working out of California's Big Sur and Point Lobos. F/64 refers to the small lens opening these guys used to photograph their subjects. A lens opening of f/64 gives rise to photos that have wide depth of field i.e., the images are in focus from very near to far away. The trade off for such crisp images is that more time is required to expose the film-- a second or more to give the film enough exposure. This meant a tripod was necessary to make such photographs. That meant it was not possible to point and click...one had to take the time to set up the shot, examine carefully the objects, and then compose the image with careful thought. It allowed the photographer to study light.

Weston was a fine portrait photographer then one summer he abandoned the "salon" style of pictorialism and started to study exposure—very seriously. He used as his subject a white tablecloth on which he placed a white cup and saucer. He made over 5,000 negatives of this subject over a few months. He kept meticulous notes--noting the time of day, the angle of the light, the combinations of time and lens opening to expose the film. At the end of that summer he said, "I think I know a little more about exposure now."

He also experimented with the chemicals for developing his negatives and paper prints. Recall that photography is a photo-"chemical" reaction. So, he played around with the chemical formulae, time, and temperature for developing negatives and prints. All this stuff is codified now, there is not too much variation on how film is processed (none at all if you send it into a lab). But there is a great deal of variation one can get by experimenting with these factors.

What really impresses me about Weston is how voluptuous the objects he photographs look. How does he do it? In a word--light. He KNOWS light and exposure better than almost any photographer.

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If you enjoy this series on photography, lemme know. I didn't realize I had so much of this stuff off the top of my head to offer.

Your Gaga