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Photograph For An “Audience”

Blue Ford 4

When’s the last time you asked yourself who your audience was, or who you were shooting for? What difference might it make to your craft, depending on who “they” were?

You’re your own first viewer. You saw these things before they were photos, remember, and saw them through the process of composing, exposing, and editing. And it’s not at all uncommon, having lived with our photos and ourselves for so long, that we take for granted what they’re saying is as evident to someone else as it is to us.

Shooting “for” a friend or mentor is a way around that particular trap. I put the “for” in quotes ’cause you don’t necessarily have to tailor every last aspect of your photography to that one individual (in fact, I’d suggest you don’t, ’cause you’re likely to end up crestfallen if you’re relying just on the input or approval of one person, even if you are that one person). Instead, I’d suggest that it keeps us from falling into the trap of creating self-absorbed, solipsistic crap. There’s plenty of that around as it is, so there’s no need for you or I or anyone else to add to it.

Which brings us to the ultimate acid test: putting your work out before the public, whether for sale or for show. Even our best critics, the ones we can count on for criticism that’s useful and perceptive, aren’t exactly going to prepare you for someone passing judgment on your work with their wallet. If you go that route, just bear in mind that low sales don’t mean you suck any more than robust sales mean that you’re the second coming of Brassai.

Of course, any of these audiences (even, or perhaps especially, counting ourselves) can be notoriously picky and fickle lot. Putting your work out there, whether it’s to anyone who’ll sit through your latest batch of snapshots, or a trusted friend/mentor or two is invaluable. Sometimes we know so well what it is that we set out to do, and the meaning we sought to convey, that we see it plain as day even when it isn’t there. Having a fresh set of eyes on your work is a necessary first step to let us know when we have, or haven’t, “got it.”

At some point, that transitions to us being able to take on that “outsider” role for ourselves and to be able to view our own work objectively after all the subjectivity that went into making it. It might feel a bit odd at first, but it’s a worthwhile habit to cultivate; when you’re not just shooting for yourself, you’ll be on your way to finding something that resonates with more people, but also on your way to making sure your images are saying what you mean them to say.

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Beyond Photography: Joseph Mitchell, Meet Henri Cartier-Bresson

Joseph Mitchell, courtesy Alex Belth's bronxbanterblog.com

Some great art and literature has come from a sense of place. Marco Polo’s memoirs, Jack Kerouac’s writing, the painting of Wood or Kahlo, and the photography of Adams, Rowell and dozens of others each have a depth and richness that comes from being exposed to new and unfamiliar places. It’s hardly surprising, therefore, when photographers look with envy on our traveling peers, whether they’re shooting war journalism in Kabul, a Nat Geo spread in Bangkok, or just vacation snaps in Cabo San Lucas.

I’m reminded of this reading the work of Joseph Mitchell. Mitchell’s name has, in large part, faded from memory, which is a shame. Over the course of nearly four decades spent shuttling back and forth between Manhattan and North Carolina, Mitchell made his name documenting New York’s more eccentric denizens (his Joe Gould stories would’ve been enough of a template for New Journalism, even if he’d never written anything else) and everyday folks (fishermen at the Fulton Fish Market, a Trinidadian rent party). And while the writer never made the connection explicit, the heartbeat under the story was just as much the city’s as the subject’s. That’s probably due, in no small part, in Mitchell’s interest in this motley cast of characters not as stories, but as people. Reading his anthologies (My Ears are Bent, which anthologizes his earlier journalism, and Up In the Old Hotel, which collects his writing for the New Yorker) you never get the sense of an agenda beyond just getting to know someone, and letting them tell their own story. In some ways, for as carefully as he wrote, Mitchell seemed almost incidental to the stories he told.

”]Unlike Joseph Mitchell, Henri Cartier-Bresson is something close to a household name, at least if your household’s big on photography. Cartier-Bresson was well-traveled. His work would take him to Africa, Spain, India, the United States and elsewhere, and would find him photographing the likes of Picasso, Pound and Giacometti. But like Mitchell, HCB’s work is built on a sense of place, and built mostly on his depictions of everyday people. He’s practically synonymous with France, but most of all with Paris… Parisian kids, workers, students and lovers, through war, peace, protests and drudgery. Cartier-Bresson emphasized “the decisive moment,” but never found a moment any less decisive because the people or events in it were so ordinary; if anything, like Mitchell, he reveled in it.

In their own ways, each man didn’t just chronicle their cities, they were their cities. They were, in some sense, intensely local, but by no means provinical. Both men’s travels aside, Mitchell’s New York had already become, and Bresson’s Paris was becoming, a global city, drawing their identities and their culture from all corners of the earth. While we remember them both now for other reasons (Mitchell for his influence on a generation of writers and journalists, Cartier-Bresson for practically defining street photography), I’d argue that in their time, maybe without intending to or realizing it, both men were on the leading edge of making sense of exactly where life was going in the latter half of the last century. They introduced their cities anew to the world, not as sprawl but as intensely detailed specificity. It might be exaggerating to say that either man shaped the places they called home, but both had, and continue to have, no equals in communicating a perception and feel of those cities to the world. And both men’s work found itself informed by a generousity of spirit, a willingness to take the denizens of their cities on their own terms. This isn’t the clinical work of sociologists; it’s suffused with the warmth of someone who’s taken the time to get to know the neighbors, and decides that he likes ’em, warts and all.

While a bit of travel can be a great thing — the chance to experience new things, places and people — we can’t have blinders on when it comes to all there is to experience closer to home. That’s not to advocate for some kind of blinkered provincialism; rather, it’s advocacy for, or just a simple acknowledgement of, the riches on our own doorsteps, and the wealth of stories waiting for us to see, hear, and tell them.

FURTHER READING:

Joseph Mitchell on the Web:

The best starting point for anything related to Joseph Mitchell is his writing. I’d suggest reading the books chronologically (My Ears Are Bent*, followed by Up in the Old Hotel*), since it gives a good idea of the writer’s evolution. The obligatory Wikipedia entry will give you the bare facts of his life, but I’d also suggest two tributes written to him, one by the New Yorker’s Mark Singer, and the other by the Chicago Tribune’s Christopher Borrelli. There’s also an interesting bit on Mitchell’s eccentric collections of things here, and Charlie Rose chatting about Joseph Mitchell with Roger Angell and David Remnick here.

Henri Cartier-Bresson on the Web:

The Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson conserves the photographer’s legacy, but you can also find out more about him on Wikipedia, on Magnum Photos (the agency he co-founded). There’s also an interview with Charlie Rose that’s well worth the time. And while countless gallons of ink have been spilled over Cartier-Bresson’s work, if you’d like a good (if slightly pricey) introduction to his work, there’s Peter Galassi’s excellent Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century,* which was published in conjunction with a major HCB retrospective at the MoMA in 2010.

*Links followed by an asterisk are Amazon affilite links.

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Beyond Photography: Gustavo Cerati, Meet Man Ray


The first time I heard Soda Stereo was around the time that their last studio album, Sueño Stereo, came out. Though the band would soon go their separate ways, I continued to follow the solo career of the band’s frontman, Gustavo Cerati, through a series of albums that dug deep into ambient, electronica, guitar-driven rock, and even a full-blown orchestral album. Cerati’s work always made for interesting, and sometimes even challenging, listening. This was not least because he sings in Spanish, but also because the musical style itself was constantly changing, slipping in and out of genres even over the course of a single song.

The language barrier, in my case, meant that bits of half-remembered high school Spanish, things understood in passing and in context, rendered the lyrics are as slippery as the music itself… acertijos bajo el agua, to borrow a lyric. The funny thing is, the lyrics still tend toward the cryptic even in translation; between that, and the music, the whole experience reminded me a bit at first of Radiohead minus the alienation and paranoia, but over time, it’s become something else: a reminder that the things we create sometimes resonate with people in ways that they might not understand themselves at first.

Man Ray, Violon d'Ingres

Which brings us, in typically circuital fashion, to Man Ray. Over the course of his lifetime would cross paths with all manner of artists (Duchamp, Stieglitz, Ernst and Arp, among others) and have a hand in Dada, Surrealism, photography, film, and conceptual art. In nearly every case, whether it was the eye-on-metronome Object to Be Destroyed/Indestructable Object (1923), the memorable portrait Violon d’Ingres (shown at left), or his Rayographs (objects developed directly onto photographic paper), familiar objects, and familiar artistic conventions, were repurposed or turned inside-out by the artist.

They’re different enough to provoke a double-take, maybe even a touch of unease; at the same time, though (as we might expect from an artist who’d been classically trained, and who also worked in graphic arts), they’re grounded in forms we know, and have seen countless times before. Like Cerati, Ray’s “language”, his visual syntax, isn’t always immediately apparent, so the work reveals itself in layers, and leaves itself open to interpretation.

Both these artists’ efforts work in much the same way. There’s a strangeness there, among the musical textures, lyrics, repurposed irons, and photographic prints, but in each case, it’s also anchored in something familiar, whether it’s a four-on-the-floor rhythm or the conventions of portraiture, even as it subverts what we’ve come to recognize or take for granted.

Quiero hacer cosas imposibles… If you’re going to attempt something new and different, therefore, it helps to remember that the things that have the power to surprise us aren’t always those that are radically different. Instead, that little “poke” is just as likely to come from something we know, speaking to us in a language or a syntax that teases just at the edge of our consciousness. Venture off into the strange, but keep one foot in the familiar…

ON THE WEB:

Gustavo Cerati:

Official Site (Spanish): http://www.cerati.com/
Official Site (English, via Google Translate)
Official YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/gceratioficial
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustavo_Cerati

Man Ray:
The Official Website of the Man Ray Trust: http://www.manraytrust.com/
Man Ray on UbuWeb: http://www.ubu.com/film/ray.html
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Ray
A recent article from the Wall Street Journal on the artist’s estate and legacy: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304070304577394304016454714.html

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How Do I Become a Photographer?

 

Taken by a photographer. Really.

If you were expecting a comment about Carnegie Hall and practice, practice, practice, you’ve come to the wrong blog. I’m a whole ‘nother class of wiseass.

You want to know how to become a first-class photographer?

Step one: buy or borrow a camera.
Step two: take lots of photos.
Step three: repeat step two, frequently and with furious enthusiasm.
Step… well, no, that’s it, really.

Gee, wasn’t that easy?

The ironic part is, I’m not exaggerating. It really is as simple as that, which means (to compound the irony) that it’s also actually as difficult as you want it to be, or maybe would rather it wasn’t. You can put all sorts of labels on it, take classes, get degrees, sit at the feet of some guru or other, and it’s all going to boil down to those three things.

All that you’ve learned doesn’t matter, and whatever else a teacher might teach you, her advice is still going to be to get out there and make photos (although, hopefully, with some instructions or caveats attached). It also doesn’t matter where you got the camera, much less what kind it is. I don’t care if you’re using a pinhole camera you’ve made out of a modified Altoids tin, a Pentax with a 2GB class 2 card and a lens you got for $7.50 at a garage sale, or a Hasselblad with a digital back and lenses for which you’ve mortgaged the house. Are you making photos? Good. You’re a photographer.

Let’s look at the other side of the same coin. You’ve got an expensive camera body, you’ve invested in enough glass to restock your local camera shop twice over, and you’ve got top-of-the-line everything? Well, good for you. Are you taking photos, or are you spending more time on various internet fora debating the merits of various doodads? Whatever else you may be, you’re not a photographer.

Now, I’m not talking about the distinction between a professional and an amateur photographer. That’s a post, or series of them, for another time; suffice to say for now that merely owning an expensive camera body and getting one good shot in a thousand doesn’t make you a professional, even if you got paid for that one good shot. But just being a photographer? That’s easy. If the camera’s out, and you’re using it to make photos instead of as a conversation piece (“Hey, is that a Canon 60D…?”), congratulations. You’re officially a photographer for the duration. Now quit worrying about whether you’re a photographer, and go photograph something, dammit!

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Beyond Photography: Robert Hughes, Meet Dorothea Lange

Robert Hughes: The Shock of the New

I first came across Robert Hughes’ The Shock of the New while I was in college. It couldn’t have come at a better time. Here I was, a budding English major, surrounded by all kinds of academic theories and approaches for analyzing and deconstructing texts, some of which made sense, and quite a few of which didn’t. At the time, I was giving serious thought to becoming an English professor, but started to feel as though some of what was passing for “criticism” was, itself, critically flawed, doing more to obscure or confuse the meaning of something than to illuminate it.

Hughes’ work pointed to an alternative, to criticism that could be lucid — cutting, even — without being empty or pedantic. Where some critics have a tendency to try to wring meaning from work that’s pretty much empty at its core, Hughes called it as he saw it, which also, mercifully, extended to calling bullshit when he felt it necessary. He could be, to use the title of one of his works, nothing if not critical, but across all his work — including his appraisals of Goya and of American art, histories of Rome, Barcelona and Australia, and his unique takes on everything from the culture of his adopted homeland to the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe — the uniting thread was a quest to understand, and then to communicate that understanding.

Unlike Robert Hughes, you wouldn’t normally think of the photographer Dorothea Lange as a critic. Her work was, however, simultaneously an eyewitness to, and stinging rebuke of, the shortcomings of 1930’s and ’40’s America. While she was best known for Migrant Mother (the photo at left), her other photos — many taken under the aegis of the FSA (Farm Service Administration) and the OWI (Office of War Information) — played no small part in informing people in America and the world over of what was happening before her lens, and influencing generations of documentary photographers who would come after.* Like Hughes, Lange looked deeply at what was in front of her camera, in order that others might also understand it; not content to be a passive observer, she became simultaneously a participant in, and advocate for, the lives of those she encountered.

Criticism means different things to different people. To some, it’s a popular sport of sorts, assigning a few hastily-scrawled lines (or a handful of gold stars) to a piece of cultural ephemera; to others, it’s an academic pursuit, drawing on tradition, theory, and close reading (not to mention, hopefully, a closer understanding) of the artifacts of our culture. In other instances, artists themselves — and in this category I’d place Lange, Heartfield, Haring, and dozens of others — are producing works that are themselves a critique, not by assigning three-and-a-half stars to something, but by engaging something and creating in response to it.

The space between these things, as embodied by these two individuals, isn’t a fine line, nor need it be a chasm; it’s simply a healthy middle ground. The role of criticism — whether your critique is of an artist’s work, as in Hughes’ case, or of society itself, as in Lange’s — should be, I would argue, one of subtraction rather than addition. That is to say that at its best, criticism should exist not as faint praise or half-assed damnation of something, but to hold it up for scrutiny in order to peel away all of the layers of stuff that’s accrued to something over time, be it dogma, politics, or mystique; it ought not to exist to pile yet more of those things on.

It goes without saying (or it should, anyway) that part of the artist’s role is by nature that of critic. To be a discerning viewer, not just reviewer, of things. We create in the context of a larger society, and also in the context of the different artists and styles that have influenced us; in either instance, we have a responsibility to approach those things, and our own work, with a clear and honest eye, and if we’re going to critique — whether our own work or someone else’s, or using our work to speak to some larger point — our goal, and end result, should be to create understanding rather than obfuscating it.

*At least when they weren’t censored, as happened with her photos of Japanese-Americans interned by the United States government during World War II.

ON THE WEB (Updated 8.8.12):

Robert Hughes passed away after a long illness on August 6, 2012. There’s a New York Times obituary here, and you can also find out more about him via Wikipedia, on Amazon, and a sitdown with Charlie Rose.

You can learn more about Dorothea Lange on Wikipedia, the Library of Congress, and Linda Gordon’s excellent Lange biography (via Amazon), Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits

Your purchases through the Amazon affiliate links in this post help keep The First 10,000 going. Thanks for your support!

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Expectation, Perception and Reality

Big Day Out

In a post a couple of days ago (Rule 32: Don’t Take Unnecessary Photos), I briefly touched on the time we waste on photos that just aren’t worth it. I chalked it up, at least in part, to the fact that quite a few of us hate to head out with a camera, only to return with an empty memory card. I think there’s a bit more to it than that, though.

First, see your subject for what it is. We don’t always do this; sometimes we’re superimposing our expectations on the subject, thinking a few moves ahead to what it will look like once we’re done fiddling with it. Our expectations can color our perception to the point where they become the reality we see, although not reality as it is. We know what we want the photo to look like, which is fine, but not when you keep a photo that’s not worth it because you’re attached to the idea of it, or when you throw away a shot that’s good on its own merits because it doesn’t measure up to some nebulous ideal.

Second, pay close attention to what’s in your viewfinder. What’s just as counterproductive as a careless choice of subject is when we put more faith in “post” than we do in the fundamentals. So what if it’s blurry, or crooked, or the exposure’s off and the subject’s not all that interesting? We have an unsharp mask, a crop utility, and a clone tool, dammit! Only that’s not quite how it works. As I’ve mentioned before, you’re not only making more work for yourself by shooting carelessly, you’re also decreasing the odds of getting what you’re after. Postproduction takes what’s already there and enhances it… not just the good stuff, but also, sometimes, the glaring flaws we’d counted on it to fix.

Finally, be honest — brutally so, if necessary — about the end result. We often convince ourselves that our work is awful; sometimes we’re right. Sometimes, however, what we’re disappointed in isn’t the photograph itself. It’s the distance between what was in front of us when the photo was made, and the expectations we’ve placed on that photo. If you stop to think about it for a second, I’m sure you can think of photos that came out just as you envisioned them, as well as some that didn’t, and others still that you felt were better than you had any right to expect. None of these things present problems in and of themselves.

However, it’s entirely possible to be crippled by our own expectations. On the one hand, we may think a photo is worse than what it is because we had something else in mind. On the other, we may also think it’s better than it is — or think we can improve or “save” it — because what we expected, or wanted, has become ingrained in what’s on the screen or the print.

We can’t always set ourselves free of our own expectations, nor can we realistically sharpen our perception to a point that it’s going to be 100% reliable 100% of the time. What’s left is the reality — sometimes disappointing, often stranger, but also many times far beyond our expectations. If we want to save ourselves some serious headaches and wasted time, it starts with acknowledging that reality (even if it’s an artistic, and not more tangible) reality. That means setting your work free from your excuses, from what you meant to do or thought you ought to have done, and to acknowledge that this piece of work, at this point in time, is done. You owe it to what you’ve done, and to yourself, to let it stand or fall exactly as it is; get the hang of that, and you can begin to move closer to what you’d like it to be.

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Beyond Photography: Robert Fulghum, Meet Robert Doisneau

Robert Fulghum: All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Stop and think about some of the best images you’ve shot. Not necessarily the most technically proficient. The ones that, for all their flaws, you wouldn’t trade for anything. I know I have a pile on my hard drive, mostly of people I love just being their usual selves, or of things I’ve experienced that, even though I won’t soon forget them, I’m glad to have the photographic reminders of. I’m sure you have them too, blurry or hurriedly-composed shots (if you even gave a second thought to composition) of a thousand memorable moments.

A lot of what we think of as “art” catches those same everyday moments. The only difference is, there’s just a bit more attention paid to the finer details.

That brings me, in my usual roundabout way, to the writer Robert Fulghum, who wrote All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It, and other bestselling collections of essays. This isn’t Thoreau or de Montaigne territory. Fulghum’s essays aren’t often concerned with events that wouldn’t happe to anyone else. He described What On Earth Have I Done, his last essay collection, as “adventuring out into the world as it is and noticing it and talking about it… being aware out there and being aware in here.” His essays, in other words, are more often written about the moments in life that we too often pass over or take for granted, in order that we might stop, reconsider, and quit taking them for granted.

Kiss by the Hotel de Ville, by Robert Doisneau

Another Robert — Robert Doisneau, whose centennial happens to fall this week — shared Fulghum’s knack for observing (and, in the case of his best-known image, Kiss by the Hotel de Ville, recreating) intimate everyday moments. Doisneau begain photographing at sixteen, and while he would one day be regarded as a street photographer on par with Henri Cartier Bresson, he started out taking photos of the cobblestones beneath his feet because he was too shy to approach human subjects. By most accounts, that shyness never quite left him. Thankfully, though, it also didn’t keep him from capturing images that became synonymous with a certain notion of France, but that also gained fame in the world at large because their everydayness resonated with the rest of us.

It’s understandable to want to make a grand statement, and to want leave our mark on our craft, if not the world. With very few exceptions, though, life’s not usually made up of such sweeping, grandiose stuff. Our lives can seem — or even be — stultifyingly ordinary. But take a look around your own life, and your own world as it is. A pretty eventful place, no? Dive in!

The solution isn’t necessarily to try and escape what we see as mundanity (though that can be helpful sometimes), so much as to observe it closely, even lovingly. Both Roberts’ works endure as they do not because the people in them are extraordinary; it’s because they’re extra ordinary. They’re so normal that we’re pulled into these little microcosmic worlds sometimes in spite of ourselves. We’ve known, or even been, these people; these portraits, whether with words or photographic processes, are familiar to us because they’re drawn from a life we recognize.

On the Web:

The official Robert Doisneau site in French here, and in English via Google Translate here. Robert Fulghum’s official site is here.

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Beyond Photography: Alan Lomax, Meet Jacob Riis

Alan Lomax playing guitar on stage at the Mountain Music Festival, Asheville, North Carolina (Photo: Library of Congress, Public Domain)

It would be too simplistic somehow to call Alan Lomax an archivist, curator, historian, or musicologist, although he was all of those things. Meticulously and single-mindedly — without regard for money, fame, or even personal safety — Lomax criscrossed the globe for the better part of six decades, recording thousands of songs and interviews, alongside hours of film footage. By the 1950’s, he’d also added photography to his already formidable arsenal, the better to document the locations he visited, and the musicians and people with whom he interacted.

Jacob Riis, like Alan Lomax, was a documentarian with a camera. While Riis’ politics and motivation have come into question (both in his time and after), he was an innovator who literally took documentary photography to a new place; his photos, shot in tenements, flophouses, and other places too often overlooked by the citizens (and many of the other photographers) of the day, expanded not only the vernacular of photography, but also the sense of what photography was “for.” Like Matthew Brady before him, he turned an unflinching eye, and lens, on what he saw, using his craft as a tool for protest and change.

Bohemian Cigarmakers at Work in their Tenement (Photo: Jacob Riis; Public Domain)
Both men leave behind vast bodies of work, some of which has broken out of its original categories and spilled over into the culture at large. While Lomax is perhaps best known for his field recordings and the Association of Cultural Equity, the music he championed cropped up in some unlikely places, such as Moby’s 1999 CD Play. Riis’ signature work How the Other Half Lives not only remains in print, but its title has become a shorthand of sorts when talking about society’s less fortunate. His legacy, too, lives on, not only in his photos but in parks and social services organizations that honor his name and the spirit of his work. 

In both Lomax’s recordings and Riis’ photography, there’s something that suggests a bygone time that stretches back even farther than what’s been captured on the observer’s medium of choice. These recordings and photos are simultaneously of their time and hovering somewhere outside or beyond time, a fleeting glimpse of lost customs and cultures. They’re positioned somewhere between the strange familiar and familiar strange; we recognize these things as part of our own cultural, and sometimes even literal, DNA even as they seem somewhat alien to us.

What I draw from these two men — an archivist who happened to be a photographer, and a photographer who was an accidental archivist — is that when we’re consciously trying for something timeless in our work, we’re not only trying too hard, we’re also missing the point. Much, if not most, of what’s timeless attains that quality usually because it’s so much of its time, rather than in spite of that fact. It reminds us where we’ve come from, and that we’ve less of an idea of where we’re going than we’d generally like to think. Sometimes the best we can do, whether as photographers or just as people, is be here now, as best we can… observing, documenting, and bearing witness so that those who come later will have the means and motivation to remember.

 Further Reading/Resources:

Alan Lomax: Check out his Wikipedia entry, as well as the website for The Association for Cultural Equity and an NPR story chronicling the digitization of the Lomax collection.

Jacob Riis: The Museum of the City of New York has an extensive Riis collection. NPR’s All Things Considered ran an appreciation of How the Other Half Lives, which you can access here. You can also read his Wikipedia entry here.

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Embrace Imperfection

A Pretty Bad Photo of Mike Doughty

I can’t even pretend that the photo at left is a great picture. I’m well aware that, as the caption indicates, it’s a pretty bad photo. And yet, for all its blur, it conveys a sense of motion that might’ve been lost in a photograph that was more technically correct. If I had a mind to, I could even pass it off as an abstract. In short, for all its flaws, I like it.

I didn’t always. The morning after the show in question, I went over the hundred or so shots I’d taken, and deemed every last one of ’em crap. I saved them in spite of that, though, because I learned a long time ago that I can be absolutely brutal with myself when I’m taking the first look over something I’ve just done (which, incidentally, I still tend to do).

I’m hardly alone in this. I think that most of us (not counting those who’ve downloaded Picnik and bought an SLR and so feel entitled to call themselves “professionals”) have, at some point,  convinced ourselves that our work — every last bit of it — sucks. The irony of it is, if you’re convinced your work is terrible, it probably isn’t as bad as you’ve convinced yourself. And even if it was (we’ve been there, too), it won’t stay that way as long as you keep working at it.

But I digress. There’s an expression that I come back to from time to time: “Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” As I told a friend not long ago, sometimes good enough really is good enough. And sometimes, the imperfections in something have a charm all their own, or communicate in a way that a more accomplished-looking result (or one that we’ve gone back and polished to a high gloss) wouldn’t. Rolling Stone won’t exactly be beating my door down or blowing up my phone looking for the rights to this photo (nor, I can safely assume, would Mr. Doughty). But you know what? I can live with the photo, so I can also live with that.

The best thing about your craft, whichever one you happen to practice, is that you can always revisit it later. Photography, like writing, allows for a certain amount of revision on top of the practice that any craft allows, and even encourages, you to put into it. Hang onto your work, because when you do that, you may be surprised to find out that it was better than you thought when you first made it. There’s a lot to be said for being comfortable in your own skin; there’s every bit as much to be said for being comfortable in your own craft.

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Beyond Photography: Studs Terkel, Meet Camilo José Vergara

Studs Terkel (1912-2008)

Studs Terkel lived to witness most of the last century and the dawn of this one, chronicling what he saw along the way. He began as a writer in the WPA (Works Progress Administration), and later became legendary as a broadcaster. For all the fame he gained in radio, interviewing the likes of Louis Armstrong and Bob Dylan, he never stopped being a writer. Terkel’s many oral histories covered subjects as diverse as the Second World War to the state of race relations in America. 

He was also blessed with that rarest of all gifts: the good sense to get out of the way to see what his subject had to say. It was a talent that served him well, since often as not, those chronicles weren’t in his own words, but in others’. Their strength lies in the extraordinary stories he drew out of ordinary people. Those stories come from a diverse lot – riveters, sharecroppers, hoboes, office workers, shop girls and others of that ilk. It’s very nearly like seeing another America, except for the fact that this is the land that’s been beneath our feet all along.  

Trees in the abandoned Camden Library; photo by Camilo José Vergara

Like Studs Terkel, Camilo José Vergara’s early love never left him. He bought a camera while still a sociology student at Notre Dame, and his training as a sociologist informs his work behind the camera — which, in turn, takes his sociological explorations in new directions. Based in New York, Vergara’s work has taken him from coast to coast, covering everything from the architecture of, and customs behind, cemeteries to the homes, houses of worship, and people of the inner cities of New York, New Jersey, California, and several points in between.

 Vergara, like Terkel, has turned his attention to what’s too often neglected. Where Terkel concerned himself with the stories of largely forgotten or overlooked people, however, Vergara instead teases stories out of the forgotten corners of the city itself. This isn’t just history; it’s a mirror, or a magnifying glass, held up to the way we live now.

Another thing that Terkel and Vergara share in common, in addition to the way the different facets of their life’s work inform one another, is an interest not so much in the broad sweep of history, so much as its gritty, quotidian details. What both have done at their best — and both men, to be sure, are very good, very often — is to stop us dead in our tracks to pay attention to something we would otherwise have disregarded or written off as mere background noise.

As photographers or storytellers we find that these narratives, whether of everyday people or of the spaces they inhabit, aren’t just self-referential. If we take the time to listen, they also have quite a bit to tell us about ourselves.

More to Explore: Click to visit Studs Terkel’s official website, his Wikipedia entry or his page on Amazon (affiliate link). Also explore Camilo José Vergara’s “Invincible Cities” or his work at the Getty Museum, view photo essays from Slate here, here, or here, read his Wikipedia entry, or check out his books on Amazon (affiliate link).