Black and White Thinking

"To visualize an image (in whole or in part) is to see clearly in the mind prior to exposure, a continuous projection from composing the image through the final print."

Ansel Adams, The Camera

With the help of some new software I’ve begun seriously thinking in black and white again. It’s taken some time to start thinking that way after a couple of years of shooting digital color almost exclusively. It may sound funny but when I shot film, I could more easily visualize the end product. I could look through the viewfinder and visualize the composition in black and white without distraction. I couldn’t see the results until I developed the film and made contact prints.  I’d have in my mind the b/w images I wanted to see in the final prints; wouldn’t even think about the original color scene. In the darkroom, with a little work (sometime lots of work!) the image would become my reality in the developing tray. It was a total b/w “workflow” uninterrupted by color images popping up anywhere.

I actually used this “imaging” technique to good advantage with whatever film I was shooting whenever I was shooting it. I could spend a Sunday morning thinking in Tri-X about the city grit and evaporating fog wandering the streets of San Francisco. Later in the day I’d be thinking in Kodachrome as the sunlight slanted across an August afternoon at Land’s End. It worked well for me, this compartmentalized thinking.  I know photographers who carried two cameras – one with color film, one with black and white; shooting both at the same time. To me, this was photographic schizophrenia and would have driven me over the edge.

With today’s amazing digital technology the image pops up on the back of the camera in full color in an instant! This was very disturbing to my b/w vision quest. Yes, I know I can change the camera settings to make the instant image b/w but it’s still distracting. It’s not the b/w image I would see in my mind’s eye and just confused the issue even further.  When I was shooting I found it hard to think in b/w and was too distracted by the ease of shooting spectacular color. To muddy the waters even more I wasn’t happy with the results I got converting color to b/w in Photoshop.  For whatever reason - my lack of software skills or limitations of the product, I just couldn’t get what I wanted.

Lately I’ve managed to start “thinking” in black and white (and shades of gray) and with some new software tools I can realize my vision. It’s very satisfying (and more than a little ironic) to get “old fashioned” results with new technology.

Hat-2282.jpg

Hat-2282.jpg, a photo by Frank Devlin on Flickr.

_MG_2393.jpg

_MG_2393.jpg, a photo by Frank Devlin on Flickr.

_MG_2390.jpg

_MG_2390.jpg, a photo by Frank Devlin on Flickr.

Contemplating Color

This video was inspired by an assignment from the book "The Practice of Contemplative Photography: Seeing the World With Fresh Eyes" by Andy Carr and Michael Wood. It runs about two and a half minutes. I hope you enjoy it.

“Of-ness” vs. Meaning: A Rural Adventure

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Andy Warhol

I often drive the byways of rural New York looking for photographic inspiration. Late one summer afternoon I came upon yet another old barn. There are thousands of barns in the rustic countryside of upstate New York. Some are quaint and well kept. Some are rugged and well-worn but still in use. It seems like many more are damaged and dilapidated; caved in or about ready to topple into a pile of broken beams and pastoral wreckage. But this one stopped me cold in my quest. I pulled the car to the narrow shoulder to get a better look. Though it was old and no longer a “working” barn it seemed different. The farm it was on had long ceased operations. I couldn’t see a farm house but there were a couple of mobile homes parked nearby. No tractors or farm equipment around, not even rusted hulks. No bucolic fields or benevolent bovines on the hoof; just overgrown weeds and a rusty, older, but still-used, car near one of the trailers. The place looked deserted but apparently people still lived here and were keeping up the barn. It still had a roof in good condition and power lines going to it.

The late afternoon light was sharp and clear and perfect. The barn sat up the hill from the road a little way. The clouds behind it and the wild weeds in front set the big building off like it had been plopped down on some bizarre Monopoly board. I got out of the car and set up my tripod, screwed my 35mm Canon to it and prepared to shoot. I had parked a little way up from the barn so the shadow of the vehicle wouldn’t be anywhere in my frame. I walked down the road a few hundred feet to get a better position in front of the barn with the trailers on the left. I was using a wide angle lens to get as much of the sky as I could while keeping all the buildings in view but I still needed to get closer. I walked a few feet off the shoulder into the weeds to get a better angle and shorten up the foreground. Wow! What a perfect day, a perfect scene!

I was blithely shooting away when I heard someone yell and saw a woman standing in the driveway near one of the mobile homes. She was stout and serious, wearing a housecoat of some kind, with long, wild gray hair drifting in the breeze.

“Hey!” she yelled. I turned in her direction.

“Hey you there!” she yelled again but with more screech. She had her hands on her hips and seemed really upset, with the ruddy complexion of someone about ready to blow a gasket. 

“What you takin’ pitchers of?”

Sometimes you run into people on shoots. Most are curious but amiable. They ask a few questions, there’s a little chit chat back and forth. They eventually go along their way, often bemused by the crazy photographer "takin' pitchers" of rusty mailboxes or derelict buildings. I usually keep shooting until I get what I’m after. This woman was different. She seemed really angry but I knew if I was polite and chatted with her for a few minutes all would be well.

“Why this beautiful barn and the spectacular rural scene of course. The light is just perfect.” I yelled back.

“Don’t you take no pitchers 'round here!”  She was shaking her finger at me now and stomped a few steps closer.

Perhaps I needed to explain more clearly. “But I’m trying to capture the zeitgeist of the decline of post-modern rural America…”

“What?!! Zeitgeist my ass!” She took a few more steps closer.

“I’m trying to craft a metaphorical representation of the effects of globalization on the waning culture of contemporary rural America as it’s represented in the state of this iconic structure and …”

“Are you from the tax assessor?!”

“No, of course not!“ I know everyone hates the tax assessor. I thought I should change the subject and get on to something less weighty. Perhaps I could tone down the conversation.

“On another level, the rectilinear form of the barn is the perfect counterpoint when juxtaposed with the amorphous sky and the tangle...”

She cut me off with a wave of her arm. "Don’t you talk like that to me! Rectilinear counterpoint!? Jeeze! Where do you people come from? You just get on your way!”

“But…”

“Don’t make me get my boys!” She turned and started hustling back up the driveway to the nearby trailer, pumping her arms and shouting unintelligible expletives back over her shoulder every few steps.

I wasn’t prepared to defend against reinforcements. It was time for a strategic retreat. There are lots of other barns and I wanted to live to shoot another day.

Photorealism vs. Pictorialism

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.  ~Duane Michals

I think there is some irony in the fact that painters didn’t create a genre called “photo-realism” until over 100 years after photography was invented. Creating a painting that looks like a modern photograph is a thoroughly modern invention, evolving from Pop Art in the 1960’s. However, before photography many painters attempted, and often achieved, what might be called a “photographic” realism in still-life, landscape and even portrait paintings. Some have even been accused (the venerated Vermeer among them) of using a camera obscura to copy real life scenes to achieve such wondrous results. Before photography they couldn’t call this “photo-realism” but it seems that as realistic a rendering as possible was, by and large, often the intent.

The flip side of this is photographic Pictorialism, popular in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. Photography wasn’t considered serious art and photographers were looking for ways to be taken seriously as artists so they made images that looked like paintings.  A whole range of techniques, equipment and manipulation were used. They often made softly focused photos, sometimes painting on the emulsion to change the texture or using textured paper to get a painterly effect.  Before too long all this changed when photographers didn’t feel the need to be painterly to be considered artists. “Straight” photography came on strong and photography grew into its own artistic force.

We’re not as dogmatic as our artist ancestors once were. Today, in many respects painting and photography are closer than they have ever been. It’s routine for painters to take reference photos of subjects to capture detail in the interest of realism and for photographers to manipulate images with lighting, software or camera techniques to make them more painterly. Photos look like paintings and paintings look like photos. This doesn’t necessarily make it any easier for artists in either genre. Indeed, it’s a good bit harder to stand out in the crowd when just about anything goes.