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Huffington Post Says

‘Here’s a foolproof way to sell a book of photographs: reconceptualize the best ones in the world. That’s what photographer Tim Mantoani has done with his new book “Behind Photographs,” a compilation of famous photographers holding their famous works‘

My review is here.

I’ve been teaching photography in various ways for over 20 years, and embraced the digital revolution for all the reasons we all have, but also because of the ways it enabled me to show a novice photographer a technique in ‘real time’ and see the result on the lcd screen. Learning is quicker and more fun this way. But one thing that I’ve tried to encourage people not to do when learning, and which digital makes easy to do, is delete in the field.

I’ve tried to encourage a process of editing in the computer, and looking at the work as a whole, and seeing how the images that you might like have been arrived at, by studying the progression of images as you shot ‘through’ the subject over a period of time.

Yes just like the contact sheets we used to make in the good old film days (and some people still do).

I think there’s a lot to be learned from doing this, not just technical lessons, but aesthetic too. But I’ve come to realize that there’s another aspect to this thats really important. Its that 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.

I was teaching photography for a community association adult group over a recent winter, all beginners, mostly using basic digital compacts. Simple class structure – an ‘assignment’ to undertake in the intervening week, and a group review of the class images from the tasks for the first hour of each successive session.

One woman class member Susan was struggling to find the particular images she wanted to show us on her laptop, and as she flicked through several others she said “not sharp, not sharp, not sharp, sorry these are ones I meant to delete“.

“Whoa!” says I. And she stopped and backed up as I requested, through numerous images, until we came to a few pictures I’d spotted as she’d flicked through.  One was simply beautiful (although the original was in colour, but with a horrible colour cast).

Village Hall, Strathconon. © Susan McLennan

I asked what she thought of it. “Not sharp, didn’t work“, she replied. And again said “I meant to delete these“. I asked the class what they thought and the same comment was made by several of them about the image not being sharp..

And so I told them what I thought. That this was a wonderfully evocative image of a highland village hall, the timber lining, the tall windows, and the pictures on the wall of the local laird (estate owner) and his wife at their wedding, the stag heads, all of it just shouting ‘village hall’ and giving it a real sense of place, but with that wee bit of additional magic -  the children. Moving around as they played during the long exposure, they had recorded as a slightly ethereal presence, wispy and transparent, almost ghostlike. And I explained how for me this evoked the presence of past children, and future children, and because they were virtually unidentifiable they were ‘any child’, and that this was a timeless image which should be celebrated and enjoyed and certainly not deleted.

The class were well up for the discussion that followed and enjoyed having their preconceptions about what constituted ‘good’ work challenged.  And many of them found the concept of ‘emotional content’ a revelation, and the realization that it is a quality totally independent of the technical aspects of an image, to be a very liberating thing.

We all have to start the learning curve of photography somewhere, and it’s been a continuing source of delight to me that with some guidance (and even without) the vast majority of people have something to say ‘visually’, and can often take a really really good image to illustrate it. Truth is that 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 the light of day because they are simply deleted?

In one subsequent class an even more emotive moment occurred. The class task was to photograph something you like or something you dislike. One woman class member showed an image of a leg, clearly badly smashed up and surrounded by a metal cage, obviously in a hospital context with a nurse’s hand visible at the bottom of the frame holding the leg. She explained this was an image she hated because it was her partner’s leg, taken after they’d decided to move 500 miles to Scotland and she’d relocated and got a job whilst her partner worked out his notice in the south. However he’d had a serious accident and was now in hospital down south for at least 6 months, until his leg healed. And this meant the new life they’d planned together was on hold because of the accident, he was down there, she was up here, hundreds of miles away “and this photo – well I hate it, I just hate it because of what it signifies, the separation and his absence” she said with an emotional crack to her voice.

After a moment I asked the class what they thought, and there was a subdued range of nods of agreement, and sympathetic murmurs. This image and its meaning had obviously struck them all as being a little ‘heavier’ and more emotional than they’d expected. So I asked a question:

“What attitude do you think that nurse’s hand displays?“.

Silence. So I asked again for everyone to look at the hand and tell me what it looked like. Still silence.  I gave some guidance, and suggested that what they had responded to so emotionally was the verbal description of the image’s meaning to the author, NOT to the image’s actual content.  And then asked them did they think it looked like a caring hand or an aggressive hand in the photo. After a few moment one of the bolder folks (bearing in mind this is only week 2 of our course) said “er….um….well…..caring I think“.  I pressed on “why caring?“.  And then several of them started to look, to see, and to think, and answers flowed, such as “it’s hard to say, it’s just well the way it looks” and  “it’s the way it’s touching the leg, sort of delicately” and so on.

I added “yes, we all recognize aggressive actions, stances, bodily shapes, and equally we recognize passive, caring, tender attitudes and actions, whether we are aware of this or not. For me this hand sums up ‘care’, and ‘tenderness’ and ‘healing’, and I’d suggest that rather than hate this image you should perhaps love this image because what it demonstrates is that in your absence someone else is looking after the person you love with a great degree of care, and dare I say it, tenderness”.

There was a silence then a little tearful sniff, and “Oh my, you’re right, I’d not realized. I didn’t see. Oh my…I’d , I’m…..I’m…I see now. Phew. Ohhh!” . The hugely absorbing discussion that followed took us in a wide arc through a range of topics, about emotional content, visual literacy, cognitive dissonance and much more and left the class somewhat drained, but much much wiser.

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.

Every image has a story. Telling that story, about how you felt that day, why you pointed the camera in a particular direction, what it felt like for you then and what it feels like for you now, all help to articulate the worth of your work, and can make you think carefully about the content.

But what others will see in your images might sometimes surprise you.

You can learn a lot by sharing.

Wondering whether or not to press that delete button?  Might be better to wait.

On the road again…safe travels.

Somebody wrote:

‘OK, Kodak’s dead…..and why is it, with the exception of a handful of shooters, none of the photographers who excelled in my generation are working, and why is it that no one really cares? I can think of 40 names, even more from the 80′s who were young at that time…. I am doing far better work that I ever was when I was getting MONTH long gigs from LIFE and I can’t sniff a good job? Seriously folks, something is way out of whack in all of this…’

Someone replied:

There are broadly two types of photographer – one says ‘everyones a photographer’ with a sneer, the other says ‘everyones a photographer’ with a tone of excitement and wonder. Or maybe there’s a third, someone who says ‘everyones a photographer’ with utter bewilderment, because I have a hard time keeping up with it these days.

But more people taking more pictures is not, and can never be a bad thing IMO. Bearing in mind photography is one of the most democratic art forms ever invented – thanks largely to Kodak funnily enough – the difference in underlying attitude is quite telling, in that it measures the photographers ideas about their audience, and their assumption as to where they are in ‘the pecking order of things’. Most of us have seen the massive trend in photography towards universality and democratization – from the iPhone, to Flickr, to people in the Middle East chucking samizdat videos and pictures around.

But there has been another trend, largely ignored – and that is the increasing tendency of photographers to cleave towards the (largely self proclaimed) ‘elite’ – political, economic, cultural.

Of course the argument would be that they’re simply following their rational economic self interest, in the light of tanking ‘old skool’ revenue streams. But its funny how it also uncannily enforces the dog-whistle tone of vanity and desperation that has always sat just under the surface of the business.

As the mass money dries up, there is a trend to aspire to be closer to the Versailles salon of the Sun King. From riding on the back of a Pentagon war machine subsidy, picking up grants from uber-hedge fund mega-predators or corporate lobby foundation fronts, becoming the in-house photographer for ’1 Percent Monthly’ magazine, to simply engaging in a seemingly endless ponzi scheme-esque money-go-round: I grant you, you bursary him, he awards her, she judging panels him, he workshops them…and round we go again.

Until it ends up on the wall of a disused church, viewed by a hermetically sealed bubble of like-minded peers, in a southern French city where the unemployment rate is 30 percent.

Or maybe they don’t do any of that, but simply pine for a Golden Era when the non-digital barriers to entry meant they were Ozymandias, King of Kings. And of course the prevailing photographic view was euphemistically called ‘Western’, but was in fact, mostly American, British, maybe a bit o ‘French. The rest of the World was their cultural playground.

It was great while it lasted I suppose. It will never, EVER come back.

The crashing irony is everybody is talking about Kodachrome like it was fine wine, when the reality was, it WASN’T. It was Spam, and manufactured by the giga-ton to be consumed like Spam by people who would genuinely value their family snaps a damn sight more than some here-today-birdcage-liner-tomorrow feature in some glossy mag.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming this is a rant against particular photographers, many of whom are astonishingly talented genuine artists, and like many, I think its a crying shame they can’t pursue their vision with the limited degree of independence they once had.

It’s the trend thats entirely retrograde IMO, and I just think they’re on the wrong end of the curve. Its a move away from the mass audience we were supposed to engage with. It’s why for example, the two most photographed wars in history have left the majority audience virtually totally ignorant, and arguably voting for economic and political policies that will cast them into an abyss.

Thats only one of many epic failures on our part, and I don’t blame the audience at all for viewing what we pursue with a fair degree of contempt. They’re tired of being patronised, so they’ve seized the tools and made their own media. The quicker we get out of the way, the better.

There is a very small number of photographers who ‘get it’, and who are engaging with grassroots audiences as peers and fellow collaborators (instead of the Old Skool ‘Attention Peasants! I bring you truth! Now shut the fuck up and take it’ model) using the very same tools available to the audience – digital capture, social media. I think its a hopeful sign and wish them every success.

As for the rest? As I’m now working on a picture desk and training people, I’m now largely part of the audience now more than I was, and find myself tending towards thinking as they do (in my case the audience is in SE Asia).

I really don’t pay a huge amount of attention to the Washington Consensus salon-monkey media anymore. The world is just moving past them.

I’m in charge of Funky Friday, make no mistake. So, If I say this Ray Charles tune is befitting, so be it.

It has been missing from the tintertwizzle for many a moon, but I found it again. And boy, what a song. Probably my favourite Ray tune ever, and that’s saying something. From the album Genius + Soul = Jazz.

The first time I ever heard this tune was when it came on the radio as I was returning from photographing a football match down in London somewhere. I had to pull over on the M1 to write down the title. Glorious. Enjoy.

A comment attached to this post meant I had to answer with this post. The comment asked, if Lee Morgan was swinging music, what did a swinging photograph look like? At first I thought of ‘Grand Prix de Circuit de la Seine’ by Jacques Henri Lartigue, which is probably a better answer than the one I am about to provide. It’s certainly a better photograph, although mine’s fun too, so there.

This is a swinging picture:

Swingers convention, New Orleans, USA. Orgy room.

I suppose if you’re going to be picky, and I know you are because I can see it in your eyes, the above is not really a swinging picture, it’s a picture of swingers.

It is actually a picture of a small part of a 1500 strong group of swingers who took over an entire hotel on Bourbon Street in New Orleans ( What a street that is).

I had been commissioned to cover the 5 day event for UK Marie Claire. I’d found the story, and the mag thought it sounded ‘fun’, so off we went. When I say we, I mean the reporter and myself. Only thing was, the reporter was a woman, and happened to be my wife. So, 1500 swingers, 750 couples (only couples allowed), and one couple who were pretty sure they weren’t into swinging, and who had a job to do. That’ll be us then. So, 1502 people, 751 couples.

I’ve never been to a swingers convention before, nor since. It was uniquely fascinating. Swingers are a bloody good laugh, I’ll give them that…they certainly know how to party. I do know now, after being politely propositioned about a dozen times a day, and having seen things that made my eyes water, that neither my wife nor I are in the least interested in swinging. It’s a laugh to attend though ,and great to take pictures of, although very tricky when the mag you are shooting for will not publish anything remotely ‘naughty’.

We had been there 3 days before we were told where to find the ‘real’ action. Upstairs, third floor, after midnight. Pick your room, choose your fancy. Maybe the orgy room sir? Perhaps the sybian room? (look it up) The dark room? The massive cocks room? The dungeon? The straps room? The cradles room? The harnesses and trapezes room? And on and on…over 30 different rooms catering to every sexual peccadilloe imaginable. And I mean imaginable. All night long.

The pic above was shot in the orgy room, where up to 50 people at a time get it on together. Everyone in the above picture was happy to be photographed (don’t ask me why), but I couldn’t show owt naughty. So, all you can really see is sod all, but you get the idea. Not easy avoiding photographing certain body parts when 50 odd people are shagging and sucking each others brains out.

One thing amongst many that I found intriguing was the fact that it’s fine for the men to watch the women getting it on together, it’s actively encouraged in fact –  it’s expected that the men will shag many other women, natch, but it is absolutely not acceptable in any way, shape or form for a man to get it on with another man. Oh good god no. How dare I even ask such a thing. Disgraceful.

I still get emails now asking if I’d like to come on another convention, whether I’d like to come aboard a swingers cruise around the Carribbean etc etc. I’ve not responded, swinging’s not for me. One unwanted side effect of the above story was the fact that I then became known for a while as the photographer who ‘did’ sex stories. So, it was doggers soon after. Filthy they are. They make the swingers look like the nuns from the local convent, but that’s a story for another day.

Swingers in hot tub, New Orleans, USA. Swingers Convention.

One of the finalists for this year’s Canon prize for multimedia at the Dutch Zilveren Camera awards.  Well worth 8 minutes of your time.

By Ilvy Njiokiktjien and Elles van Gelder.