Kate setting up her mother’s computer to get podcasts

Studio 360 recently ran an interview with David Plowden, one of the few times I’ve heard a photographer interviewed on the radio. It’s worth a listen, particularly if you enjoyed Plowden’s recent book, Vanishing Point. The interview makes it clear that vanishing point perhaps refers as much to the disappearance of his favored subjects as it does to a feature of perspective.

Get the MP3 here.

“I actually like to stay clear of financial dependencies in this project and enjoy it as it is. I already had turned my hobby to profession once, know how it works and what to expect and even though it worked pretty well for me there is no need to repeat the same move again. I have profession and I have hobby and I like it this way.” MORE

“This is New York. This is the upper east side of Manhattan. I could tunnel, secretly between my apartment and the next door apartment and have a suite. Again - prices would go up substantially - and that could very well put me out of business. That would be just like me - kill many years of hard work because of ego. Oh sure, I’m represented by the xyz fine art gallery in Soho and they have 12 of my prints on the wall. Nah… I like my web home. I like that I can offer over a hundred prints at various sizes.” MORE

“No single model will work for everyone. There’s room for all of us. Some artists are the Coke and Pepsi of music, while others are the fine wine — or the funky home-brewed moonshine. And that’s fine.” MORE

“My point, though, is this: the buyer does not care about your heat bill, or the cost of rubber bands, or even the cost of your printer. The buyer is buying an object, and what the buyer is willing to pay for it has a everything to do with demand for that object and the supply of it. We can alter the buyer’s demand (by advertising, or by giving a convincing story about the object), and we can alter the buyer’s perception of supply (by using limited editions and other gimmicks). I’d argue, though, that those alterations are minor.” MORE

“Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements.” MORE

“These points illustrate that you shouldn’t be basing what you do on price, or technical skills. Instead, it should be on vision, and customer service. Is there any difference, really, between this single white t-shirt at Nordstroms for $18, and this pack of 3 fruit-of-the-loom t-shirts at K-Mart for $9.49? Probably not much. But, the service - is it worth it? Nordstrom’s has proven that the answer is yes, and photographers who choose to compete on points other than price or rights-give-aways have shown that it works in our field too.” MORE

I think I’ve taken some variation of this picture in this place (underneath the skylight outside our apartment door) approximately 50 times. There’s something instructive about repeating yourself. More on that later.

My pocket is full of cash from the recent sale of my D80 (yay for craigslist). In the post-sale euphoria, I normally start dreaming about what to buy next, but I can’t come up with anything. None of the current digicams hold any interest for me apart from the Canon G9 and the Leica M8, but I can’t imagine what I would do with either of those that I can’t do now besides not shooting film, which I’m not inclined to do at the moment. If we were to graph my satisfaction with shooting film, it would look like a wave, and having recently hit something like the bottom, my satisfaction has been steadily growing. So no digital, for the moment.

A medium format camera is always an option. Hasselblads and Mamiya rangefinders still look like fun to me, but I’d need a new scanner too, and then probably a new computer to handle the larger files, which would probably also mean that it would make sense to upgrade photoshop. It all just seems like too much bother when I don’t really know what I’d do with it.

There are still accessories that I could go for. Perhaps I should coble together some magnifiers to give my Hexar a .9x VF? It’s a thought, and a fairly cheap one at that, but it’s unlikely to revolutionize my photography. Perhaps if I was eyeing a fast fifty I’d be more inclined to go this route, but I don’t do that much shooting in really low light anymore; I’m getting too old to hang out in dark bars.

So, for the first time in a long time, I can’t think of a piece of photographic gear that I want. Given that I haven’t purchased any new camera or optical gear in over a year, this is kind of an odd feeling. Am I loosing my gear lust? Does this mean I’m in danger becoming one of those guys that answer every forum post about gear with that tired old rant, ‘It’s not the gear but the photographer.’ Or am I actually finding the artistic process more interesting than the technical process? I’m finding that the intellectual part of the process is shifting away from the technical decisions. Although the technical decisions are still interesting, they are like warming up and stretching before a workout; they are what I do before I do the thing I do so that I can do the thing better. It will be interesting to see how long this lasts and where it leads.

As Marek commented on the last post, I’ve been a little off my game the last couple of weeks. Chalk it up to changes at work, the cumulative effort of keeping a film based blog going (seriously, it’s a lot of work), and just doing too much of the same thing for too long. The last couple of weeks I find myself repeating a passage from the Tao Te Ching over and over; “Keep sharpening your knife and it will dull.” My knife is dull. It’s time for a break.

On that note, I’m hanging up my “Gone Fishing” sign. The blog is closed until further notice, but feel free to poke around the archives. There are literally thousands of photos on this site, which should be enough to keep all of you busy for a while. See you back here when the fish stop biting or the beer runs out, which ever comes first.

Harry Callahan, writing in a grant application after World War II, asked for money in order to “photograph . . .to regulate a pleasant form of living.” This seems to me to be the best reason to pursue any craft. Whether it be photography, writing or beer brewing, the regular rhythm of craft, the slow, steady build up of skills and self-confidence, does indeed regulate life. It evens out the low points by providing successes to look forward to or back on. And, if pursued with any degree of honesty, every craft regularly knocks you back to earth when hubris has taken you too high.

I wonder if the new Luminous Landscape Endowment would buy me an M8 to help me “regulate a pleasant form of living?” A boy can dream . . .

If this was Colin’s blog, I’d file this under Words Not Lose.

I’m blessed with a local library that values photography books. Here are a few of the books I’ve recently plucked from the self.

• Harry Callahan. The Photographer at Work.: fascinating, more about this one another day.
• Moksha, by Fazal Sheikh: beautiful, ethereal B&W, troubling subject. I usually pass on social justice sort of photography, but this book is hard to set aside.
• Weeping Mary, by O. Rufus Lovett: another book of great B&W work on an interesting documentary subject.
• Work, by Mitch Epstein: I just didn’t get it, but maybe you will.
• My America, by Christoper Morris: a retrospective of the excellent VII photographer’s time with George W. I couldn’t decide if this was boring or creepy? Subversive or patriotic? Is there a difference?
• David Hilliard: a weird, eponymous book of shabby-chic, large format work. I wanted to dismiss this at first, but I kept going back to it. There’s something there, but I’m not sure what.

What have you been looking at?

Despite my recent comments about using what you are comfortable with, at the moment, I can think of two great ways to spend $5000:

1. Buy an M8.
2. Buy a Seitz Roundshot.

The Case for an M8

It’s fairly hard for me to justify buying an M8. I’ve gone through three digital cameras in as many years. The Canon 10D lasted 4 months before I traded it in for my first Hexar RF. The KM 7D a year later followed on the heels of the great gear purge of ought-five that saw the mad sale of my Hexar AF and Nokton 35 F1.2. The 7D fared poorly; I’m fairly certain I’d sold it within three months at least in part out of bitterness over the lost Hexar AF and Nokton. My current digital, a D80, I’ve had for almost a year, but it’s been sitting unused on the shelf for most of that time. It doesn’t know it yet, but it’s days are probably numbered.

Given this serial dissatisfaction with digital, why would I go spend almost $5K on another? Well . . . one could make an argument that all of the other digitals were discarded because what I was really waiting for was a digital M or, better yet, a digital Hexar. The M8 might just be good enough. Although I haven’t been all that impressed by most of the reviews or most of the resulting photos, Dante Stella’s recent piece on the M8, has sparked my interest again. He’s described the M8’s strengths and weaknesses in a way that makes sense to me and that runs parallels to my own thoughts on camera design. I’m intrigued again.

Intrigued or not, the M8 would essentially allow me to continue what I’m doing but without dealing with film. I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. Film has a certain rhythm that I’ve come to appreciate. And, as Colin has noted, there’s something about the tangibility of film. I know that regardless of my scanning or photoshop skills, I could go rent a darkroom and print my negs. I probably won’t do it, but it’s nice to know that I could. I also know that even in the event of a massive and multiple hard drive failure, I’d still have the negs. I’m not sure I’m ready to give that up. But with the pile of undeveloped film growing again, I can see the appeal of at least lessening the amount of time I spend with my hands in a changing bag, spotting negs, mixing chemicals, etc etc etc. It’s usually fun, but not always.

The Case for a Roundshot

Michael Reichman’s recent review of the Seitz Roundshot 28/220 came to my attention just a few days after having stumbled on “America by the Yard”, Robert MacKay’s excellent book showcasing some of the best Cirkut images from the 1900’s to 1950’s. I was vaguely aware that there had been some really, really large format panoramic photography done in the past, but the book turned out to be a revelation and potential inspiration.

The Cirkut and the Roundshot 28/220 work on the same principle; the film and the lens both rotate, but in opposite directions. The result is a photograph that can be as wide as you want - up to or even beyond 360 degrees - with a corresponding growth in the negative size as you go. The early Cirkut cameras produced negative that were literally yards long by up to 16 inches tall. The Roundshot, by comparison, uses 120 or 220 film, but the principle is the same.

In either case, the great appeal lies in the resulting images. Long, wide and fairly distortion free if you pay attention to the bubble level. The Cirkut was often used to create giant portraits of whole towns, factory floors, quarries etc. You have to see these to understand the impact entirely. The town and group portraits are particularly fascinating, being a kind of group photography that is certainly posed but almost entirely free of artifice. Do a google image search on Cirkut Cameras and you will start to get an idea of what I’m talking about.

As a modern day stand in for the Cirkut, the Roundshot has a lot of appeal. It would just be too much fun to take one of these things around to small towns, county fairs, all manner of gatherings etc. The documentary possibilities are huge even before you get to architectural photography. With a little luck, you might even be able to get a grant to do this.

This would be something entirely different from what I’m doing now. I’m not sure how much my skills would translate into something like this. I might be entirely lost, up a $5000 creek with no paddle. But it might be a hoot.

Choices, Choices, Choices

All this is working from the erroneous assumption that I’ve got $5000 to spend on camera equipment. I could do it, but it would seem kind of silly given the circumstances of my life at the moment, which perhaps isn’t a reason not to do it. 9 months ago I was thinking about spending $10K for to go to Salt’s documentary program. Heck, if that’s my yardstick, I could buy both the M8 and the Roundshot, and still be ahead of the game considering I wouldn’t be loosing all those wages by being in school full time. Hmm, see how that works? You talk yourself out of spending $5K by way of talking yourself into spending $10K.

If you had $5K to spend on photography, what would you do?

This guy ran right through my bleak mid-western suburban landscape.

I’ve got a number of half-baked ideas for posts banging around in my head. I’m noting them here, so that I don’t forget.

• A post about the difficulties of portraiture, the role of employment in changing idea of self and the growth of the media culture, along with thoughts about Arnold Newman’s environmental portraiture and its relationship to changes in the newspaper/magazine business. Referrences to the Stranger a Day site and Alec Soth’s blog.
• A post about choosing B&W films.
• A post about Robert Adams, a photographer who I know almost nothing about.
• A post about print sizes, print presentation etc etc etc. References to William Gedney and Paul Butzi with apollogies to folks that really like large prints.

So that’s whats coming up. I’m limiting my shooting for a while - got to do something thinking/editing - so I should have plenty of time to write.