The Online Photographer

Very wonderful red-letter day for me: my first-ever article for The New Yorker just went live at newyorker.com. It's called "Your Camera Roll Contains a Masterpiece." Comments/thoughts/ reactions welcomed. 

Please tell your friends! Post on Facebook! Butters' friend Wex is here to play, so I'll have more to say later. (Guess that's always true.)

Mike

UPDATE: Check it out...it also made Apple News+ (you did know you can search Apple News+ for "photography," right? Okay, I didn't):

And Ken Tanaka noted that it made the evening's list of featured stories for subscribers:

Whew, what a day. One thing I also wanted to point out is that my editor there spent a very generous amount of his time with me, and the articles are carefully crafted with the help of various professionals in addition to his expert editing and direction. My piece ended up far stronger than it started out.

Book of Interest this Week

Home Fires Volume II: The Present. There is of course a Volume I: The Past.  TOP reader Bruce Haley has produced documentary work relating to conflict, humanitarian crises and environmental/industrial/land use issues for 30 years. He received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of the ethnic civil war in Burma. This is his exploration of his home territories, and it's great.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Stelios: "I was thinking just that yesterday. What am I going to do with the thousands of pictures on my phone? What happens when the phone goes? Sure I download them on my computer but still, they are so many! Most of them notes. Thousands of my dog, most failures, or identical to each other (you can only have so many pictures of a dog lying upside down, all the same and yet all different because they happen now!). Congratulations on the New Yorker article. I hope there’s more coming."

Niels: "Great article, congratulations!

"I don't understand why they couldn't link to this blog in the credits, but they appear only to do internal links.

"English isn't my first language, but the article seems a bit more polished than I am used to from you—which is understandable given the medium, but I kind of prefer the style on this blog—it is more lively—in lack of better word.

"I hope you will also notify your readers when the next article is up."

Mike replies: Well, on them not linking here...it might be a little like when I hired one of the caregivers at my son's daycare center to come stay with him while I traveled to the yearly photo trade show at the Javits Center. The neighbors said she held parties at my condo every night and that they heard my three-year-old crying at midnight. She left some shot-glasses in the dishwasher, and one of my bedsheets was in the dumpster down in the garage with cigarette burns on it. When I asked the director of the daycare center about it, she said, "we can only guarantee their behavior while they're here." (The next year, I got my Mom to come stay with Xander.) I would guess that about sums up why The New Yorker doesn't link directly to things like triflin' lowdown no-editor-having blogs and the like—they can only guarantee my behavior when I'm there. (Where's that laughing emoji with the crying eyes when you need him?)

Animesh Ray: "Beautiful article. Thoughtful. Ruefully romantic. Sparkling with insights. Congratulations."

Antonis R: "Well, first: Congratulations Mike! To New Yorker's credit, they know to pick among the very best. I have been reading your wordsmithing since the days of the 37th Frame (I always opened the magazine from the back!) and this one, referencing 'Your Camera Roll' suggested a continuity in tone. Encouraging, evocative, informative, at once very personal and truly universal. It's in a different voice than, say, blog posts with their own casual charm. Making us create a mental image for a picture that only appears in words is brilliant, but how the subject switches from 'a woman in dark clothing' to 'we had gone to...' takes us across the chasm from generic to intimate and to the emotional essence of the story in a quick flash. Some sharp writing there.

"I know things live in the Cloud these days, but I wish a selection of your writing would come together, ink-on-paper, in a bound volume. A photography how-to manual with no technical instructions."

Mike replies: I tried once, but I'm too disorganized. Couldn't bring it together. I did hire a friend's daughter to clip all my magazine articles, rather than throw them away. Filled six (or was it eight? Where's the fact-checker?) three-ring binders! But they're here, at least.

Patrick Murphy: "OMG! Just saw your New Yorker article (via Apple News+, not from your blog). As you began to describe the 'woman by the sea' photo, a chill went up my spine. I purchased that photo during your print offer last year. It was the only print I’ve bought from you in the two decades of my reading your exceptional blog—the only print that really moved me. And now here it is shared with the world at large. The photo alone is an evocative masterpiece. Your description of its taking and meaning to you is what put it over the top for me. Congratulations to you on your as-always insightful writing getting the audience it deserves!"

Aaron: "After thinking more about your piece: given that we are awash in images and that our phones give us such easy access to making photographs I think you should write something on when not to take a picture. I hasten to say that this isn’t motivated by digital grouchiness or nostalgia for the good 'ol days. Rather, I’m interested in how not taking a photograph can be a way of practicing taking better photographs. I remember reading once that in a piece of music the negative spaces—the pauses, decrescendos, rests—were as or more important than the positive spaces—the notes, chords, accents, and so forth. Music is only music when the notes are framed by emptiness. A set of notes played continuously is noise not music. In our image saturated world—and our image saturated personal lives—perhaps there’s an analogy to be made. The images we do have are enhanced by the images we intentionally refrain from making. I also remember (though I can’t recall who) a professional nature photographer saying that he could only photograph a small percentage of the beautiful things he saw simply because the other things would not work as a photograph. Knowing when not to take a picture was part of his craft.

"Just this morning, clouds are clearing after several gray days and they have a the clarity and brilliance that seems only to come after rain—but these particular clouds in this particular setting won’t photograph well. Learning to appreciate the photos I do have may be part and parcel with remembering to appreciate the moments that can’t be photographs, and crucially appreciating them as moments, not as potential photographs. Again, I don’t mean this as general life advice (don’t let photography rob you of appreciation for what can’t be photographed). But, rather, I wonder if there’s something to learn about taking better photographs by paying attention to what can’t be photographed successfully."

Curt Gerston: "I’ve been a New Yorker subscriber since my dad got me my first subscription as a going-to-college gift in 1986. Great magazine…you absolutely belong. Congrats!"

Alvan: "Congratulations, Mike! A lovely, fluent, illuminating piece. You're an inspiration in many ways. Long may these—pictures, pieces, muses—continue! Long-time reader (and lurker) here, harking from Singapore."

Andre Y: "Congratulations Mike! To the story of NatGeo editors wanting a surfeit of photos to distill down to 15–20 perfect ones for the story, it's thought that in documentary filmmaking, an 80X ratio (that's eighty times) is about the right amount of footage for B-roll. That is, you need to shoot 80 times as much footage as you might use for the ancillary, illustrative stuff in your film."