The Online Photographer

So to continue where I left off in my musings about consistency and having the wrong camera with you...sorry for the delay, and sorry this is so long; I didn't have time to make it short—! This is 2,000 words, which is about the longest I'll ever make a post.

SteveW wrote: "Love your photo. I'm an iPhone guy now. Since it's always in my pocket, I get pics I would not get otherwise. And the image quality is in my 'good enough' range. I'm an old dawg happy snapper, and that's pretty much how I've always shot photos, so I guess the iPhone suits me."

I'm really kind of the same way. Sometimes I don't think I love photography so much as I just love looking. The impulse to take notes on what I see has always been a strong part of my motivation. And for that note-taking impulse, the iPhone is right up there with the best cameras ever. I do always have it with me, and I love the viewfinder except when it's too bright out to really see it. 

I've put forward the argument before that the iPhone is actually the closest current expression of the idea of the original Barnack camera, the first screwmount Leica. Oskar Barnack wanted a highly portable, cunningly small camera he could carry anywhere and take pictures with where a bigger, more cumbersome camera just wouldn't be convenient to deploy. Not that you couldn't deploy something bigger, necessarily, just that you wouldn't. The analogy to an iPhone camera is exact.

As far as liking looking and seeing goes, while you can do it without having a camera at all, having a camera with me, especially when I'm actively using it, helps me see better. It gives me a reason to stop and look, to explore more fully, to seek a better vantage point, to discover more of what's there to see. I do that more often since I've had a phone camera.

But it definitely increases the incidences of "wrong camera" syndrome. Glenn Allenspach put it nicely in the Featured Comment to the previous post. Here's a hard and fast rule of the kind of note-taking, always-on-the-lookout kind of photography I like and generally practice: you never know when you're going to get a good one. And when you do—when the magic happens and the Universe gives you one of those fleeting inevitable gifts—you generally wish you had the best file you can get. That's especially true if the result you ended up with doesn't "go" with the body of work you've been building up long-term.

Consistency
Long ago I was photographing with a Contax 35mm camera and a Zeiss lens, and I bought an Olympus XA point-and-shoot because I didn't always have the Contax with me. (DPReview just did a nostalgia review of the XA recently.) My idea was to keep it in a pouch on my belt and put it on every morning and take it off every evening "like my shirt" (something David Vestal said he did with his Leica M2's). The problem was that when I tried to put XA prints next to Contax prints, they didn't look similar enough. At least, I could tell. They didn't go together. I got rid of the XA quickly, because I didn't want to "get lucky" and get a great shot with it. I knew I would have wanted the picture to have been taken with the Contax.

As far as consistency goes, I written before that my work took a big hit when I started reviewing cameras. No longer was I going my own way and doing my own thing, being "true to myself" as the old saw has it. I had to photograph with one camera, then another, then another. I "saw" subtly differently with every one, and the results looked different.

There's a word: "manqué." Properly used postpositively, it means "falling short of, or frustrated in, the fulfillment of one's aspirations or talents." (Merriam-Webster.) "A poet manqué" means somebody who always wanted to be a poet but never quite put it together, never quite got going, never lived up to his or her promise. The son of an old friend struggled for 20 years trying to be a musician and never got out of the local coffeehouses, and sometimes found it rocky going even at that level: a folksinger manqué.

It's a French word. Did you know about a third of all vocabulary words in English originally came from French? "Postpositively" just means that it follows the noun it modifies, as most adjectives do in French. In French it means "missed." Collins Dictionary says, "having failed, missed, or fallen short, esp. because of circumstances or a defect of character; unsuccessful; unfulfilled or frustrated." Emphasis mine. In British English it more usually means that the ball when playing roulette has failed to land on a higher number. Which kinda follows. Humbert Humbert, in Lolita, says, "At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry as many manqué talents do; but I was even more manqué than that...and I switched to English literature." 

A body of work manqué
When I was exploring the meaning of the word I came across a discussion of the word applied to projects, although when I went looking for it again I couldn't find it. The idea is of a project only partially fulfilled; started, then stopped; not fleshed out or followed through to completion. If that's a real meaning, then most of my work my whole life long has been manqué—half-finished projects, abandoned projects, ideas not carried through.

To give one example among many: I taught at a prep school for girls for a few years, and did many senior portraits, usually on request, for the yearbook. I worked it all out—method, style, approach, etc.—and did some nice pictures, but it ended up being a sort of political problem at that job. I didn't actually take pictures only of the better-looking kids, but people accused me of that anyway, and there was some thought that if I charged anything, even a token amount for expenses, I was "taking advantage" of a clientele that was in some weird sense "captive." I was also accused of taking portraits only of people I liked, and I think that was closer to being true. I was never instructed to stop, but as the pictures got more and more attention in the school community it got...a tad awkward. After taking maybe forty or fifty portraits, I ended up with twelve or fifteen that were good. That cohort are in their fifties now. For it to have been a complete body of work I would have had to continue until I had three or four times as much work as that, at least.

There were many things like that. I hopped from one idea to the next without really accomplishing anything to completion. 

I can't complain, really. It's what I wanted to do. I loved getting ideas, starting out, working things out, satisfying myself that I knew how to go on...but then moving on to something else.

Becoming a magazine reviewer, one of my big breaks, sort of formally fractured any consistency I had built up prior to that. My standard then was that I had to use a camera for three months, and for real work, before I would write about it. Every camera gives you its gifts, but three months isn't long enough for the hits to accrue. So I had all these projects manqué—here's a sample, a taste, of what I did with this camera, then here's what I did with the next one, and so on. Nothing ever had time to build any of 'em into a finished, fully realized, communicable body of work. Never got as much as a book's worth, and only rarely a show's worth. I did have a few shows.

All this is okay, by the way—I got reinforcement, reward, and attention for writing, not for photography. Photography was just the subject. The grist. For writing, it was beneficial to do more than one kind of project, use many tools, try lots of different styles of work including commercially. Broader rather than deeper experience was better.

So here's what I've been leading to: why in the world, at this late date, should I even worry about consistency? Why not take pictures with my Sigma monochrome and my iPhone? And the Fuji? Who cares if the pictures go together?  If you look at my Photostream on Flickr, does that single blue picture belong there? Of course not. It's not like I need a picture of the back of the Catholic church for some reason. (Jeff Hartge asked, "What does the other side of the church look like?" It's never interested me is all I can say. Never been moved to take a single picture of the front.) It's all just exploration and discovery anyway, just the joy of looking at the world with a camera, merely me being me. Pursuing the pictures. To use an overused expression, it's all good.

My Merry fate
And by the way, here's what happened to that portrait work. (I've told this story before, so I apologize if you've heard it already.) Originally it was 35mm B&W and sort of austere or dry and plain, inflected with the work of several historical photographers (starting with Mike Disfarmer) but then "making it mine." Of students without makeup and in casual clothing. And usually unsmiling, which is not, you know, The American Way. A friend who owned a frame shop in Georgetown allowed me to put up a permanent exhibit in her shop of a dozen portraits, which led me to more of the kind of work I wanted to do, but gradually I started to get public commissions and to charge more and more. Some clients wanted color, so I did more and more work in color. In many cases 35mm wasn't adequate, so I switched to medium format. And in most cases my "austere" style wasn't what sold, so I drifted toward a more conventional, client-pleasing style. I ended up doing pretty well with portraits—at my peak I was charging $675 for a sitting and $100 for a print, which was a lot in those days. My sitting fee was more than a month's rent. I photographed a fair number of people who were at least locally famous in D.C. at the time: a talk-show host, a Supreme Court judge, a U.S. Senator, a famous female photographer, a nationally famous Black leader. Of course I didn't do enough marketing, because Mike.

As Carl Weese once pointed out to me, to make it as a portraitist you have to shoot a lot of portraits.

But then somehow the original prints that I'd hung in that frame shop came to the attention of Merry Foresta, the first curator of photography at the Smithsonian's Museum of American Art. She called me and asked to see a more recent portfolio of more of that work. And...I didn't have any. I'd left the school by that time and morphed into a more conventional portraitist in medium-format color, taking pictures of carefully-groomed people in nice clothes. Executives, whole families, rich people's children, marrying couples. The whole gestalt had changed. Never did show any work to Merry. You know what they say....

As advice to the young, my advice has always been to do something else for money and be an amateur photographer, but at the same time take your work seriously and not be a dilettante. That's a tall order. But if you're going that route: persist. Redact the work. Make your ideas into projects and bring your projects to completion before leaving them in the rearview. Life goes on; things change. Don't leave things till later; don't leave things unfinished. Respect the work you're doing. Respect where you are at the time. Don't miss;

Don't fail;

Don't fall short.

Mike

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