As I make more books and things (collections of postcards are in the works), I increasingly think of photos in series. I don’t deny the power of a single, amazing photograph, but there is a value in seeing photographs as part of a collection of related images. I have long appreciated the powerful work of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Series can be as short as a pair of photos, a diptych, or much longer series, such as 52/4.
From a recent trip to the Great Sand Dunes I have a number of nice, single photos as well as a number of photos that work well as short series. The images are fine on their own, but work really well as a triptych.
I often think of photographs in collections or series, linked to a single subject (e.g., an idea, place, time, experience). Given my preference for printed, physical photographs, I increasingly try to imagine a project in the form of an artist’s book. Artist’s books are not restricted by the format of a traditional book, sequential pages glued (or sewn) together. Instead, an artist’s book gives me the chance to play with form (accordion books, folding books, etc.). By taking advantage of these different forms, I can encourage people to imagine different ways to think about the relationship between photographs.
PBα #0.
Recently I was playing with what I’ll call a “panel book” (“flap book” or “flag book” might be good terms as well, but let’s not dwell). In this initial experiment, three series of eight photograph-sentence pairs are arranged so that the reader can flip through each panel individually. The reader creates the series by flipping between photograph-sentence panels.
PBα #1.
The book is an unusual shape, very narrow and tall at 2.75″x16″. The pages are stitched together inside a heavy stock cover. The paper I used for the pages was a bit thick (fortunately, I have since purchased some thinner paper). It took some planning to get the layout correct so that the printed pages would be in the correct order when folded and sewn. But now that I’ve figured it out, I’ll certainly be making more — I’ve already got PBβ planned.
Flowers are powerful means of conveying emotion: condolences, loss, love, apology, friendship, thanks. Among the flowers commonly given, roses occupy a particularly important place, especially to express love. Yet, roses die quickly. Cut from the bush, placed in a vase full of fresh water, they last only a few days before petals brown and fall all over the table and the rose bud itself droops and becomes sad. A metaphor, perhaps, of the fleeting and fragile nature of romance.
#2200903.1: Study of Flowers 14.
Genetically modified and homogenized, grown in carefully controlled environments, today’s roses lack the variation, hardiness, and rich aromas of older varietals. 1867 and the tea rose. Today’s roses are standardized, like so many things in our world, even the ways we express our emotions.
#220903.2: Study of Flowers 15.
And yet, if we look close enough, we can find variation and differences even in today’s roses, the shapes of the pedals, the colors of the stems, the peculiar way each flower decays. These two photos are form part of a pamphlet in a series of pamphlets on flowers, a sort of paper menagerie.
Just as I am rarely alone, despite how far I might venture into the wilderness, I rarely take an original photograph. Sometimes, my photographs are obviously unoriginal (perhaps not entirely cliché but certainly not obscure).
Landscape #220511.1
I don’t care if some of my photography looks familiar because other people have been there before me and taken similar photos. In subtle and often overlooked ways, my photo captures a fleeting and irreproducible moment and reflects my particular framing of the scene, just as most previous and subsequent photos will capture fleeting moments and reflect some other photographer’s approach to the scene. And I will always take photos that don’t look so familiar, that reflect my personal eye for something. Such photos tend to work better in collections or as part of a series (see, for example, 52/4).
Some initial thoughts on “photography as art” or “photography of art.”
In some cases, it seems easy to say that a photograph is the art, e.g., when the photographer doesn’t manipulate the scene, stage the subjects, or otherwise interfere with the world captured in the photograph. For landscape photographers who search for the right scene in the right light and the right conditions at the right time of year, the photograph is probably the art. Similarly, photographers who scour urban or interior spaces for details, or a fleeting scene. But I wonder about instances where the photographer as intervened, arranged, manipulated the objects in the photograph. When does the staged scene become the art and the subsequent photograph merely a photograph of that art?
Series: Herbarium #211004
A portrait or a still life both require the photographer to intervene and stage the scene, and seem to be the space where this question of “Art or photograph of art?” becomes rather thorny. When producing the portrait or still life required considerable skill, time, and effort, perhaps we could more easily see the work as art: Titian’s portraits, or Bruegel’s still life paintings, or Dürer’s drawings. But today, when almost anybody can make technically sound photographs, the quality and execution of the work is no longer sufficient to make it art.
The ease of producing photographic portraits and still lifes displaces the art from the final product, the photograph, back to the staging of the photograph. Photography, in this mode, risks becoming mimesis. The art, insofar as art is related to effort or skill or talent or vision, is in the staging of the scene, the creating and arranging of props, the directing of people in the frame. The photograph becomes a sort of single frame from a movie. Perhaps that’s why we hear so much about cinematic photography these days, and why color grading seems to be mandatory, and why any photograph of a gas station at night shot on CineStill is considered art. Photography has become merely the means of representing art.
Series: Herbarium #211015
Photography has always risked mimesis, risked being little more than a representation of art: Weston’s peppers; Penn’s portraits; Mapplethorpe’s flowers. But there seems to be something different today, at least in degree if not in kind. Weston, Penn, Mapplethorpe seemed to try to find the beauty in something, tried to reveal the beauty that was there as opposed to fabricating the beauty. Photography was, it seems, both the means and the material of the art. Mapplethorpe’s flowers were beautiful works of art because they were photographs. The photograph captured something that Mapplethorpe could imagine but was disguised, fleeting, or indiscernible. The photograph added something, was essential, was more than simply a representation of what anybody would have seen if they looked at the flower. Increasingly, the photograph doesn’t aspire to be art so much as it is content to be evidence. Evidence of having been somewhere, eaten something, creatively arranged an assortment of things, artistically staged some scene. Evidence that art was made.
I just sent the files of the latest issue of 52 to the local printer, Fireball Printing. This issue is a collection of photos of leaves, usually just a single leaf though a few pairs of leaves. They reflect quiet fall moments before a breeze or a car disturbs them.
The printed photograph encourages a different, lingering engagement with the image, and allows for sequencing and order that digital photos discourage. There is no scrolling, no share-on-social-media button (no buttons at all, in fact), no likes. Just a series of photographs. Perfect for a cup of coffee, a pastry, and enjoy.
If you would like me to send you a copy, let me know: darin@drhayton.com. You can also download pdf copies from 52.
When I started this Daily Photography Project I committed to taking one still life photograph each day. Nothing too elaborate, no lovely basket of fruit spilling across an opulent tablecloth, or pile of exotic flowers and fine bone china. For my goal was not composition. Instead, I had pragmatic and instrumentalist goals: to become better at using my flashes and better at understanding how to light something simple. The variable was the lighting, not the subject.
Now for nearly four weeks I have been taking photos of glasses, usually filled with some liquid, and the occasional flower. But just taking 30 photos without pausing to think about them seems unlikely to help me improve, except by chance. So I’ve spent some time looking at the photos and thinking about how they did or did not capture what I had in mind, and how much and what sort of work I had to do to get them close to what I imagined.
#210408a
I’ve learned some things, and become aware of others. I have a new appreciation for and awareness of how shiny surfaces reflect light from other light surfaces. I think now about how a flash (or any light source) will reflect on certain surfaces and not others:
How many times have I had to adjust slightly the flash so it doesn’t overexpose the close side of a glass? Or how many times have I had to put up a dark book or some other object to block the light from spilling back from the far wall, which happens to be white and therefore rather bright?
#210408b
I have a better sense of how shadows fall depending on how near or far the light source is from the object, and how large or small that light source. Want a hard, distinct shadow line? Take off the softbox and move the flash a bit further away. Smooth shadows? Softbox and close flash.
I haven’t discovered any insights. What I have become familiar with these lessons to the point that I can now produce the effect I want without going through a series of trials and errors. Insofar as I wanted to learn something about flashes, this exercise has been useful.
However, I have largely disliked this project. I find it dull. I have fallen into the habit of thinking that making the single photograph (which I do each evening) is sufficient. As long as I do that, I’ve accomplished something for the day. Consequently, I find myself taking fewer photographs as I wander with my camera. As if I’ve replaced taking photos of the world around me with taking my daily flash photo.
I appreciate that other people might find these daily projects useful and generative. But I don’t, at least not in a particularly fulfilling way. Useful? Maybe for acquiring a particular skill. Generative? No. Maybe I need to think about the project differently. Maybe by imposing greater constraints, e.g., a photo each day of the same half-filled glass. Michael Beirut who popularized the 100-day project reportedly drew his left hand every day for 100 days. Or more open, e.g., commit to taking a photo each day that captures the sense of some word I’ve chosen for that day (Day 1: Green; Day 2: Anger; Day 3: Wealth; etc.).
In the end, for me, I worry all these parameters will encourage me to produce quantity without encouraging quality or creativity or imagination or questions.
Dublin’s colorful doors are legendary and even staid London has a long tradition of colored doors, though not as dramatic as Dublin’s. Lots of photographers produce series of photos of these doors, photos that end up on countless postcards and posters, typically with catchy names like “The Doors of [fill in city name].” Now that we’ve moved into a post-postcard world, snapshots of those doors probably fill social media feeds. When I find myself in cities known for their doors, I want to be attracted to them. I take photo after photo of them. I vary the composition. Yet I’m never quite satisfied.
#210204.2
The color contrast and textures never quite reproduce in my photograph they way I imagine them. They’re interesting, sure, but something is missing. This photo, for example, works well as a souvenir. I see the cracked, teal doors and recall immediately walking along the little side street, the morning sun warming my limbs. I remember waiting for a car to pass so I could step out into the street to take the photo. But is there more?
#210204.1
This one works better. I like the window poking out from behind the wall, the only splash of color. The dead plant on the right highlights the layers in this photos. Reminds us that there is space between the front wall and the window. The beam set into the adobe on the left is like a question. Why is it here? What does it support? I think there is more nuance in this photography. It hints at something.
Closer to home, I still try to make colored doors interesting. Philadelphia has no shortage of opportunities. I find that the doors in alleys and behind buildings more attractive. Perhaps because I think they are more suggestive. They imply a history filled with people living lives, moving goods, trying to slow the building’s ruing, surrendering to the ravages of time only to try, now and then, to paint over the decay.
#210204.3
Maybe these doors are more interesting to me not because they have been painted some vibrant color, but because they are part of a micro-ecosystem. I like these doors because they prompt me to build a story around them, they reveal layers and layers, each one another history. Colored doors are fine and all, as visuals, but I want my photographs to be more than a pleasing visuals.
The patterns created by the stairs and shadows intrigued me, as did the contrast between the parallels of light and dark, on the right, and the smooth, evenly lit surface on the left. I like the photograph I made that summer afternoon, I like it because it reminds me of the afternoon wandering the gardens, and I like it because I think the two halves present an interesting contrast. But somehow the photo doesn’t capture what I saw in my mind when I took it. It falls short of my imagined picture and include aspects that distract. But I still like this photograph.
#170825
My dissatisfaction with this photo has nothing to do with the picture itself and everything to do with how the picture fails to compel the real world to conform to the image in my head. A translation error prevents me from mapping the ideal world onto the physical world, the world in which I live. I am reminded of Plato’s story about the Demiurge, his quasi-divine, omniscient but far from omnipotent creator. This Demiurge was burdened with creating the messy, flawed world we humans inhabit out of some ideal, eternal, and immaterial world of forms. In every instance, however, the Demiurge was thwarted by the recalcitrant matter that refused in random and unpredictable ways to conform to the plan. We are left with the flawed, decaying real world filled with things that only approximate their ideal models. With every photograph I am enacting in some limited, two-dimensional way the Demiurge’s struggles. I have access to an ideal photograph that exists only in my imagination, but my efforts to realize that photograph always fall short because the world refuses to conform to my ideas.
#191207
The contrasting halves, the crooked lines converging at the top, the tooling marks on the steps, the eroded stone captured my attention. I took a dozen photos of this scene, and although I like this one most, it too fails to capture what I saw. Within the self-help and motivational cottage industry there is a sector devoted to the pursuit of perfection. On the one hand, somebody with a fancy wireless mic pacing around a stages for three to ten minutes urges us to stop letting the idea of perfection paralyze us. The self-help language stretches and distends the aphoristic: “Perfect is the enemy of the good.” On the other hand, somebody, often on the same stage with the same fancy wireless mic and for the same three to ten minutes, reminds us that by striving for perfection we can achieve greatness. The motivational language expands and dilates the aphoristic: “…if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.” The messages are honest, earnest, and affirmational.
#210111
The fractured steps, the weeds, and the graffiti all attest to the impermanence and imperfections of human creation. Plato’s Demiurge never stopped creating imperfect, flawed, degenerate and degenerating things. The goal was not to produce perfect but to produce imperfect. For by considering the limitless series of imperfect humans might glimpse the perfect, or at least imagine it. The imperfect encourages us to reflect, to contemplate, and to imagine. So celebrate the imperfect for it is the only way to bridge the gap between the real and the imagined.
Singular photographs are fragments, or perhaps illustrations waiting for a story to give them context. But series of photographs seem to prompt a different kind of reflection. Collect together enough individual fragments and arrange them in some order, and the begin to reveal something you can’t see when looking at just one. The photographer engages in a sort of Aristotelian project, seeking out as many discrete examples of something in its natural setting in order to discern the features and characteristics each shares. Or the ways that each interacts with, shapes and is shaped by, that natural environment. In this way, photography becomes a project of natural history.
#201213
The intentional and sustained effort to take a number of related photos and to assemble them into a meaningful series encourages reflection and a sort of tranquility. And, in the end, says as much about the object studied, e.g., windmills, as it says about the photographer. But then, that’s true of any natural history endeavor.
