Lately I have been inspired by the long-exposure photos of Alexey Titarenko. I think his “City of Shadows” is beautiful and haunting. To be sure, some of my fascination comes from my fascination with 1990s St. Petersburg. Nonetheless, I find the images lovely. So I thought I would try some long or, in this case, multiple exposures
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The local café is convenient and has reasonable coffee, so I am practicing there. I like the look, but need to find a better location. I should head into the city one night. Maybe if we get snow this winter. I have some places in mind that will, I hope, look good.
Style has become both a fetish and a marketing device. We read or, more likely in today’s podcast- and YouTube-dominated world, hear and see over and over again that we have to discover our style as if it’s some buried treasure or a form of therapeutic self-realization (the alternative formulation, “we have to find our style” doesn’t change the point). The person telling us to find our style usually offers to help us do so, adopting a sort of guru or therapist role, or, equally often, offers to sell us a class to lead us along the path to illumination. All this focus on style seems to be, at best, misguided or, more likely, fraudulent.
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Style is now a commodity that people sell. In marketing pitches, they link photographic success to finding a style. They dream up exercises and techniques, not for taking pictures or making photographs or thinking about what interests you, but for developing your style. They talk about visual consistency. Although they are quick to say style is more than a set of presets, they then reduce style to a set of prescribed actions that enables you to achieve this consistency of look, as if homogeneity were a desideratum. And they promise to help you find your look. Free newsletters are gateway drugs to $150/hour coaching sessions. Free YouTube videos are infomercials for classes and one-on-one sessions. Some talking head teases the viewer with promises of fame and success, usually through tedious and dubious claims about the presenter’s own overnight economic success. Style is always reduced to economic success.
Never do we hear these people promise your photography will be more fulfilling or more rewarding or more enjoyable. They don’t say you’ll be better able to realize your creative vision, or that you’ll make more important photographs (here, David duChemin’s distinction between good and important is relevant here). No. They can only promise financial success. How often they deliver on that promise is an open question.
Imposing a style, i.e., a signature look, has replaced any expression of creativity or individual intentionality, has reduced photography to an iterative almost algorithmic task. Find a particular scene. Photograph it from a particular angle in a particular light. Process in a particular way. To paraphrase and repurpose Lear:
That way madness and homogeneity and boredom lie; let me shun that. No more of that.
To be clear, I think that after doing something over and over again and with intentionality, a person will create a style. Klinkenborg’s comment seems appropriate here: style is the “fusion of your command of [visual] language and your commitment to your own intent.” Importantly, “you don’t need to think about style.”
Countless artists developed a style, but not by focusing on style. See, e.g., Lucas Cranach the Elder or Albrecht Dürer or Hieronymous Bosch or Giuseppe Archimboldo or Pieter Breugel since I’m in a Northern Renaissance mood. They produced lots and lots and lots of drawings, paintings , sketches, and engravings. Their style emerged, as Klinkenborg puts it, through their command of the relevant language and their commitment to their own intent.
No, the style gurus can’t teach style. They can teach rules. But rules are not style, as Mavis Gallant reminds us:
Working to rule, trying to make a barely breathing work of fiction simpler and more lucid and more euphonious merely injects into the desperate author’s voice a tone of suppressed hysteria, the result of what E. M. Forster called “confusing order with orders.”
M. Gallant, “What is Style?” in Paris Notebooks, 259–260
Gallant’s comment applies equally to photography, and probably every other creative endeavor.
I don’t quite know how Hopkins meant this comment. His poetry suggests, to me, that he meant he didn’t write popular verse. He wrote for an audience of one or maybe for no audience. He wrote what he needed to write and didn’t give any thought to how people might read it.
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Hopkins’ comment pairs well, I think, with a poster I saw the other day:
it’s not always about what you make, but the fact that you are creating.
Today’s economy of exposure demands that we create in the hopes of gaining validation from some imagined audience of potentially thousands. Succumbing to that demand prevents us from making the things we want to see and risks constraining our collective creativity.
Repeat as needed: Be comfortable enough with yourself to create what you need to create. That’s what matters.
Seven women sit in the cafe. I’m the eighth person. Aside from the worker’s voice that carries, the room is quiet. One woman is writing something, her pen poised above a pad of paper. One woman reads a book. Two are working on class assignments — like most students, “work” seems to mean announce that they have assignments to finish, and then to talk to each other about non-assignment issues (e.g., “I’m looking for an audio version of that book I wanted to read” and “My Spotify smart list introduced me to lots of new music” she said as she put in her earbuds). Another woman just entered and put her stuff on the table nearest me. She ordered an iced chai.
The three workers behind the counter pass the time by telling stories.
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Three more women just entered; an old man followed them in. They stopped to put there stuff on a table. He walked straight up to the counter, ordered a large black coffee — “No” he replied when asked if he needed room for cream — and immediately left with his coffee. The women order lattes, one with vanilla.
So went the first hour of business. Maybe the incessant rain discouraged customers from coming in.
The old guy is asking questions, offering suggestions, and taking notes. He’s there with a young couple, planning the music for the couple’s wedding. At first glance he looks like the leader of some cover band, but he’s probably DJ. A full head of lovely silver hair, he is in his mid-60s and easily twice the age of the couple. She does most of the talking. Her fiancé sits quietly, nodding his support when she looks his way. The old guy directs most questions to the young woman. She fields even those the the old guy tosses to her fiancé, who seems overwhelmed, a confused spectator in his own life. The fiancé’s physical presence exhausts his role. His being there is evidence of his agreement with the planning decisions made this morning.
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She, by contrast, has arrived prepared and eager to engage. Consulting her computer screen, she emphasizes her responses with a chopping motion of her right hand. Occasionally her left hand reaches out to touch her fiancé’s shoulder, but her attention remains focused on the old man. She steps through various stages of the event: while guests are being seated, walking down the aisle, entrances, first dance, father-daughter dance. The fiancé nods appropriately. When he looks to the side to retrieve his coffee, fatigue flashes across his face. He shifts, uncomfortable in his chair. He doesn’t share her enthusiasm for this process. Will the fiancé remember this episode? Does the music matter to him? Maybe. Maybe not. The music will likely have no more of an impact on him than the flower arrangements, the menu choices, or the photographer whose serviceable but unremarkable photographs will rot in some drawer amongst a pile of other USB thumb drives filled with important memories.
As they stand to leave, the young woman hands the old guy an envelop, she looks at her fiancé who, on cue, extends his hand and thanks the old guy. They say how excited they are to be working with him. They leave. The old guy puts the envelop in his bag, walks up to the register, orders an oat latte, and sits back down.
