"Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above
all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the
key to photography."
- George Eastman
I have a nascent lecture that I noodle with (noodling being that thing where you think about it from time to time, but don't actually write anything down) that explains that all photography is nothing but light. I'm still working on how to make it comprehensible and even a little profound, so you'll have to forgive this over-short, lunken version, but basically it revolves around the fact that, in physics, things don't really have colors. Rather, they absorb all of the light rays of all the other colors in white light, and just reflect the wavelength of the color we perceive them as. So a red ball isn't red as a state of being, but is something that reflects red light to your eye.
By extension, by the time you get to photography, you're not really making pictures of things, but rather you are capturing the light that reflected off those things. Pictures aren't of things, but of light.
Get it?
Yeah, I'll keep working.
Anyway, over the past months I've been saving some websites on photography and other things that seemed worthy of mention.
One is a blog by Cheri Frost explaining that, like any profession, photography can't be learned through one simple, miraculous training session. "Instead of allowing Experience to teach, the industry has gone another route: they have replaced Experience and her years of wisdom with Mr. Fast Track," she writes. "Oh, he’s smooth, real smooth, and hip and trendy. He’s like the photography equivalent of Weight Loss Pills-guaranteed to work overnight. He’s got answers for everything AND a workbook, forum, DVD and/or downloadable e-book."
This is a variant on something I've ranted about before, especially when a couple of these charismatic session people were accused of plagiarism (and the reporter writing on it completely missed the point -- this point),
Meanwhile, Mark Manson notes: "In our instant gratification culture, it's easy to forget that most personal change does not occur as a single static event in time, but rather as a long, gradual evolution where we're hardly aware of it as it's happening." He's talking about the things he learned in his 20s that he wishes other 20-somethings would know before that special period of life slips by, and I couldn't agree more.
And while you're learning those lessons, there's also this. Normally, I find these things overly technical, or reflections of the sort of flashy, pointless stuff the Superstar Photo Seminar people mentioned above do, but Jeff Meyer's suggestions are all good ones ... and not coincidentally, I think, resemble what you would have to do if you used an all-manual, film camera for a while.
Now I guess I have to get on that "post a photo a day" thing, maybe over at Guy with a Leica.
Finally, I find Avedon's work interesting in a paradoxical way. Part of me thinks it's brilliant -- simple, unadorned, straight-on shots in front of a plain, featureless background; the subject stands alone. Part of me thinks it's a rather simplistic, easily imitated trick, overdone even by Avedon. I have that feeling about others who have "trademark" styles (like William Wegman or Joyce Tenneson), but then again, if it works ...
Anyway, there was an interesting little blog in the New Yorker about Avedon's efforts to make a portrait of the recently deceased author Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I wonder what it was he so disliked about the 1976 picture ...
RANDOM BONUS THOUGHT: Some April Fools Day, the cable company should list the "80s Porn Channel," which would be a signal that never descrambles.
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