Pay the Photographer ... sometimes?

Okay, as I've aged and become more experienced as a professional photographer, my colleagues and friends have become used to my ever increasingly rigid attitudes about working for free or little pay and demanding copyright respect.

I'll admit, I did my share of jobs for little or no money, gigs where they'll "take care of you next time," or they'll make sure this all adds up to a good, long-term contract.  And there are two that I remember in particular that ended up not paying at all ... not because I agreed to work for free, but because they just didn't pay.  I've done jobs for friends, who hoped it would become something, and I've even cheated myself, trying to put together deals I hoped to become something.

While all these experiences have taught me lessons, and while I think being rigid about payment is as foolish about being rigid on anything else (for example, why not do something gratis for a cause you believe in?) I wish, wish, wish that the world would understand that photography is a skill and a talent that requires a lot of experience and training to perfect.  You should be paid for quality work.  Period.

Now, this may seem to be an odd continuation of an earlier post, even a contradiction to my apparent love of the Vivian Maier Test, but it's not ... and worse yet, that's not where I'm going here.  Rather, I want to talk about Facebook.

Often, my profile pic is someone else's picture.  I recently lifted the one above from the Banksy FB Revolution page, where it was posted (note the passive voice, signaling my uncaring ignorance) and I thought it amusing and symbolic.  I didn't ask, didn't pay, and don't plan to.   Another was lifted from The Times magazine's cover, a picture of the stars of "Doctor Who."  Didn't ask about that either.  This isn't the first time I've wantonly lifted someone's image for my profile, and it probably won't be the last.  Am I a hypocrite?

Well, aside from Banksy's anarchistic free-source attitude, I like to think not, but I'll also admit mine is a modulated response.  These people have made some fine pictures -- as shown by the fact that I wanted to be associated with them -- and I'm sure it cost them time and effort as well as money to make them.  As above, they deserve to be paid.  So am I ripping them off?  Are the thousands, millions of people who lift images and repost them on Facebook casually undermining not just the incomes of artists, but the whole concept of copyright?

Let me invert this: What if I found one of my pictures posted as a profile pic, or shared widely on Facebook.  What if I made a meme, seen around the world, but not a cent to me.  Well, the latter might frustrate me a little, but until some profit-making publication "printed" it (yes, quotes, as "printed" is the only available, if antiquated, term I think for distribution in something like the now internet-only Newsweek) I wouldn't expect anything from it.

Why?  Well, I chose the profile pic example with intent.  That is something I can feel rather confident about.  Finding a picture of mine as someone's profile picture (a pretty bunny, say, though that's hardly my specialty) would strike me as amusing and complimentary.  That individual doesn't expect to profit from the image, aside from the "Likes" of her friends, and has shown her admiration of the picture in the same way she might by cutting it out of a magazine and hanging it on her wall.

Ah, you might say, but you would have been paid by that magazine.  Well, yeah.  And, as I think about it, perhaps this is where the rigidity breaks down.  The error here is in thinking about this in purely financial terms ... and coincidentally this is where I become consistent. 

A magazine buys my picture with the intent of making yet more money from yet, usually in the form of fees from advertisers.  The advertisers, in turn, are paying in anticipation of income because the magazine brings them the eyeballs of potential customers.  My great claim to income in this equation is that my picture is more likely to cause people to look at the magazine than anyone else's.  In this model, everyone makes money ... and the end user is more likely to pay with his attention than his hard-earned lucre.  (For, even in the days when printed media were king, subscription fees didn't even begin to cover the costs of productions; advertising was the real income-producers, first, last and always.)

So where do the pictures in this blog fall?  I'm always the first to admit that this is primarily a business venture, intended to raise my profile as a professional.  However, it's also an exercise in personal expression, and though I wouldn't refuse income if it came my way, this costs me more (in terms of time and effort) than it makes (which is ... well, nothing).  However, I have been careful for some time to use either my own pictures (primarily) or those that I know are in the public domain.  Otherwise, I just link.  This seemed like a good chance to run a test.

So, in the end, even in the gray area of this blog, I think I am consistent, even if my guide is like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's infamous definition of pornography: "I know it when I see it."

Third Victim on Left ...

For a while, I've been giving some thought to the anonymous.

Boy, that sounds a lot more meaningful than it really is, because the anonymous I initially started wondering about were the ones in movies.  You know, in those epic films, when the aliens land or the volcano erupts or whatever, and the shock wave blasts through, followed by the rolling cloud of flame ... all those people you see running in front of it, or sitting in the cars that are thrown about like toys, the people put there by the filmmaker to give scale to the event.  We're all watching the main protagonist, the hero who will dodge into a convenient doorway at the last minute and escape.  But those figures in the background -- we might be given a short glimpse of a pleading face to add pathos to the scene, but little else -- what about them?

Well, naturally, a movie can't be populated entirely by heroes.  That would be ridiculous, not to mention really hard to follow.  Imagine all the plot lines.  However, I often think of a great line by the brilliant novelist Patrick O'Brian.  I can't find it exactly now (I'll add it later, as I have actually copied it into a notebook, the wording is so excellent), but a young character announces he is totally unafraid of death, because he is the hero of his story, and everyone knows the hero never dies.

The quote, I think, is ingenious  in a number of ways (as O'Brian's writing often is), partly because the author would often kill off major characters in his books without so much as a preamble.  Some were simply obliterated offscreen, as it were, in between chapters.  ("After the death of --"  WHAT?!)  However, I think it is more interesting as to what it says to real life, because we all trundle through our own stories, knowing we are at the center of them and everyone else are merely supporting players.  While we can't possibly wrap our heads around the idea of infinite heroes living infinite stories, that's really going on around us all the time.  "The universe," said Muriel Rukeyser, "is made up of stories, not atoms."  It's an interesting thought.

I guess I've been playing around the edges of this concept for some time.  For example, we've been trying to get a project on White House news pictures funded for some 20 years.  The idea is to get some of the old photojournalists that covered the place to tell their stories, and use that to show how a president's image can be permanently shaped by a single photograph, or perhaps a series of images reenforcing each other.

Similar ideas have been done, but usually with either the official photographer, or some big-name photographer like Annie Lebovitz or Harry Benson, who parachuted in to Washington from New York to take a grand tour at covering the presidency.  I was always much more interested in the guys who had been there day in and day out.  You probably know the pictures, but not the photographer.  And I suspect you most likely never will.

Or, for another example, take Star Trek.  After nearly 50 years, it has seen many incarnations, the newest being the second reboot for theater release by J.J. Abrams.

So, you hear that?  At the very end, the noise they cut to, that peeping, sort of sonar like sound.  If you're old enough to have watched the original series in the 60s, you recognize the bridge viewer screen noise.

So let's pause a moment here: that's just one of a spectrum of sounds designed from, well, nothing by a professional to build a realistic bed to make the idea that we're watching guys actually traveling through space.  There's that peep, there's the tones made when they throw switches, there's the iconic whoosh of the doors -- all that stuff was added post production.  Somebody had to come up with it and mix it in.

Have you ever seen outtakes without all that?

The video's terrible, and the audio's pretty muddy, but I think you see what I'm getting at.  It's just flat, like a high school play, without all the rich depth of the additional sound.  The bridge is just another room on a soundstage.

So who did all this?  What genius is celebrated for his work?  It took three Google searches and a great deal of plowing through IMDB to find the name Doug Grindstaff, listed as the Sound Effects Editor.  No personal details, aside from a birthdate of 1935.  Nothing on Wikipedia.  Further searching finds he won five primetime Emmys from 12 nominations.  The last win was in 1987 for "Max Headroom," but none of the nominations was for Star Trek.  All the same, you could only call that a successful and rewarding career, with credits on successful primetime television shows for a solid three decades.

Is he still alive?  As his last credits seem  to be in the late 80s ("Dallas" and "Knots Landing"), I'm guessing he retired.  It would be fun to find him and talk to him, that third guy in the production team on the left, because that ping instantly puts me (and apparently J.J. Abrams) back on the bridge of the old Enterprise.  And that's quite a trick, isn't it?

But in the end, and I guess this is my point, unless someone hunts him down and celebrates what he did, no one save some family and friends, and maybe a few audio obsessives, will remember who Doug Grindstaff was, even as science fiction movies for decades to come draw on the work he did.  He's just become another guy in the crowd, obliterated not by a fireball but by the rolling tide of time.

Maybe we need to take a minute to think about the guys in the crowd.

There Are Not Ten Million Photojournalists with iPhones

Contrary to the recent smartphone ad, anyone with a camera of some sort is not a "photojournalist," for the same reason that someone with a stethoscope is not a doctor.  They are people with cameras who might make an image of something happening, and like fish roe, one in ten-thousand may survive to become a decent picture.

With the recent events around the Boston Marathon bombing, there has been a useful illustration and, secondarily, reaction to emphasize this point.  Kenneth Jarecke made the point extremely well in his blog, and even one of the photographers there, the man who made what may become the iconographic images of the initial event, said it very clearly and well in an interview with Poynter.

"What newspapers and professional journalists need to realize, and the world has to realize," John Tlumacki said at the very end of the piece, "is that we are news photographers, not somebody out there with an iPhone and a camera, jumping over people to put images on YouTube. Our job is act as professionals and to show the world images that they can’t see because they aren’t there.

"I’m so sick of citizen journalism, which kind of dilutes the real professionals’ work. I am promoting real journalism, because I think that what we do is kind of unappreciated and slips into the background."

I recently did a book review for NPPA's News Photographer magazine that, I fear, morphed into a rant about one-man-bands in television news and all the other ills (many corporate driven in a blind, uneducated effort to save a few pennies) that have begun to grind my gears recently.  In it, I cited an event I experienced, where a TV station executive blithely announced to his news staff, including a number of photographers, that "all the best news pictures through history were shot by amateurs." He smiled, as if to soften the blow, and began to run on for a while about the Zapruder Film.

We can laugh about it, we can hope it goes away when the truth becomes obvious, we can scream and weep about it, but I can't help but sense that this is all just a part of the coarsening and decay of the quality of journalism and news.

What You Do ...

There's a saying: Morality is what you do when no one is looking.

I got to thinking about that the other day, when a Facebook friend posted a blog link that coined a phrase I plan to callously steal: The Vivan Maier Test.  It's an interesting piece in and of itself, and you should follow the above link to read it, but it got me going on a tangent.

Lately, you see, I've continued to shoot stills on film, but I haven't the money to process the film (or, for that matter, buy new film -- much of what I have shot lately has been on old stuff that's been aging like fine wine in my fridge.)  Yet I still do it, because ... well, because that's what I do.  I am a photographer, and this takes me to The Vivan Maier Test.

She, as you hopefully already know, was the Chicago nanny who had quietly and privatly shot thousands of photos, apparently for her own amusement.  The quality of the stuff is, frankly, stunning, yet she was completely unknown until some of her negatives were sold in a storage bin auction.  Soon there will be a documentary on her story.

Anyway, here's the point: she shot this stuff without an outlet, apparently without any viewers at all for that matter.  She seems to have done it, I guess, just for the creative satisfaction of it.  How ... pure.

It makes me think of discussions I used to have with friends in college. Mind you, this was in the late 70s and early 80s, so the big media were magazines and newspapers and stuff like that.  One friend had found the rate for a full-page ad in TIME -- some astronomical figure that sounded like the yearly income for a common worker.  With a little additional math -- models, transportation, other accessories -- we figured a major ad campaign ran up six figures of costs alone pretty quickly.  Again, in the early 80s.  So, we laughed, when a top photographer demands thousands of dollars before he even picks up his camera ... well, as a percentage of total cost, that wasn't so much.

But that was an image and phrase that stuck with me: He won't even get out of bed unless someone writes a check for X-thousand dollars.  Frankly, it was an appealing image.  It engendered dreams of a luxurious life in a beachfront hammock.  "How much?  Oh, very well ..."

However, either age or the changing times has shifted me toward the purity of Vivian Maier ideal: to shoot because it needs to be shot, to make a picture for its own reasons.  I wouldn't turn down the thousands -- and it could be argued that the shift for me has been in some way inspired by the profound absence of people offering hundreds, let alone thousands, for my presence -- but there is a true nobility and grace and beauty to the idea.

Apparently, this is a growing feeling.  David Burnett recently did a quick posting on the joys of film, and Vincent Laforet just blogged on a similar experience.  "Somehow, for the first time in awhile, the end result – the resulting 'still photograph' was beautifully overshadowed by the pleasure I felt with the simple act of 'taking my time,'" he said about going out with film as part of a challenge.  But, you see, he still needed to be challenged.  I'm talking about a compulsion.

So, I am a photographer, and I'll keep shooting pictures, ideally with the cameras I'd like to use and on the media (film or digital) that I wish, but I'll do it with whatever I can, even if it's out-of-date film that I can't afford to process. 

What's Wrong With These Pictures -- Update

Saw this today on Facebook from photographer David Burnett:

Dave Burnett

tonight, running around the net, found this cogent description of the "new phone" photography: " .....it's fine, it's fun and funky..looks artsy...but i get tired of photographers acting like they're now 'artists' when it relies so heavily on the phone to do the effect..they're not even making cool effects in their printing or even photoshop..they're just picking an app...." geez, sounds familiar!

What's Wrong with These Pictures?

I was in the kitchen the other day, when a simple still life struck me as interesting.  But, here's the thing: It wasn't just the subject and light that caught my imagination ...

You see, it's interesting and all -- nice, soft, raking light, reflections, lots of exciting colors and shapes -- but in this image, it's not really striking.  It's not something that would make you stop walking by and look.  But what I saw in my head was this:

Now that's much more arresting.  Still not satisfying for me, though, as we lost the bright colors.  So I tried one more thing:

That was more like it.  Perhaps not perfect -- I think a painting, say oil or watercolor, might be even more what I want -- but it was good enough for the moment.  And then I paused. What really did I think I was up to?

With the rise of the iPhone and its many photographic apps, there has been an accompanying rise in controversy (like when a New York Times photographer made a bid for the Pulitzer).  First, it was bad enough that digital cameras made amateurs think they could be professionals, because the cost-free making of thousands of exposures while the ever-increasingly smarter cameras did all the complicated exposure calculations for you allowed them to actually make a nice frame or two.  But now your ever convenient phone did the same, and had a bunch of options that took care of the processing and Photoshopping process for you too!

Secondly, these effects -- effects that in the past required you to actually know how to handle film in particular ways or, for that matter, make a wet plate exposure using techniques a century old (see second exposure above) -- were far more dangerous than merely relieving the "photographer" of any need for knowledge or experience.  They tempted one to make frankly bad or nonsensical exposures, overlay them with a thick coating of special effects, and then act like they were somehow now "good."

So what the hell did I think I was doing when I made those two artsy images?  And are they really better than the first one?  (Actually, the first one is the last, timewise, as it occured to me after making the other two that I was leaning, as so many have, on the iPhone's fancy apps, and I wanted to blog about this.  So I shot it untouched using the iPhone as a "control" of sorts.  It was frankly too much work to get out a DSLR and make an even more conventional control.)

Since the Hipstamatic Tinto 1884 package came out, I've noticed a lot of my photographer friends using it.  And, to be totally honest, I promptly sought it out as soon as I learned what to search for.  It's a cool little effect, and I have been interested in the look and technology of wet plate photography (though I haven't had the chance to try it) for a while now.

However, though I may be able to rationalize my hackneyed use of the Tinto by claiming an interest in photographic history, I have to ask whether I and all my friends are just leaning on it as a crutch to make otherwise mediocre or uninteresting pictures somehow fascinating and artsy.

This reminds me of an anecdote I love to tell when the question of photo manipulation comes up.  I was standing with another photographer, he older and working for a newspaper, waiting for the start of a Pentagon news conference one day.  It was still in the days of film, the earliest versions of Photoshop were just gaining acceptance.  He told me how a young, techno-savvy photographer was showing him all the things that could be done with the program, saving under- or over-exposed pictures, correcting faults, evening out bright and dark spots, and so on.  He ended with the punch line: "I asked him, 'Wouldn't it be easier just to make a proper exposure in the first place?'"

So I have to wonder: Wouldn't it be easier just to make a proper, interesting photo in the first place, rather than something that depends so on special effects to be attractive?  And, countering that, is this yet another example of Marshal McLuhan's overused axiom that the medium is the message?  Is art what you make of the tools, and art designed with certain tools in mind (just as I shot the second picture above specifically with the Tinto package in mind) still art?

Don't Fear the Reaper

So the commute in to work at 3 in the morning can be a peaceful time.  It can also be a frustrating time, but that's for another day.  Today, I want to talk about the odd moment recently when, hurtling down the interstate in the predawn darkness, my radio scanned to an FM station playing the old Blue Oyster Cult song, "Don't Fear the Reaper."

It was one of those moments, like when you catch a special, familiar aroma, when memories suddenly flood back.  You are totally in a moment, that moment so long ago, that it takes an effort to return to the present.  Slowly, you rise back from a waking dream.

I was in my family's Datsun B-210 hatchback again, returning from a dozen parties in the 1970s, plunging through the Washington, DC, post-midnight darkness.  "Don't Fear the Reaper," along with Boston's first album and any amount of other music, was new then.

My mind wandered to how often I have found myself driving alone through the dark at odd hours.  After those parties, traveling to and from college, heading out to assignments for wire services.  The last time I remember being so conscious of that moment, that circumstance, was some 25 years ago, rushing out into Northern Virginia from DC to photograph a train derailment.  As I headed off the main highway and into the countryside beyond Leesburg, I remember thinking how oddly alone I was, sweeping down the two-lane highway as the trees that bordered it flashed by, making an even whooshing sound.  Nothing but the blackness of unlit farmland around me, my headlights lighting the road lines and those trees.

At the time, I thought it would make a good transitional element for a movie, opening with that metronomic sound, like breathing, the undercurrent of the car motor beneath, the lit trunks sliding past, in and out of the headlights.  Whoosh ... Whoosh ... Whoosh.  Whenever the film came to a turning point, we could return to that moment, as the protagonist moved further down his memories of the story, back to long childhood trips and forward to angry departures from lovers.

But this day, on my commute, I reveled in the simple experience of having all this come back, bathing in the memory like a hot tub, and honestly clinging a bit to the feeling of being young again, in high school with the world full of possibilities and nothing denied you by time or bad decisions yet.  How strange it is to be at the other end of the timeline; I don't think I ever really expected to be here ...