Choosing a new camera

I'm about to buy myself a new camera, my first digital with interchangeable lenses. I'm the sort of person who likes to do a lot of research before making a decision (at least partly because I don' t like actually making them!), and so I've read reviews upon reviews about different DSLRs. But then I stumbled across the comparatively new Micro Four Thirds system (“MFT”, also known as “compact system” or the snappy “mirrorless interchangeable lens digital cameras”). Being the sort of person who is a fan of technology I decided to research whether this new system or the traditional DSLR was the way to go for me – one of the things I kept reading is that buying your first DSLR is as much about buying into a system as it is about buying a single camera.

The key concept of the MFT is that they are designed from the ground up around digital technology, rather than adapting from the technology developed for film cameras. This means that there is no need for a mirror or pentaprism in the cameras, and the lens optics don't need to be so strongly retrofocal. As a result the key selling point of the system emerges – that both camera and lens can be made much smaller and lighter than is the case for DSLRs. Indeed the camera body can be as small as a point and shoot compact while featuring the interchangeable lenses.

Little and Large - an Olympus Pen E3 camera with a
Panasonic 45-200mm telephoto lens.

Photograph? or Photographic Art?

Photography is a discipline that can be undertaken as an art or as a more scientific record, so just as all art is not all photography not all photography is art.

I took both the photos above on the same day while walking along the Thames Path, and the difference between the photograph as a record on the left and the photograph as art image on the right is clear.

Nobody would argue with anyone taking photographs like the right one above calling themselves a photographer, after all it is an unedited photograph. Similarly photographs that have been touched up or slightly modified in programs like photoshop are still fundamentally photographs and so most would agree the producer is a photographer. But where does it end? 

 

The image above is of the Albert Bridge in London. On the left is the original, on the right is the significantly modified derivative. Is the modified version a photograph? I think so, just, given that it is essentially just changing the colours around. I consider myself to be the photographer for both, as I took the original and did the modifications it matters little in practical terms.

The next example is of Stonebridge Park tube station. The left half is a photograph and so I'm a photographer for taking it, clearly. But what about the right half? This is digitally traced from the photograph, but there are no photographic elements left in it, so I'd say it's not a photograph and I regard myself as the artist of it, rather than the photographer. 

 

The top row images of Ickenham are by "cso" and "bowroaduk"
both are used with permission.

Finally we come to a composite of four images, which have then been repeated to produce the final image. Two of the component photographs are of Ickenham tube station, one is Imperial Wharf railway station and the final one is of Island Gardens DLR station (the only Transport for London stations starting with the letter I). The final image is certainly artistic – but is it a photograph and am I a photographer for producing it? I think it is <i>photographic</i> but not a <i>photograph</i>, despite being composed solely of photographic elements*. I do not regard myself as a photographer for having created it though, and I would not think it honest of anyone else to do so either. Particularly if none of the original photographs were taken by them, they're an artist working with photographs rather than a photographer in my opinion.

*Other than the station names being blanked digitally – it was originally created for a quiz where people had to identify the stations, so leaving them in would be a bit of a giveaway!

References:

Costello, Diarmuid and Iverson, Margaret, "Photography After Conceptual Art", 2010

Gerlach, John and Gerlach, Barbara, "Digital nature photography: The art and science", 2007

Photographic Grey

“Photographic grey” is an interesting early example of the increasing importance of photography for publicity purposes and the evolution of this influence as technology improves.

From around the 1860s railway companies were keen to exploit the expanding potential that the relatively new photography could bring. However the cameras and glass plate technology of the day were not able to to pick out in much fine detail in the often darkly coloured company liveries, especially for the all over black that was frequently applied to goods locomotives and wagons. Even when the first films started to be used, the chemistry had yet to be perfected and they were poor at recording red hues – red and maroon were common liveries of the time.

A circa-1909 application of photographic grey to a Midland Railway locomotive

The solution was to paint the locomotives in a mid-tone grey scheme that best suited the cameras sensitivities and enabled as much detail to be recorded as possible. These detailed images were exactly what was desired by the publicity and marketing, particularly of the locomotive builders who wanted to attract customers for their product – with lots of small railway companies and many locomotive builders then market was competitive and any advantage was seized upon.

As the sensitivities of camera technology to various tones hues improved from around the 1920s the use of photographic grey began to give way, first to multi-tonal greys, often in the pattern of the final livery, and then to the standard livery as this became possible to record accurately.

This all changed again with the coming of colour photography – as again attention grabbing images were wanted, locomotives were out-shopped in very brightly coloured, distinctive liveries, often of quite contrasting colours. While the rail industry is very different these days, the concept of making your product stand out in photographs continues to greater and lesser extents in many different industries. 

Newly built steam locomotive "Tornado" in rail grey livery in 2008.
Photographer: WIkimedia Commons user Ultra7. License: Public domain

 References:

Wikipedia article: Photographic Grey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photographic_grey

Nock, Oswald, "British Locomotives of the 20th Century, Volume 1" 1983
"The Railway Magazine", volume 146, 2000 

Cameras, Cameras, Everywhere

Who doesn't own at least one camera nowadays? If you don't have at least one box of electronics specifically designed to record digital images (probably both moving and still) chances are you'll have one on your mobile phone whether you want one or not. At every event you go to, chances are there will be at least one person taking photographs that will appear on Facebook the next day (if not sooner). What does this mean for professional photographers though – is there still a need for them?

Despite their number and prevalence the majority of snappers capture only two sorts of image – “my family, my friends, and my life” (the traditional family album shots), and the “unplanned news event” (citizen (photo)journalism).

Count the photographers

The latter type of photographs are now vastly more common than they were, as the people on the scene when the event happened have cameras where they typically didn't previously. However this lack of cameras on the scene was as true of professionals as amateurs in almost every case (and in the other cases was normally just a matter of luck). Nothing has been taken away from the professionals here, as they are still the ones at the planned events – like they always were, and due to the very nature of the difference between professionals and amateurs in terms of time, I cannot foresee this changing any times soon..

More interesting is the photographs of everyday life. There are only two differences between these amateur shots being taken now and those being taken during my childhood in the 1980s-90s – the volume and the visibility. The volume is a direct result of digital cameras – when you are restricted to 24 shots you chose carefully which frames you exposed, when you can take thousands and edit them after there is no consideration needed. This means you can afford to take a camera with you on a drunken night out. The visibility is a function of the internet – when you are restricted to prints in an album, only your close family and friends would get to see them. Now with Facebook, Flikr, and all the other sites, the world gets to see them. This is what makes it seem like its a new phenomenon, but it isn't. What this means for professionals though is quite different, these photos don't rival those of a professional who puts effort into composition, lighting, etc., in terms of artistic quality, so other than at the bottom of the professional skill range is there any real competition.

However what will it do for the “snapshot aesthetic” photographer when there is no shortage of snapshots to see? Works light Nan Goldin's “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”.distinguished themselves not by the quality of the camerawork but by showing the world the unseen intimate lives of people they didn't get to see. In those days you didn't see anyone's family album, let alone the family albums of those from different subculutres. The Facebook generation though does see all this everyday - every member of the tribe with decent compositional eye can show the world the intimate life of them and their friends. Can the genre survive this? Not without changing itself it can't. In order to make money as a proffessional you have to offer a product significantly different or significantly better to what hte amaterus are offering, otherwise no one will buy it. Their niche has been blown wide open – now these professional photographers need to find a new one or die. 

References:
Allan, Stuart, "Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives", 2009
Eadie, William F., "Twenty-first Century Communication", 2009
Warner Marien, Mary, "Photography: A Cultural History", 2006 

Copyright

Copyright on the Internet is a frequently misunderstood concept – just because a picture is on a website doesn't mean that it's in the public domain. Just as if it were published in a book, a photograph published on a website remains the copyright of the photographer or publisher (depending on the licensing agreement between the two parties) unless explicitly licensed otherwise.

There are exceptions, such as for critical commentary, which is how I can legally use the pictures from people like Zoe Strauss I've used in my older posts, and even then they require attribution. This doesn't mean I can use them for any purpose, or take them and use them in my own work as some have claimed. The only pictures on this blog that are not attributed are those that are my own images (I'm not going to sue myself!).

There is a more recent class of licensing though that sit between the “all rights reserved” of traditional copyright and the “no rights reserved” of public domain. Collectively these are called “copyleft” licenses of which varying subsets are often called “Free” licenses (and here “Free” means “libre” or “free as is speech” rather than “gratis” or “free as in beer”). These licenses allow a much finer control of what you allow other people to do with your work. Perhaps the most widely known are the family of licenses produced by an organisation called Creative Commons, also known as the “cc” licenses. These contain mix-and-match elements that allow you to share your work without giving all control away. For example, Wikipedia and many of the images on it are licensed under the “cc-by-sa” license, the “by” meaning that all users must attribute the authors/artists/photographers, and the “sa” standing for “share-alike” which means that all re-users must also share the work and any derivative versions under the same terms.

I licensed this image of the Bridgnorth Cliff Railway under the cc-by-sa license in 2005. It now illustrates the Wikipedia article, and was recently published in Heritage Railway magazine.

In my view this is a good way to get yourself known, and to provide something for the world community, particularly for images you do not intend to make money off – although there is nothing stopping you from earning money for images you place under a free license.

Copyright law is something that can the subject of a lifetime's study, so nothing here is the last word on it – as the popular phrase on internet discussion fora has it, “I am not a lawyer”.

References: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights

http://creativecommons.org/

Strokes, Simon, "Art and Copyright", 2001

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgnorth_Cliff_Railway

I'm a photographer, not a terrorist

Whether, like the title of this blog, the name of the campaign group “I'm a Photographer, Not a Terrorist” is modelled after Dr McCoy's lines in “Star Trek” I don't know, but the issue that is their focus is one that I feel strongly about.

There is no doubt that terrorism is a serious threat to Britain. However, the more we curtail our rights and freedoms, the more we let the terrorists win. And this curtailment of rights is exactly what is happening due to the government- and media-incited hysteria. It seems that it is getting increasingly hard to find a professional or semi-professional street photographer who has not been stopped by the police or security guards at least once.

Does taking this picture make me a terrorist?
The station supervisor thought so.

I take lots of tube stations - in addition to being an enthusiast myself, I run a quiz for others to identify stations based on unusual views of them, so I'm often taking photos of bits of stations that aren't often photographed. Combine this with street photography and although I'm careful not to take photos anywhere I shouldn't, I do regularly get stopped. Normally the police are polite and when I explain what I'm doing and show them my images they're fine and we both move on with nothing more said. Security guards however are a different matter, while you do get the polite ones who understand photography is not a crime, there are those that demand you delete your photos, leave the premises (I've even been told to leave the premises while on the public street!), etc.

As the I'm a Photographer Not a Terrorist group point out, nobody has the right to make you delete your images. Nobody. Not even a police officer. It requires a court order. The reason is simple, if you are commiting a crime by taking a photograph then the photograph is evidence of your crime – it is a serious criminal offence to destroy evidence, which is exactly what deleting such a photograph is. If you have not committed a crime then there are no lawful grounds for forcing you to delete a photograph.

Street photography is under threat, not from terrorism but from the fear of terrorism. Whenever there is a terrorist attack, the police are always asking for any members of the public to send them any photographs they have as they could provide useful clues. It's contradictions like this that mean “I'm a Photographer, Not A Terrorist” are sadly necessary.

And I've not even started on the accusations of being a paedophile as soon as you have your camera out in public place. Quite why photographing a tram means one is sexually attracted to children I still can't fathom!

"Stop taking photos of our kids you paedophile!" said a middle aged lady walking by as I took this shot. There were no children nearby as this was mid-afternoon on a school day.

References:

http://photographernotaterrorist.org/

Ekkleesia staff writers, "We're photographers not terrorists, say press freedom day activists", Ekklesia.co.uk 3 May 3011

Hughes, M and Taylor, J, "Warning: Do not take this picture", The Independent, 2 December 2009

Biography 3 - Zoe Strauss

Zoe Strauss is a Philadelphia-based American photographer.

Starting later in life than many photographers, she was 30 when given a camera, she concentrates on her home city. Focusing on what she sees around her that most people overlook, and not restricting herself to a single type of subject, she embodies the post-modernist outlook on art. Hosting exhibitions on concrete pillars and selling photocopies of the her works cheaply she further rejects the traditional view of who should be able to appreciate photography. Coming from a working class background, art accessible to the public is something she passionately believes in, although she does still have shows in major galleries to her name.

Passionate about meeting people, her outlook on life is probably best summed up by this quote from The New Yorker magazine, “If a lesbian anarchist can drive into the desert, knock on a stranger’s door, and go into a trailer where there’s a bunch of guns, and leave with kisses, a promise to return, and a cup of Sanka to go, all’s right in the world at that moment”. This freedom of what to photograph and who to interact with defines the spirit of her work.

These two photographs from her recent work, “America” illustrates the diversity of subjects at a glance. Yet they both, in their own way, record something that is everyday and yet intriguing. The first photograph, is a roadway that could be in many places in the world – the perspective draws me in and wants me to find out where it goes, while the bright yellow sign on the right is intriguing me to find out more. It's such a simple message, but what is it really saying? Why here? How many people drive by this every day and don't think anything of it? I know I did exactly the same when I commuted 30 miles to and from work each day – it takes a photographer to take a picture before we stop and think.

As a rule, I'm not generally into portraits, they're just not my thing. However this one has my interest. Who is she? Where is she? What is her story? Her face suggests she's seen some interesting things in her time. She isn't young and she isn't beautiful, and her surroundings are far from glamorous, exactly the sort of person overlooked by much of contemporary media, and yet Strauss has not shied away from photographing her. If all portraiture was as real and unmade up as this, then perhaps I would have more time for it – perhaps its the artificiality puts me off, rather than the subject.

References:

Rorring, Rollo, "Zoe Strauss Meets Strangers", The New Yorker, 27 October 2010

[Audio interview], "2005: The Year In Stories", WHYY, 25 April 2005

Feminism

Feminism is no one thing, it is different things to different people. Although most see it as meaning the rights of women – whether that means superiority or equality, and whether that is best achieved by treating men and women equally or differently, depends on which feminist you ask. Whether men can also be feminists, and whether “positive discrimination” is at all positive are other questions without consensus.

One of the most high profile feminist campaigns in the art world, aiming in this case at the end of what they see as discrimination against female artists, is that of the “Guerilla Girls”. An anonymous collective of female artists founded in 1985 and based principally in New York, they have engaged in high profile publicity campaigns against such targets as art galleries featuring only male artists in exhibitions.

While there are many female photographers who identify themselves as feminists, Annie Leibovitz, Cindy Sherman, Nam Goldin and Barbara Krueger, there is no single style or single topic that one can point to and say “that's a feminist photograph”. Common topics that essayists on the subject of feminism point to are such themes as examining gender roles and seeking to document life from a woman's perspective, but those women who do not describe themselves feminists also photograph just the same things. 

 

So although there are hundreds of photographs by feminists, I remain unconvinced “feminist photography” exists. The image above is a good example, at first glance quite a male chauvinistic image of a scantily-clad woman in bright red high heels on the knee of a powerful suited man, is actually taken by Annie Leibovitz, a self-described feminist.

It seems therefore that just as Marcel Duchamp famously said “Anything is art if the artist says it is”, anything is feminism if a feminist says it is.

References:
Williams, Val, "Illuminations: women writing on photography from the 1850s to the present", 1997
Warner Marien, Mary, "Photography: A Cultural History", 2006

Biography 2 - Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin is an American photographer best known for her works giving an intimite portrayal of groups such as Boston's late 1970s and early 1990s post-punk music scene and the members of the newly vibrant gay scene of the same era. Her most famous work is undoubtedly the 1979-1986 collection published as “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, notably depicting from an insiders point of view the hard core drug use and the relationships of violent and agreessive couples she surrounded herself by after moving to New York following her graduation. Martin Parr has argued that this was the major boost to the personal snapshot aesthetic of photgraphy that catpulted the genre into public consciousness.

Goldin grew up in middle class Jewish family in suburban Boston in the 1950s and 60s, but her previously peaceful family life was shattered when her older sister commited suicide in 1965 aged 18. Most biographers her later choice of relationships and societal companions on this event to a greater or lesser extent.

Her early work, prior to around 1995, is dominated by hard realities of love, violence, sex and relationships while since that time her work has mellowed and includes subjects like babies, parenthood and family life. Topics that one would not necessarily associate with someone who focused on transexuals and drag queens for her notable works while younger. While attracting ciriticism for her works appearing to glamourise drug taking, she has spoken out against the “heroin chic” since the early 2000s.

This image, possbly one of the tamer ones from her early works, reflects the snapshot style taken with the available light in grungy surrounds that she preferred.

References:

martinparr.com – Official Website

Goldinm, Nan, Costa, Guido et al, "The Devil's Playground", 2008

Coast, Guido, "Nan Goldin", 2010

Biography 1: Martin Parr

Martin Parr is a photojournalist and documentary photographer from England who is particularly noted for his critial photographic protrayals of suburbia and suburban life. His approach to his work is to depict his subjects in an intimate manner in their natural environment, sometimes quite anthropological in style.

Active since the 1970s he cites being shown the work of Tony Ray Jones while studying at Manchester Polytechnic as being the biggest inspiration on his early professional career. A keen collector, the “garish” postcards produced by John Hinde in the 1950-70s are also cited as influential to his colour work.

This photo of Parr's of the Swiss Alps from his 1995 book “Small World: A global photographic project 1987–1994” illustrates his post-modernist approach to doucmentary photography. This is neither a portrait of the browsing shoppers, nor a classical landscape shot of the dramatic mountain scenery. It is however a portrayal of life as it is – a window on the world as he sees it. Yet it is more than just a casual snapsot, composed to show the juxtaposition of commerical tourism with the wilds of the snow-capped mountains beyond. It is a study of the apparent indifference to this grand vista that the browsing couple show.

This preponderance of documenting the real life does not win him acolades from all quarters though, with one Sunday Times article describing him as possibly the most polarising of all contemporary phographers.

References:

Samdal, Robert, "Martin Parr polarises the world of photography", The Sunday Times, 20 April, 2008

Martin Parr.com – official website

Parr, Martin “Small World: A global photographic project 1987–1994”, 1995.

Phillips, Sandra S, “Martin Parr”, 2007

Modernism and Postmodernism

Modernism is a cultural movement focused on the future, on social change, on technology originating in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. It was founded as a reaction against the more conservative Realism movement that preceded it.

To a large extent it is about context and needing to understand the context and the background to a work before you can understand the work itself.

The invention and development of photography largely coincided with the rise of modernism, and the technology was embraced as art by many followers of the movement. Documentary photography was apropriated as art as well as the abstract and avante garde.

Alexander Rodchenk and Jean-Eugne Atget are notable photgraphers of the early 20^th century part of the movement.

Florence Henri's “Composition with ball and mirror” from 1930 shows the strong compositional aspect to modernist phtography.

Postermodernism arose in the latter part of the 20^th Century as a recation to the then-prevailing modernsm. It strives against the hard classifications of modernism, and is more playful with meanings and cultural references – it's about works for everybody more than works for those who understand. It is highly represented in modern contemporary culutre's adoption of the everyday as a worthy subject. Where modernism adheres to rules and convention, postmodernism breaks free of them.

Japanese photographer Miwa Yanagi's image, from her “My Grandmother” series illustrates the freedom of postmoderinsm in photography.

References:
Roberts, Helene. "Art History Through the Camera's Lens", 1995
Warner Marien, Mary, "Photography: A Cultural History", 2006

Semiotics

Semiotics is the study of signs within a culture, particularly with reference to how they are used for communication. Communication is the exchange of information between parties.

Semiotics states that the information exchange is an exchange of signs – things that have a form (e.g. writing, an object, a gesture) and refer to something other than itself. For communication to happen, both parties must both recognise that the thing is a sign, and understand what it refers to. This is not universal – different languages have different signs for the same thing for example, and different symbols mean different things in different cultures.

The picture above is of a collection of road signs in Llanberis, north Wales. All three are dependent on the reader knowing the signs they portray, but to different extent. The bottom one is giving directions to the village car park – two concepts, a “village” and a “car park” that speakers of the English language recognise by those two signs, which combine to make a third concept “the car park for the village”. Speakers of the Welsh language recognise the same concept also by a combination of the same smaller concepts, but represented by different signs “maes parcio” (“car park”, or literally “field [for] parking”) and “y pentref” (“the village”). The white-on-blue “P” sign is a pan-European sign that also represents the concept “car park”. The arrow is a near universally recognised sign representing direction. The brown background to the signs represent another sign when appearing on British road signs – that the information shown on the sign relates to tourist destinations.

The middle road sign uses linguistic signs to impart meaning to a new sign – those seeing this road sign are being taught that from this point on the picture represents the concept they already know as “Electric Mountain” in English or “Mynydd Gwefru” in Welsh. Further road signs do not need to repeat all this information.

The top road sign uses no linguistic signs at all. Some of the signs are familiar from being defined as standard signs for use throughout Britain (e.g. the “P” and “steam train” graphics) but others are defined only locally on a previous sign, for example symbol left of the “P” - if you have not seen the explanations previously this sign is nearly as meaningless to you as “Rheilffordd yr Wyddfa” is to a non-Welsh speaker. “Nearly” because it is aimed at tourists who will know that there is a funicular railway in Llanberis and recognise this as a train going up a slope, and thus it's a sign that signifies the “Snowdon Mountain Railway”.

Even within a culture, signs do not work if you don't have the expected knowlege to understand the meaning – the associations that are provided by the signified are not communicated and the communication becomes meaningless. Comapnies spend lots of money on getting celebrity endorsements for the products they are advertising, hoping that by the association the values associated with the celebrity will be associated with the product. For example, a golf club manufacturer will spend millions to get Tiger Woods to endorse their product – hoping that you will associate excellent golfing performance with their clubs and so buy them to improve your game.

The image above is another example of celebrity endorsement. This time for “Swift Cover car insurance” (and it is only because I've seen previous adverts that I know this much), who will have paid lots of money to get this man to appear in their adverts. However as I had no idea who he was, the advert means nothing to me. In finding a copy of the image above, I've learned that he is “Iggy Pop” and although I know he is (was?) a signer that is the exent of my knoweldge about him and I'm still clueless about what message the advert is trying to say. I do not recognise the sign and so the communication fails. The watch he is holding is another sign, but this one I do understand - it represents time. 

Referenes:
Chandler, Daniel. "Semitoics: the basics", 2007.
Bignell, Jonathan. "Media Semiotics: An introduction", 2002