What Might Be

 From a conversation this morning about recent landscape work: A few of the images are of ecological restoration sites that I've done design or permitting for; young alders along the restored Salt River, for example. One of the first steps in a restoration is understanding what was once there. In this case we were able to put part of it back, but not all of it.

Other images are of still degraded landscapes. In those cases, I guess I'm seeing what's there now, and what was once there, and what might be there again someday. It's a very intuitive thing, thinking in multiple and dynamic temporal scales... and not easy to explain.

After that I spent a few hours relaxing at the hot springs. Nice to unwind a little, and going two hours south meant it was 10 degrees warmer. No major revelations, but there was a chance to think about already defined things.

 This is my current analog loadout, about to go with me to get another cup of coffee. Lightweight and it barely fills a third of a Domke bag.

Changing to digital, the camera body would be about 3 oz heavier but no need for a handheld meter or film; I'd carry a charger and extra SD cards only for extended out of town travel. So probably a wash or just a bit heavier depending on the situation, but not enough to matter.

These days, I consider simple to be a good thing.

 Over the weekend I loaded a roll of medium format and shot half of it, intending to finish the rest of it sometime in the next few days. A lot of the reason is simply that I have a roll of Plux-X 120 sitting around  waiting to be processed, old enough that I don't even recall what's on it. May as well fill a tank, so it was an excuse to pull an old 500C out of the drawer where it usually lives. 

This quickly led to a realization: As much as I enjoy the quality that comes with the larger film negative, and as much fun as I had for years working in medium format, right now it doesn't fit my goals very well. I'm just happier with the small, unobtrusive 35mm rangefinder.

For now, that is. I tend to do something til I get bored with it and desire to break up the routine a little.  That may take a little while or a long while.

 

 

Chey Alexandria, from the "feral" series. December 2021, on the Russian River in Mendocino County.

Film

 Because it's been a while since I've processed film in quantity, I'm stepping back and making fresh decisions about which products to work with. That's because things change over time; the film stock, the chemistry, the nuances of my processing technique, my preferences for the end look. There's a great deal of misinformation on the internet, much of it from well-meaning newcomers who either read it somewhere else, or are doing their best to interpret their own results but not controlling for variables. For example, I've seen at least two recent statements that Tri X allegedly hadn't changed at all since introduction; one claimed to quote a post by a guy from Kodak (but with no link or citation). It's not even close to true, one look at my early work and more recent work makes that very obvious. Other sources claim multiple changes over time which is far more likely to be true. There was one big change that resulted in Kodak publishing new processing times (according to Wikipedia, this change was in 2007 and included allegedly finer grain and less silver; but they don't cite a source either. I do know that some of the new HC-110 times are not accurate, see the notes on Massive Dev Chart and my own experience backs that up).

So at the moment I have four rolls of Tri X, and two rolls of FP4 ready to proof and there are a couple of rolls of HP5 ready to process. All were done in Rodinal at 1:50 dilution and all with the same agitation and temperatures. I'll print a few examples, see what I like and don't like, and then shoot some more with whatever seems to be working for me. There are a few old rolls of 120 sitting around too, one-offs of each of several film types, great reason to run a couple more rolls through a medium format camera.

I probably won't settle on just one thing. Rodinal is a high acutance developer, which I like; that means the edges of the grain are less diffused, which gives the appearance of more grain and better sharpness although it's not really the same thing. That works for some subjects, not as much for others. So for those other things, I could use FP4, or I could just go to medium format... which I may very well try for the landscape work. It's a heavier rig but can be set up to be not too bulky. A tripod is a big advantage with larger cameras. I may not want to haul that on a 12-mile backcountry hike over rugged terrain, but close to the road it's perhaps worthwhile. 

I'll zero in pretty quickly on what I want to use. Things other than the look of the images may or may not factor in. 35mm Tri X is about $2.37 per roll more expensive than HP5. That doesn't matter for a few rolls, but over a hundred rolls it adds up. But then Tri X is available in 100 foot rolls for a better price, and I still have two of my old bulk loaders and would just need to buy a few new reloadable film cassettes at $2-something each and see if I can find the trimmer for the roll leader. So HP5 has a cost edge for small to medium quantities, but not for large quantities. Then there's the matter of whether one company is more deserving of support than another. I'm just beginning to look at that. Kodak is presumably still a fairly typical large publicly held corporation. At last check Harman (Ilford) was owned by a venture capitol firm. Either way, they're about making a profit and may or may not differ in how much they actually care about photography. That will take time to research and it's not a top priority this week. It's something I'll want to forget the moment I pick up a camera and go in search of images. There, it would just get in the way.

One thing that has become painfully clear doing just this little bit of information gathering: A lot of once commonplace film photography knowledge is rapidly being lost. Things that were once on my darkroom shelf, and that of most every other serious photographer, have in some cases become hard to find and often hidden behind internet misinformation. Young photographers, if you have opportunities to learn from older folks who learned when there was only film, go for it while you still can. Gramps may know things he's forgotten he knows, and will probably benefit from being around your creative energy. Maybe he'll even dust off that old camera.

Resilience

 

When I returned to serious photography in 1997, after a long absence, the first step was to recalibrate, to dial in technique. With photography, I've found it's helpful to learn the rules so one can then forget the rules. That is, get equipment handling and technique to the point that they're largely intuitive, and can then fade into the background. That frees up space to focus on the creative elements. It's perhaps daunting for someone just starting out, but I'd already worked at pro and semi-pro levels for something like 12 years, so for me it was more of a refresher and breaking some bad habits acquired as a photojournalist. In the early newspaper days, end published reproduction quality was often marginal at best so the incentive was to get the shot and worry less about say, holding the shadow detail. When I was ready to shift to exhibiting and higher-quality publication the quality had to step up some.

A lot of that initial calibration happened with landscapes, since they're readily available and it was possible to go somewhere, spend days away from other distractions, and just photograph landscapes. At first that was close to home (I was still living on Chicago's north side at that time, so usually it meant a 30 or 40 minute drive out to suburban open space). Toward the end of that year I transitioned to photographing people, and I also made extended trips to a couple of the standard and classic landscape photo places. There was a spring trip to Yosemite which lasted a week or two, and then a two week mid-winter trip to Joshua Tree. 

I was mostly shooting medium format film at the time, most everything was done with one camera body, one lens, and a couple of backs and a hand-held meter. A tripod added some serious bulk and weight. On the Yosemite trip I mostly photographed alone even though I was camping with some rock climber friends at Camp 4; a typical day involved an hour or two hike and then several hours working a given location. Joshua Tree was a bit more diverse. Jon was there for the entire time, now he's a successful commercial photographer http://www.jonchristophermeyers.com/ but then he was young and still learning and it helped me a lot to have to explain most everything I did, it brought to the surface a lot of things I'd been doing intuitively. Ellin was also there for the entire time, as was Melissa. Branka, then one of my favorite models, drove out from LA for several days mid-trip. So there was an interval of people in the landscape within a trip mainly oriented on just the landscape.

I still have a portfolio of prints from those trips somewhere, plus some slightly later images from Glacier National Park and a few Chicago region locations. They're generally perfectly exposed images, archivally printed on fiber-base paper, selenium toned, with rich tonal range. 

When I look at those prints today, all I see is pretty pictures of the landscape. They're related only by place, and otherwise pretty meaningless. 

I didn't have much time to think about it then, because by the time of the Joshua Tree trip I was already well into the "Strong Women" concept which was exhibited a bit later. I kept photographing people, and didn't do a lot with the landscape again until recently.

Last fall included a trip to Ridgecrest CA, in the Mojave Desert. It was a work related trip, but things weren't excessively busy at the time so I was able to wrap a couple of extra days in and drive the long way, up 80 and over Donner Pass and then down 395 on the back side of the Sierra's. I started photographing the second day at Mono Lake, in the higher elevation Great Basin Desert. It was past peak season and hardly anyone else was there. Hiking the best known trail got a few pretty pictures, and a feeling that this has been done a zillion times before. The shift began back at the trailhead when I walked across the road and took a few shots of the dead trees across the road. Then a few minutes of research identified some less traveled trails. Half a day later, I had some images that were a lot less conventional. Carrying just the M10 with a 50 Summicron, I was able to scramble to places that would have been challenging at best to reach with a bigger camera and a tripod.

Those images set the tone for the rest of the drive, with several stops along the roads and batches of images. After a day and a half of work things the return drive had to be more direct and with a lot fewer pauses, although a couple more interesting things were photographed along the way. 

In keeping with the previous post, I won't elaborate on the current concept except to say that the working title is "resilience" and that it was born on a rutted dirt track somewhere just south of Mono Lake. I've added some northern California images since then, a much more densely vegetated place than the deserts. It may very possibly split into two (or more) themes by the time it's done, too early to know right now. 

Philosophy

http://leicaphilia.com/ is a fascinating blog that I look at every now and then. In this age of internet gear geeks, this fellow, who among other things has a philosophy background, tends to focus much more on the act of creating images, and things which facilitate doing so. Also unlike many of the photography blogs I've seen recently, there's some quality work posted. It's refreshing to see black & white images that have a full tonal range, it's all too rare.

He doesn't post that often. In what is, at this writing, the most recent post (August 2021), he says:

"...a creator should never explain his work. Much better to just put it out there and let people explain it for themselves. There’s nothing worse, in my mind, then pretentious artist’s statements. Good art comes from somewhere other than the logical mind and can only be diminished by intellectualizing it."

I partially agree. Or maybe I agree part of the time. Certainly I'm guilty of sometimes wanting to explain at least my overall concept, although they tend to be short explanations and I hope they're not pretentious. As both a writer and photographer, it helps me to write about my thought process, it helps the concept to more fully come together more quickly. Perhaps the decision then is if, or when, to share those writings and when to keep them personal. Recently I've done it both ways. Going forward, probably it will depend on the concept and on the setting and on my mood at the time.

We're in complete agreement that it helps a great deal to have a theme or a concept to tie the work together. I'm not going to go look for the exact quotes, but it's there in more than one place, all the more reason for you to go take a look of your own. For me, the realization that the concept is really important was a paradigm shift, a night and day difference in how I photographed. The day I figured it out was the day I was offered my first serious gallery exhibit and that was not a coincidence, and that curator gets a lot of credit for gently nudging me to the realization. Ralph Gibson talks about something similar in his book "Duex ex Machina" where (on page 9, in the introduction) he quotes Dorothea Lange calling it a "point of departure." That story, about a conversation that happened in San Francisco in the early 1960s, was printed in a book structured as multiple themed chapters, that was published in 1999; not long after I consciously figured out something that I'd already done accidentally and subconsciously during my post-punk photojournalist years and then forgotten for a while. For both of us, and probably for many others, it took a while to understand.

Us art photography types often tend to overthink the concept. At least that's the realization I came to after one of several conversations with fashion photographer Sam Hessamian https://www.thecoolist.com/sam-hessamian-fashion-photography/  Sam was one of the f-eleven collective photographers, one of the about 40% of the group that I never met in person, but we did talk during the time the books were being put together. That was about 12 years ago so I can only roughly paraphrase now. Roughly, what Sam told me was that as a working fashion photographer he had to sometimes have a theme... what he called "a story" several times in a week, which didn't leave time to overthink it. And that a story didn't need to be complicated, that it could be as simple as "red." I'm pretty sure that was the example he used. All that mattered was that something tied the images together into a semi-coherent whole.

Almost everything I've done since that conversation with a gallery curator in... 1998? has had a theme or concept. Before that, back in the beginning, my mainstream 1970s photojournalism work had default themes because I was usually working specific assignments given by my editor. Then my post-punk work was conceptual because of a cultural accident, the subculture itself tied everything together, made the images about something. It wasn't til later that I had to figure it out for myself, and that required first an understanding. Sometimes a concept lasts a week, sometimes it lasts a decade. Sometimes they're simple, sometimes they're complex. Whatever the circumstance of the moment, that's made all the difference.

Media

 I'm back in an analog mood. These things are unpredictable and not entirely rational, when the mood strikes the easy way is to follow it for a while. In this case I think it's mostly about slowing down a little, engaging with the process of creating images, getting back to basics for a while. It's going a little deeper this time: In addition to processing film (six rolls so far this week, mostly Tri X, some FP4, a roll of HP5 in the camera now) and getting a feel for current iterations of various choices, I'm also back to processing in Rodinal. It was long one of my favorites, put on the side for a while. It's a huge plus that I was able to grab a mostly full bottle that's several years old and it works just fine.

I've also cleaned up the darkroom and am almost set to print. The only thing I'm waiting on is some Dektol which is one the way from B&H and should arrive day after tomorrow, so probably there will be contact sheets this weekend and maybe some prints. For now, I may stay with hard copy and not scan much... concentrate on the process for a while as I zero in the workflow.