On Quality

 Every now and then I like to do a reset, go back to basics and discard accumulated bad habits, tighten up the work flow. I did that in 1997-98 when coming back to serious photography after a long break. I've made an effort recently to do this again, after a shorter and more partial break.

Much of the effort has gone into analog photography, in part because most of the point of going back to analog is to slow down and work the process, to previsualize. As usual, there was some reading involved. We never need to stop learning. In this case I worked through some things marginally relevant to what I do. One of the more useful references was mostly aimed at medium and large format film photography. I've never had the patience to stick with large format for very long, and medium format is too constraining for what I wish to do right now. So instead I'm taking some of the concepts and applying them to 35mm film. That requires tighter control, because any minor deviation from perfection shows on the small negative when it's enlarged or scanned.

Many of us were taught early that with B&W negative film, it's expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights. Taken to extremes, that becomes the zone system which is very valuable to understand, harder to implement with the more agile small camera except as intuitive background info. But then look at the vast majority of work posted on the internet, and most folks are rating film at one EI (usually underexposing) and usually doing one processing time. That's not going to give best results in the full range of lighting conditions.

I'm currently using three different ways of doing things depending on the type of available light. Some of the early results have been processed these past three months, on a couple of different types of film, and a very few printed. Just now I scanned a negative from two months ago. I just saw the payoff for the work.

I need to spend more time on this, scan a few more, later post a couple. I like what I'm seeing so far. Full tonal range, from black to white, subtle grays. Considering it's Tri-X in Rodinal, the grain is surprisingly pleasing.

Just when I was thinking of shooting more digital... this set of analog work needs to be taken to completion. I have some tentative plans for this, and at the moment it's looking promising.

Reviewing the Reviewer

 Today I stumbled on an online review of the Leica M10 which was less than completely positive. Most of the time when that happens it's someone who doesn't impress with their photographic knowledge, but this fellow seems to be a working pro. His opinion needs to be taken a little more seriously based on the better than average quality of his posted work. The way I'd sum it up is that given the type of work he does, I'm not surprised he prefers other platforms. That said, there are a couple of places where I think he at best fails to account for people who do things differently than he does, and at worst hasn't  stopped long enough to really think about a few things.

Which provides an opening for me to think through why I do what I do.

First, let's get the obvious out of the way. I completely agree with him that Leicas are absurdly overpriced. Now that I'm mostly retired, it's unlikely that I'll be buying any more of them.

Back when I began doing photography it was a little more complicated than that. As a working pro photojournalist from the age of 15, I couldn't afford a Leica then either. They wouldn't have worked for what I was doing at the time anyway. It was February 1971 when I started, with a borrowed Kodak Retina Reflex IV and three lenses for the first few months, slow and archaic and finicky. The Leica M4 was still in production, the M5 had just come out. The former wasn't an option because of the lack of a built in meter. The latter had not much size advantage over the other options of the time. More importantly, I was shooting a lot of sports. I needed longer lenses, and the rangefinder wasn't... still isn't... good at that. Thus I put my first earnings into a Nikkormat FTn and 50 and 135mm lenses. Those served me well, and I wore them out over the next two and a half years. I stayed in the Nikon ecosystem for a while, upgrading to an F2 and FM and better lenses, a different (slightly later) multi-coated 50 and 105 mostly.

About 1978 or so I got my first Leica, a IIIf found at a garage sale for an absurdly low price. I played with it in the studio, marveled at the build quality. The little early 1950s vintage 50mm f/3.5 was sharp, as long as one didn't shoot into the light. The early screw-mount body was slow to load, but in retrospect I could have used something like an M6 for the post-punk journalism I started doing about that time, if it existed yet. It didn't exist, not until 1986, three years after I was done with that work. So I used a Nikon. Years later I did shoot a few bands with an M6, and it was quite useful in that low-light up close photojournalism role.

For me, Leica happened in about 1998 or 99, when I was doing mostly street photography in Chicago and studio portraits. In that latter role it supplemented medium format. I'd shoot the big camera on a tripod with studio flash, and wanted something handheld for more spontaneous shots and the combination worked well. It was on the street though that the rangefinder was at its best.

Gradually as my photography moved out of the studio I developed a style rooted in the early photojournalism experience, a spontaneous approach of setting up a framework, letting the model play within that framework, and capturing whatever happened. Perhaps the timing was right, with Tri-X and Rodinal and gritty urban settings the look was successful for me at that time. I could have done it with other 35mm options, but the real answer is I enjoyed shooting with the Leica. The lack of a mirror let me get away with slower shutter speeds  in low light, the lenses were much better wide open than most of the competition and the shallow depth of field contributed to the look, and the ability to see outside the frame lines was well suited to the shooting style, allowing rapid adjustment. During these years I basically used two lenses, a 50mm Summilux and much less often a 35mm Summicron. Only once did I  try a longer lens, an ancient 135mm picked up on a whim for something like $65, and that for only a small part of one shoot.

The reviewers criticisms are more valid for digital, because Leica was at first late to that game. My M8 was an odd camera, sensitive into the infrared range, which sounds like a problem (and is for fashion work, where it can render some black fabrics as purple) but also gives a unique rendering of skin which can be pleasing. It was slow, with limited buffer, and erratic white balance. The 1.3x crop factor was strange, with a 35mm lens effectively acting like a 47mm lens. For some reason it also allowed remarkable print quality all the way up to 17x22 despite the relatively small sensor, by current standards. I used that camera right up until about a year and a half ago, when it was traded for the M10 and brought me more residual value than expected.

Until recently I haven't been shooting as much as several years back, and half of what I have shot has been on film. So the M10 hasn't really been pushed hard yet. The few serious shoots have gone well. The sets with Brooke and then with Chey produced excellent results. The M10 is faster, it's quieter (although still not as quite as the older film bodies), it's got a full frame sensor. It's the same size as an M6 TTL. That doesn't sound like much, but making the body a few mm thinner helps ergonomics tremendously, and also makes it joyful to go back and forth between film and digital bodies the same size and mounting the same set of lenses. I briefly thought the focus had wandered out of adjustment, but that turned out to be a lens, not the camera body. An old 50mm Summicron I'd bought 20 years ago for a very low price because it was cosmetically challenged finally gave out. Even Leica lenses aren't bullet proof it turns out, and I seriously abused this one as did whoever owned it before I did. It appears the rear element pair has started to separate. That's OK, I got my $300 out of that lens many times over. The only regret is that it balances a bit better on the digital body than the Summilux, and is a bit smaller, and I no longer really need that extra stop with improved modern low light sensor capability. So I'll be using it because it's there on the 'lux, not because it's essential.

I want to go after one criticism directly: The reviewer believes that rangefinders aren't accurate enough. I dispute that. Yes, they take a bit of practice. But today I pointed that 'lux at a test subject, focused quickly and shot a frame near close focus at f/1.4, and it was dead on. I can focus on a near eyelash just as quickly, and get it perfectly 95+% of the time, which is slightly better than I can do with auto focus. If he struggles with rangefinder focus, I'd say that's his lack of experience, not a lack of capability. And I'd argue that in really low light neither is easy, but the rangefinder is possible. One of those bands a few years ago, I got my shots in really poor light. A DSLR most of the time hunted without success for that same focus point, unable to get enough contrast to find it. One other factor: At age 17, I could manual focus my Nikon in any light, no problem. Today the eyes aren't as young, and manual focus on a ground glass takes a lot more care. The remaining options are auto focus, with or without EV, or a rangefinder. Any of those work.

The rest, I don't really disagree with him. If I were shooting weddings for pay as he does, I'd want a modern EV camera too. Most of the rest is personal preference. He doesn't mind over-complex menus, I do. I spent an entire career dealing with complexity, I don't need it in what I do for fun. He works 100 feet from his car, so a bag full of heavy gear and lenses is OK. I sometimes carry a camera 10 miles into rugged high elevation backcountry, so size and weight matter a lot to me. And so on.

Would I follow that path if starting out now? Probably not. I got in when pros were starting to dump analog gear and prices were more reasonable, and now they border on the absurd. My M8 was a demo at half price, and as a trade it covered a fair bit of the M10. All my lenses were acquired used. If I were a young photographer today, I might buy another IIIf as a toy, something to enjoy as a work of industrial art and use for fun and when not in a hurry, and then get something more cost effective for day to day work.

Next exhibit

 I'm starting to print for the next exhibit, this one opens October 2nd at a small local venue. Most of the images came together quickly, for this one I'm drawing from the "Minima" series, these are what I call naked portraits, that is they're art nudes but with expression of emotion encouraged. It's all simple backgrounds, either in the studio or with careful composition on location. I'm using images from 2010 through 2022, up to 14 selected right now although I never rule out shooting a few more right up until the last couple of weeks.

It will be a mix of black & white, mostly from the earlier years of the series, and some more recent color work... probably alternating on the wall, although with only five printed right now (and needing to order some more paper) it's early.

Dasha and Tiana below, as examples.

 I'm wanting to elaborate a little on some of the writing immediately below. If I'm rejecting the mallgoth culture, looking beyond the obvious commercialization of rebellion, why is that? What was different about the earlier experience?

The closest I can get quickly to explaining what we experienced in the post-punk years starts from the sublime. It's perhaps best known to us today from Edmund Burke's writings, but they're really quite tedious and he takes quite a long time to get to the point. Instead, I found the following: 

"Arthur Schopenhauer, in "The Will and the Representation" (1819), explored the fissure that lies at the heart of being, and envisaged a self that can in certain situations observe itself in the very act of confronting a fearful inner abyss, and by so doing attain a certain dark grandeur." 

The quote is from Simon Morley, editor of the book "The Sublime" and he's done us a favor because I can vouch that Schopenhauer isn't exactly a fast read, either.

In any case, that abyss is where we were perched in the early post-punk years, and it was a surprisingly wide-spread phenomenon among the folks I spent time with. We'd pretty much universally rejected middle class suburban values, torn the whole framework down, and in the process created our very own abyss. It took a little while to build a new framework. In my case, the void lasted from sometime in late 1978 into sometime in 1980, I think. For sure by April 1981 I'd pretty much worked through it, because by then I was helping a friend find the way. While there was not any one day that was before or after, a milestone was July 14, 1981. That night I met a young woman at Exit, I'm not really sure who picked up who, but we spent the night together and pretty much talked through the entire process of nihilist destruction followed by gradual rebuilding that we'd both been through. I only saw her once more after that plus a couple of phone conversations, but parts of that night are still very vivid memories. We shared a lot of interests, had read a lot of the same books, and it was very easy to talk about it.

That was four months after I'd seen Bauhaus play for the first time, and talked to Peter Murphy and Daniel Ash after the show. They had been, and continued to be, on the same trajectory, passing through a lot of the same interests as me... well documented in their lyrics. It was about a month before The Fall and the afterparty that went into the next morning, and for sure Mark E. Smith understood all this in his own irreverant way. It was more than three months before I met Siouxsie and drank beer with her, an hour or two isn't really enough to get to know someone but my sense is that she hadn't dived that deep into the abstract although I think a couple of others in the band had. Finally, it was a good two and a half years into listening to Joy Division and more than a year after Ian Curtis committed suicide, those songs were much more personal and emotional than they were about philosophical ideas and they never toured the US so I'll never know for sure. It certainly was a fitting soundtrack for the inner city experience of the time, and it appears that Manchester was in some ways like Chicago and other large cities.

The places are an important part of this narrative and possibly hard to comprehend for many today. These were still the cities of white flight, urban wastelands with numerous boarded up buildings and vacant lots and with gentrification barely started in a very few select neighborhoods. Violent crime rates were near all time highs, much higher than today. The US was deep in recession. We'd fled the suburbs, many of us, for bleak, gray but inexpensive inner city neighborhoods where most whites were afraid to go. Barely a week went by that we didn't hear of someone we knew being mugged, and most every month there was another overdose or suicide. The music, the writing, the art grew out of that chaos and anarchy. If some of that music wasn't very upbeat, that's because it reflected daily reality. Still, most were trying to find a way forward, not a way down. Many of us did find paths forward.

There were malls then, mostly in suburbia, but they had little or nothing that we wanted. It was essentially impossible to buy post-punk fashion there, mostly it was constructed by odds and ends, retro stuff from Goodwill stores or resale stores or scrounged and repurposed in some other way. A lot of us were very anti-materialist, and the concept of buying shiny new ready-made coffin shaped backpacks would have horrified us. It kind of still does.

It's been argued that goth goes back to the 60s or 70s, that the Velvet Underground and The Doors were precursers. There were references to "gothic" in a few places in the late 1970s. But it was probably 1982 or later before anything like what we now call goth began to come together in any organized way. Most of us, the first and second waves of post-punk, were gone by late '82 or early '83 and much larger, more mainstream crowds were beginning to descend on the clubs. Where post-punk was more often than not led by British bands, goth became much more American. The earliest examples maybe still had some things in common with us. Early Christian Death, at least through when I saw them (February 4, 1984, in San Francisco; with the classic Rozz Williams/Valor Kand/Gitane Demone/Constance Smith lineup), I'm pretty sure Rozz had read some of the same books that I had. After the surrealism of Catastrophe Ballet that began to drift. I didn't see 45 Grave til sometime later, and while they had a better sense of humor than they're often given credit for, that's about where my interest ends. After that it quickly seemed to become an angst-ridden fashion show. 

My goth experience was mostly later and as a photographer. I worked mostly with alternative models, and by 2003-2009 that often meant goth. Some of those young ladies were brilliant, a few of them understand much of what I've written above. I wasn't working with average people though. They poked fun at mallgoths more than I ever did. We sometimes wondered if it was possible to fake a counterculture look for the camera, and usually the consensus was no, putting on clothes and makeup did not equal authenticity and that it wasn't hard to tell.

That's enough for now. Perhaps I'll find a few photos to go with the stories.

 While on the goth theme: Acid PopTart, from the first of our two shoots so about 2005-ish, in Columbus Ohio. She was fashion editor of Gothic Beauty Magazine during this time. The shoot was done in a light drizzle, in the parking lot of a hotel while another model and photographer shot in one of the  rooms. I've published the whole story elsewhere, so won't go into detail here.

Goth

 

Today there was a local goth day. Photo op, right? Actually it was a bit of a challenge, as so often happens it was mostly mallgoths. Not a lot of authenticity, not surprising away from a major urban area. For at least some of these kids, their ideas come from the internet, not from personal experience. Most telling for me was that the one bookseller at the event had not a single serious work on the shelf, despite the fact that there's so much to work with in this genre it was all superficial fiction... and not even the best of that.

Perhaps I'm being too cynical, having been there at the beginning, before anyone beyond a very few journalists was calling it goth, and that only indirectly. Read the history, and I've seen most of the bands cited before they were popular. Later, I had opportunities to photograph several individuals central to the subculture. In many ways I was lucky. Now, so many years later, some of this feels disconnected from the earlier concepts. 

The images above: The first one, she was pretty much expressionless, vacant, sat in one place and hardly moved for 30 minutes while he did his best Rozz imitation (the real one was a whole lot more chrarismatic). So the image is of visual interest only, and the backlighting was tough. The second one is about the contrast; mom done up as goth, kid in Carhartt's. What will he be when he grows up?

Photographing the band was easy, having done so many of them it took only 8 or 10 images to call it done, and they were only marginally interesting. There was only one person on the floor right in front, everyone else was standing back; can't remember the last time that happened and it sure is easy to move that way. Some of the crafts on the tables offered interesting images, in some ways more interesting than most of the people. In this case the event served as useful practice, zone focusing and framing quickly, grabbing images before the subjects were fully aware... although no one seemed to object to being photographed, if I paused too long they over-posed so it worked way better to grab the images quickly.

Burlesque

 Earlier today, a friend told me she's in a new local burlesque troupe. From the couple of video clips and photos I've seen so far, it looks promising; that's a good thing. A couple months ago I went to see another local attempt and was sadly disappointed. There's a vacant niche here, for sure.

That got me thinking about the various interactions I've had with burlesque performers around the country, and the fascinating people I've met along the way. 

The first group I recall photographing was Hells Belles, in Detroit. That was in January 2005, it was 9 degrees F and we shot in an old restored downtown loft building near old Tiger Stadium in a half-abandoned neighborhood. It was part of a gothic-themed group shoot, organized by Racine Miller... then a law student, now a practicing attorney. She lined up the space, and recruited the majority of the models and did such a great job of it that I had to bring in three other photographers to help, we had over 20 models and three floors of space to work with.

Hells Belles were the first to arrive, all nine of them entering together. They dropped their things in the center of the large empty main room, and started to change and do makeup. One of the photographers tried to be polite and avert his eyes, and soon realized he was surrounded and there was no direction to look that didn't have a performer in some state of undress. It was obvious they'd been doing this for a while, they were soon ready and dispersing in small groups to create images. That was the day I met Sparkly Devil, who I'd shoot with twice more in Detroit after Hells Belles had long since broken up. We accidentally broke up a crack deal on the downtown streets, borrowed a shopping cart from a homeless guy, and made a mess in a clawfoot bathtub in a borrowed Victorian home in one of the then few gentrifying neighborhoods.

 Salome Slaughter was probably next, in Chicago. Again, we met at a larger shoot, this time with perhaps half a dozen people present; she was a friend of a friend. We turned her into a living statue, covered neck to toes in cling-wrap then gauze and plaster, in a duo with another model. The really amazing images happened when we cut her out, after 45 minutes of immobility the freedom resulted in a burst of enthusiastic and spontaneous movement and it was really easy to catch that energy. Again, that led to subsequent shoots. Salome has the distinction of being possibly the most extreme model I've worked with, as far as working conditions. Besides the plaster, we covered her in dried mud, worked in everything from 104 F and hot blowing wind in sand dunes to sub-freezing sleet and snow at Allerton Park, to wading a thigh deep marsh half a mile from the nearest trail. I was in hip boots, she was stark naked. It was actually a while til I got to see Salome perform on a burlesque stage, a few of us surprised her for a performance at Exit... which was outstanding. Considering her formal acting training, that didn't surprise me. That's her in the photo above, an evening shoot along the Chicago lakefront. In typical fashion, we walked under Lake Shore Drive from her nearby apartment and she wore only that one flimsy garment the entire time.

I met Michelle L'Amour in late spring 2010, when she performed (as Naked Girls Reading) at my exhibit opening at Gallery Provocateur in Chicago; her partner Franky Vivid was another of the artists exhibiting that night. It was pretty crowded, so a few of us went to see another performance a few weeks later when we didn't need to be "on" for the audience ourselves, when we could just enjoy. The photo above was taken after that performance, which was top-level. Two of her co-performers (Greta and Crimson) later participated in solo photo shoots. Take a look at https://michellelamour.com/about/ for more about Michelle; and that "The Most Naked Woman" video at the bottom of the page is a very worthwhile 11:54, I strongly encourage watching it.

Somewhere around that time, a little before or after, a group got together in Chicago and called themselves SS-XXX. I knew most of them long before then, had photographed several of them. The shows were OK the first time, repetitive after that. The attempt to be counterculture edgy turned out to be limiting. There's only so much one can do with fire dancing and a grinder on a metal plate throwing sparks. 

 Most of the performers were very good models though. I did a number of shoots with Natalya and they kept getting better. A shoot with Colleen in her apartment was very successful, quietly sophisticated. A shoot with Candy aka Alexandra on the streets and alleys around her Pilsen apartment covered a range of things, including a surpringly soft series against a fence with a Chicago PD car in the far distance, then finding recently expended 9mm casings in the alley right behind her place, then a slightly ominous looking set after nightfall on a bridge over the Chicago River, after a conversation best kept private. 

Curiously, another member of the group who I won't name booked a shoot, and then I turned her away after she tried to reschedule for the second time. I don't think she's accustomed to being told no, but I have a low tolerance for unreliability and in the end she took it well.

There were others, in some cases I don't recall any of the names. The shows themselves are challenging to photograph, rapid unpredictable movement best addressed with zone focusing, and poor or extreme lighting. When it works though it can result in strong images. Experience photographing dance and anticipating movement helps a lot. As a generality, the better performers are not only fun to watch on stage, they tend to make excellent creative collaborators in front of the camera. Movement can range from nuanced to assertive depending on the performers style, and communication is usually easy. So if this new local bunch does as well as I think they will, that's a positive thing.