Photography – Page 2 – LCS & GBML Central

Assignment 1: Photograph a Reflection

Halsman defines creativity and imagination as Une Tournure D’Esprit in his book The Creation of Photographic Ideas. He also proposed a set of rules to help developed your photographic creativity. Some target your logic thinking, some target your unconscious. I…

Halsman defines creativity and imagination as Une Tournure D’Esprit in his book The Creation of Photographic Ideas. He also proposed a set of rules to help developed your photographic creativity. Some target your logic thinking, some target your unconscious. I was tempted to start practicing Halsman rules, but they felt a bit daunting and I was a bit lost on where to start. Where they written in order? Should I just focus on one of the rules? Should I stop thinking about it or just stop thinking about it and let it permeate for a while? Hence, I decided to dig a bit more around just to see if I could make my mind about what path to take.

After reading a few, not very interesting webpages and blog post, I finally run into Becoming a more creative photographer by Harold Davis. A collection of seven articles written back in 2009 which target how to help you develop your photographic creativity. And yes, the bottom line is to keep shooting no matter what, as you may have guessed. However, each of the seven articles target a specific topic for development. Also, along the way each article lists a sequence of assignments for you to practice around the discussed topic. If you have some time and curiosity, go and check it out. I am sure you will find something useful there. “Expecting the unexpected” is the first article of the series. The first assignment on the list reads as follow:

Your assignment: Photograph a reflection (in water, in a mirror, etc) so as to convey an entirely different world.

Actually, when I read about this one I just smiled. I did it even before I read the article and decided to take the assignments route. This looked promising. I had the opposite problem, now I had to choose one reflection picture that conveyed the idea of an entirely different world.

Talking about open interpretations in a sentence. I guess that is the goal, to force you to explore all possible interpretations of your images and see where do they take you. I eventually chose the picture shown above. What eventually pushed me to choose this one over a few others was that it shows both worlds, but with a subtle, ephemeral, and easy to miss reflected world. Moreover, it showed the reflected world as a narrow, flickering, and easily missable invitation to get you transported to a realm of unknown and uncertain rules. To a time long passed. To the place where your actions shaped your path. To the spot in time that enabled you to now be there staring at the ephemeral doorway to hypotheticals.

Xavier on Google+

Une Tournure D’Esprit

I still do not own a copy of Henri Cartier-Bresson‘s The Decisive Moment. It seems hard to get a decent copy at a reasonable price. However, Philippe Halsman‘s The Creation of Photographic Ideas has been on my shelves for quite…

I still do not own a copy of Henri Cartier-Bresson‘s The Decisive Moment. It seems hard to get a decent copy at a reasonable price. However, Philippe Halsman‘s The Creation of Photographic Ideas has been on my shelves for quite a while now. In the book opening, Halsman defines creativity and imagination as une tournure d’esprit—or a mental attitude and ability which can be directed developed. Although this resonated strongly the first time I read the book, successive readings have let me to a different crossroad. A crossroad I am not sure how to approach. Philippe writes bluntly

“Those photographers who take pictures belong to the candid photography school. Their greatest representative is the Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson who never interferes in the action of the photographs and whose unobtrusiveness is so unique that it has created a legend that, at the moment of the picture taking, Cartier becomes invisible. Similarly, the amateur who is photographing a baby in the crib is not making a photograph but taking it.

The problem of taking and making photographs are completely different. In the first case, the photographer is a witness to the occurrence; in the second case, he is its creator.”

The rest of the book is solely target to boost and develop two facets of creativity applied to photography: (1) oil the logic thinking mechanisms that help idea creation, and (2) seeding the subconscious for spontaneous blooming—or as he writes it down, stimulation. This is not much different from other creative disciplines. It also plays well with divergent and convergent thinking cycles that permeate almost all creativity literature. But all this rambling is beside the point. The main issue I run into every time I read the book again is the uncomfortable dichotomy between taking and making photographs. He goes further down the path of the dichotomy making a literature analogy.

“The photographer who takes the picture is a visual reporter. The photographer who makes one is a visual author.”

Reporters versus authors. Documentary versus fiction. The premise echoes labeling and struggles. And that is the main reason I keep rereading Halsman’s book, regardless if it makes me feel uncomfortable. The book whispers, you should take a stand. The book seems to defy you to take sides. Do you want to become a reporter or an author? It is not about the glamour, real or perceived, assigned to each of these labels. It is the struggle. The struggle that you define yourself by willingly choosing on of these two opposed worlds. It is the Aristotelian dichotomy that labels introduce in life.

Do you want to take or make photographs? I do not have an answer and that is an itch hard to scratch. I guess that most of the time I have been taking pictures. Maybe, I should treat Philippe’s book as a challenge, not as a choice I have to make, but as an enriching experience. Maybe experimenting each of the rules he so clearly outlines will make the itch go away. Isn’t experience also une tournure d’esprit after all?

Xavier on Google+

Jacques Henri Lartigue

I always thought that if I wrote about photography I would likely be about some of Henri Cartier-Bresson‘s photographs that I cannot shake off. Instead, I am writing about the first picture that got me puzzled to the point I needed to know how. How Jacques Henri Lartigue took such a grasping photo. The photo you can see below.

Spectators on the side of the road appear angled towards the left. The rear wheel of car number 6 deformed into an ellipse with a semi-major axis leaning on the opposite direction, away from the spectators. The construct gives the frame and incredible sense of speed and urgency. Having said that, this is not what got me staring at it again and again. What keep me intrigued was how could he shoot such a photograph and get such opposing lines on moving objects forming such a surreal v.

I sketched a few theories. I read a bit more, hard task when you try to avoid the answer. I barely knew anything about taking pictures then, not that now I know any better now. Yes, panning while shooting may definitely have something to do with it. So I took my DSLR to a street corner and started taking pictures of cars driving by while panning. Frames showed the blurry background, the cars were crisply focused, but I could not reproduce the opposing angles between the background and the moving objects. Now I needed to know, there was not way I was going to give up now. Then, it hit me. Maybe his and my camera were not close relatives at all. And yes, I went and I read some more about the cameras and hardware used when Jacques was taking his pictures. Eventually, I found the missing piece. Suddenly, everything felt into place. I was so painfully obvious now.

I am not going to spoil the joy of figuring it out on your own. You should definitely do the exercise. Definitely, it is much more rewarding than getting the answer. On another note, a while back I got an awesome gift in form of a nice compact collection of Jacques’ pictures in Thames & Hudson’s Photofile series book. Worth checking it out if you can get a copy. Be careful though, some of those pictures may grab your thoughts for a while.

Xavier on Google+

Revamping My Blog

I have been away from my blog for quite a long time. I have barely posted anything compelling in the last three years. Most of the updates were the sporadic announcements to ACM SigEvo’s GECCO conference, but event that was spotty at best. Yes, like everybody else, I gravitated toward social media (pick your favorite poison here).

I spend quite a bit of time thinking what I wanted to use my blog for. Should it be the same kind of blog? Should I change it under the hood? Should I give it a golden retirement since it seems I have no stories to share anymore? Then in the mist of all this unanswered questions, I realized I wanted my blog to be what it has been all along. It is whatever I need it to be. Yes, some thoughts are faster to share on ephemeral social media outlets, but there are things you want to keep around longer. Hence, I decided to start a face lift as part of this renewed path. Talking about look and feel, I kept it pretty similar as you may have realized. No big changes, mostly layout updates, removing as much clutter as possible, a bit of font sprinkling here and there, but eventually trying to keep it pretty much the same. I guess that I like the cozy feeling of it feeling familiar.

However, one thing I decided to change, after people I care deeply kept insisting that I should, was to build a more permanent home, as I mentioned earlier, for those moments you want to keep around long after the social media rapid timing has digested them into oblivion. Curating photos into gift wrapped packages you find while window shopping was one of those itches that help drove change. As a result of it, you may now see a ‘Photo Stream‘ top main menu entry. It is a running stream of some of the photos I share on my G+ profile. Under this running photo stream, you will find soon some of those gift-wrapped packages containing some of the photos I cannot shake away. Today, I am adding one. Make sure you check it out.

Will this revamping of the blog make me post more often? That is another story.

Xavier on Google+