La Macchina Fotografica

I saw three big cameras at the farmer’s market this weekend. It seemed to make the photographers imposing and separate from the life of the market. Lenses are getting longer and bulkier. It used to be that a zoom lens was an extravagance—it was most certainly a tradeoff in quality. Back in my youth, most serious photographers used prime lenses because zooms were so unsharp. Now everyone seems to use a zoom lens. I do, though with ambivalence.

While zoom lenses are enormously helpful, they do tend to keep us away from our subjects. It’s so much easier to zoom in than it is to move in. But, moving in is where the action is. Moving in takes interaction and courage. There is nothing worse than a portfolio of people images, all photographed with a long-focal-length lens. The detachment and sterility are palpable.

Move in. I remind myself of this constantly. Sometimes I do, other times I succumb to the shyness and laziness of staying back letting the lens to the work. Moving in forces an interaction between camera and subject. The camera becomes part of the stage, the unseen actor that provokes reaction.

One of the best-known encounters with camera is exhibited in the famous photo of Joseph Goebbels by Alfred Eisenstaedt. Shot in Geneva in 1933, Goebbels glares at Eisenstaedt as the photographer moves in with his camera. It is chilling preview of Nazi horrors to come. Eisenstaedt, a Jew, courageously intruded into Goebbels personal space to evoke the hidden veracity of the Nazi regime. A long lens would have yielded nothing more than a tabloid-style throw-away image. Instead, we see truth.

This weekend at the market I tried to move in whenever possible. The result is today’s image of one of the market workers as he looked up at me for a spit second. For that moment we saw each other, interacted, and acknowledged each other’s existence. I don’t think it’s a deep photo, but it does have power—thanks to moving in.

Carrying a camera around in a public place is tricky business. Sometimes I think people assume the worst in the person behind the lens. The world of paparazzi and hysterical mass media have made us wary of everything and everyone. Try carrying a tripod around a few major buildings in a big city and watch the reaction. Most likely a security guard will pop up out of nowhere and tell you to go away. When a society assumes the worst, it usual realizes its expectations. Sadly, fear is big business.

The fear of photography gives me angst. My camera and I are simply trying to find that little sliver of a moment when people become themselves. Sadly, cameras can get in the way of the treasure hunt. People stiffen, sometimes smile, other times scowl. They tend to look at the camera askance, out of the corner of the eye. While the reaction to the camera is part of the reality of the moment, my goal is to trigger the shutter just before that happens. While my intentions are good, it makes me feel more like a hunter than an artist.

The world of photography is partly to blame for the hostility towards it. Photography can be aggressive and invasive. Examine, for a moment, the language of photography. We capture images, take photos, and shoot our subjects. The term, snapshot, is borrowed from the sport of gun shooting. I know not why these terms were adopted by photographers. However, I try never to use them.

Who among us wants to be shot, captured, and taken?

The camera makes me feel like a skulking voyeur. Pointing the damned thing at people makes them nervous. Therefore, I oftern walk around with my camera as if I were a cat tiptoeing on a sheet of aluminum foil. Cat owners who have actually seen their feline doing this will appreciate what I mean. More times than not, I want to be invisible.

When I feel myself getting shy or paranoid I start photographing my reflection. I’m a willing subject, even when I’m cranky, and I really don’t care what I look like in my images. Sometimes the worse I look the better the image is.

Besides being a convenient method of self-portrait, the reflection deepens the complexity of an image and reveals the elusiveness of reality. Children intuitively grab at reflections like they do soap bubbles. Both are elusive. Children understand the multiple planes of reality.

A reflection is so deep and complex that each viewer sees something different in it. Whether our own reflection is bouncing back at us or not, reflections are mirrors of our soul. We see into them what we must. And so I photograph them as often as I can, especially when I feel that blasted aluminum foil under my feet.

A lot of my early work, especially the reflections, was about what I call the surrealism of everyday life…picking out the strangeness in the world we live in. Those doors are doors that could lead you to other worlds, or what is behind what is in front of you. – Stephanie Torbert

There are times in a photographer’s life when the light is so exquisitely right that it aches. When the right light combines with a compelling subject one can feel an alchemical change occurring. Clicking the shutter becomes an intoxication, something we must do. Endorphins rush into the brain. It’s heady stuff.

Regardless of where we are or what we are doing, it always starts with the light. We photographers are the sentinals of electromagnetic radiation as it dances around the universe. It is wrong to think, however, that photographers are simply observers of light. We know from the study of quantum physics that the observer never merely observes. She changes the nature of the observed. Pull out a camera and it changes everything. I have spent most of my life pondering whether this is a good or bad thing. I suspect it is neither, simply a fact that needs to be recognized.

The very nature of capturing something and freezing it forever is unnatural. It is toying with space and time. Photographers are tricksters. If we’d been alive during the Inquisition we’d have been burned at the stake for heresy. There are so many photographs on the planet now that we’ve become numb to their power. Yet, our unconsciousness is unfortunate. Not only do we alter reality with our camera, the photos we make come back around and alter us. They change our perception of everything.

Standing still at the farmer’s market last weekend I was struck by the light as it passed through the morning fog. I began to feel the rush of the moment. Light and subject were converging. A family walked by. I made an image of a sublime moment that might now last forever.

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still. – Dorothea Lange

I stand there with my big, nerdy camera and they look up at me—straight at me. Their glare goes right through the lens and then right through me. I shiver. It’s my least favorite aspect about photography. I am probably the shyest, most self-conscious photographer in the world.

The frustrating thing is that I love photographing people. However, most people hate having their picture taken, at least when a stranger comes poking around with a big, black camera and lens. If only I were invisible or in a bubble. Shyness is a curse.

I’ve gotten more skillful over the years at being unobtrusive yet respectful (at least in my mind) about photographing in public. Sometimes people notice me, the stare back, smile, or stiffen up. That, actually, can result in marvelous images. Other times they go about their business, ignorant of me in every way. Life being lived.

Serious cameras are just too big and obtrusive. They separate us photographers from the world and turn us into skulking paparazzi. There are too many buttons, beeps, clicks, whirrs, and protruding appendages. More times than not I feel more like a dork than an artist. It’s like those well-past-middle-age guys you see driving the hot Porsches—somehow there is a disconnect. They (we) are trying too hard. It isn’t about cars and cameras.

No, it isn’t about cameras but next camera is going to be small and simple. Then, rather than being the painfully-shy photographer with the big, nerdy camera, I’ll become the painfully-shy photographer with the small, weenie camera.

As I write this, winter is, technically, three weeks away from us. I’ve always felt that the official designation of season is slightly out of sync with how things actually feel. The labels are about a month behind the tangibles. Right now it feels like winter and no meteorologist can tell me otherwise.

Mornings are as heavy as a woolen, winter blanket—darkened atmosphere laden with mist, stale wood smoke, and inversion. The sun reflects its amber light against Mt. Tamalpais which announces dawn to our bedroom. Eyes open more slowly in winter. Awakening feels like a long, delicious reentry into a obscured world.

The deep shadows of winter herald a deeper kind of creativity, shrouded in mystery. When the sun finally lifts itself from its stupor, it dances carefully around the house, turning it into a chiaroscuro stage. Everything can be photographed. Everything should be photographed. The simplest of objects are transformed into winter still life.

Last week at the farmer’s market I found three pumpkins. Rich with autumnal color, they seemed destined for the kitchen. Returning from the market I emptied my basket onto the breakfast table. The pumpkins have been there since. I haven’t had the heart to take a knife to them yet. They have added much to my mornings and are more optimistic than the writings in the newspaper. So, I stare at them instead of reading the daily drivel that passes for news.

Within a week or two I will come to the realization that my pumpkins are past their prime and ready to be transformed into stuffed pasta or gnocchi. It will be their final act in the drama. Until then, my winter’s still life will remind me of the simple pleasures of winter on Planet Earth.

Sometimes I get sick of the literal images of this or that. As a visual artist I am bombarded with images. Like listening to the lyrics of a ponderous song one more time, my mind gets heavy with content. That is why we have improvisation. That is why we have jazz. That’s why visual artists have abstraction.

All other sentient beings on this planet go about their business without the heady weight of the human mind. And they do just fine. There is a dance to life, a flight of weightlessness. Yet, we humans seem to be getting more and more trapped within the literal. Just look at the faces of those using their cell phones—and everybody these days is using a cell phone. It all seems so serious. “Buy!” “Sell!” “How could he do this to me?” The details of life are killing us.

It makes me want to scribble. I remember, as a small boy, when scribbling was okay. It was permitted. Then, at some point, teachers would get mad when we scribbled. “You’re too old to scribble. Make something nice!” So we all made pretty pictures that were understandable to the grammar school teachers. They needed something concrete, something literal. They were adults and they were serious. Make something nice.

I think all adults should scribble. And doodle. And make a mess. Whatever happened to the notion of carefree play? I’d like to go back to my first-grade teacher in my Way Back Machine and say, “Miss Boney, I think scribbling would be good for you. You haven’t been smiling lately and, quite frankly, the class is being affected by your bad humor. Would you like some crayons?”

One of the best things about cell phones is that I can now talk to myself in public. Not that many years ago it was considered odd to have a conversation with oneself. Now people are talking aloud seemingly no one just about everywhere. True, they usually have some kind of Bluetooth earpiece attached to to them and they are, theoretically, talking to an other human being somewhere. But, who knows for sure?

I don’t wear a Bluetooth device. Nor do I enjoy cell-phone conversations. But, I’ve considered getting a cheap earpiece just so I can talk to myself without being self-conscious. I figure if it’s okay that everyone is jabbering into cyberspace it’s perfectly normal to jabber to oneself. After all, most of us are in our own little world anyway.

It’s easy to spot people in their own little world. I love going into public spaces and finding people who seem alone in thought, daydream or preoccupation. If one is a photographer one needs to be quick. The moments are fleeting. Usually some kind of external stimulus prods our dreamers back into the social universe. Often the click of a camera shutter is all that it takes to jolt them.

I feel connected to those lost in their own universe. It makes me feel that we really are all the same—inextricably linked yet very much alone. Seeing others in this state sends me off into my own little world. I wonder about them; their life, their history, their story. And If they start talking I secretly hope that it’s just a conversation with themselves and that there’s no silly Bluetooth gadget hanging off their ear.

Daylight Saving Time plays tricks come October. The mornings are dark long beyond when my body clock says “Morning!”. My brain tells me to get up. My eyes say something different. I don’t like to move clocks forward and backward. It feels like I’m trying to cheat the cosmos or mold it into some kind of seasonal convenience. It never works. October mornings are dark forever.

I woke up the other morning and it was even darker than normal. “Fog!” I said to myself and sprung out of bed. I am energized by weather, especially gloominess. I grabbed my camera and went down to the park, knowing that the low-hanging fog would soon burn off like cotton candy on a tongue.

The sun poked through the mist. I had less time than I thought. Exposure is tricky when shooting into the misty sun. I fumbled with the stupid camera controls, missing the blunt simplicity of my long-lost Nikon F—a camera that mysteriously disappeared many years ago. I spun my thumb and index finger, and click, click, click.

New cameras have these crappy little spin wheels and buttons that never seem intuitive. It’s a simple reciprocal relationship between aperture and shutter. But, modern cameras seem to think I need five thousand pieces of data in order to get a photo. Buttons, metadata, presets. I don’t need 90% of what the camera thinks I do. If I push all the buttons will it make my photos better? I don’t have that many fingers!

I ignore everything and bracket the shots. “Maybe if I hang the manual around my neck…” I say to myself and the imaginary camera engineer that I complain to all the time. Suddenly I realize that it isn’t about the camera at all. The light is stunning and it’s disappearing right before me. I grab at the fog and try to make it last. “One more photo!” I plead to it. But the sun burns through it all and I need my sunglasses by the time I click my last click.

I went back home in the low October light, hoping I got the photo. The golden sun erased the moment, but there it was again, appearing on my studio computer. The miracle of digital photography gave me instant feedback. The manual bracketing did the job and hit the sweet spot of exposure.

Now, if only they would do something about those buttons and spin wheels…

An artist knows how quickly light changes. Landscape painters are keenly aware of shadow movement. Painting outdoors is a humbling experience. Nothing stands still. The universe speeds up and becomes elusive, as if it were aware that someone was trying to capture it.

I walk in the canyon early to avoid the searing midday heat. Each step lulls me into the same kind of hypnotic effect that painting en plein air would have on me. Time dissolves into a metronome beat. I look down to make sure of where I walk. Snakes, rocks, cacti and mule poop are all to be avoided. When I look up I see the changes. The light morphs gently yet relentlessly. The canyon shadow shifts, changes color, shrinks. My own shadow looks alien in the craggy geometry of crumbling rock. I am an interloper here.

I come bundled into this alien landscape equipped like a moonwalker. My liquid life support is strapped to my back. Once the water is gone I have about an hour or two to survive, something that I never forget as the shadow shrinks toward noon. The shadow tells me everything as does the color of light. A camera grabs the moment more quickly than a paintbrush, so I keep clicking with fascination.

The golden morning shifts toward a clean whiteness of high noon. All shadow disappears into flatness. My own shadow shrinks to insignificance. White hot. I lose my interest in art. I’m more worried about cactus stings as my legs become leaden and clumsy. The heat starts to press down on me. I make a mental calculation about my water supply.

High noon comes and goes. There is nothing to mark its passage except an imperceptible return of shadow growth. Soon the canyon shadow lengthens again, this time in the opposing direction. Light turns to gold. A slight breeze softens the air. I think about art again as the aching beauty blooms in my presence. Cactus stings be damned, I look up to watch my shadow as it flows across the canyon plateau.