Salish Park

When I lived in Brooklyn, my roommate worked at Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg. When his company installed a viewing of the photographs lined up for the next auction, he would make mention of it, and I would trek over to Chelsea and check it out. It was a great way to see vintage prints from Diane Arbus, Robert Capa, Garry Winogrand, Stephen Shore, Robert Frank, William Eggleston, Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. Once, while browsing around at the gallery, I heard a familiar laugh coming from the next room. I went over there, wondering, “Who do I know that sounds like that?” and it was Cameron Diaz, chatting with some official-looking types.

Judging from the turnout at Jen Bekman’s talk about tips on breaking into the gallery and marketing yourself, Boston is home to a whole lot of aspiring fine art photographers — more than the Photographic Resource Center, which put on the seminar, had thought. That auditorium got pretty packed. There were people sitting on the steps in the aisles and people standing up against the wall in the back. It was like college all over again. (Much of my curriculum in college comprised classes I took just because they were the ones not already filled up.)

Luckily for me, I’d shown up at a decent time (traffic and parking weren’t as bad as I’d anticipated) and was able to snag a seat in the middle. Standing at the lectern, guys scrambling around her in an effort to solve a technical issue, was Jen Bekman herself, gallery owner, the person behind personism.com, patron saint of emerging photographers, a name in fine art photography (which, as Al Gore would say, makes you think of “jumbo shrimp,” but, whatever, I’m a fan).

Some random notes from the lecture:
- Have a website.
- Have business cards (as well as promo pieces).
- Make maquettes: blurb.com is good for that.
- The work needs to be coherent, in subject matter, in theme, in concept.
- Edit your book tightly: each image should be able to stand on its own, keep the portfolio to between 10 - 30 images, a body of work for an exhibition can be as few as eight pieces, edited down from a submission of 15, which was probably edited down from 40.
- Know the landscape, know whom you’re approaching: different galleries show different kinds of work and have different submission policies.
- Observe etiquette, mind your manners, gallerists are people too.
- Artist statements: be articulate, be simple, be direct.
- Proofread.
- Moo cards are a good idea.

In the question and answer period, a remarkable (to me) number of the audience wanted to know about pricing and editioning their work.

From an article by Judy Stoffman in the Toronto Star on Alice Munro:

In Lives of Girls and Women, her autobiographical heroine Del Jordan set out her ambition, to preserve not only what was real about her hometown but to capture what was universally true: “What I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together – radiant, everlasting.”

Munro’s achievement lies in developing a technique and a voice with which to do this, and in something else: She did not think she had to move to Paris or London or Ibiza to make contact with her muse. It never occurred to her to feel marginalized as a Canadian writer; she did not think real life happened elsewhere. The self-confidence she had in her material enabled her to make Huron County as vivid to readers around the world as Balzac’s Paris or Joyce’s Dublin.

Based on what I’ve been reading on the blogs, it seems one of the most insulting things you can ask a photographer is what kind of camera he or she uses, the suggestion being that if you had the same kind of camera you could take pictures like that too. Nobody asks an artist what kind of brush he or she used to make that painting, right? Nobody thinks, boy, if I could just find the right pencil, I could write like Hemingway.

Yet there must be something worth learning from the decisions an artist makes. Much has been made of how Richard Avedon would stand beside the camera when taking portraits, not looking through a viewfinder but instead being face to face with his subjects. That, or there must be some reason why a photographer would decide to lug around an 8×10 view camera when 35mm would pretty much get the job done if pictures are the thing. That’s a lot of work for a picture. Ideally the thing would be not having to have a camera at all. Avedon is said to have once told Truman Capote, “I hate cameras.”

Strangely, someone who didn’t hate cameras was Diane Arbus. In December 1970 she wrote this in a letter to Allan Arbus and Mariclare Costello: …Have gotten obsessed with buying a new camera. Utterly smitten with the new 6×7 pentax. (2 1/4 x 2 3/4). Its just like a big Nikon, which is what Ive always wanted… What it could do is make the pictures more narrative and temporal, less fixed and single and complete and isolated, more dynamics, more things happening. Id like that. The difference knocks me out. Of course it’s not to the good, not yet anyway, and probably it wouldn’t be so apparent to anybody else, I mean nobody else gives a shit, but that’s OK…

Sigma Corporation has announced the launch of the DP1. Pictures show that it has a hotshoe and there’s an external viewfinder available. Also, it looks nicer than the iteration they came out with last September. That one looked kind of cheap. I like what improvements they’ve made to this one. You just can’t get better than a black box if you ask me. The specs suggest this may be the digital version of the Contax T3 that I’ve been wanting. More information at Sigma’s website and dpreview.

Panasonic is coming out with a 25mm F/1.4 for 4/3 system cameras, eg. the Olympus E-410. It’s about three inches long and weighs over a pound, smaller than a big honking zoom but not by much. More info at dpreview.

According to luminous landscape, the G7 comes close to being the digital Contax T3 that I have been looking for but its fatal flaw is not having RAW capability. I would like to be able to shoot RAW not so much for the higher quality (to be honest I can’t tell most of the time) but for the ability for post-processing when I’ve blown it with the exposure.

Olympus has announced a newer version of its E-400 but no lens that makes it good for a carry-everywhere camera.

From The New Yorker, March 5, 2007

Shades of Gray
By Mark Singer

Spalding Gray, a naked man who wore chinos and long-sleeved shirts, usually with the cuffs rolled up, last appeared onstage in New York in December, 2003. He once told an interviewer, “When people say to me, ‘What do you do?’ I say, ‘I tell stories from my life.’ They say, ‘You must have a very interesting life.’ ‘No,’ I say. ‘But I tell it well.’” His standard props included—along with a table, a chair, and a glass of water—a spiral notebook. Often, his monologues had paradoxical emotional and sensory effects upon audiences. Not the least of these was that he possessed such an immediate, arresting presence—he lived in quest of what he called “perfect moments”—that it was possible to forget that his meandering delivery depended upon words he had committed to the page with obsessive precision. Was he principally a writer or an actor? In one of his unpublished journals, he described himself as a “collagist taking bits and scraps from the growing heap of my life.”

My first camera was a Nikon EM, introduced in 1979 and still the smallest SLR ever produced by Nikon. It was fitted with a 50mm f/1.8 Series E lens, and it was what I carried around with me when out and about doing other things and when traveling. Later, once I got some education about photography, I decided I needed a Nikon like what the professionals used. Carrying one of those things around was a total drag, though. It was too big and bulky. It attracted attention. I bought a point and shoot and then another one.

In retrospect, that little EM did the job just great. It’s not a Leica, but it’s as small as one and lighter. The Series E lens is fast and performs real well according to the reviews. Its build quality is good enough, it has held up all right over the years, manual focus is fine, the viewfinder is bright enough. Except for not having manual control, it’s about all the camera I could need for when going around.

If they could make a digital version of this camera, that would be great. Olympus has gone ahead and developed the E-400. I’ve never seen one in real life, but the specs suggest a real good camera for taking pictures on the street. It’s about the size of a Nikon EM: the E-400 at 130mm x 91mm x 53mm v. the EM at 135mm x 86mm x 54mm. What kills it for me, though, is the weak selection of prime lenses available for the 4/3 system; there’s not even a normal. Mostly it’s zoom lenses, which I don’t get: what’s the point of a compact camera if you’re going to fit it with a big honking zoom.

There’s the Leica M8, but the body alone costs $4795 at B&H.

If they could make a digital version of a Contax T3, or even an Olympus Epic, Yashica T4, Nikon 35Ti, Rollei AFM 35, Leica CM or Ricoh GR1v, that would be really great. Of course, there’s already a wackload of digital point and shoots coming out on the market, but, as long as they keep coming out fitted with those teeny sensors, the image quality isn’t going to cut it. Another thing about them are those zoom lenses that are too slow to use; a fast prime would be just fine.

Like the Olympus E-400, the Ricoh GRD is not sold in the United States. The specs suggest this camera fits the bill in most ways, but—not that I ever take five frames per second or whatever but still—if you’re shooting RAW, it locks up for 13 seconds after each exposure while it writes the file to the card, which suggests some aggravating waits down the road.

So, film it is…