civilized ku # 114 ~ a different kind of initial immediacy

Red hydrant, construction cone, and reflected light • click to embiggenAs I often do whenever we travel, this past weekend I brought along a couple of my photo books. I do so based on the premise that you never know whom you might meet. On occasion, in fact on quite a few occasions, this habit has yielded up some interesting and valuable feedback regarding my pictures and such was the case this past weekend in Montreal.

It should be noted that I was not looking for feedback from just anyone. In fact, I had a specific target in mind - the doorman / valet / greeter at our favorite Montreal hotel and all-around jolly good fellow
Matthew • click to embiggenby the name of Matthew. Matthew has come to be one of the primary reasons that the wife and I love staying at the Auberge du Vieux-Port. He always greets us and chats us up like long lost friends in manner that is so seemingly genuine that it can't be anything but that. And so it goes throughout our stay. I am quite certain that, when he leaves the hotel - it's a weekend job, he's actually a school teacher - the wife and I will be looking him up for dinner every now and again.

One of the ongoing topics of conversion that Matthew and I, along with the wife, engage in is that regarding my picture making. He has never seen me without a couple cameras hung on or about my body so it's a natural thing to talk about and he has always expressed a (once again) genuine interest in what I am doing photograph-wise.

So, upon our arrival last Friday, I gave him one of my photo books to peruse at his leisure. He accepted it with glee and delight in his eye and put it in his valet station drawer for later unhurried study. During the rest of Friday evening, every time the wife or I past him in the lobby, he had a few quick words about some facet of the book. He was obviously enjoying it - he took it home with him that night so that he could spend some time with the text - he was having some trouble with a some of the words. He speaks English very well but apparently some of my more obtuse use of the language had him stumped.

Late on Saturday afternoon, when the wife and I returned from the spa and visiting some neighbor shops and galleries, Matthew pulled me aside, returned the book and was very eager to give me his thoughts and impressions about it.

Now, let me clear about this - Matthew is not a photographer of any kind other than an occasional snapshooter. Consequently, there was not a single comment about vignetting, black edges, square, composition, etc. As far as I know, he has no artistic ambitions of any kind so he comes to looking at pictures with few, if any, preconceptions about what a "good" picture is.

In short, Mathew is my idea of "the perfect viewer". He just looks at and sees pictures through photography-expectations-free eyes.

And what he had to say simply blew me away. In a nutshell, he just simply seemed to intuitively understand virtually everything that I try to accomplish through my picturing making.

As an example, he liked my fall pictures best. He said that this was so because the pictures were not of the typical fall picture variety - no wall-to-wall sea of blazing color filling the frame, but rather little glimpses and snatches of fall color in otherwise color-sedate and most often overlooked scenes. He liked the subtlety and the fact that he wasn't being visually bludgeoned to death by the obvious.

He also mentioned that he really appreciated the wealth of subtle detail that all of my pictures exhibited, especially that detail found in the darker / shadow areas of my prints - a characteristic that many of you have mentioned as well. Because of this quality, Matthew found that he could spent lots of time "reading" the pictures once he moved beyond his initial impressions. He professed a sense of "savoring" the pictures and a feeling of "discovery" as he delved into the details. And, after having done that, that he could then "stand back" and view anew the entirety of each individual picture.

Matthew kind of summed it up by labeling all of these impressions and characteristics as my "style", my "way of seeing" which, I am absolutely delighted to say, pleased me enormously.

But, all of that said, here's the real point (as opposed to what some might see as an exercise is self-aggrandizement) of all of this - I have repeatedly pointed out to all of those who would listen that I deliberately have adopted (and adapted) a manner of "composition" that replicates that of the "casual" snapshot. Those who have an understanding / sense of design and the use and organization of space on a 2-dimensional surface know that my manner of "composition" goes far beyond that of the "casual snapshot", but that fact is not at all obvious to those who are, in all reality, "casual snapshooters".

I do this for the simple reason that I want to make my pictures accessible to a non-photographer audience much more than I do to the "photographers" amongst us. At first glance, I want my pictures to look like their (the non-photographer audience) pictures. I don't want that audience to have to work to get beyond the sturm und drang, the clang and clatter of technical / technique virtuosity and visual tour de force-s that so often turn the referent of a picture into something that it is not - a caricature of itself.

Rather, I want that audience to see my referents for what they are - something that can be seen and appreciated with apparent ease and no extraordinary effort. Something that, if one takes the time to notice it, is simply there for the taking - the surprises and delights to be found in the commonplace and in ordinary life.

That's why my experience with Matthew validated (for me) both my approach to picture making and this recently discovered bit of photo wisdom from Carl Robert Pope, Jr.:

I realized that people have a really intuitive relationship with photography and most people’s relationship with photography is through their personal documentation of their own history with their family and friends and their trips ... That informal way of composing is a really powerful strategy to use as a photographer to draw people in. The immediacy of a seemingly informal composition is a way of really speaking the language of people who have cameras, of the way we see our lives in pictures. I am always fascinated by that and always ready to use photography in that way.

and this from Robert Adams:

Why do most great pictures look uncontrived? Why do photographers bother with the deception, especially since it so often requires the hardest work of all? The answer is, I think, that the deception is necessary if the goal of art is to be reached: only pictures that look as if they had been easily made can convincingly suggest that beauty is commonplace. - Robert Adams

Without a doubt, I have always believed that the best way of seeing is seeing simply / simply seeing, or, at least creating the illusion when you are making a picture that you are doing so.