Originally posted by 6BQ5 Earlier in the month I went on a business trip to London and on my own time I paid a visit to The Photographer's Gallery. They had an exhibition of Edward Steichen's photographs.
If you don't know who Steichen was then please Google search his name and read the Wikipedia article on his life. There are a few videos you can watch on Youtube too.
Steichen, like many of his contemporaries, was an artist in the beginning and he ventured into what was the new and budding field of photography. Photography at the time was still very focused on the technical aspects of picture taking. Film, paper, chemicals, and technique got a lot of attention. He turned his attention away from the nuts and bolts and onto the subject matter. Steichen wanted to develop beauty rather than film. The most important question wasn't what focal length to use but how to light the subject. With this different mindset he created photographs that had never been made before. Every shot must have felt like a major experiment. Can you imagine the rush and the high of being on the bleeding edge like that? He and his cohorts at Vogue knew they were onto something great.
"Turn Vogue into a louvre" and that's exactly how his photographs felt to me when I look at them. There were some excellent and stunning shots of well known actresses like Greta Garbo and less well known (today) actresses like Gloria Swanson. I wish I had the artistic talent to create such photographs! When I looked at them I felt like I was taken back to the 20's and 30's and I was living and breathing in that time. All of my problems melted away and I forgot about my jet lagged exhaustion. It was almost like a dreamy trance. I looked closer hoping to extract more detail from the image and then I saw what would make many modern photographers cringe - aberrations, blur, and missed critical focusing. It snapped me out of my trance only to hit me with an important lesson.
Megapixels? MTF measurements? LBA? Coatings? 12-bit vs. 14 bit RAW? Seriously, none of that matters as much as we think it does. It's actually a bunch of ****, really. Edward Steichen had none of that and he transformed photography from a mundane technical process into an artistic platform that warms our hearts. The photographs wouldn't have been any better if the corners were sharp or if the contrast was higher. All these features which we would call technical mishaps today didn't lessen the impact of those photographs one bit.
Let me clarify. We should understand the technology enough so that we are enabled to create. A pencil artist may not have the slightest clue on how a pencil is made but he understands how it feels to him. How often do we think of f-stops in terms of numeric DoF distances or focal lengths in FoV in degrees? We don't. 28mm is wider than 50mm and we zoom with our feet. f/8 is great for landscapes while f/2.8 is good for portraits and we adjust for everything in between based on feel for the most part.
Every lens I have is stunning. My K-30 is magical and my flash is all powerful. FF will come on its own time if it ever will. Now let's go make some pictures!!
Thank you for the post. I totally agree with you on the notion that we need to focus on image-making and sharing the magic.
For Christmas, I treated my self to a book I saw at COSTCO called "Photography: The Definitive Visual History" by Tom Ang.
I almost never buy books especially coffee-table books. I borrow my books from the library and return them later. However when I saw this book, I could not resist. It is a photographic journey like no other. There are pages dedicate to selective masters who were trend setter. Steichen is one of those photographers along with Bresson, Adams, Avadon, Cappa, Weston and many more. One of my favorites of all time, Karsh, does not get his own pages but is mentioned in the rather comprehensive biographies section in the back of the book.
Reading this book has inspired me to go back to pure image making. I do get tangled in the technical distractions of all the technology that is in front of us and what is coming down the pike. Just a few months ago, I mentioned this to a photographer buddy of mine. That we should stop the tech madness and focus on image making. I created more memorable images with a Pentax K1000 and a 50mm f1.7 than all my digital gear I have owned over the years. There was something magical about film that has completely disappeared in this new world of instant gratification with digital photography.
I feel guilty sometimes thinking about all the gear I have and not using them enough. I hang out at a local community college that has an unbelievable photography program. They have high end gear coming out of their ears. Yet, the students are for most part borrowing equipment to do their work. I keep thinking how most of these student long for gears of their own. The extensive hallway galleries at the college exhibit some very innovative work form these students. I go to see these constantly changing exhibits for inspiration.
When I went to college in the early 80's, I had no money either so I borrowed a K1000 from the college media center to complete my assignments for the one photography class I ever took. I always longed for my own gear until a summer job and savings paid for my Pentax MX purchase. Long story short, all of us on this forum have more than enough gear to create magic and share it with the world.
I wish I was in London and could see the Steichen exhibit. For now, I am going to read my book and let the inspiration kick my *** into picking up my camera to do some real photography not the kind of mundane photography work I do to pay the bills.