Thursday, May 21, 2009

reclaiming the fun

My dad used to be an avid photographer. When I was little, he used to spend entire Saturdays locked up in our bathroom, which he had turned into his little darkroom, a refuge of old-school creativity. When he was at work, no one else was allowed to enter, lest his work be ruined by the destructive power of stray light. My sister and I spent many a morning stepping from one foot onto the other fighting the power of too much milk for breakfast. My life is now richer for the many black-and-white memories hanging framed on my walls, but back then his passion wasn't good for family harmony.

When I was in middle school, I got my first camera, a simple and entirely manual viewfinder model, and started attending extracurricular photography classes. Now it was my turn to spend hours in the dark, in a tiny dungeon in the basement of our school, far away from the bathrooms and in no one's way. I have only the faintest memories of mixing solutions, processing film in a cylindrical container with developer sloshing around noisily, and making prints. This last activity entailed quite a bit of artistry. Besides prints of the photos we had taken, we also made greeting cards and reproductions much like one does today on the computer, but with more effort and wet hands. I didn't get hooked and left the photo club after a short while. The camera continued to lead an uneventful life.

In 1996, I went on my first big trip, venturing far from the comfort of Central Europe and the safety of home. With two friends from high-school, I went to Romania which had at that time an unenviable reputation for organized crime and brutal violence. Romanian gangs dominated German red light districts and fought for control in the drug trade. It was all over the news every night. Our parents were close to panic over our plans but we allayed their fears with a brilliant piece of logic. If all the Romanian criminals are in Germany, only the friendly folks are left behind and Romania must be a charming place. Little did we know how accurate this statement was. Romania was brilliant.

Before taking off into the history of Transylvania and the mountains of the Carpathians, I got my dad to get me an SLR. After three weeks in the wild, I returned with good photos (but nearly without my camera – having left it at a restaurant in Tîrgu Mureş for a few hours), but one of my friends shot slides, and his photos were so much better. The colors were more intense and the images more detailed, especially projected onto a ten-foot screen in a darkened room. Another camera faced a long, dull life in a cardboard box.

I unboxed it and brought it back to life when I went to the US where my days were flooded with the new, the curious and the unexpected. I had an obligation to document my daily life and later relate it to friends and family, of which none had ever been to America. As the months and then the years passed, I slowly evolved from tourist and visitor into local, and my habits changed yet again. I made friends who were into photography as well and became more serious in the process. I acquired an old semi-professional SLR and a few lenses, similarly second-hand, and discovered Fuji Velvia. Colors were suddenly my friends.

Late in 2004 I went digital and early last year I finally purchased a DSLR.

What sounds like a natural progression certainly felt like one. I never questioned my motives nor doubted my motivation. I thought I drew comfort from taking pictures, but it might have just been the habit. I shot with little passion and without great results. My images were decent enough to impress most relatives but didn't satisfy my too much.

A few weeks ago, one of my friends from Salt Lake, my closest photography buddy and companion on countless trips, shocked me with the news that he had put his trusty Canon aside. "I used to take pictures", he said nonchalantly in a conversation, and suddenly I couldn’t help a critical evaluation of my hobby.

Honestly, I had got bored and slightly frustrated. I have good equipment and take good pictures but there's something missing. The thrill is gone. I had got into a rut and kept on keeping on because that was the only thing I knew how to do. Putting the camera to my eye, I see the same things over and over again. Historic buildings, exotic markets, ruins in the sunset, Eiffel Towers, Southbank and clouds – the list could go on. Only over the last months did I become aware of what I was missing in my photos. It's blatantly obvious once I saw it, but I've only seen it now. There are no people in my shots. Most of my photos are dead.

I could have stopped at this point, and it wouldn't have been for the worse. It might have even been for the better. Deprived of the documentary might of the camera around my neck, I might have found myself forced to pick up a pencil more often and record the goings-on verbally or as drawings. That it didn't come to this is owed to my joining, a few weeks before what could have easily been a fateful conversation, a photography group where I rediscovered some of the fun that had been conspicuously absent for too long. The current high point of this recent development took place on Saturday when I tasted the kick of street photography for the first time. Since then, I've been trying to find out why I was so massively affected by the experience.

I think it has to do with excitement. Pacing down the sidewalk with camera en garde, simultaneously looking left and right in search of moments worth immortalizing suffused me with the most curious rush. I'm not one to go out and get in people's faces, and yet this is exactly what I found myself doing on Saturday, and I enjoyed it tremendously. In two short hours in the most hideously touristy part of London I witnessed more memorable moments than I normally do in an entire week. Many I captured on my chip. It was as if someone had unblindfolded me, and I could suddenly see.

I came home with three or four shots that might not have ultimate artistic merit on their own but easily stand up to critical evaluation as part of a street photography series. Since then I've been doing some reading and discovered some great clips on YouTube. One video in particular, a vignette on the peculiar work style of Bruce Gilden, was immensely edifying and spoke to me in an uncanny way. The first bit of wisdom hides in only little sentence. "I see in black and white", says the artist, and what he means is that his equipment is never in the way, that is camera is an extension of his eyes, never mind that the film doesn't see colors. Secondly, there is his confidence. This guy behaves as if he owns the streets, and when he takes a picture, he only takes what is his already. He is brash, even brazen. While this is certainly not my attitude, I get his point. If you want to get good shots in the street, you have to be bold, even brave.

Toward the end of the film is a third piece of insight that might just be the most important of all. It's a bit indirect and thus hard to relate properly, but it goes something like that. A friend points out that he only sees interesting characters when he is with Bruce Gilden but never when he's on his own. Gilden is a magnet, he concludes. In reality, Gilden’s focus allows him to see where others walk obliviously. I noticed the same thing this afternoon when I was walking along Kensington High Street in the middle of the afternoon shopping rush. I don’t recall one single interesting person, not one moment I would have wanted to commit to memory. The reason for this stark difference to last Saturday? I wasn’t out with my camera, and I didn't look with the eyes of a photographer.

London is one big playground; it's full of characters. So far, I haven't seen many of them. In Camden Town one can't help it even if one is engaged in a treasure hunt for birthday presents. Southbank is one big stage also. But the rest of the city might seem like any other place. However, with newly discovered open eyes and a trigger-happy finger I should be able to start seeing. I'll dive into the crowds and shoot from all angles. With time, I may build the skills to undertake topical projects, showcasing particular facets of my city. And later that year, when my dad retires and rebuilds his darkroom, maybe I'll get a classic camera and go black-and-white again. The street is grittier, realer, more honest without color.

4 comments:

Stacy said...

oooo...this was an excellent post...i'm always disappointed when i hear people switch to digital, even though i have sadly done the same :( my slr sits quietly on a shelf, collecting dust, literally...i will say that after kennedy was born i shot one roll of black and white of her...that was a year and a half ago already though...i love black and white as well, it makes you pay attention to the details more or something, i dunno, color is distracting? i'm sure your digital camera has a black and white setting at least! so you can throw some in now and again! i love taking pictures! i guess if you don't have a good subject it can lose it's flare but i have yet to give up on taking photos...i absolutely love it...i guess cause you're capturing memories...i sit for hours (well very rare is it that i have hours to "waist" nowadays...) and just sift through piles and piles of pictures in shoe boxes...it's a trip down memory lane i suppose...and this brings me to why i hate digital! you can take thousands of pictures and never get them made into physical photos...and the physical photos are the part that's the best about taking pictures, so you have them in your hand to look at and come back to again and again...so now i have thousands of great photos but nothing to show :( i even recently invested in a quite pricey cell phone that has a five megapixel camera with a carl zeiss lens and a flash...it's great

Stacy said...

whoops, guess i'm writing too much, i ran out of room....anywho, it's great because i always have a decent camera right in my pocket to take great shots when they pop up! but, of course, i have a thousand pictures on it already and have only physically printed out a few so far, maybe 50...i always think i should just force myself to only use my slr and then i have to develop the rolls of film to see the pictures at all and then i have them! (although many places are not even developing 35mm anymore!) but then i think of all the good shots i wouldn't have captured because of the ease and convenience of the digital cameras...i guess i should just keep up with printing them out?! i would probably quickly go broke though! i guess there's positives and negatives to both styles of picture taking! okay i guess i've rambled enough...i just get excited about photography, i like it. i wish i could have my own dark room...that'd be sweet...i don't really shove my photos onto other people but i will seriously look at a complete strangers collection...i find it fascinating...like you can decipher for yourself who that person is by the photos they take. but that's prolly not true for the average photo taker...maybe that's just how i view my photos...okay, i'm going to stop writing! feel free to send me as many pictures of yours as you want, i'd love to look at them! hmmm it must be like four in the morning your time, that's what the time stamp is on the comment i just posted says anyway....stacy

Stacy said...

one more thing, i liked kensington high street!

Stacy said...

oh and i cannot wait to give kennedy my old digital camera to take pictures with! i don't know if you know, but kids take some of the coolest pictures i have ever seen! their view of the world is just so much cooler than ours i guess! i'm also an avid movie fan, of all kinds, and one of my favorite documentaries is Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids (2004), it's cool, watch it if you get a chance sometime...(this and "step into liquid" tie!)