Don’t settle

Portrait of a building – time does not have to be an instant; perhaps the best side of a subject has to be a composite

I have previously written about various personal approaches to photography – manifestoes or beliefs or aspirations or aims if you will. I’ve written about why we photograph and the relationship between images, the artist and the audience. But I don’t think I’ve ever really written about the endgame.

Everyman – or falling prey to familiar habits

There are a lot of possible interpretations here: shooting one subject or camera or one location until you die, or get fed up of photography; quitting entirely; or aiming for the near-impossible (like say, international celebrity) and never quite getting there. I don’t think any of these is realistic or inspiring enough to keep you going, frankly. I’d much rather look at it as a question of where you want to be photographically in five, ten, twenty years’ time. What kind of images would you like to produce? What kinds of subjects would you like to be able to regularly shoot? The answers to all of these things may not be well define, but that’s no problem. If there is no goal, then there can be no progress because you have no idea where you are going.

Painterly I – what makes a photograph appear to us as being a photograph?

It’s always going to start with a necessary amount of imitations: the easiest way to set a photographic target is by first defining what you like and dislike: and you’re only going to be able to answer this if you see a sufficiently wide range of images and styles. If you haven’t seen anything you like, it might just be possible that you haven’t been looking hard enough – or you already know where you want to go. The next step is executing the imitation: it’s not because you don’t want to make better images than that; it’s because what is really important here is the control and understanding gained from the execution. Once you can produce what you envision, then it’s time to work on the envisioning.

Arches – order in abstraction in extremis

There is no point in trying to make a facsimile of another person’s style or work your own endgame: not only is that person’s work probably also continually evolving, but the more you attempt to imitate – the closer you get to verisimilitude – the more little differences are going to start feeling jarring. No two people are the same; photographs are a reflection of our own biases and preferences, and therefore no two photographs are going to be the same, either. You diverge to your own course, and perhaps find another photographer to follow. The cycle repeats. The more times the cycle repeats, the more integration happens rather than imitation. Previous elements of style and presentation get layered on new ones. The creative process is really not a completely blank-state innovative one, but rather one built on a sort of collective evolution.

Bathroom I – there is beauty waiting to be found in the everyday

You are now at the final stage of creative evolution. You have the executional chops, you have an idea before you even think about translating it into an image, and now the challenge becomes making every image and idea a unique one. It is very easy – sometimes too easy, too comfortable – to slip into previous ‘automatic’ behaviours; you see something, you compose, expose and process it a certain way to give it a certain ‘signature’. Avoiding the temptation to make photographs you’ve made before (whether with the same subject or not, same location or not, or merely the same idea but with no improvements) is one of the most difficult things for any serious artist to avoid. In effect, it’s self plagiarisation to an extent; you really can be your own worst enemy.

I personally know I have to fight the temptation to make the same kind of images again and again; it’s not always easy to avoid this because there’s obviously something about the results from the previous time that worked – they proved attractive to you and your audience. Experimentation is needed; a challenge is sometimes necessary to force that. The challenge might be a new location, a new subject, a new piece of equipment – or more likely, a new restriction. Restrictions force us to get creative to work around them, and hopefully find something new to add to the visual toolkit in the process.

Wheel shadow – light is at the core of every photograph; but what about images/scenes/subjects that are really nothing without a very specific quality of light?

Experimentation is risky, though: it’s an experiment precisely because we don’t know what the outcome will be, and this might prove to be a waste of time or disappointing. You may well come away with few keepers and the slightly resentful feeling that you probably should have stuck to the tried and true – especially if the opportunity was a fleeting or limited one. I try to avoid that, not just because inevitably you’ll land up playing it safe for some images out of instinct anyway; but also because the experimental images that do work are going to give you something new, and be far more satisfying. Rather than be disheartened, it’s important to be as objective as possible to figure out exactly what went wrong, why, and be open to any serendipitous lines of experimentation to investigate further.

It’s easy to talk about experimentation, endgames, restrictions and creative development in a very abstract way. In practical terms, it means that you do need to go into a given photographic situation with a fairly specific objective. Condition yourself mentally as to what to look for to satisfy the objectives; but at the same time, it does help to keep an open mind since other opportunities may arise. Equip yourself appropriately hardware-wise – there’s no point in bringing lenses or cameras ‘just in case; the temptation to fall back to shooting what’s safe is far too high, especially if the objective isn’t yielding results. Forcing yourself to work with a very restricted or unfamiliar toolkit is sometimes not a bad thing, especially if you are a person who can ‘see’ a lot.

Autumn in Tokyo III – the idea of transparency is one that I think I’m now comfortable with. Oddly, the next evolution seems to be into Asian landscape paintings: not to the point of minimalism or oversimplification/stylization, but seeing this vertical, ‘cascading’ flow in a scene.

Personally, I could be very happy 99% of the time with say a 24-70/2.8 zoom; it’s flexible enough to have a wide range of perspectives, fast enough to work in marginal light, and of sufficient quality. But I don’t own one, because it feels to me like too much of a creative compromise. I’d rather shoot with manual focus primes that force me to slow down, or tilt-shift lenses that force me to think about perspectives and focal planes, or single focal length that forces me to previsualize. I have no doubt my hit rate would be higher if I went with the 24-70/2.8 over say a 24/3.5 PCE and 1.4/55 Otus; but I’d be making a large number of ~3 images*, but no or few 4s. I’d much rather have a lower overall yield with the latter two lenses, let some ‘safe’ shots go, and have a solid number of 4s than a large number of 3s. Falling back to the ‘safe option’ Swiss Army Knife can be relaxing and good to just develop one’s instinctive seeing, but real creative advances are only going to be enabled by breaking out the obsidian scalpels.

*See The Four Things for an explanation of the rating/curation logic.

Most of the time, I do just that. I have only one situation in which the 24-120/4 VR comes out (the closest thing I have to a 24-70; VR is more useful to me in obtaining optimal image quality than the faster aperture since I work stopped down most of the time anyway): when there’s a job at stake and the client hasn’t wanted or given any room for any experimentation. Producing a result as expected is then a matter of professionalism and craftsmanship. I’m often tempted to also default to the same during workshops and masterclasses because I fear that my participants want to see some effortless images as per their expectations; however I usually get sensible towards the end and remember that the purpose here is really to be creative, and that learning what doesn’t work from failed experiments is equally important.

Stitch error – this should have been Forest VII; Photoshop thought otherwise. An unexpected but surprisingly interesting result; much like when you fire a Hasselblad CFV digital back again before it’s had time to completely read out and save the file…the question is, how can one use something fundamentally unpredictable to create consistent images and ideas other than by repetition and tight curation? Is that still photography?

It’s one of the reasons I’ve been refocusing my own personal hardware lately: I have some specific objectives, always overlaid by the desire to make physical, printed output. Only in the printed image can you see all of the captured information at once, and truly be able to assess whether an image works or not. I also want to have as high a degree of transparency and control over perspective and focal plane as possible; this means chasing ultimate image quality in the form of apochromatic lenses like the Zeiss Otuses, Voigtlander APO-Lanthars and tilt-shift PCEs on – for now – still a D810 body. It’s also why you’re not seeing much cinematic or conventional reportage work from me these days – it doesn’t speak to me as much as it used to or follow my creative intentions, and as a result, I’m seeing but consciously bypassing those opportunities, and usually not carrying the appropriate hardware for it. (Of course, you can shoot anything with anything, but it seems silly to deliberately use a tool that is not just unconventional but really not suited for the job – like a PCE.)

I don’t rule out either the objectives (and by extension, the hardware) changing; it has done so heavily in the last five years and will undoubtedly continue to do so. Five years ago, I couldn’t have seen myself making the images I do now – and by the same token, I look at my work from five years ago and cringe a little at the overall compositional and idea ‘looseness’ and lack of finishing refinement. But at the same time, I realise that this is the result of a little malcontent and the need to always push; it’s a process of experiments tried, failed and new creative avenues explored. I could not shoot what I shoot now without having produced what came before. I certainly hope I won’t settle, and I can say the same thing in another five, ten, twenty years. The images in this post are all chosen to deliberately represent a certain avenue of experimentation I’m exploring now; the concepts/principles are not fully matured, but I can see the germ of something there. My own endgame is very simple. I’ve often been asked what my favourite or ‘best’ image is: it always has to be the next one. MT

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