Short Sighted

One of the oddest things about me (there’s a hole with no bottom) is that despite the fact that for over 20 years I have played in a succession of hard rock, metal and punk bands, the music I actually listen to when I’m tucked up home on the sofa is a litany of 60s and 70s folk, bottom heavy with Dylan, Cat Stevens and any whiny women singer who ever stood alone on stage with a guitar. Naturally the dirt-bags I play with, festooned as they so often are with Megadeath t-shirts and biker boots, are ignorant of my embarrassing little secret. Just once I would like to play music that doesn’t cause permanent hearing loss. While I’m at it, I would also like to request a few gigs where the audience members are both sober enough to stand and without any visible head wounds.

I picked up a bass for the first time when I was 16 after deciding that six strings was at least two too many and that I would have a better chance with only four. I never took it seriously enough to get good at it but now, 24 years later, I have at least learned to play the notes: sometimes in the right order. I have learned one other thing as well: being able to play music is very different from being a musician. Get me on stage and I can dish out a pretty passable bass line to Won’t Get Fooled Again but when I go and listen to John Entwistle play it on Who’s Next I am faced with the sober reality that he had music emanating from his soul and I’m a ham-fisted hack.

While I’m on the subject of feeling like a hack- I have just spent the better part of the afternoon at a Lee Friedlander exhibition which, by dumb luck, I happened to stumble upon as I was wandering purposelessly around Barcelona.

For photographers of a certain bent, mentioning the name “Lee Friedlander” invokes a reverent silence and tugging on the forelocks. Friedlander, along with Walker Evens, Eugene Smith, Mary Ellen Mark and Henri Cartier Bresson pretty much set the standard by which all other photojournalists came to be judged.

Friedlander isn’t just good, he is scary good. In the 60s and 70s when he was at the top of his game he produced a waterfall of images any one of which, if it were mine, I would consider a crowning lifetime achievement. Walking around the Barcelona exhibit I was humbled, inspired and left with a feeling that I am simply too lazy to be a good photographer.

I know a guy, an instructor at the San Francisco Art Institute, who is a friend of Friedlander. The instructor told me that it is nearly impossible to walk down a street with Friedlander and attempt anything like a normal conversation: the guy doesn’t hold still for a moment- constantly darting around taking pictures of everything. To Friedlander everything is a good photograph and even now, well into his 70s, he has a work ethic that few can come close to.

As for me, I just shoot a lot and hope for the best.

Let’s talk about photography. Unlike IT where I simply bluffed my way into a job which no one, as of yet, has thrown me out of, I really was a photographer- in the bottom of some drawer somewhere there is a piece of paper from a very expensive school that proves it. I made my living as a cowboy street shooter for almost 15 years; working for newspapers, wire services, private clients, schools, I ran my own photo bureau, taught photography, ran a lab, sold cameras and did just about anything I could to keep my hand in the game while I slowly slid into abject poverty. But I’ve already told that story.

Before I go any further I feel it wise to point out that when it comes to photography I am an elitist snob. For me photography means black and white film and gelatin silver prints- although I will make allowances for Kodachrome 64 which is probably the finest color film of all time. In my opinion, when Kodak stopped producing their entire line of B&W paper they committed nothing less than a mortal sin.

They killed off my friends damn it- materials that I knew and trusted. I learned the Zone System using Kodak film and Kodak paper- the characteristic curves of Pan-X are burned into my skull. You simply can’t expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights using a digital camera- their range is not good enough- your highlights will blow out and your blacks will become impenetrable. The latitude isn’t there. Maybe someday it will be. Maybe someday a 30x40 digital print will match the tonality and pure artistic grace of Moonrise over Hernandez and maybe someday my butt will whistle show tunes.

Perhaps that’s what pisses me off the most about the entire digital revolution- the technology being replaced is superior in every aspect (except immediacy) to what’s replacing it. Of course it would be hypocritical of me not to point out that the throughout the short history of photography this same process has occurred on more than a few occasions: Daguerreotypes reproduced the world with a richness and detail that remains unsurpassed; yet they were swept aside by wet plates, dry plates and eventually roll film. However, each of those processes, unlike modern film, suffered from fatal flaws that made their demise inevitable. Daguerreotypes were too slow to capture motion, wet and dry plates required the photographer to be an amateur chemist and cart around a wagon load of material. Roll film, with its speed, tonal range, exposure latitude and versatility overcame all those obstacles and gave us a medium through which artists, journalists and Joe Public could express themselves with ease.

Almost without exception I have every single negative I have ever produced. They are stored in acid-free sleeves in dark boxes in San Francisco and London. 100 years from now, barring fire or flood, someone will still be able to make prints from those negatives- selenium tone them and they’ll last virtually forever. How many of your computers still have a floppy disk drive? How about a 100MB Zip disk? Do you think that CDs are archival? Think again. They have a useful life-span of a decade or so- I have a stack of CDs which are completely unreadable because of degradation of the media.

Maybe you think you’re clever and have backed up your digital images onto an external hard-drive: what’s the interface on that drive? USB? FireWire? In 10 years time will anyone even know what a USB plug looks like? One of the agencies I worked at has thousands of pieces of artwork imprisoned on Zip disks because it is nearly impossible to find working players or computers that will interface with them. Digital technology has a useable life-span of a Mayfly- we are storing the records of our world on the 21st century equivalent of nitrocellulose.

It’s not that I don’t think digital images don’t serve a purpose: they have revolutionized photojournalism and any other field where instant access to images is crucial. But they have reduced commercial photographers to little more than trained monkeys who push a button and let the art directors and graphic designers do the creative bits. Yes, that’s too harsh and an oversimplification but my mates who make their living shooting big expensive sports cars with big expensive cameras say that there is no longer a need for specialty trained photographers who can compose and light anything from a tube of toothpaste to a blimp.

I am one of those guys- or at least I used to be. My entire first year of photography school was spent just looking at light- how it reflects on shiny objects, dull objects, faces, white skin, brown skin, how it falls off with the square of the distance, how it’s blue in shadows but orange under tungsten bulbs and green under fluorescents, how it bends through lens elements and focus at different points on the film plane, why magic hour is so magic and how to calculate equivalent exposures in my head. I was taught that real photographers don’t need no stinking light meter and that bracketing exposures was for pussies.

Our cameras were off the fucking grid and they didn’t stop working if it rained, or snowed, or there was no plug to recharge them. Joe Rosenthal lugged a bloody 4x5 Speed Graphic up a mountain on Iwo Jima to take one of the finest photographs of all time. History doesn’t wait for your camera to recover from a humidly induced battery leak.

When I was six years old my father gave me a Kodak Instamatic and from that point on I was hooked. While the other kid’s heroes were football stars, mine were grubby middle aged men with drinking problems, bad teeth and half a dozen cameras slung around their necks. All I ever wanted was to be a photojournalist and the day I got my first press credentials I felt I had been knighted by the Queen.

Maybe that’s what it gets down to- a visceral love for the art and tools of the trade. I fully understand the limitations of the equipment and the media I use but the magic comes from working within and around those limits not in accepting them as obstacles. I guess I’ve become an anachronism- but at least I am a creative one.