Your first assignment is to photograph a dozen or more pairs of ears, right away print the best nine in a black-and-white proof sheet format on Monday, 27 July, solicit a “yes!” favorite from everyone else, so that by 10am, at the end of your first classroom hour, you will have developed a new method of photographing and seeing, gotten feedback on your first experiment, and will be ready to move on to a next step.
That’s the basic workflow, and in the diagram on the right you’ll be reminded that it is just like experiment, science, and most everything thoughtful: we start off with a hypothesis (for example: details+pattern=meaning), then test, document, and evaluate the results. Do this for one after another principle of composition, design, theme, or history in this course and you’re gold.
Start with ears as everyone’s got them and a portrait with two ears from two people has less chance of being a mug shot, and with ears pointing to each other and other things your composition will be inviting attention to context and complexity. As ears come with heads and much else you will also be dealing with problems of proportion, of relating telling details to the whole, and once you get started thinking about that you’ll be on your way.
Practically speaking, we are in the business of studied movement. You can move, or they can move, or both; as that happens, the world is thrown into play. Your mission is to put some order into it. Unless we start moving people and things about, your fundamental tool in photography is movement: you move left, right, forward, back, up, down, and you choose the moment when the elements you see before you fit together.
Play is really important here, because as you play you try things out every which way, see what might work and might not, become comfortable with your equipment, materials, and subject (the city is waiting for you, patiently), and with luck a few things will “come out” and with concentration you will “get into the flow” and produce works of genius.
There are a number of tricks in this business, and one of them is paying attention to forms, such as curves, as in curved ears, so that they relate or “speak” to each other in patterns. Once you learn how to see patterns wherever you happen right now to be you will see them everywhere and forever, this will be a gift. Learn how to line up ears you’ll be able to do the same for up curves, circles, lines, angles — all these formal elements that are just about everywhere, even in the deep blue cloudless sky, but only visible and therefore potentially meaningful through compositions, because we are surrounded by chaos and confusion and need help if we are to get at your meaning — just as you need help creating meaning out of that chaos.
In the illustration at the very top of this post, the student in front of me was lining up the ears of her friends while I was lining up their noses, cheeks, and hands. In the middle of that I discovered how nicely one well-lit face fit on top of the darker one, the contrast helping to bring out the interaction of forms, and so I started off with the silly business of ears and ended up with a compelling relationship of facial forms.
That’s how it often works: you start off with one thing and end up with another, that’s discovery.
Another trick is to build complexity: having fitted the horizon into a puzzle I got busy locking up my line-of-sight, as the student was, lining up the hand with the ear as if they were touching, and so presenting my viewer with yet another riddle.
Then there is the light, which can be used to add more complexity or unity. In the picture of the five heads above, three on the left are falling back in the shadows while, in contrast, the two lined up on the right also share the light.
I really didn’t make too much of this up. The Dutch painter Vermeer worked with such elements all the time, and much of what I know about working in this way comes from learning how he creates figures with meaningful gestures, sets them carefully about in rooms, guides my eye in through the use of perspective, and illuminates the whole business with beautiful light.
So there’s a method to this madness as I am passing along to you what I learned in art school and years practicing since, and it includes elements of design, art history, pedagogy, and play.
Such exercises will walk you through elements that all painters, photographers, and creative people everywhere have used every bit as carefully as mathematicians working with numbers, writers working with sentences, and poets with their breath and imagery. Even if dogs and cats are your thing, I assume you signed up for this class to learn how better to arrange, understand, and master the bow, the wow, and the meow!
So I don’t suppose that everyone here dreams of being a great painter, or even a great fine art photographer, but I do suppose you are interested in learning how to work with your materials, our subject of the (multiculti) city, and do so in a thoughtful, self-conscious way: we do not need to be great artists to work like they do. These days, I think the way to do it is by stepping into their footsteps slowly and carefully, learning from their examples, and applying what we learn to the world in front of us.
With a little practice, you’ll get the hang of it — I’m sure of it! And having mastered ears you can move right along to the magic of pony tails, chair backs, riddles, and discovery.
Like the difference between faces and different ways of rendering them. Which of the two on the left do you prefer, and why? This one is easy, the face in the back is too far and stuck against a grid, but the one in front is remarkable for its minimalism, her head turned so we see but elements of profile, yet as they are complemented by the cool color, shape, and tone of the computer screen, this lovely fine line is supported, set into tension as well by the proximity and precision of the picture frame, and in this tiny corner of the image I feel like her face is in a peaceful place, its warmth against a Mediterranean water or sky, that there is this lovely complementary relationship being worked out in that corner as she is meditating, and it invites me to imagine or feel someting about who she might be and how she might be holding herself in the world. It is a portrait, caught on the fly, which for a moment or two viewers might find compelling, not for who she is, but for how she appears in the context of how the work has been done.
There is all this wonderful discovery in photography. You start off with ears, and then pairs of them, then one falls out while some magic happens with the other, and the next thing you know you have an image that invites gazing and reflection and sharing.
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