The notes I would like you to practice taking should relate directly to your image making within the framework of this class on photographing multicultural Berlin. Note-taking is an art, not a science, and so be open to noting things you might not have seen or made notes about before.

Methods

Keep one page active for notes on methods of seeing and photographing, noting what you learn about holding your camera, asking people to pose for you, moving forward and back, and also, noting how the experience of photographing a few dozen years leads you to see people and things differently.

Culture

Culture also lives in details, often momentary ones that vanish from our memory — especially when one is asked about it in class! Keep one page active for notes on what is similar and different about Germany in comparison to your country, including the shape of fried potatoes, how children are sometimes carted around in wooden wagons, that you get to open the u-bahn car doors … when you have written down about one zillion of such details you will be done.

Learn how to learn by sharing

Share your notes with your classmates as if you were all cub reporters . Simply ask: “so, what tell me what youI will ask you to share some of your note — to read a few and offer general observations — to the end of finding support in the responses of others. There is no right or wrong way, only better ways!

I’ll be adding more to this post too!

We make these proof sheets so you will learn right away what those in our small group see and don’t see, and so you will get a “reality check” on what you have done. That is, we want to train ourselves to make things for others, learn our common vocabularies, and be able to anticipate what others will respond to and how.

Feedback is vital to learning, and we get a lot of it by sharing our b/w proof sheets in class, sharing our images over dinner, watching each other photograph … each occasion has its own strengths.

We’ll also use some online technologies, beginning with Picasa Web Albums. When you store your images using Picasa online, we’ll be able to project and discuss your work in class and find and add our comments during the rest of the week, too.

1. Upload your photo albums to your Picasa Web Album.

Picasa Web Albums offers a cost-free and very easy way to put your photo albums online and share them with me, your classmates, and your friends. To see how they work, click the illustration above to view my Picasa Web Album, choose among the available albums, browse the thumbnails, and click “slideshow” to see the images enlarged and presented one after another.

a) Setup. To set up your own Picasa Web Album, so visit https://www.google.com/accounts/ and follow the instructions to sign up! That’s easy.

b) Upload Photos. Once you have set up your Google Account click “Picasa Web Albums” or “Photos”, depending where you are in your Google Account, and then click “Upload” and follow the directions to drag the photos on your hard drive to the uploader and then click “upload” and you will be done.To see how it works.

1. Navigate to “My Photos” and view the album you have just uploaded.
2. Click “Slideshow” and be amazed at your own work.
3. Click “Share” and learn how to send the link to your mom.
4. Click “Download” to see how others can save your images.
5. Click “Edit” to see how you can move or delete or rename images.
6. Select and copy the url to share.

e) You can also install Picasa on your own machine and take advantage of its many, many photo editing, sharing, managing tools, as you will find described in these great videos.

TIP: Picasa will catalogue your entire hard drive, but you probably want it to catalogue only one photo folder and its sub-folders, as I have done here by selecting the red “X” for each of the other, non-wanted folders. And from there you can simply click these folders to upload them and keep them synchronized.

2. Share your album with the rest of us.

We need ways to find and connect to each other, and for that I’ve created a group bookmarking site on delicious called “bt2009″ where you can add the link to your albums and blogs everyone may find everyone else easily.

To add the url of your new Album to our bookmarking site, navigate to http://delicious.com/bt2009, login with bt2009 and the password I’ve already sent you by email, click “Save a new bookmark”, and paste in the url you just saved.

Before saving it, you will need to add at “tags” that we will all use to sort, such as:

• yourname
• our-albums
• our-blogs
• ears
• street
• comparisons

By clicking these “tags”, Delicious will sort through all the bookmarks and serve only those that you have tagged: this works if we follow common conventions, and as long as two or more of you agree to a new tag name, you are free to add your own!

To understand what makes this application “social bookmarking”, plug your ipod headphones into your computer and watch Social Bookmarking in Plain English, and while you are at it, watch Blogs in Plain English, too.

3. Set up your Google Reader.

To make it really easy to see what everyone has done, set up a reader that will collect all of our posts on your own Google Account, using the Google Reader that came with it. Here’s a one-minute video that explains how it works.

4. Set up your personal blog.

You fourth task is to set up a blogger for posting comments on your images and your final projectyour final projects Our third web activity will be the posting of our photos with commentaries using the free blogger that comes with your Google Account. It is so unbelieveably easy to use that all I have to give you is the url, http://www.blogger.com and invite you to follow the directions!

There are a couple of tips I’d add, as we will here be working with photos and text.

Use the Simpla II template, because it is the widest and simplest, and you probably don’t want to have a narrow column with fragmented text a million miles long, but something closer to a magazine format so that you can concentrate on the interplay of photos and text.

Add posts from the bottom. I chose blogger.com because it gets the basic job done simply, but it is quirky, and it adds images to the top of a post, not at the bottom as we normally type and think, so you’ll probably want to build your posts from the bottom-up (you can drag things around, but it is not elegant.

In the example from my new post, Normally, I don’t follow … illustrated below, I added first the bottom three images as “small”, then the text, then the “large” image at the top.

(If you use WordPress or have your own blog editor, you can and must specify file sizes, but in the interests of time we are choosing a simpler solution.)

Alternate image sizes. Learn how to vary image sizes to give your posts some depth. Positioning a “large” image at the top of the page is always a good idea for the post and the post aggregators (the rss feed or linking arrangement to be discussed below), and including “small” images lower down can help you discuss context, as I’ve done here. Use just these two sizes to keep your blog formats simple, consistent, and easy-to-build.

5. Print proof sheets to share during the break and in class! Finally, print out your collections of ears and street photos like we did on Monday, with nine images on a page, so we can all sign the ones we like best and choose 4-6 of your favorites from anything you have photographed, on any topic, and send them off to the color printer on A4 size to be picked up in room “Bora” when we come back from the break, on our way back to class, so we will have some color images to share!

The purpose of this tutorial is to help you learn how to make proof sheets at the Zedat PC Pool as quickly as possible so we might spend most of our precious class time learning from each other!

You need to bring:

1. Your mensa card to transfer money to your Zedat print account.

2. USB memory sticks (to backup)

3. Your camera with your photos on it!

Keep your image sizes small, so you can work fast!
In this course we will be making images for proof sheets and the web, so there is no need to make files sizes of more than .3 mb unless you plan to make enlargements, when 2 mb for A4 size prints will do just fine. .3 mb will give you image sizes as indicated above, where the 300 kb compressed .jpg file your camera makes expands to 900 kb and capable of producing a high quality 6×9 cm image — more than enough for our proof sheets and the web.

Later, when you might want to print A4 size, set your camera to the 2 mb size, which will print nicely 17 x 22 cm (on A4, 22 x 29 cm paper).

Your daily workflow.

File size greatly matters as a 2mb file will take seven times as long to copy the five times you will need to be making in the workflow that follows, and so, as we want to begin our class discussion of your work each day promptly at 9:30am, you will have only 30 minutes to make prints if you want to arrive at 9am: you simply didn’t come all this way to be missing class discussion for the sake of downloading files, or? Also, please skip the temptation to read your email or chat during class time: better is to work fast, and if you are already done, offer to help someone else!

OK, here’s what you’ll need to do as efficiently as possible so we can get to the good work of sharing and discussion. Bring this printout and do the following:

1. On your way into the PC Pool, first put money on your Zedat printing account if you need to (so you won’t have to interrupt your other work; better, put money on your account when you are finished and have free time before class).  
2. Then look for a free DELL or Macintosh pc in the “Taifun” room on the right (the older machines are much too slow, they have only 512mb RAM, and we want to be in the same room to help each other).
3. Log on to your computer (and again, please do not check your mail until the class break!)
4. Insert your camera’s card into the PC and copy all your new image folders onto the pc’s Desktop.
5. Then copy these folders onto your memory sticks and be sure everything is secure!
6. When you are sure everything is now in three places, delete all the images from your camera so you’ll be ready for the next day’s work! If you want to be able to share your work, better to make an extra proof sheet: the images are larger!
7. Then create new folders for each of your projects and give them today’s date and a relevant assignment name. Select your nine best images for each assignment (because nine is how many images the Windows “passport” or proof sheet format puts on a page) and drag them into their new folders.
8. Print the nine images in each folder to the “Passat 1-6″ printers. Use the Windows print wizards and choosing the “passport” format which prints nine images at a time.
9. When you go looking for your printout, don’t leave your valuables behind unattended!
10. Upload the folders to your Picasa Web album.
11. Copy all of your newly organized folders onto your memory sticks in addition to the originals.
12. Delete those folders from your desktop.
13. Log out.

How to download images from your digital camera

• Downloading pictures from your digital camera (Windows)
• Printing your own pictures (Windows)

Print Application. After you have copied your files and sorted them you want next to print using the “Fotodruck- Assistant”, which you get by a strg-right-mouse click on the folder you want to print. Be sure to choose the “passbild” format which prints nine images on one side for proof sheets.

B/W Printers. When prompted for printers you want to choose the black/white laser printers named “passat-1″ to “passat-6″ as there are six of them in the room called “Passat” next to “Taifun”.
Color Printers. When you want to print color, you will choose “farbe46″ and pick up your print 30 minutes later in room “Bora” which you passed on the way into the PC Pool.
Print Costs. Printing costs .04 per page, put on your Zedat print account using your mensa card and the kiosk in the PC Pool, as I will show you on the first day. To find out how much money is left on your Zedat print account, go to: https://portal.zedat.fu-berlin.de/services/index.php and click the “Printservice” link.

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.

We’ll also be photographing and sharing and discussing our work, as well as the work of established artists and professionals, along the way. We’ll also do some exercises in the use of light and composition that will help train our eye and inform our picture-making strategies. And finally, we’ll be using the new web communications technologies to share with each other and reach out to larger audiences. You’ll learn how to upload your digital images to online photo albums, create your own photo blog, and keep track of your many images. In sum, you’ll get a solid introduction to milticulti Berlin and the use of photographs for documentation and expression.

You need not know much about photography or Berlin — though we always have advanced photographers, art students, and urbanists or other professionals in this class. If you haven’t uploaded digital images to the web and worked on a blog, that’s no problem: it’s really easy, once you get the hang of it, and I’ll show you how. Just be sure to bring a digital camera and maybe an extra battery and chip, and if you’ve got a laptop it would be good to bring that, too, so you can sort your images on your hard drive at home. But you can also use the PC’s and Macs in the Freie Universitaet Berlin’s Zedat PC Pool, a room with a lot of machines and printers near our classroom, and you’ll get lots of help with the technology if you need it, I assure you.

I want to help you discover and convey what you have discovered. That means developing strategies for finding things that might interest you, working with what you find, selecting and sorting what you’ve collected, preparing and presenting your work to others, inviting, evaluating, and assimilating advice, and applying what you learn to the next opportunity. I’m interested in preparing you to be “reflective practitioners”, if you are familiar with the relevant research literatures on professional training, and most notably, the work of Donald Schön. This means that if you are among the third of the class that, in year’s past, includes graduate students in fields as diverse as computer science, criminology, social science, and literature, this course will be not only fun, but also, offer some very solid advice on the role of creativity and group dynamics in professional training. If you are among the third of the students, in year’s past, with artistic training or interests or goals, almost everything we will do will be completely familiar to you and anyone involved in studio art programs: most of what we will be doing I first learned hands-on as a graduate student of photography at Cranbrook Academy of Art and while teaching photography for years after that — before I made a little detour into the humanities and social sciences. In the simplest of terms, all you’ve really go to do is do what Ahmed did beautifully: look at great art, like we looked at Vermeer, and make pictures like that, as Ahmed did here.

We will be using the web a lot, as you will see on the last year’s course page, where everyone kept both web albums for the sharing of their daily work and created blogs for their final projects. Learning how to use these technologies is basic to digital photography today, so I’ll be giving you advice on the basics and sending you off with these powerful tools in your toolkit. We’ll also be using some excellent online resources, such as you’ll find in the other posts on this page, including the advice from sociology and art history noted above. You’ll also find a number of resources for the study of perspective, including the studies of Vermeer, the detailed explanations of how perspective works, and examples that helped Ahmed do his good work.

And then there’s the good advice of yourself and your peers! Much of what you will learn will come from your working closely with your classmates, and this is often the most helpful and fun! Consider, for example, the photo I made of that fabulous moment after our first tour, when we were going around the table introducing ourselves and I’d had time to drink exactly half a beer, when Liza said: “I’m from Moldavia, I study banking, and I LOVE money! Everybody: show me your money!” She was full of curiosity and mischief, but we did it, and within a minute we had money from China, the U.S., Brazil, Turkey, Europe, and Moldavia all over the table, and in the picture you see Liza expertly sorting through it and showing us how to look at it and discover things we hadn’t seen before. Such curiousity is contagious, and if the past is any guide, you can expect to become infected with it, too!

That is, I try to offer a number of different ways of thinking about problems, including, again, the methods I learned in art school and university and as a teacher and artist since then. The workshop approach insures that if you don’t really understand me you’ll have the support of your peers, somehow get “hooked” by at least one conversation, and have at your disposal lots of other advice when you might be ready for it. I will be right there reading and photographing with you, too, because I love to photograph and because art is sometimes best learned in the company of fellow artists, as I have learned and continue to learn. Although almost all of my artistic work for six years now has been rather specific, addressing a series of formal, emotional, and philosophical issues — as you’ll find by clicking the My/Current Spook link above, I’ve done a lot of photographing in cities. Sometimes I make very formal studies of streets and buildings, but at others I just have fun making snapshots, as in a walk in Neukoelln. I love making different kinds of photos and so use this month-long course to get back in touch with street photo, multiculti Berlin, and working with those new to the art.

Group work is a magical thing, and it works like this: two evenings a week when the light is especially nice we’ll all go out on this tour, everyone will be photographing on the same streets, but everyone’s pictures will be quite different, and so you’ll be presented with the riddle: “Damn! I was there, but I didn’t see that! … how did she do it?!!?”

This sometimes unsettling experience usually comes before the “a-ha!” experience, when you finallly solve some little riddle. It is unsettling because you were there, staring right at the thing in real time with someone else who managed to see it quite differently and cobble it all together in some magical way that you did not. “Damn!” you will say, and if you are luckly, you won’t sleep so well that evening and spend some time the next day trying to figure it out, and when you do, this strange, mysterious, and sometimes very productive process will be rewarding: you’ll end up seeing things you haven’t seen before as well as end up with with some new photo tools in your photo tool kit. And since this is a photo class, with all manner of acknowledgement for what you’ve done and suggestions of how things might be done better, you’ll have a chance to learn why some things might be better than others, and thereby develop your critical abilities.

This happens to me all the time, and in part this is because I put myself in the way of such creative mischief. In my own work, twice a week now for years I’ve been visiting basically the same weird abandoned places, maybe 300 rooms in four or five places outside of Berlin, that are slowly rotting into the earth and so changing with every drop of moisture, and these days I’m obsessed with about 50 cold winter cellars when the night falls and the light does these magical things. When I first get there around 3pm, the light is dumb and I wonder how on earth I will make something interesting, but I’m patient, I work with what I’ve got, and by dusk just about every time something magical happens, and about once a month, maybe one out of 120 pictures that I make, I’ll get something worth exhibiting.

That’s mostly how it works with me, and how it might work with you might be something like this: Since I’ve fallen in love with tango dancing, do it all the time, and use any excuse possible to talk about it, you can be sure that when I start talking about photographing the famous Berlin courtyards, these unusual spaces with curious mixtures of working, living, commercial, and recreational functions, I’ll advise you to walk into and around and about them as modern dancers would. This is not so far-fetched as it might at first seem. The image to the right is from a 1970 dance film, “Journeys From Berlin,” made in Berlin in front of the unusual church on the Hohenzollerndamm depicted in the film still, and where the dancer and film-maker Yvonne Rainer created a powerful meditation based on exploring that unusual space with the exotic purple glass roof over the doorway that curves up like an elephant’s tusk. It’s really something what she did. Well, the analogy I offer is very practical: that by moving systematically through a room or courtyard we get to know the objects, light, colors, etc., much, much better and because we have moved forward and back, left and right, up and down, and felt the presence of all the other objects and light and shadow and color and feeling, we will find it much, much easier to compose an image with some sophistication. In any event, moving the camera is your basic activity when photographing: finding a place to stand, figuring out what to include and exclude, and then maybe when … that’s where we make our choices, and choices are the key to expression, or? So, I don’t know if this particular explanation will work for you, but once we enter into experiment and dialogue about ways of knowing and seeing all sorts of wonderful things can and will happen.

In the illustration to the left, you’ll see how all this talk and practice with problems of light, color, detail, gesture, composition and so forth paid off for Lena, one Sunday afternoon at the milonga in the Tango Loft, where she made a simply lovely, warm, three-part composition arranged vertically, like a Japanese scroll painting. Well, I’ve danced in that place at least 100 times and made a zillion photographs, but I’ve not made anything like it: it is done so well, and I think it brings out in a very nice way the light, heat, color, and rich sensuality that makes such places simply magical. Lena showed me something I’d not seen, it was wonderful. Thanks, Lena!

So, there’s theory, including all this wonderful, sophisticated advice that we find in art history, sociology, or whatever, and then there’s the practice, the “tricks of the trade”, that you don’t often find in books (though Howie Becker and many others talk about the difference between “how to” and “know how”), and which comes out when groups addressing a common problem start comparing notes in detail: what happens when people with different backgrounds and interests decide to work together, each offering something, and end up proving that the sum is far greater than its parts.

Maybe it has to do with “lost in translation”, if you know the movie, where you find yourself in a new place with some guides, opportunities for intense friendships among fellow travelers, and the odd timelessness that happens in summers between semesters — I don’t really know, learning is basically magic to me. But after just a few lessons and examples last summer, everybody started photographing things much, much closer, and got a lot closer to their subjects, too; they started lining things up on the edges like professionals, positioning themselves so the light would come in from one side so the important stuff pops out, letting the background fall away or open up on to some other space so the picture might “breathe”, developing a feeling for timing and the “moment” and so making the picture “snap” — as Liza did when she looked for and found fellow Russians she could interview and photograph in scenes reflecing the cultures they have in common.

As Melissa did in this fine photo of a seamstress, too: how we treat the central problem of photographing multi-culti in Berlin as a more general problem of photographing persons in places and getting to know them: how to set things up, inventory the pictorial elements, find patterns in their arrangement, balance all against the light and subject , and all the while asking one’s subjects how things are going and finding out, as one does in conversation with this warm, thoughtful Turkish woman, that it is difficult to pay the rent that is going up because of the new mega-mall built down the road and how the cheap clothing such malls sell means people are buying more clothing but repairing less.

So, the basic plan is this: We meet two mornings in a university classroom to share our work and experiences and talk about the assigned readings, and we meet two evenings a week too, to tour different parts of Berlin and photograph together. During the first two weeks, we work on the basics, including the basics of digital camera controls; editing, sorting, storing, and uploading our images to web albums; developing a feeling for light, perspective, and composition; learning from some of the great photographers, and learning how to talk about photographs. During the second two weeks each student concentrates on a topic of particular interest and creates a photo blog as a final project. If everything goes to plan, you’ll learn some of the fundamentals of the art and craft as well as get to know some of this city in its particulars. If you’ve got any questions — and no question is too smart or too dumb! — simply send me an email at bruce.spear@gmail.com.

Ahmed’s Blog and Web Album. “One way to learn is by making mistakes, I have learned how to build bridges of trust with the person I am taking photos of, and sometimes it was more like hunting: you need to wait for the right time and hope you have enough luck!”

Beyza’s Blog and Web Album. “In Turkish, there is a famous saying: ” Who knows more? The one who reads a lot or the one who travels a lot?” I’ve read many articles about people living in Berlin, but the incredible experience was to meet the flesh and blood Berliners themselves, talk to them in person, and capture the moments of their lives.”

Bruce’s Blog and Web Album. “From the moment when I first met them, I just KNEW these people were going to do wonderful things, and they did! It was a tremendous pleasure working with these people, and as you may see by what they say and by visiting their blogs and web albums, they worked hard and achieved much: there are a lot of photos here that are simply fabulous!”

Chet’s Blog and Web Album. “I learned that my photographs are about capturing the moment My pictures are now about composing the images that my eyes see in order to show the beauty that the world provides.”

Echo’s Blog and Web Album. “Before, I took lots of landscape pictures, but now I’ve learned how to communicate with people and share feelings with them. I now get closer to people and things when I make pictures and so show the details. Photographing is not so hard, but just a reflection the normal life. When we notice it we can take more excellent photos and enjoy our colorful life.”

Jake’s Blog and Web Album. “I learned to pay more attention to details, to walk into an area, notice the finer elements both natural and constructed, and wonder why it is the way it is.”

John’s Blog and Web Album. “Patience. I wasn’t patient. I wouldn’t wait for aspecific moment in time to freeze. I learned to wait for the life and dynamics of the photo to come into the frame and position themselves. I learned to wait for the photo to come to life.”

Judith’s Blog and Web Album. “I learnt that there is an ethics to good photography: that when you come to a subject with preconceived ideas, you risk casting it in stone. Great photography requires a sensitivity that demands you set aside your opinions and seek out fresh understanding.”

Lena’s Blog and Web Album. “There’s a vulnerability in the photo that comes out when there is mutual trust between the photographer and the subject. When you build rapport, there’s a new warmth, an intimacy that makes for a beautiful photo.”

Lisa’s Blog and Web Album. “I’ve learned that much of photography is about letting go. Often one must set aside shyness and usual social defence mechanisms in order to enter an explored place where a good photograph can be taken.”

Liza’s Blog and Web Album. “I wanted to show people the atmosphere and the importance of the photos i’ve taken, that’s why i think i’ve learned to pay attention to the details in order to make the whole picture of what i’m doing. It’s important for me because i want people feel what I felt when I was taking that photos, when I was in that place or when I met those people.”

Mariana’s Blog and Web Album. “I learned that while being shy did not allow me to take good pictures up close, it allowed me to observe things and people from afar and in my opinion, take pictures that are as good and more personal to me.”

Melissa’s Blog and Web Album. “Details. You should take a second look around and you will find that there is so much more. After studying the fundamental elements of photography I see the world different, more interesting and more detailed.”

Nina’s Blog and Web Album. “I learned not to be afraid of interacting with people. As with my friends, I was able to become more comfortable with them. Then they were able to open themselves up to me.”

Yoni’s Blog and Web Album. “I like to investigate people that break away from homogenized mainstream culture which we are all plagued with everyday. I’ve found a lot of them in Europe.”

When A or B get lost, they say “whatever” and make the best of it, which typically involves kicking back with a beer — and lots of photos made from camera’s steadied on the tops of bottles. When C and D get lost, well, they never get lost, because they simply stick together — and make photos of cheeks, chins, and the ears of their neighbors. When E gets lost, lucky here, she simply calls a number and a black SUV with darkened windows pulls up and whisks her away to her kids — which she then photographs, except then her oldest grabs the camera and takes over. When F gets lost, she basically goes into a panic, loses her normal reticence to go up to complete strangers — and photographs them! When G gets lost, she thinks she is supposed to look around for daddy to save her, but since he never shows up she then finds her way home with complete confidence — and takes these amazing photographs of walls, windows, and whatever.

When looking for models to emulate we started off by looking at a painting of Vermeer’s that is analyzed on the website of the National Gallery of Art in at least three dimensions:

Light. Note how the light draws our attention to what she is doing, how it models her features beautifully, unifies the important elements, and sets up an emotional tone … and suggests how we might compose our own work similarly and to our advantage!

Design. Note how the painter has balanced fields of light and dark, set up diagonals with objects and light, and organized the perspective to guide the eye to what is important … something you can and should do, too!

Symbols and Meaning. Note how he dresses his figure, furnishes her room, and organizes her activity … and ask yourself: what things surround my subjects in Berlin and what do they tell us about them?

Learning from other artists is of course central to studio art training and much artistic practice. You might be interested, for example, in learning about the modern photographs Jeff Wall has made based on classical paintings, including a remake of a Japanese painting.

In the images above, moving from left to right, I think we can see how Evans was at least in part thinking about what to do with the bright white circles in the background that risk distracting his viewers from the faces and actions that are his main subject: he’s got to do something with them, or at least I think so, if he is going to make a coherent image, one where most if not all things have their place and fit together in a special way. His solution was to center the man on the left between the two white signs in the show window and, for the woman on the right, to have the line of lamps receding in the background lead to a vanishing point precisely behind her head — as precisely, I think, as Vermeer had his vanishing point lead to the scales (as we see in the previous post).

The second thing I think we can learn from this image, is to see how he moved to the right to reveal the man’s face, and as he did so, the woman turned to view him, so that we have this curious sequence of gazes: the man to the woman, the woman to us (and maybe the person in front, whose darkened head we see, looking at the man). I suspect you will read this second image like I do: my eye going from the one to the other, tracing their gazes, looking into their faces, and wondering how they fit together.

This leads us to consider how street photography can often be about setting things up, spontaneity, and interaction with the photographer — and as here, about all three happening at once! What a curious combination: planning and accident, design and surprise, balance and then some action which makes things all wobbly! I think that’s why such pictures develop such interesting, curious tensions: the picture starts off being about these people in this place, and then it ends up being about chance actions, the photographer intruding on someone else’s privacy, and then their interacting with him (or her).

If you’d like to explore another street photographer working in this tradition, you might take a look at the webcast about Lee Friedlander on the website of the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts.