Inceptive Notions

Sitting Still

Taylor, 2009

Twelve weeks ago I was lying on a table in a drawing room at Pratt staring up at the ceiling. I was cursing the camera standing next to me vowing to never touch it again. It was my first time shooting with an 8 x 10 view camera. It was heavy, time consuming, and the film was incredibly expensive. A few hours later I met a friend for lunch. I was still fuming. “Everything went wrong. Now I have a headache. People can’t sit still. Why is it so heavy? Why would anyone ever touch that thing?” His response: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you angry.” One week later I was lugging the camera to Brooklyn yet again. This time for something a little more intimate. A series of closer portraits. Fast-forward one hour and I’m boiling again. I’d never worked with a subject who acted so rudely. I wasn’t given the time I needed and I could almost imagine how blurry and horrible the images were going to turn out. Something tells me I persevered because I knew I wasn’t getting something I wanted. Perhaps I enjoyed the challenge. I decided to shoot someone closer to home. Someone that would give me the time I needed. Someone I cared about. It worked. The first time I walked out of the darkroom holding a 16×20 print of the image my stomach lurched. I hadn’t felt that proud of something since I first started shooting in high school. It was beautiful. It was tac sharp. It was like real life.

I’ve finally discovered a medium that captures the detail and presence of a human being. I have a strange reverence for film for these somewhat spiritual reasons I’ve mentioned before… That it actually captures the energy of a person. It becomes a little treasure. A piece of someone to keep and remember and hold onto. Everything is a transfer of energy. The light that caresses the details of our faces is transfered to an 8 x 10 inch negative. It’s an artifact. A large and tangible imprint of a living thing. When I’m holding up the negative I feel like “this is you.” These feelings are only exacerbated by the fragility of the thin sheet that is susceptible to scratching and deterioration throughout every step of processing.

For a while I was back at square one. Relearning the technical aspects and basic optics of the camera. I was working at speeding up the process. Learning the idiosyncrasies and perfecting my developing. I still have so much to learn. I’ve only been shooting with one lens. I haven’t moved the camera from standard position. I haven’t experimented with different films. I haven’t done anything but “straight photography.” But I’m actually more happy with my work than I’ve ever been. Which is why I need to figure out what it is that I’m doing and why it is that I’m doing it.

Jack, 2009

The funniest part of the 8 x 10: I never see the image I’m taking. Sure I compose it. Sure I direct the subject. But that 30 seconds between announcing “I’m focused” and snapping the image is filled with me jumping around the camera and double-checking my exposure. I always cast my eyes down when I say “1, 2, 3″ and click the shutter. I think I’m in love with the element of surprise.

What goes into every image? Tremendous expense. The time it takes to lug a suitcase, wooden tripod, and backpack full of image holders to the location. The hour(s) of shooting. The hours of developing. And the hours of scanning and working in the darkroom. All of those hours are therapeutic. I feel like I’m working towards something. It makes me care so much more. It feels like there’s a basic breakdown: with digital for too long I was trying to “get” the image. I would shoot until I thought I “got” the image. With the 8 x 10 I’m making an image. Creating it. I’ve usually only got 1-2 shots. It feels like a skill rather than a stroke of luck. It’s more careful… more precise. And I’m more passionate.

Emily and Jake, 2009

Many of the shots have been on the street. I was taken aback by how much attention the camera gets. I started to keep track of how many people stop to have a conversation. The record is 16.

There’s such an anticlimactic element to the shot itself. So much preparation for a little “click.” That’s probably why I always go “woo!” after every shot. I want to install some fireworks.

I currently have a list a hundred miles long of techniques I want to try and people and locations I want to shoot. It will probably be a year before I embark on any coherent project. I’m too much of an experimenter to lock myself down.

My friend Peter gave me some good advice. I’d just finished a shoot and was folding up a piece of paper on which I’d sketched image ideas. I was on my way out of Tisch when I asked him his thoughts on an image. He basically told me I too often know precisely what I want. I have an image in my head and I try to force it out. Fortunately the spontaneity of people in reality is often much more interesting than whatever my brain can come up with. Psychology would probably say that the image in my head is just a combination of past images anyway. “Let your subject come up with their own interpretation of your direction.” Let them make it their own. After all, an image is a collaboration. That was one of the most important lessons I received from the Model as Muse show at the Metropolitan Museum. The photographer-subject relationship is a tug-of-war of ideas and egos that gets lost in translation and results in some static image that is either revolted or cherished on a hundred different levels that vary from person to person. Something else to add to the list. A new way of working.

“Never think photography is easy. It’s like poetry in that it’s easy enough to make a few rhymes, but that’s not a good poem.” -Perkins

Rob, 2009

Somehow I’ve found myself focusing on portraits of other artists. The energy levels and personalities are so very different across the board. I’ve found the positivity and passion inspiring. Of course that’s the problem with an arts school and New York City in general. There’s so many people doing such great things. It’s impossible to digest it all or find the breathing room to complete your own body of work. A life in the theater, a life in the dance studio, a life behind a computer inventing the next great iPhone application.

“The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don’t belong.” -Meiselas

Addison, 2009

Since this entry long ago lost track of its main focus I’ll end with a short exploration of ideas.

These are quotes and my reactions that were extracted from a talk I attended between two genius wordsmiths: Zadie Smith & Jonathan Safran Foer.

JSF: “What do you want?” ZS:”What I want changes every day.” | I imagine it changes every day because we accomplish something and what we want is always contingent upon what we have. If we weren’t hard-wired to want something more then progress would dissipate. Of course then we have the classic question: Can we ever truly be happy? I’ve decided happiness is surrendering. Tripping into the pool of optimism. Finally giving up on worry. Which, honestly, feels like an impossibility.

ZS: “Family you cannot change.” | It’s the one thing in life you are seriously and sometimes tragically stuck with. I recently saw August: Osage County and experienced a mix of laughing until my gut hurt and sudden knife-stabbing realizations that this was my family being acted out on stage. It’s both frightening and comforting when something hits so close to home.

ZS: “I can only write the way I write.” | When will I stop trying to please others with my most personal work?

JSF: “I write so that when you are exhausted in your own world, you can escape to another.” | How generous.

_______

Someone once told me, “you love being a student.” I’m still not sure why that was like a slap in the face.

Finally, here’s a question I was posed that I’m still having trouble answering: “What to you is a failed photograph?”

Michael George :: Jun.23.2009 :: My Photography :: 3 Comments »

From the Left – April/May 2009

This is going to be quite the image dump. Enjoy!

My high school photo teacher once told our class “if you turn in an image of a sunset I’m giving you an F”

Oh well.

Michael George :: Jun.04.2009 :: From the Left, My Photography :: 2 Comments »

Spoken Word: Todd Hido – A Road Divded

#3235 from the series Roaming, 2005

*note: this interview was recently published in the Spring 2009 issue of ISO magazine

The road embodies ideas of travel, exploration, and discovery— elements that make up the soul of a curious photographer. From Stephen Shore to Ryan McGinley, road trips have long been a tradition in the photographic process. Roads bring photographers out into the American landscape where they become free to explore the quirks and detritus littered throughout. Though many have used it as a path to their subject, Todd Hido sees the road as a subject all its own. A Road Divided is a series of images shot through the windshield of a car. Some details are sharp while others melt into abstract fluid forms. This visible separation distances the viewer from the specificities of the landscape, exemplifying the universality of the subject.

As a teenager driving across the flat and endless landscape that is Florida, I relished in those moments of solitude when the road felt infinite. I would peer to the left at the travelers moving in the opposite direction. I was always heading toward others’ destinations, and they were always heading toward my starting place. For me, being on the road was a search for meaning, traveling through space and looking for answers, a promising destination. What we don’t see is that the endless search for peace, home, and a common experience is realized in the very search itself.

____

MG: I’d like to start with something a little basic. How did the series begin?

TH: I remember clearly I was scouting around for places that I was going to go back to and photograph at night. I was looking around, stopped at a stop sign, and all of a sudden this water kind of rushed in front of my window off my roof. I remember thinking, “Wow, that is really amazing. I should take a picture.” So I got my camera, which was sitting on the front seat, and took a photograph.

The picture sat on my contact sheet for quite some time because I was focused on my night shots at that point – shooting mostly what became my House Hunting series. But then every so often, I would go through my contact sheets, and I remember finding this image and thinking, “This is something very interesting,” and printing it. That’s how a lot of my series begin. Something just sort of happens, and it leads to many others.

MG: The series is titled A Road Divided. Why?

TH: I feel that the first thoughts of this work were about when things come apart—about what divides people—but in the end there are always two ways you can take. It is up to you how you look at it.

#6097 from the series A Road Divided, 2008

MG: The images are, sometimes noticeably and sometimes not, shot through the windshield of a car. Many times, the windshield is smattered with water droplets and sheets of ice. The effect reminds me of old techniques like rubbing Vaseline on the camera lens to create a tilt-shift blur. Do you find yourself using the windshield as a canvas – constructing these layers onto the painterly image? Or is it all a natural effect, completely dependent on the weather and conditions?

TH: It’s a little bit of both. Initially, it starts with just the weather and conditions, and I’m just driving around, and it’s raining, and stuff happens on the window, and I just try and shoot that. I think, over the years, I’ve been able to get control over my technique, and in that particular sense, it would seem like a canvas. I’m definitely able to figure out where I want things and how I want them. I’m shooting with a handheld Pentax 6×7, and all of the pictures are made when I’m stopped. I let the rain accumulate on the windshield and continue shooting as it adds up. Then I’ll clear it and start over again. That’s pretty much the process. Like any photography there’s a humungous amount of luck involved in it. I think, as a photographer, because chance is such a key element of photography, it’s your job to make chance work for you. I’ll shoot many different pictures, and I know which images to pick. That’s really what it comes down to—you shoot and then you edit down, and you curate it into something you really like.

MG: The series, like many of your images, has an explorative and introspective mood. When you venture out on these journeys is there anything you’re looking for either in the image or in yourself? In that same sense, what attracts you to these desolate roads?

TH: I think that absolutely, there’s an introspective feeling to my pictures. I feel like that comes from when I get to just go out and look around, check things out. I really enjoy that process because there’s a real freedom to picture making, and when I’m looking for subjects, whether it’s a house, a landscape, or even a portrait, I’m always looking for something that feels familiar to me. Something from my past or something that I know a little bit in some way or when I see something that I recognize as a place from my history. There’s a certain quality of memory and familiarity to the places that I take pictures of and in the feeling that my photographs evoke.

#7557 from the series A Road Divided, 2008

MG: The weather is a prominent subject throughout the series. Does this bear any special significance? Is it simply to control the emotional weight of the image?

TH: There’s something about the mood that a cloudy day (and nighttime and in my earlier work) that evokes something that I’m really interested in. I would say yes, definitely the weather has significance. I rarely ever go out and photograph on a sunny day. I’ll do portraits on that kind of a day because that just means brighter light on the inside, but I won’t go out and shoot in the blue sky. That kind of thing is just not what I’m interested in. There’s a mood to a blue sky as well, but it’s not the mood I’m currently looking for. The weather does definitely infer an emotional weight in an image, and there’s something about a rainy day that you just can’t beat in some way.

MG: The murky results from shooting through the windshield give an antiquated coating to the images. They feel like the nostalgic memories of a seasoned traveler. What are your thoughts on this? Do you feel like the images speak to the past?

TH: I guess there’s a sense of longing and loss to my work, and there’s something people just kind of recognize from their own history in it. One of the things about my pictures that I think works and sometimes sets it apart from other people’s work that we see these days is that there’s a real emotion to my work. I think my work is psychologically driven instead of being driven conceptually. I certainly don’t sit down in my studio and think of an idea and then go out and photograph it. I’m the kind of photographer that prefers to respond to what I’m seeing and that’s how I work. That is how I have always worked.

MG: What do you hope, if anything, people take from experiencing the emotional responses that your images evoke? I know you said your series are not driven conceptually, but do you have any specific goals for this series?

TH: My goal is to express myself and to connect with others. This is a statement I wrote in graduate school—I think it still fits:

As an artist I have always felt that my task is not to create meaning, but to charge the air so that meaning can occur.

#6426 untitled 2007

MG: In one of the more recent images, you include a human presence. This contrasts with the feeling of isolation of the rest of the images. What was your intention with this portrait? Was it also reliant on chance? Do you feel that it adds to the rhythm of the series?

TH: No, this person was not there by chance. I had her stand there. That is usually how I direct my portraits. I say “just stand here” or “try leaning here,” and I just let gestures and expressions naturally occur. I think much of my work has always had a “human presence” in it. All my images of places are somehow to me about people. Yes, they are often empty, but they are about things that have happened there. Not literally of course. But in a roundabout way.

MG: When you set out on a journey to take photographs do you have any sort of trajectory or is it more of a meditative exploration? Have you ever gotten yourself lost?

TH: You unfortunately can’t get lost these days. I have tried. A road always leads somewhere—and they mostly are all connected.

MG: Music is a big player in affecting a person’s emotional outlook. When encapsulated in a car, it’s usually just you and whatever is vibrating from your speakers. While driving do you listen to music? If so, what?

TH: I actually always listen to talk radio when I am driving and shooting. I like the conversations I hear.

#4155-A from the series Between the Two, 2007

____

To view more of Todd Hido’s work please visit his website by clicking here

all photographs courtesy Bruce Silverstein Gallery

Michael George :: May.20.2009 :: Interviews, Photographers :: No Comments »

ISO – Spring 2009

The Spring issue of ISO is now available for viewing online and to purchase in print (no markup). A few changes this time around…

It’s longer! A whopping 72 pages
More articles! We brought on a team of writers who have been just awesome
Redesigned PhotoFlo section
Aaand more

As expected the issue brought many sleepless nights but with the help of our tireless staff everything turned out better than I could have hoped.

Hope you enjoy.

FYI: We’re always looking to sell ads! The magazine is distributed to the NYU student body. Feedback is good too. Just send me an email.

Michael George :: May.17.2009 :: My Photography, Publications :: No Comments »

Punctum

It’s an experience everyone shares. You show up at a thrift store, antique show, or flea market and begin to rifle through a pile of old photographs. You get sucked in. Flip, flip, flip. People on average spend half a second with each image. Flip, flip, stop. What is that image that forces your rhythmic shuffle to a halt? What is in that image that forces you to take out your wallet and spend the $1 (or sometimes more, if the dealer has a sense of aesthetics) to take that image home? This is a simple question, one that was raised in my Poetics of Witnessing class and left me thinking for the next couple of weeks. What images stop to make us think? What images stop to make us look? What are we thinking? What are we looking for? Quick thoughts:

The moments surrounding the photographs – what was happening before? What was happening after? Is there a narrative? Are there more images in the pile that can help to piece the mystery together?
The photograph speaks for itself. It’s simply interesting.
People you think you recognize, those universal qualities. What is the same? What is different?
What is the difference between photos you’re in, photos you’ve taken, and photos you look at?
Emergencies and traumatic events. Why is she on a stretcher?
How places have changed since the photograph was taken.
I’m looking for myself.
Eternally looking to recognize someone.
If you see yourself in the past it makes the world feel more connected.
When people are in love with the occasion – love is in the air – D-Day, what will eventually be Obama’s election and inauguration.
Consistency in subject matter that helps to construct a narrative.

This question is different from why do you want to look at old photographs? After all, what compels us to do so in the first place? What about the anonymity of the photographer? It almost seems like the images just came into being. Who was supposed to hold onto them? Where have they been and why are they here? Will someone ever be asking these same hundreds of questions about an image of me? Will people ever look at my images and wonder why I took what I took and who I am and what I did? It’s strange how often people look at these images and wonder ‘who are these people’ rather than ‘who was the photographer.’ Especially when the images are beautiful. It’s, as a classmate put it, “a science of looking through desirable or detestable bodies.”

And in the end these images are only the sum of what you bring to them. The personal narratives that you construct are likely nothing more than what you know. This reminds me of an interesting point that was brought to my attention the other day. NYU hosted a conversation between two genius contemporary authors: Jonathan Safran Foer, one of our professors, and Zadie Smith. While discussing memory Zadie mentioned how perturbed she can be by sifting through photographs after an event. The images begin to substitute her memories. That fluid intangible thing that is filled with emotions and random sparks of faces, laughs, and objects is succeeded by a static image. I started to think about the places I’ve photographed. I tried to remember them as memories and not photographs. This was extremely difficult. Photography make life both easier to remember and impossible to recall.

After discussing old photographs and the undiscovered wonders that wait patiently throughout the city’s fleamarkets, I had an itching to go exploring. Early one Saturday morning I arrived at The Garage. As I pushed past the hanging flaps of semi-translucent plastic that keeps out the flies and locks in the smells, I paused. Vendors sat with their wares which ranged from ceramics to sunglasses to old school pinup girl posters. Immediately to my right I spotted a familiar sight. Among various Polaroid cameras and beaten down SLRs sat a little plastic container filled with brown-tinted photographs. I dove in. Strangely, I never really stopped to think about precisely what I was looking for. I just looked. I felt like a curator as I threw down images into a pile to the left of forgettables, a pile in the middle for slight curiosities, and a pile to the right for true loves. After possibly 600 images I began to ‘kill puppies’ as my professor would say. I knocked down my selection and took them to the vendor.

I looked at most of the images strewn throughout the first floor. One table split the images by race: blacks and whites. As I looked through each section I was unnerved by the complete lack of overlap in skin color. I moved on. The top floor brought a stack of Polaroids, mostly taken at parties. I saw mullets, nudity, and too much beer. I kept seeing the same people hulled up in the same broken down house with wood-paneled walls accented by cigarette butts. Who were they and why did they care so much about documenting this endless stream of hangovers and legwarmers. By the time I was done, many hours later, I had a substantial handful of images tucked into the back of my journal. Each one I cherished more than any print I would purchase in a gallery. These were originals. Anonymous, unique, and completely unpretentious. Some made me laugh, with their self-proclamations like “Mark Twain Community-Golf Course + Me.” This image of a woman with her back to the camera exuded the same emotions I felt while watching the last piece in Paris Je’ Taime.

I’ve posted a majority of the images I collected that day throughout this post in hopes you will feel a little bit of why I chose these instead of the others among the hundreds of images that flitted past my eyes that day. Looking through the collection was nourishing, a slide into history and that never ending habit of snapping photographs. In someway I feel like I’m fulfilling the photographer’s dreams of igniting their vision for decades to come. Maybe it’s a karma thing, I’ll probably never know.

Tangent: A film photograph captures someone’s energy (the light bouncing off of their bodies). Does digital change that? There’s no direct absorbance of energy.

Michael George :: May.04.2009 :: Miscellaneous :: 1 Comment »

From the Left – March 2009

Unfortunately ‘From the Left – April 2009′ may not exist because I couldn’t afford 35mm film for the first half of the month thanks to the incredible price of 8 x 10 film. More on that later…

Staten Island, March 2009

Untitled, March 2009

Lightbulb, March 2009

Untitled, March 2009

Class, March 2009

Untitled, March 2009

Michael George :: May.02.2009 :: From the Left, My Photography :: No Comments »

Light – Margaret Tait

This poem is everything.

Light

Did you say it’s made of waves?
Yes, that’s it.
I wonder what the waves are made of.
Oh, waves are made of waves.
Waves are what they are,
Shimmeringness,
Oscillation,
Rhythmical movement which is the inherent essence
of all things.
Ultimately, there’s only movement,
Nothing else.
The movement that light is
Comes out of the sun
And it’s so gorgeous a thing
That nothing else is ever anything unless lit by it.
- Margaret Tait

Read this. Fall in love.

Michael George :: Apr.30.2009 :: Books, Miscellaneous, Poetry :: No Comments »

City Stories Follow-Up & Trees

Huzzah! I finally gnabbed a shot of the Sara Bareilles image that originally piqued my interest. Granted this was taken with my iPhone but it’s better than the reflections in the last post.

In other news, I shot a wedding in Philadelphia last Friday and that was a blast. Now Spring Break is coming to a close and that is a tragedy.

If you’re in New York and have a free moment you absolutely cannot miss the show at Yossi Milo Gallery right now. I saw one of Myoung Ho Lee’s images when it was hanging in the back section of the gallery a few weeks back. I thought it was beautiful and was happy to find out a show would be up soon! Apparently it’s Lee’s first concrete body of work. This means no book, which I was saddened to find, but the images really thrive as large prints.

This is one of those cases where an artist’s work makes you realize how maybe-not-original your own ideas are. I, for the longest time, had plans to place white backdrops on the streets of NYC behind fire hydrants to work on a typology of sorts. For now I’ll leave that thought in the gutter.

You know, I just love trees.

Michael George :: Mar.23.2009 :: Advertising, Photographers :: No Comments »

Banana Republic – City Stories

Well, I’m pissed. I was walking home the other night and saw some surprisingly striking images in the display windows of the Banana Republic store on the corner of Spring and Broadway. When I went back to shoot them today I found a giant SALE banner covering them up. To make matters worse, I was shooting during the day so the reflections killed the images anyway. Now, my first reaction to these flubs was “Oh well, I’ll find them online.” Unfortunately, that has been a fruitless effort.

The images are part of a campaign entitled City Stories. BR has taken quite a few well-known musicians and interviewed them to find out what it is about the city that inspires them. The interviews tend to be less than inspiring in themselves, but some are worth watching (such as Chris Carrabba’s of Dashboard Confessional whom, no matter what anyone says, I will always love). They’ve also got some exclusive performances on the campaign’s website. However, there’s no photo gallery to be found and the images that are on the website are not near as good. One in particular that is not on the website is a black and white image that depicts Sara Bareilles reflected on the underside of a grand piano…Now it’s stuck behind a giant orange banner. At any rate, the images were shot by Tom Munro whom I had not heard of before but has some interesting celebrity work on his website.

If you enjoy any of the featured musicians I would say the website is worth a visit. If not, I would say let it alone and hopefully I’ll post the images once the banner goes away.

The musicians include: