Another read worth seeing over at Heather Elder’s Blog.  It’s the answer to her open letter from last week.

Dear Rep. – An open letter from an art producer

Heather Elder

Heather Elder has an impressive group of photographers in her care; most notably (to me at least) is Andy Anderson. Her site is worth a visit just to look at her stable of photographers.

However, here are short segments from her post – you must go to her site to read the good stuff, sorry.

1. When you ask me what our budget is, usually I don’t have access to that info, or I’m given a number that needs to include so much more:
2. Personally, I don’t kiss and tell, er– divulge who folks are bidding against, until after the job has been awarded
3. I try to offer feedback about creative calls, and estimates, when I have time.
4. I will always let you know when I am asking for a third bid, and your photographer has little chance of getting the job.
5. I don’t ever want to be the art buyer you jokingly want to charge each time I  make you triple bid for the hell of it, or revise an estimate 20 times.
6. What kind of art buyer doesn’t tell you that you didn’t get the job?!
7. Are you kidding—portfolio shows are one of the best parts about being stuck inside this cube, and not out on production bossing everyone around!
8. I appreciate the email blasts to alert me who is doing what. Unfortunately, my in box is inundated with them– half are from sub-par talent, and repeating weekly.
9. I wish reps/photographers would market the appropriate audience, once a month or when there’s truly awesome new work.

So now … go here:  Heather Elder Blog to find the context and some other goodies.

Heather Elder Represents 9 commercial photographers, hosts a stock inspiration website, a

Heather Elder

blog, and consults with a variety of photographers nationwide. She’s written an open letter to Art Buyers that deserves the attention of both photographers and art buyers.  I’ve highlighted the lead sentence in each of her 8 points.  It’s worth a read here.

1)   When I ask you for the budget, please know that I am only trying to get an idea of how to approach the project.

2)   If I ask you who else we are bidding against, it is ok if you don’t want to share that inform But if it doesn’t really matter to you, then I could really use the information.

3)   If you ever have feedback for me about the book, the site, the call, the estimate; any of it, I would really be appreciative.

4)   If I am just a third bid, please let me know.

5)   When we are not awarded the job, please let me know right away.

6)   I so appreciate when you let me come to your agency to brag about our photographers.

7)   I also appreciate when you spell out your expectations for a portfolio show – especially when it comes to what will entice the creatives.

8)   Please do not get annoyed with me when I send email blasts.  I know, I know you get so many.  However, these are one of the only measurable forms of communication we have nowadays.

In a post titled, “Why Do You Do What You Do; Why Should I Care?” from Oct. 12, I introduced Simon Sinek’s TED talk based on his book: Start with Why.

Frankly, I find his book helpful. Creative Professionals (like me) are caught in a cycle of showing first, what we do, then sometimes, how we do it in an effort to differentiate ourselves from competition. We hope to sell others on our value but can easily forget what value our work has to us personally.

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” – Simon Sinek

Call it our passion but if you’re anything like me, it’s mostly taken for granted until discovering a void.  But, if I’m selling my value and forget my “WHY”, then my cause is lost.  Actions without a cause won’t accumulate passionate followers.

Here’s Me Starting with Why

I photograph because I see something with which I want to spend more time and of which I want to make partially mine.  It’s a quest of surprises; I surprise myself when I frame something that stirs my emotion; a feeling much more than a thought. It’s that moment of surprise that makes me want to do it again and again.

Camera in front of my face, I’m bracing for it. I feel it when it’s there and disappointed when it’s not. So potent is the anticipation of the surprise moment that the senses surrounding a shutter release becomes a jolt of electricity as though feeding an addiction. More please. It’s how you know you’re a photographer.  If you don’t feel it, you’re probably not one.

I’m opinionated. My opinion is expressed at the moment I press the shutter. Just like that person on the bus that won’t stop talking about their politics, I’m showing my photographs except you can’t tell me to shut up. My visuals are much more persuasive than my rant. Like passing a car wreck or a promised glimpse of George Clooney, I hope to lure you in.

Simultaneously, at the moment of surprise, I want share my discovery. Post capture it’s the profundity of the find along with the clarity of vision that dictates whether it gets shared or I move on to the next sighting. Can I make you feel my surprise?  Can I draw you into the emotional story?

It’s as simple as seeing an unusual shape, color or texture juxtaposed – or as complex as combining an emotional memory with what is happening in front of the camera as an unusual turn of a story.  It’s what I see and you don’t until I tell you to look.

I look for beauty but not always conventional beauty [I’m not one of those image makers who can capture horrific human failures and long for more].  Found in stories, moments, emotions and character, beauty is that which I want to make mine.

I produce the media for the joy of making. The fine craft of selective lighting, composition, and tonality rewards my personal expression. The making is often the only path to closure.

I work with advertising, design and editorial businesses for the collaborative creative community that surrounds the industry, while at the same time, it’s what allows me to finance deeper exploration. Like a back stage pass to the world, I can often gain access to opportunities unavailable to those outside the business.  -  Bruce DeBoer, Photographer

________________________________________________________

My how and what varies, but the why is remarkably stable.

Care to give it a shot?  It may not be as easy as you think: Why do you do what you do?

Passing this along via Phaidon.com and APhotoEditor.com for fans of Stephen Shore.  Phaidon.com has a gallery of Stephen Shore found on their blog here.

Clichés are born from veneers of understanding and observation.  If you lack empathy for your subject you’re doomed to only shooting hackneyed or trite photographs. Or worse, you get busy mocking your subjects and claiming the lie is extraordinary.  I’ve taken my share of these and I’m fairly certain they won’t endure beyond my wages.

As though you’re acting the expert at a party when you know little about the subject, artists make false statements through sensational imagery but risk less since the image is a piece of reality, i.e. proof that you had a right to the statement. Most deliberate photographs start as an assumption; this is what this person is and how I feel about them.  Naturally the best assumptions are accurate but the finest photographers remain open to expanding on conjecture. They refuse to be defined by clichéd conjecture and thrive on discovery.

Artistic style, that is too much method, can force assumptions. This is the origin of my suspicion regarding pinhole photos in gallery exhibitions or an entire 30+ picture show of those quirky “tilt / shift” photos where everything looks tiny. The photographer’s discovery is easily limited to a technique; they’re lying about something because every subject fit into the “box” of the photographer’s phony revelation that pinhole, tilt/shift photography, or other, adds value to the imagery.  Yes, some lies are bigger than others but eventually all the photos in the collection lose authenticity like a politician changing their long held view to gain votes.

photo of Horton Foote by Keith Carter

I visited the National Portrait Gallery and rediscovered Keith Carter – a photographer I’ve long admired.  I saw his portrait of American Playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote in which Carter limited focus using forward lens tilts. I had forgotten him.  I saw it and mumbled, “there it is”.

Standing close enough to hear a mumble, my wife asked, “there what is”?  I launched into a forgettable monologue about how techniques are often so trendy and misused but sometimes they’re perfect. Keith Carters portrait of Horton Foote was one of those that was perfect.  The technique wasn’t trendy yet; it wasn’t an iPhone app, it was simply a technique honestly used in the process of discovery.

“I don’t think there is any great mystery about the vagarities of making art. We all start out the same way: learn your craft, work hard at trying to be coherent with your pictures, and pay your nickel and take your chance.  The bedrock in a body of work is your subject matter and how you relate to it. If you have empathy and care about your subject matter, then discoveries, deeper meanings, and understanding have a greater chance of evolving from that work. Sometimes you just have to get butt-naked.” – Keith Carter [via Calumet Photographer Spotlight]

[[Show as slideshow]]
All photos in slide show by Keith Carter

More on Keith Carter here.

• From Uncertain To Blue (1988)
• The Blue Man (1990)
• Mojo (1992) ISBN 978-0-89263-335-7
• Heaven of Animals (1995)
• Bones (1996) ISBN 978-0-8118-1282-5
• Keith Carter Photographs — 25 Years (1997) ISBN 978-0-292-71195-2
• Holding Venus (2000) ISBN 978-1-892041-24-1
• Ezekiel’s Horse (2000) ISBN 978-0-292-71229-4
• Two Spirits: Keith Carter and Mauro Fiorese (2002) ISBN 9788837020170
• Opera Nuda (2006) ISBN 978-1-888899-25-2
• “Dream of A PLACE of Dreams” (with Mauro Fiorese) (2008) ISBN 9788890202377
• A Certain Alchemy (2008) ISBN 978-0-292-71908-8
• Fireflies: Photographs of Children (2009) ISBN 029272182X

Keith Carter Biography [via his website]

Keith Carter is an internationally recognized photographer and educator. Born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1948,he holds the endowed Walles Chair of Art at Lamar University Beaumont, Texas. He is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Regional Survey Grants and the Lange-Taylor Prize from The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. In 1997 Keith Carter was the subject of an arts profile on the national network television show, CBS Sunday Morning. In 1998, he received Lamar University’s highest teaching honor, the University Professor Award, and he was named the Lamar University Distinguished Lecturer.

By The Way – in case you didn’t know :

Tilt Shift is not an iPhone app – ok, it is – but that’s not its origin and neither is the look of altering the plane of focus something native to Photoshop.

If you’re a serious photographer using the technique but don’t recognize the name Theodor Scheimpflug or understand the significance of lens nodal points, here’s a starting point:

Theodor Scheimpflug (1865-1911) stated that; ‘when the extended lines from the lens plane, the object plane and the film plane intersect at the same point, the entire subject plane is in focus.’

I owe my knowledge and practice to my college text that I first cracked in 1976 and still recommend for those interested in knowing more: View Camera Techniques by Leslie D. Stroebel.

There’s no wonder we’re struggling with authenticity. We’ve been dealt a line of crap so many times we

don’t believe as much of what we see and less of what we hear. What started as a 70’s T-shirt, “question authority”, has morphed into a societal mantra, “question reality.”

Undisputed credibility was considered the providence of photography, but genuineness is no longer that accessible; it’s not as easy to recognize when you’re being deceived into believing something. We settle for realism and hope we aren’t taken for too big a fool.

Mom used to tell me, “Never pretend to be someone you’re not”. That was 40 years ago. Today there are elementary lessons about judging accuracy from spin or truthfulness from propaganda. In the hierarchy of skill sets skepticism has move to the top tear. Photography’s relevance is shifting.

The medium that was used to prove reality is in the position to be a master deceiver; counterfeit authenticity. Photography is morphing further into illustrated reality. The “transparency” of the medium is nearly invisible.

I’m not sure all this matters except in a nostalgic sense. The savvy among us learn to read an agenda in symbolic moments. What matters is reciprocity.

We run from the loud broadcaster and tire of stoicism. The compelling is that which binds us.  It’s those 7 literary story plots that are common in our experiences and found in the moments available to capture.

“All of my work is about trying to find some element of what it feels like to be alive as a human being on this planet.” … “I’m always looking for moments of interaction, emotion and intimacy.” … “”it’s really little subtle moments of interaction that explains the connections we have”– Doug Menuez

There’s a small percentage of professionals who consistently embrace a viewpoint that extends reciprocity to me as an artist – Doug Menuez is one of those. In this video interview, Doug explains in clear language what is enduringly authentic about photography. He explains – beyond nostalgia and manipulation – what I believe is the timeless future of photography.

Doug was also a speaker at TEDx San Francisco in Nov. 2009. In his TED presentation he talks about his life as a photographer, how it has changed him and his project Fearless Genius about silicone valley.

Taking a photo allows ownership of the subject.  Many cultures fear loss of soul through photographs. In brutal frankness, photographers characteristically pinch intimacy and trigger vulnerability that only close examination bares. Anyone retouching a high resolution image can tell you they risk knowing way too much about their subject.

Seth Mydanshe in a post for the New York Times blog “Lens” introduces the documentary “Camera, Camera”.  I have yet to see the film but still it inspired this post.

["Camera, Camera" was directed by Malcolm Murray, written by Michael Meyer and produced by Josh Haner, who is a co-editor of the Lens blog and has photographed Laos for The Times.]

Yes. My photography is being deeply affected by the democratization of quality imagery but, wait, there’s more.  The “more” is a cultural affectation that has relatively little to do with me. It has to do with an extreme global loss of the objective observer.

[via Wikipedia] The ideal observer is one who causes no unnecessary perturbations to the system being observed. An observation made by such an observer is called an objective observation. In basic school education of physics and chemistry, we routinely assume that our observations are objective.

But reality seldom, if ever, provides us with ideals. The real observer always causes an unnecessary perturbation of some kind. Scientists must remain alert in their efforts to minimize the magnitudes of these perturbations. The extent to which they succeed determines the level of confidence they can claim in their results and, therefore, the certainty they can expect in their knowledge of things.

As a professional I’ve spent decades making photos and, with unmistakable irony, it took digital imaging for me to discover that I can’t make something better than what is there to take. In other words, the harder I try to make my own reality, the more I am disappointed with its legitimacy. The act of observing destroys what I hope to capture.

While I may want to disappear with a camera in my hand, the ubiquitous photographer is changing what there is to observe. The camera is coming between culture and the unperturbed experience. We are witnessing life through an abstract medium and mistaking it for truth. The souls I steal are now permanently altered no matter how light I tread.

I’ve been influenced by Usher Fellig (aka Weegee the Famous).  I had no idea. But I’m in good company from Diane Arbus to Cindy Sherman, and the rest of us.  It’s hard to peel away the nostalgia from his photos from mid 20^th century NYC, but as I try the feeling of intensity remains; as though one held a candle under humanity fluid and let it reduce.

Photographic creativity is unique in many ways but one in particular in which Weegee’s body of work describes well is it’s demand on speed.  How many photos does one have to take before all the choices we make when pointing a camera happen faster than the subject is moving?

“I think about my camera all the time … There are photographic fanatics, just as there are religious fanatics.  They buy a so-called candid camera … there are no such thing; it’s the photographer who has to be candid, not the camera.” – Weegee

The trigger finds emotion.  I know from years of feeling subjects through a lens that the emotional moment is telepathic. Loud emotions are easy; it’s the quiet ones that lay demands on skills.  It’s the empathy of the photographer that presses the button at exactly the right moment after finding the perfect composition dictated by circumstance.

“People are so wonderful that a photographer has only to wait for that breathless moment to capture what he wants on film.” – Weegee

“When you find yourself beginning to feel a bond between yourself and the people you photograph, when you laugh and cry with their laughter and tears, you will know you are on the right track.” – Weegee

Also easily captured are surface emotions, or non-emotions.  Saying cheese is the best way to make sure a camera fails to reveal anything you own. We learn to say “cheese” early and often.

“Press agents, seeing my camera, pointed out notables to me, but I refused to

Weegee

waste film or bulbs, as I don’t photograph society unless they have a fight and get arrested or they stand on their heads.” – Weegee

Finally, there is nothing like a life devoted to their art. A part time musician is just that – “part time”. A fine artist making it her day job or a commercial artist carving out a career is at a different level – they just are because they must. There art is front of mind all the time.

“I’m no part time dilettante photographer, unlike the bartenders, shoe salesmen, floorwalkers plumbers, barbers, grocery clerks and chiropractors whose great hobby is their camera. All their friends rave about what wonderful pictures they take. If they’re so good, why don’t they take pictures full—time, for a living, and make floor walking, chiropractics, etc., their hobby? But everyone wants to play it safe. They’re afraid to give up their pay checks and their security they might miss a meal.” – Weegee

Weegee’s World

Permission To Suck Manifesto Law #3.    There’s NO plan “B”. Quit moonlighting.  Put in the hours; work without a net.  If you have a plan “B” it’s too easy to bail, and you’ll want to.  Part timers can’t keep up with the guy who’s bustin’ it like a sex crazed school boy.

[via: Wikipedia]

Weegee was the pseudonym of Arthur Fellig (June 12, 1899 – December 26, 1968), an Austrian-born American photographer and photojournalist, known for his stark black and white street photography.

Weegee worked in the Lower East Side of New York City as a press photographer during the 30′s and 40′s, and he developed his signature style by following the city’s emergency services and documenting their activity. Much of his work depicted unflinchingly realistic scenes of urban life, crime, injury and death. Weegee published photographic books and also worked in cinema, initially making his own short films and later collaborating with film directors such as Jack Donohue and Stanley Kubrick.

Creativity is a near simultaneous encounter between our imagination, introspection and reality. The richness of imagination is fed through inspiration to encounter surroundings and cultivated with intense motivations. The value of our introspection is sustained by wisdom and experience; what is essentially you. Confrontation with reality is how creativity is birthed; it’s the final relationship with objectivity.

Artistic creativity is an act of intimacy or not;  it’s genuine art or it’s artifact.  Learn to manipulate tools and their crafty mechanisms so they become secondary or not.

Mechanization serving up uniformity, predictability, and orderliness (i.e. image capturing devices, signal processors, computers, or any fine apparatus) can either heighten the creative encounter or cheat it. Left to dominate with crafty mechanization and we cheat expressive intimacy.

Roughly, in the late ‘80’s, Mark Zimmer and Tom Hedges, founders of the Fractal Design Corporation, created Painter.  I recall passing photographs through a software “filter” to create a painting effect. Extending photography,  it instantly aped wrist skills without the hard work. Incredibly, Painter transformed every photograph into works of painted art.

Yet, it didn’t take long to realize painting filter presets produced artifacts, not art. Extraordinary turned less than ordinary within weeks as my employer’s entire creative department mastered the programmed keystrokes. What just happened? Amazement transformed into distaste within a few weeks.

Now the cheat is obvious, back then, not so much. We correctly felt the excitement in discovering a legitimate creative extension. What failed us was our loss of expressive intimacy; the new tool masked our art transforming it into a mechanistic artifact. There are no shortcuts.

Case in point: A camera is either an extension or protection from the creative encounter. Countless photographers feel defensive because they’ve cheated the encounter and lied to themselves and others about the intimacy of their works. Most recent democratization of the cheat is forcing photo artists and others to cope with the creative encounter that produces art rather than artifacts.

How many of us can say we are hiding behind the mastery of crafty mechanization?  Suddenly, there’s a need to pull up to the creative bar or be forced out of town. It takes courage to rediscover artistic expressive intimacy especially after producing artifacts for years.

There will be a day when “take a photo” means that we run home with electronic reality in a box so we can rummage through it at our leisure, try this focal length or that depth of field, and find the precise moment that we’ll label our still photographic masterpiece.  Editing is a big part of shooting yet something will remain uncaptured unless we learn to pay attention.

“He’s famous not for his flower pictures, but he is famous for his objectionable sexual representation” – Louise Bourgeois, Artist

That said Louise, it’s not hard to find the uniqueness of Mapplethorpe’s work whether it’s a flower, a penis or a portrait.  Along with other greats like Richard Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evens, Robert Frank, Irving Penn, Helmut Newton – Mapplethorpe is the reason good photographers shoot the way they do and that will remain so into the foreseeable future.

He’s right on the edge, bridging the gaps and exploring the paradox. The best description I’ve gathered from many sources is that R.M. civilized the shock of sex, violence and race – localized our fears, lust and hopes with ambiguous well crafted works.  He succeeded in such a powerful way that it’s spawned countless derivatives – my own work being no exception.

“It’s about ME trying to see things.  I’m amazed it shocked – I’ve been through the experience.”  – Robert Mapplethorpe

Shocked we were.  Controversy started in Washington DC when an ICA [Institute of Contemporary Art] funded Corcoran Gallery of Art exhibition was cancelled 10 days before a scheduled opening in 1989, thus thrusting Mapplethorpe’s work into Congressional Debates over what tax payer money should and should not support.  The controversy over censorship and the artistic freedom continues in Washington at the expense of NEA funding.

Biography [via Mapplethorpe Foundation Website]:

Robert and Patti at Coney Island

Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946 in Floral Park, Queens. Of his childhood he said, “I come from suburban America. It was a very safe environment and it was a good place to come from in that it was a good place to leave.”

In 1963, Mapplethorpe enrolled at Pratt Institute in nearby Brooklyn, where he studied drawing, painting, and sculpture. Influenced by artists such as Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, he also experimented with various materials in mixed-media collages, including photographs cut from books and magazines. He acquired a Polaroid camera in 1970 and began producing his own images to incorporate into the collages, saying he felt “it was more honest.” That same year he and Patti Smith, whom he had met three years earlier, moved into the Chelsea Hotel.

Mapplethorpe quickly discovered the satisfaction of taking Polaroid photographs in their own right and indeed few Polaroids appear in his mixed-media works. His first solo gallery exhibition, “Polaroids,” took place at the Light Gallery in New York City in 1973. In 1976, he acquired a Hasselblad medium-format camera and took to shooting his circle of friends and acquaintances—artists, musicians, socialites, pornographic film stars, and members of the S & M underground. He also worked on commercial projects; he created album cover art for Patti Smith and Television, two of several musicians with whom he would eventually collaborate, and shot a series of portraits and party pictures for Interview Magazine.

In the late 70s, Mapplethorpe grew increasingly interested in documenting the New York S & M scene. The resulting photographs are shocking for their content and remarkable for their technical and formal mastery. Mapplethorpe told ARTnews in late 1988, “I don’t like that particular word ‘shocking.’ I’m looking for the unexpected. I’m looking for things I’ve never seen before … I was in a position to take those pictures. I felt an obligation to do them.” Meanwhile his career continued to flourish. In 1977, he participated in Documenta 6 in Kassel, West Germany and in 1978, the Robert Miller Gallery in New York City became his exclusive dealer.

Mapplethorpe met Lisa Lyon, the first World Women’s Bodybuilding Champion, in 1980. Over the next several years they collaborated on a series of portraits and figure studies, a film, and the book, Lady, Lisa Lyon. Throughout the 80s, Mapplethorpe produced a bevy of images that simultaneously challenge and adhere to classical aesthetic standards: stylized compositions of male and female nudes, delicate flower still lifes, and studio portraits of artists and celebrities, to name a few of his preferred genres. He introduced and refined different techniques and formats, including color 20″ x 24″ Polaroids, photogravures, platinum prints on paper and linen, Cibachome and dye transfer color prints. In 1986, he designed sets for Lucinda Childs’ dance performance, Portraits in Reflection, created a photogravure series for Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, and was commissioned by curator Richard Marshall to take portraits of New York artists for the series and book, 50 New York Artists.

That same year, in 1986, he was diagnosed with AIDS. Despite his illness, he accelerated his creative efforts, broadened the scope of his photographic inquiry, and accepted increasingly challenging commissions. The Whitney Museum of American Art mounted his first major American museum retrospective in 1988, one year before his death in 1989.

His vast, provocative, and powerful body of work has established him as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. Today Mapplethorpe is represented by galleries in North and South America and Europe and his work can be found in the collections of major Museums around the world. Beyond the art historical and social significance of his work, his legacy lives on through the work of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. He established the Foundation in 1988 to promote photography, support museums that exhibit photographic art, and to fund medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV-related infection.

See More:

Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith short video

Photography of Robert Mapplethorpe 9 min. Video

Mapplethorpe Foundation Website

Read more:

“Just Kids” – Patti Smith:  Book Review