The Next Step

[Bill Pierce]

In our last post we talked about cameras and taking pictures. The next step is displaying those images, be it in prints or on a screen. When you were shooting you chose where to point the camera and when to push the button. That made it your picture. But the process of making it your picture doesn’t stop there. Be it print or screen, you have decisions to make. Is the image dark or light or somewhere in between - soft or harsh or somewhere in between? But equally important and often neglected - what do you think is important in that frame?

A lot of you know that Gene Smith and David Vestal helped me and influenced me. Both believed the personalized print was important. Both were very different in their approach. Gene shot news, situations that were often uncontrollable. To great extent his printing technique was designed to emphasize the important elements and de-emphasize the unimportant and distracting elements that inevitably show up when you are shooting events you can’t and don’t want to control. Limited by what could be done in a wet darkroom using variable contrast paper, dodging and burning and bleach, Gene would make the important elements a little brighter or contrastier at the same time the distractions went in the other direction. And knowing that folks flipped through news stories pretty fast, he made dramatic prints that were stoppers. If you think this does’t apply to you, remember that picture of your dog in the living room will be a little bit better with an enhanced dog and a suppressed living room.

David in many ways was the opposite. Be it urban or rural landscapes or still lifes, he wanted you to explore the whole scene. He was the master of the long scale that brought tonal values in to every element of the photograph. Few people have ever given Tri-X such generous exposure. David lived long enough to achieve the same results with digital cameras and ink jet prints, They were beautiful and they were David.

For the most part film photographers of that era enjoyed the controls that the black-and-white darkroom offered, but thanks to Jobo processors and Kodak drum print processors or even dye transfer printing some were able to exercise some control and personalize color printing. Be it scan or digital original, processing programs and inkjet printers are now at the point that both control and quality are possible in both black-and-white and color.

Obviously, I think creating “your image” is important. There’s a lot to be said about the variety of ways to do this and any thoughts you may have would be much appreciated.

 

[ranger9]

Plunging right into a "we don't talk about Bruno" topic, it's potentially interesting to ask not only how far you're willing to go to make an image your own, but also where you draw the line and stop.

Specifically: I recall a number of years ago reading a reputable report saying that a number of W. Eugene Smith's working documents had surfaced, demonstrating that Smith was not quite "limited by what could be done in a wet darkroom"... he also occasionally indulged in cutting, pasting, and re-photographing prints to create the results he wanted. Supposedly, according to this article, the real reason Smith would not submit his mammoth Pittsburgh essay to LIFE magazine was not (as the canon would have it) his insistence on total artistic control, but rather his realization that LIFE's journalism-oriented editors wouldn't tolerate the level of "physical retouching" he had used. However, I suspect that the Smith Church Militant would furiously deny this, and since I can't produce a citation, we have to follow the rules of research and say it didn't happen.

So instead, let's take another well-known and well-loved work by a well-known and well-loved photographer: Hotshot Eastbound at Iaeger Drive-in, West Virginia by O. Winston Link, the visual poet laureate of steam locomotives at night and entire towns wired for flashbulbs. (For those who won't click, this is a famous image made in 1956, showing a steam locomotive passing in the background of a foreground scene of cars parked in a drive-in theater with an image of a jet plane on the screen.

I always had admired this image, and was a little disappointed when I visited the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, where a wing houses the massive Hall Collection of photography. The collection includes an original work print in which you clearly can see (and read on the accompanying wall label) that Link simply had cut out a separate photo of the jet plane, pasted it onto the drive-in screen, and rephotographed the result to produce the final image. It's easy to understand that even a flashbulb genius such as Link would have had trouble balancing the exposures needed to get a clear projected image on the movie screen plus showing the cars in the foreground and the locomotive in the background... not to mention the logistical difficulty of identifying a movie with a good image of a jet plane and arranging to get it projected at the Iaeger Drive-in on that particular evening, timed to make sure the jet plane appeared on the screen at the exact moment the train went through. No way. It's perfectly understandable that having come up with the idea of representing three generations of transportation in a whimsical yet poignant image, he'd adopt this method to get the result he had in mind.

On the other hand... it's not really photography, is it?

(And yes, I would ask the same question about the work of the recently-deceased Jerry Uelsmann, the 19th-century paste-pot virtuosi Henry Peach Robinson and O.G. Rejlander, and everyone else who works in the perfectly respectable medium of photocollage but calls it photography.)

 

[Bill Pierce]

. Supposedly, according to this article, the real reason Smith would not submit his mammoth Pittsburgh essay to LIFE magazine was not (as the canon would have it) his insistence on total artistic control, but rather his realization that LIFE's journalism-oriented editors wouldn't tolerate the level of "physical retouching" he had used.

I knew Gene and his darkroom and his prints pretty well. And the above is not only totally wrong about "physical retouching," it isn't even correct about who he shot the Pittsburgh essay for. It wasn't Life. I'd put the article down as ignorant BS with a little touch of envy. As to Uelsmann, his early fans who had no doubt that his multiple negatives printed on a single sheet of enlarging paper were photography and not paste and cut collages included David Douglas Duncan, Pete Turner and Will McBride. There's a rather broad spectrum of what a photograph can be in just in the work of the fan base.

 

[Dogman]

Unless you're shooting forensic photos as evidence in court or trying for absolute neutrality in news pictures, I'd say just about anything goes in what you do with the presentation of your photographs. The first thing you want to do is please yourself with the photo.

Here's my dog in the living room:

 

[Ko.Fe.]

Nice retrospective with some common names personal touch. It i important and I wish OP spend more time on it while typing here.

Prints are not important for most by this time, non they are eco friendly, but still way to make $$$.
And image manipulation OP has touched in OP is very relevant.

 

[MrFujicaman]

Bill...A question for you-was Gene Smith's darkroom really as messy as the pictures I've seen of it?

 

[Bill Pierce]

Bill...A question for you-was Gene Smith's darkroom really as messy as the pictures I've seen of it?

I like to think of it as "lived in." He could occasionally have prolonged printing sessions that lasted 15, 16, 17 hours. That's two official 8 hr. workdays back to back. I suppose the more accurate term would be "worked in."

 

[JeffS7444]

...I think creating “your image” is important. There’s a lot to be said about the variety of ways to do this and any thoughts you may have would be much appreciated.

Right now I'm doing a lot of exploration in the post-processing side of things. I see photos that have a certain look which appeals to me, and I try to analyze why they capture my attention as they do, and what mood they convey. Also, as you've alluded to, how post-processing can emphasize some elements, and downplay other details which might otherwise be distracting visual noise. And the way I start to learn the nuts and bolts is by attempting to replicate what I see. Lately I've been exploring multiple Photoshop layers, including Levels and Solid Colors (and 99% of what I do is color).

Some of my sources of inspiration include magazines such as Popeye and Kinfolk, NHK TV, movies, and what-not.

My emphasis is on learning the nuts-and-bolts of achieving a specific look, rather than relying on software presets, including in-camera effects. Because I want techniques which work with any brand of camera, and any software.

 

[peterm1]

Unless you're shooting forensic photos as evidence in court or trying for absolute neutrality in news pictures, I'd say just about anything goes in what you do with the presentation of your photographs. The first thing you want to do is please yourself with the photo.

Here's my dog in the living room:

I agree. (Which I suppose goes almost without saying as I have been very open here on this forum and elsewhere about the fact that I post process - often fairly extensively but not always). The fact is that digital image making has given use degrees of freedom that most of us never had in when shooting film as most of us had no access to a darkroom to process our film images. This means we are free should we wish to take advantage of it to put our own mark on our images as Bill suggests.
I suppose though that it depends somewhat on one's philosophy. Some people "take pictures" others "make images".. I do the latter, always looking for an outcome that has a touch of artistry about it. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail. But I never stop trying.

 

[Bill Pierce]

Unless you're shooting forensic photos as evidence in court or trying for absolute neutrality in news pictures, I'd say just about anything goes in what you do with the presentation of your photographs. The first thing you want to do is please yourself with the photo.

Here's my dog in the living room:

I would have to say that either your dog sleeps in the spotlight or you have done some intelligent edge burning

 

[Dogman]

Why, thank you, Bill. Predictably, dogs are always in the spotlight for a dogman.🙂