Category Archives: Art Photography

To Fill The Abyss’ Void With Emptiness

A colleague recently asked in a Facebook group what other photographers do to stay fresh and to continue enjoying photography. Wedding after wedding after wedding can become a bit of a grind, portrait session after portrait session after portrait session can become a bit of a grind. It is what anyone who does the same thing over and over again has to come to terms with, whether in photography or in another profession or area of interest.

My answer: personal work. Photography that is not taken to practice my wedding or portrait skills, not taken to practice the skills I deliver to couples and families, just work that is about exploring the camera, photography, myself, and the connection between these three things and my environments. Personal work.

I have for the last several months been working semi-privately on a tumblr of personal work, and today I posted the 100th image. I think it is time to tell people about it. It is a loosely curated collection of images that have been taken mostly in the last two years, and that represent how I continue to explore everything that photography can be.

I’ll be working to make prints available in the next week or so, and of course I will continue to update with work.

Here’s the link:

http://matthewhallphotography.tumblr.com

First, Create Meaning. The Art Will Follow.

Ultimate procrastination tool Ted.com has up an excellent video today, one that makes me think not just about being an artist, but also about how I am as a parent and how I have been as a teacher.


Too many people think that art needs to be perfect; too many people think that art needs to be excellent; too many people think that what art is is beyond them. It is a creative analogue
to the idea that God is “that above which nothing can be imagined”–art is that above which I can’t create. Perhaps this is because many of us get our sense of what art is, and by extension what creativity is, by visiting museums or reading books, and only being exposed to the greatest works available. If you want to consider your merits as a painter, maybe Monet and Richter and Rothko are not the ones you should be comparing yourself to. If you want to be a photographer, maybe Adams and Leibovitz and Gursky are not not the ones you should be comparing yourself too. If you want to be a musician, or a writer, or a chef…you get the picture. Somehow, we tie the idea of art and creativity to the idea of genius and greatness, and end up with the destructive idea that only the great, only thee brilliant, only the special can create art.

Art–but more importantly, creativity, as the process that results in art–originates from something far simpler: the search for meaning. But even that sounds a bit too highfalutin’, so let me rephrase: creativity originates from trying to figure things out…i.e., from thinking, which is something we all do to varying degrees. The act of creativity is the act of building meaning up around the mundane details of our lives. Making something the subject of a creative act imbues it with significance, and then you begin to ask yourself why it is significant. You have created a work, you have created an idea behind it, and that, at its heart, is art.

Not all art is destined to hang on the wall of a museum, gallery, home, or refrigerator. Much of the production of these acts of meaning-making will, and should, remain private. But even if it remains private, it has served a benefit to you: it has made the things around you more meaningful, and has therefore made your life more meaningful. Art is not about greatness and fame, it is about being meaningful, and that is something that everyone should aspire to.

I have felt liberated by my recent reluctance to address the grand idea. I once thought that art was about great ideas and oddball vision; and it’s not that it’s not; it’s just that so much of art isn’t. I’ve tried to let the idea of the epic go, and I feel that my work has been more personal, more intimate, less of a statement about the world write large–something that I still don’t understand, which is why my art built on those ideas tended toward the vacant–than about how I encounter detail and context, and how I process and remember it.

Some people will find that they need to share the ideas and products they create, and some of those people will find that audiences are receptive to their art, and some of those will find that audiences find something new and impressive in their works. Others will write in their journals, fill their photo albums or photo streams, or fill their sketch books in obscurity and be pleased with how, as their personal art advances, they find more to work on because more appears to be meaningful. Others still will find that their creative works help them indulge their emotions, or alleviate them, or figure them out, or simply spend time with them. Others will create works that are intellectually shallow but very pretty. But in an authentic act of meaning-making, one that uses a creative act to build meaning around something personally important, any creator will benefit.

“Creativity” isn’t a matter of being brilliant; it’s a matter of creating, of making. Create a text. Create an image. Create a song. Create a quilt. Create dinner.

You can, and you should.

On Film, and Photography Not Being About Photography.

If you’ve been following this blog recently, you’ll know that it has been covering my drift back toward film, a process that started a couple of years ago, but really got going in earnest this spring. If you haven’t been following this blog, well, it’s been covering my drift back toward film, a process that really got going in earnest this spring.

 

 

To start, I’d like to point you to the catalyst for this post. Ryan Muirhead is a pretty good photographer from Utah, and he has been featured this summer on Framed Network’s show Film. I say he’s pretty good because his images, while appealing both stylistically and aesthetically, don’t drop my jaw like those of other photographers whose work I’ve been spending time with lately, such as Steve McCurry or Mary Ellen Mark (whose Prom exhibit is currently at the Philadelphia Art Museum; go see it). The comparisons are probably not a good idea…each is a very different kind of photographer, but it’s who I’m looking at these days. What I like about Ryan is his ability to talk about process. He talks about liking to shoot film because he enjoys the process of it. But he also talks about, and has clearly spent a good deal of time thinking about, the artistic process and what it means to pick up a camera and create.

 

 

In general, Film has been fun to watch, but it is not a show about shooting film. Rather, it is a show about photographers who shoot film, and the lifestyle-style direction of the show leaves out technical talk while showing that shooting film is an entirely rational decision that can result in exquisite, edgy, modern work.

 

 

Then along comes Episode 14 (free registration required). At about the 23:45 mark, Ryan starts talking about photography. It’s an episode about continuous lighting, but that’s not what he’s talking about. He’s talking about photography. Or as he puts it, “truth, beauty, life, and fear”, a phrase that brings to mind an introspective passage from “West-Running Brook,” one of my favorite poems (it’s by Robert Frost): “And it is time, strength, tone, light, life and love, and even substance lapsing unsubstantial, the universal cataract of death that spends to nothingness, and unresisted, save by some strange resistance in itself, not just a swerving, but a throwing back, as if regret were in it, and were sacred.” Ryan puts it many other ways as well, but that’s the one that snapped me to attention, made me listen more closely, then listen again, and then write down everything he said. The jangly, anonymous acoustipop fades away, the rapid-fire editing takes a break, the tomfoolery and roughhousery are put aside, all sound is cut out except for Ryan’s voice, which sounds like a very intelligent rock slide. For nine uninterrupted, gut-wrenching minutes he goes on, pouring forth a tremendous flood from the soul that is arresting, liberating, intoxicating, sobering, grounding, motivating, heartbreaking, tragic, and triumphant. It’s about photography; it’s about coping with survival and coping with terror; it’s about how to live.

 

 

So why do I pick up a camera and create? My answer is not nearly as compelling as his, but it, too, originates from a driving need to make sense of things. People I know are always suggesting beautiful things I could photograph, and I get the sense that they feel a little hurt when I don’t always show interest. I hold with Albert Camus, and to a lesser extent with deconstructionists, that the physical world, no matter how awe-inspiring, is devoid of meaning, and that all that we find meaningful is a product of our minds, of what we believe. In my life before photography, I was an English teacher, and one idea that I was interested in, and that informed how I taught writing, was the idea of “meaning-making”. It is the process by which a constructive process encourages the thought and reflection necessary to gain knowledge and understanding of both the world and the self. Very mundane things, if properly investigated, can lead to great insight, but we each have to create that insight for ourselves. Even something as grand as spirituality and religious illumination means little if not supported by individual experience and reflection.  If we wish to have some amount of control over what we find meaningful, if we want to look out onto the world and inward onto our selves and have a sense that they are at least partially understood, if we look to have a say in the structures of significance that we build our lives around, then we must each engage in some meaning-making activity.

 

 

Photography (and writing, too, still) is this activity for me. I don’t approach photography in a way that demands that every image be perfect (there is no perfect image, anyway); I approach photography in a way that asks each image to build on the ones before it, and the concrete shot limits on a roll of film help me structure that process. A roll of film is a thought process, an investigation. It has a theme, a location in time and space. It is about something that other rolls are not about. It is a journal entry. The simple act of taking an image confers importance onto a subject, and the repeated shooting of the same thing, whatever that thing may be, or however loosely defined, in different ways confers the subtleties and inferences that make knowledge, and self-knowledge, interesting.

 

But because the physical world can’t hold meaning itself, the action of meaning-making builds the meaning in our minds. The way we shoot portraits reflects the way we interact with people. The way we shoot the land reflects the way we interact with our environment. The way we shoot an event reflects how we discern time and action. The way we shoot a still life reflects our capacity to gaze. And reflecting on the resulting images will show you something about yourself, which is itself an act of meaning-making.

 

 

In this way, photography becomes a method of grounding, or centering, of meditation. It becomes not a tool of image-making, but of self-construction and maintenance. I look through the viewfinder, on onto the ground glass, and I ask myself, “Why is this important?” And the answer to that is the beginning of discovering or rediscovering, making or repairing meaning. I like film because it leaves behind a physical artifact of this process.

 

 

And it is a compelling process.

Evolving Ideas and Honing Quality {Philadelphia Landscape Photography}

I was forced to part with a good friend today. It wasn’t that the relationship was long…it’s just that this friend taught me an awful lot in a very short time. Yes, I had to return my 4×5 view camera today.

Working with a view camera is different. It is slow. It is deliberate. It is expensive. It is painstaking in its technicalities and demands. But the results are superb. For better or for worse, the digital age of smaller, lighter, faster-to-post-to-the-web cameras, more so than the era of film point-and-shoot cameras, has changed what people think of as high-quality photography. The 35mm camera used to be the light, fast, traveling person’s camera. Now, a full-frame DSLR is not only at the high end of the price scale, it is also at the high end of the perceived quality scale as well. Medium format or larger photography, not to mention film in general, is increasingly seen as a choice of eccentricity, rather than as a choice of quality. I’d like to submit that the quality of a 4×5 negative can only be believed once it is seen. Digital has no answer.

At $85 for a 50-sheet box of film, one has to be careful how and what is shot. Each mistake, each careless exposure, each half-baked idea, comes with a tangible price. A full day’s shooting might only result in ten or twelve frames. And depending on how strictly you edit down your shots, that means that, every day, you might get one usable shot, even when you are thinking clearly and working well. Some days, there won’t be anything usable.

For the large format photography class that I’ve been taking, we had the assignment to develop and shoot a project over a six-week span. Not long by any account, but long enough to spend some serious time thinking about how, what, and why we each were indulging ourselves in this form of photography. Such a project has to start out with an idea, and I, in my fashion, had a few awful ideas that I tried to play around with at first, the kind of ideas that would have worked out well if I had had six years and an unlimited travel budget, and maybe a helicopter, to work with. I finally realized, after much crappy photography, that what I was shooting when no one was watching me were intimate, detail-driven landscapes. So that is what I decided to focus on.

The only thing is, that is kind of a wishy-washy idea, and wishy-washy ideas lead to wishy-washy photography. Cartier-Bresson said that he would rather see a fuzzy picture of a clear idea than a clear picture of a fuzzy idea, and I’m not one to disagree. My project started out with textural shots of erosion and roots, and they were…mneh. Boring pictures of interesting things, at best.

But I found that using the camera in its slow, methodical way was a sort of meditation. The surface actions of finding an interesting subject and making a technically sound capture became, in their familiarity, somewhat invisible, and I could then think and look and see at a deeper level. And being the kind of person that I am, thinking in images soon led to thinking in words, and I found myself ruminating not about intimate landscapes, but about the mutability of natural forms, and the timescales that change happens across. It’s a much more specific idea, and even if that idea is not explicitly investigated in the resulting images, it was a much clearer idea that was motivating me to shoot. I found more interesting things, framed them better, and printed them better. Over the course of the second half of my shooting, each image became a little more compelling than the previous. I started getting that sense that things were well in the universe. I kept the idea in mind, I talked to myself about it so that the idea of mutability of forms became, in its familiarity, somewhat invisible, and a clearer, calmer, more productive space opened up for me. These later shots ended up comprising 75% of my final portfolio.

There was even a moment when I started knowing that what I was intending to capture was what was going to come out in the final print. There, under the dark cloth, I could imagine, even, where I’d have to dodge or burn, how I’d have to play with contrast, what the final thing would look like. And at some point, I actually started to be right, too.

I don’t often have the time to spend twenty minutes searching for just the right thing to photograph. As a wedding photographer, things come and go so quickly that it is exhausting merely to keep up, in the moment. It’s a different type of shooting, a different mindset that demands that I be open to seeing (Mssr Cartier-Bresson also said that photography has to be like the last few words of Ulysses: yes, yes, yes) and consuming images and moment en masse. With large format photography, I have to be more careful, saying not yet, not yet, not yet, and making more choices in the moment, not in the dark room. That time to slow down, to look, to think, to decide on something else, to not have to settle for anything that is not exactly what I want, has made me a better photographer by broadening the experience of shooting, and by putting a literal price tag on the value of each shutter click. It has taught me when it is best to say yes.

The last frame I shot for the class. Also, the best. A result of process, not coincidence.

Ektachrome: The End Is Near

Seriously depressing news from Kodak today.

I’ve been on this kick about the importance of physical artifacts, and that has carried over into my photography. notably in that I am shooting much more personal work on film than on digital, and making more prints no matter how I shoot. Digital photography, as a medium, is so easy, so effortless…there’s no changing film every 12 or 36 shots, no taking the film to the lab, no time in the darkroom, no smell lingering on your hands after you work hard on making that perfect print. The files come and go, a card might need to be replaced every couple hours if you are really shooting a lot…. I think it is easy to forget the fragility of the digital files we create. Photography is still difficult no matter the recording medium. But the decline of film has me worried about the tangibility and permanence of our photographic body of work.

So it is very disappointing to hear that Kodak is discontinuing production of my favorite film, Ektachrome E100G, as well as the other Ektachrome films. It is hard to communicate to those who have never shot film how one can fall in love with a particular medium, and find that it amplifies and improves one’s photographic vision. This isn’t a Lightroom preset or a Photoshop action or an Instagram filter that one can click on and then click away from; learning a film, and being in artistic symbiosis with its peculiarities, is a commitment. When you shoot Ektachrome, you shots look like Ektachrome, and you start to see the world as Ektachrome sees it (because a camera, says Dorothea Lange, is a tool for learning how to see without a camera).

And those slides! My god, those slides!

Photography will continue; excellent photography will continue; excellent photography on color transparency film will continue. Perhaps the loss first of Kodachrome (which I never had the pleasure of shooting) and now Ektachrome is sort of like the decline of script handwriting (you’re reading a guy who prefers writing with a fountain pen). For those who do it, it is important, not just aesthetically, but as a part of what writing or photography is.

I think I’ll have to shoot a bunch more of this film before the end of the year, when current inventory is expected to run out. I’ll have to come up with a suitable project to frame it around, and go from there.

After that, I guess it’s on to Fujifilm.

House Taken Over V

Of the images in this series, I think this one best conveys the aesthetic I was going for, a combination of August Bradley and Gregory Crewdson, with traces of others. And, I think more than any other image in the series, this one really transformed from the original captures into something that is not directly representational. One could argue that that is not the point of photography, but then again, one could argue that this kind of image is not so much a photograph as it is a digitally imaged work; that’s semantics, and if you would like to debate that, remember that I used to be an English teacher, and still have a strong interest in linguistics, so you’d better bring something tasty to eat and drink ‘cuz we’ll be discussing for a right long while.

House Taken Over III

The funny story behind this image was the expression on the clerk’s face when I assured her that careful wrapping was not necessary, since I was going to beat the tea cups with a hammer as soon as I got home. I don’t think she thought I was serious.