I'll start with the "off topic" stuff first. I really missed swimming on Thursday and Friday this week. It sure felt great to get back into the pool this morning. Both masters workouts were crowded. Pent up demand, for sure. I woke up, tossed on a sweatshirt and a favorite pair of pants and headed to the pool. Didn't bother with shoes. Didn't need them. It was 55° this morning. No danger of frostbite on the toes.
We sleepy-heads hit the pool at 8 a.m. pushing out the early-birds from the 7 a.m. workout. I was fully caffeinated upon arrival having gotten up early enough to make a really outstanding cup of coffee. It was so good that I'm certain I could have used it to convert even steadfast tea drinkers...
Our Saturday coach, Peter, put up a traditional warm-up of distance swimming, kicking, and then sprinting in order to loosen up our muscles and get our heart rates up. Matt, Wilson and I were in lane four. Matt is usually our lane leader. He likes to go first and he hates to get too much rest so the other people know that if they get into "his" lane it's going to be a hard charging, non-stop hour of hard swimming. Today we were joined with a new swimmer. She brought up the rear of the crew.
I had a fun moment when, at the end of the workout as we were gathering our wits and our gear and getting ready to exit the comfortable warmth of the pool, I took off my swim cap and revealed a forest of white hair. The newbie exclaimed that she was shocked that I was ..... old. I asked why. She replied: "because you are faster than me." Made my day. Probably my week.
Happy to be back to a wonderful, near sacred daily ritual I pulled myself out of the pool and headed off to find fresh coffee and a walnut scone. We logged about 3200 yards in the hour. I'll add three or four miles of walking this afternoon. Feels so good to be in decent shape. Keeps the pants fitting just right. And the resting heart rate nice and slow. Belly over belt? Maybe it's time for some walking shoes...
On to the more topical stuff. Photography. I'm continuing with my adventure from yesterday. That was the day I posted all the boot photos.
The photos I'm posting here, today, are also from yesterday. They were all done with a 90mm lens, set mostly to f4.0 and attached to a Panasonic S5 camera. Not an expensive camera but certainly a good and reliable tool. At this point it's the work tool with the longest tenure in my camera case. I'd sell it but I'd regret the sale and just buy another one down the road. Why? Because along with the Sigma fp it's the best low light camera I have owned. The 24 megapixel sensor in this camera is probably the same one used in the Sigma fp and with both cameras I've been able to shoot at ISOs as high as 12,500 without noticing noise and at ISOs as high as 25,000 while getting very acceptable and workable noise performance. Now that Adobe has introduced an A.I. noise reduction feature in Lightroom Classic I am pretty sure I can use 25,000 as a decent exposure setting --- as long as I get the white balance correct --- as well as the optimum exposure.
Why do I walk with a camera so often? It's not that I think I'll see incredible stuff every time I go out the door, it's not even critical to always take a camera, but I think anyone interested in cultural anthropology is well served by immersing themselves into the culture of their interest as often as possible because things change so quickly. Austin, for example, has zoomed from quiet, low cost, backwater town into a big, bustling city. And it's done so in about 25 years. What was "every day" to us 25 years ago now seems interesting and unusual in photographs from then. Cars were much different. Fashions were different. People were thinner and more physically graceful. Shops marketed to budget focused consumers. Coffee was much cheaper (but woefully inferior). Now we're working hard to make S. Congress Ave., once home to hookers, drug dealers and by the hour motels into a Southwestern version of Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. We've even got an Hermes store.... So, the images we take now might just be enthralling to people who unearth them years from now.
But more importantly I think, for me, the practice of walking around with old Austinites, new arrivals and weekend tourists, gives me more insight into what's driving our local economy, what's trending week by week in our restaurants and shops, and how people are constantly transitioning to new looks and new interests. Ten years ago bicyclists seemed to be everywhere. All wearing their bike shorts and their shoes with the click-itty toe clips. All wearing loudly colored, tight jerseys. Now? Not so much. Not at all yesterday. Tattoos were peak popular five years ago but now there's a trend away. Cigarette smokers are almost extinct. Birkenstocks are back with a vengeance. Hoka brand running shoes are legion.
And it will all change next week, next month, next year. If you work in advertising it's important to keep up to date because your work generally needs to mirror the markets as they exist in the moment.
This is also why I sometimes sneak away to Blanco, Johnson City, Lockhart and San Angelo, Texas. I want to see which trends are universal and which ones are location topical. I also want to see how much slower adaptation is in rural markets. Knowledge of what is trending affects how you see and what you look for when you finally get around to working with a camera. You have some subconscious plan for what you want to include and what you want to exclude when you go out shooting.
I try not to photograph for an audience when I do work for myself. It's just that. It should be work for myself. You can't really do that when you are making images for clients, or to impress some set of peers. But it's important to shoot what you want in order to both have fun with the process but also to stay engaged with it. I know most of you old codgers can't figure out why in the heck I'd ever want to photograph mannequins. But I know why I like those images and that's why I photograph them and include them. (hint: science fiction).
It's interesting for me to see work from all over the place. That's why I still look at Instagram. If you look at Milo Hess's work from NYC it looks profoundly different than work from photographers who've planted themselves in the hinterlands. There is a constant feeling of reinvention and energy in both his work and the subject matter. It's the same reason Bill Cunningham's work for the New York Times Fashion Magazine was so wonderful. He was immersed it a culture that was alive and vibrant instead of stodgily defending some rural status quo. Some second tier market's J.C. Penny's fashion paradigm. https://www.instagram.com/realbillcunningham/?hl=en
Austin is growing into a more diverse and interesting city. That's uncomfortable for lots of long time residents. But it's important to me to understand what's changing, how it's changing and what that looks like because it affects my own view of the world. The world I can see all around me on a day to day basis. And change will always include anchors from the past and signposts from the new.
It's one thing to be in a dying market or a static market and get your knowledge about music, art, fashion, tech and photography from the web and a completely different and much more immersive thing to go out and be in the middle of it. The ugly, the beautiful and all the stuff in between. I write my columns not with a nod to history and a leash from the past ("Here's how we pros did shit with a view camera back in the golden age..." Please...) but by going out and experiencing how it is to use a camera in a general society that is, demographically, much younger than me. More conversant with tech as it applies to their everyday lives. More knowledgeable about new trends in cuisine. More mobile and more interested than many of my age peers in having experiences rather than having stuff. And by staying in this mix it's easier to reject some of the trappings of "being old."
I have a thirst to share this with my photographs. To nudge people not to take the old ways so seriously. To not get locked into a 1950's idea of the inevitability of just falling apart, piece by piece, after cresting the age of 60. Rural residents age faster that urban residents. It's a fact. People who are truly engaged with a mix of cultures and a variety of age groups age less rapidly than those who cloister only with people who are of their own age and who have their same interests and beliefs. Being more open to change can also mean becoming more compassionate about differences because different generations see things like gender identity and economics in much different ways. Same with race. Same with ideas.
When I venture out of my humdrum, "safe" and privileged neighborhood I see life differently. I see people struggling. I also see people with so much wealth that it insulates them from the real world. When I bring along a camera I constantly take visual notes so I won't lose the momentary visual experiences to a faulty memory or a constant re-prioritization of visual events.
The camera doesn't matter and it does. I want things to look a certain way when I photograph them. The right camera or the right lens (or a right combination) is a shortcut to getting what I want into my photo catalog. I could take photos with a shitty camera but the presentation might cloud the message of the photo. I could buy an "ultimate" camera but then my focus on technical issues might also cloud the messaging. A current Leica is really no better or worse than any other camera and lens of a certain type so it's really just a matter of preference for handling and design. For once in my life I can afford any camera I might want but my selections, in reality, are mostly mid-brow, mid-tech and mid-priced. Most are bought used. Most are several models old. But the way a camera feels as I go through a daily shooting process is at least as important as the feature set. Probably much more so.
I've recently been writing about converting images from color to black and white, or using color profiles or recipes to make black and white images in the taking cameras. I've stated my preferences for doing things this way instead of committing to the cost and limitations of a single purpose mono-only camera. For the way I generally work I find the single "language" camera too structured and limited. Some have read the blog posts and assumed I am unknowledgeable about monochrome cameras or that I've never used one. Lost to them is that my early career and my teaching at UT were all centered around using and printing "real" black and white images from film stock. Or that I've actually shot with earlier monochrome cameras such as the short-lived Kodak DSC-760 M camera and others like it. That I have tested the older M monochrome camera based on the Leica M-9. After all these experiences I think I know what I am writing about. And my specific questions in recent blogs were about the capabilities of a single camera; the Leica M 246. Produced prior to the M10M and the M11M.
Our current culture is all about color. For me a mono camera has an allure only when I think in terms of the history of photography and of being locked into the legacies of Ansel Adams and Paul Strand, on one hand, or the successes of documentarians like Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson on the other hand. I don't think monochrome imaging fills the same role in modern times. I think it was an expedient of the times in which those classics became established. The black and white film was more robust, stable and cost effective than the color emulsions and it also allowed for artists to do a closed loop process; from the taking of a photograph to the finished print. Now, all of us can do that in both color and black and white. The black and white, as JC mentioned, does something special for portraits; that's for certain, but in documentary applications it's like leaving out a lot of the key ingredients in a recipe.
I still maintain that its cultish adherents are clinging with fervor to established tradition and feel uncomfortable with new visual dialects that are much, much more popular. In one sense it's a grim, firm grip on imagined barriers to entry for newer generations. A way of marking territory and declaring a hierarchy or pecking order of importance. A lot like the gatekeepers at the French Arts Academies of the 19th century.
Where is the disconnection? I am no longer interested in making physical objects for sale. That's basically what a photographic print is. No argument. The print is a wonderful thing to put into your home or office as decoration but when it comes to cultural messaging it's an anachronism. I'm more interested in sharing images across a wide audience than I am selling one or two prints at a time. And I'm not sure that prints are so vital for sharing visual information in a way that keeps pace with newer generations. Like the cardigan sweater I think of prints made for an audience as being from another generation.
Just to be clear, I love to see my own prints in my own house. They have meaning for my wife and me. But I'm never that keen to have someone else's prints on my walls. And I think most people who photograph feel the same way. Would I like a Robert Frank print? Sure. Would I display it in my living room or dining room? Not likely. Probably in the office, just to the side of my computer. But would I prefer it to the work I do myself? Not necessarily.
I think the real generation stumbling block or divide is something I wrote about at length back when social media was being widely, almost universally accepted as a way to transmit visual messages to one another. In the 20th century a physical print was the most popular method of transmission. It was also an object on which the producer could put a price. It was a physical product as much as art content. That's the paradigm we of a certain age grew up with. Object = Value. And a print was intended to be "used" for an indefinite length of time. Years, maybe.
Photography, as our culture understands it now, is consumable thing. Meant to be experienced in the moment, and in the context of the moment, before moving on to the next image, the next moment, the next trend. If galleries were courageous they'd have shows of ephemeral images on super high quality screens and we'd stand in front of them with our plastic cups of wine and talk about how much we love seeing lots of fun, exciting and creative images but we'd never imagine that we'd want them all, or any of them, hanging in our living room. I'm pretty certain I'm right.
I look to the example of movies and home viewing of movies. We used to buy videotapes, then DVDs, then Blu-Rays of movies. Even though they could be rented people had collections of their favorite movies sitting on shelves. It was important to them to have the movies they cherished on their own shelves. I think we all remember this. Same with books. We all created libraries of books; novels and non-fiction. Did we really think we'd ever circle back and re-read the books again and again? Nope. But we collected them because we thought we wanted them and they were physical objects and the physicality of the object made it valuable. Object = Value. That's why so many people have so much difficulty cleaning out their houses. Tragically leaving that responsibility to the heirs...
But now, here's my anecdote. My kid was going on a trip to Japan. I have a physical copy of the movie, "Lost in Translation." It's a movie I like very much. I offered to loan the movie to my son so he could see one vision of Tokyo (Scarlett Johansson was so, so good in this movie, as was Bill Murray). He demurred. He didn't have any device to play the DVD on and further felt that if he wanted to see the movie he could just stream it. No intentionality of ownership or archiving. For his generation a movie, or a show of photography online, is like a meal to be savored and enjoyed. Not an object to be venerated and cared for. But not particularly re-used.
I guess it's true that everyone is different but no one is ultimately immune from the evolution of culture. In the days of painting it was an aspirational experience to be able to pay to have a portrait painted of yourself or a family member. You had to be wealthy to experience that level of attachment to art. Then came the Daguerrotype and more and more classes of people could afford to be "immortalized" for the ages. And then Kodak opened up the floodgates to everyone else and for over 100 years nearly anyone who wanted an image of themself or their loved ones could readily afford one and could keep the object forever (I wonder if anyone has researched how often couples actually open and look through their own wedding albums after the first successful year of marriage????).
As the web matured and iPhones hit the market everyone everywhere could take their own selfie and put it up on Facebook, MySpace, TikTok, et al. Suddenly the portraits of the citizens of the world were online and available. The popularity of an actual, professional portrait session with a photographer just flat died. Sure, some people are still paying to have family portraits made. These people are called, "Grandparents."
But in the last two or three years something strange has arisen. Now it's easy enough to steal someone's likeness from portraits uploaded to social media and use them to commit identity theft and actual, financial theft. Now even recorded voices can be sampled and repurposed for identity theft. Now parents don't want their children's images up on the web at all. Or their own images on the web because they fear the loss that might occur. And they should. It's devastating. So culture is moving on from our experiment of sharing everything. And it's moving on from collecting physical objects. And all the structures that rose up around the physical objects. Sure, I think people will always want images of their lovers, families, children and so on. But, no. They don't need big prints for walls. The don't need physical albums.
And none of that is what my take on day to day photography is all about. At its core it's just a process that helps me understand change and metamorphosis. To learn how different we all can be. And many times I come home, look at the photographs I've taken. Make mental notes of what I've learned and then hit "delete." It's fine. It's okay. I'm sure so much of our time will vanish away. Even the prints we tried so hard to make and save. But my goal is to really see life. Not just conjecture about the world I've read about. Or seen on the web.
Who could have known that actual experience would become the cool trend of this decade? It sure beats sitting at home looking at a screen. And if a camera provides a motivation to go out and experience all the richness of the real world...is that so bad?
I have no idea why "chain lube" is included here but I'll go in and find out.
A club that's been on S. Congress for decades.
So cool for a hair salon's signage.
This is exactly what some people on S. Congress Ave. looked like in the afternoon, yesterday.
Nostalgia for marketing's sake.
Just look! It's funny!
