Tuesday’s Thoughts by Joe Farace
“Here’s looking at you, kid”, a line spoken by Humphrey Bogart in the 1942 film Casablanca
I used to agonize over titles for this blog’s posts, trying to balance a description of the contents with SEO (search engine optimization) requirements to keep Google’s algorithm happy and inspire any lurkers out there to actually read the post. Now I just write the first title that comes to mind. Yet on some days I end up changing the title of a post four or five times. Is this because of some deep-seated insecurity of mine? I have that in abundance but obviously each post contains something I want to say. I don’t know what the title will eventually be when you read this but I hope you get something from it anyway.
There’s an old expression that was once popular in the automotive world that goes something like this: “You are what you drive.” I don’t think that thought’s as popular today because most cars are generic and boring. But I think the expression may still be true for some people, such as enthusiasts to whom a car is more than a transportation module. I extrapolated that concept into a post for my car photography website called “You are what you shoot” and I think there’s some truth in that as well.
In Andreas Feininger’s 1973 landmark book, Photographic Seeing, there’s a section he called “The Different Forms of Seeing” where the writer discusses how four well-known shooters of that era might photograph an identical female subject. He then posits a theory that “differences in seeing would, of course, reflect in their work.” Naming names, Feininger then eviscerates each of their hypothetical images as “sterile,” “dull,” “unimaginative,” “stereotypical and rather cold.” Yikes! My friend Rick Sammon has a different and friendlier theory about seeing and puts it this way: “The camera looks both ways” and “that in picturing the subject, you are also picturing part of yourself.”
How I made this photograph: I made this photograph when visiting Albuquerque and the University of New Mexico campus with an Olympus E-5 DSLR and Zuiko Digital ED 12-60mm f2.8-4.0 SWD lens. Exposure using the camera’s Dramatic Tones Art Filter was 1/250 sec and f/16 at ISO 320. Olympus cameras, including all of their newer models will let you shoot a bracket using all of the different Art filters and I have found that this is a wonderful way to chew up memory card space.
Here’s another theory
The late Richard Avedon once said,“ My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.” What I think he meant is that when creating a portrait Avedon liked to control as much of the environment. lighting and maybe even the subject that reflects his image of them, not necessarily how the subject might view themselves. And not that I would ever compare my portraiture to Mr. Avedon’s, perhaps some of this philosophy might apply to my studio work as well. Maybe this kind of thinking is another form of my OCD or maybe all/some/many photographers have this same affliction because their own images strive to restructure the world into how they imagine it should be.
After reading that section of Feininger’s book and thinking about Avedon’s and Sammon’s concepts, instead of sleeping one night I ly in bed thinking about what my portraits of women say about me. I don’t want to bother you with all of the Neo-Freudian ideas that ran through (what’s left of my) my brain but all of this was fresh in my mind this morning, hence this post.
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