From: "Bob W" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
before I go scooting off to these places I like to look at photographs in different guide books and coffee table books to get a sense of how the places are portrayed by 'ordinary' travel & stock photographers*. I at least know in advance where the qualifying bar is set. I also like to look at books by Magnum & National Geographic photographers (often one and the same), and at the respective websites, to see where the world record is, so to speak. The latter usually have an entirely different way of looking at things, or turn their backs on the ordinary subject matter.
Ah, yes, I've done this too. One of my favorite recent moments is looking at the big Nat Geo portrait book. I stayed up the entire night slowly going page by page contemplating what the photographer might have done to get the portrait they did--how they seem to bring originality to portrait they made. I'll never forget that night.
I've always found it extremely useful from the point of view of my photographic education to visit places where some of my favourite photographs have been taken, and try to figure out what Barbey, McCurry or whoever saw, how they saw it and how they came up with something different. I don't want to copy their shots - I want to try and understand their thought processes.
Yes, studying the process is just as fasinating. In the context of photographic apprenticiship (which I'm knee-deep in) there are actually a few shots of famous photographers that I would actually like to copy but with different subjects and locations. I would never publicly show these or include in a web gallery. Instead, the purpose would be to just physically go through what I think it would take to get the shot the master photographer did. Apprentice creative writers sometimes do this. They take sentences from master writers and copy sentence structure but use different content. This sentence copying is just a creative exercise to help understand craft--and to actually physically feel what it feels like to write out that sentence. I would like to know--as best I can--what it physically feels like to recreate some of those photographs I most admire.
Knowing how the master artist works is really important and can be helpful, even if this knowledge leads the apprentice to the conclusion that the master's process isn't going to work for the apprentice. I once watched a video on how Bresson worked--how he moved quietly with a crowd, stopped, took a picture, and kept moving. This doesn't really work so well for me at this point; for some reason I feel it's better for me to stay put and let life/people move around me and I try to capture it. Course, Bresson was a much better photographer than I'll ever be, so maybe I should give my strategy up :-).
Before my week in Fez I bought Bruno Barbey's book called "Morocco", and spent a lot of time on the Magnum website looking at his pictures and those by Abbas and others. They helped me to see Fez in a way that probably wouldn't have been possible otherwise. Since I came back I've looked closely at the book and the website again, with the light of experience, and it has increased my respect for them enormously, and given me different ways of looking at and appreciating their work.
It's always annoyed me when folks look at art, then turn around and say, "I could have done that." To which I always respond, "perhaps, but you didn't, did you?" Like you, Bob, I have enoromous appreciation for the master photographer. The variables involved in making an artful photograph are numerous, and the speed the master photographer has to have to bring order to the chaotic mess of variables is daunting, and when it all happens for the master photographer, I'm in total awe and appreciation.
Cheers, Christine -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
