What Triggers the Shot (subjective or unusual realities).

As many pant their painful way through this year’s Amsterdam marathon I leisurely witness their stress from a vantage point on top of a bridge. All around me and along the track many cheer and many take pictures, thus setting me to think about what actually moves people to want to take pictures of this or that in the first place and whether their motivations can be at all fathomed or indeed classified in clear and general guidelines. Thirty years into my personal obsession and profession I have taken photographs for all the right, and probably most of the wrong reasons, which somehow should qualify me to tackle the question, also given the fact that on this particular moment I don’t feel like shooting at all and much rather sip on my paper cupped cappuccino and lose myself in abstract thoughts as I am wont to do in the presence of mass hysteria of the sportive kind.

Individual motivations are either typical or unfathomable by definition. Actually I guess the typical is by large more frequent and likely than the original. As the typical has this way of appearing original to the beholder of the thought in question, any attempt at mass investigation or statistics is doomed from the start. So trust my own instinct on this one. If my guess is as good as anyone’s, surely on the same account it is not likely to be any worse than yours, should our opinions differ, and perfectly all right, should they coincide.

Boldly split, the motivation for taking photographs is either evolutionary procreative sexual bodily or aesthetic cultural entertainment and human curiosity (the superior capacity of being captivated by anything other than feeding, procreation and survival). In short: beauty or the beast. Take any picture and you will find that it fits into at least one or more of above-mentioned classes. Whether a picture is more or less effective in ticking its intended box is the measure of how accomplished it is, regardless of any judgement on the legitimacy of its goals and subject matter. The motivation for looking at pictures can be roughly classified in exactly the same way as the taking, thus completing the cycle.


The taking of pictures easily fits into the profile of a species of hunter-gatherers, as an activity. Left to his or hers own evolutionary devices, this is what people do with photography when spontaneous and free. Of course much goes on in photography which is neither, and professionals in particular are able to toggle with many elements at will in perfect awareness and next to perfect technical prowess as to where they want the picture to go and what it needs to say. Then there are the intentions of those who do not control the process but still try to, leading to poor imitations, stereotypes, and boring pictures in general. Bad pictures constantly happen, but boring ones are mostly made intentionally.



As my fellow humans below push on their podistic endurance quest I am for once perfectly at ease with not taking pictures and mildly amused by the unexpected serendipity of my recent thoughts. Of course I have merely scratched at the surface of the problem, but it kept me from the worst indulgence of all in taking pictures: mindless automatic compulsion.

The Problem of Exposure.

Photographers are usually familiar with the term exposure, meaning the amount of light given to film or sensor in order to take a photograph. Once left over to guess work and experience, later to be made easier by light meters and then effortless by automatic systems built in the cameras, the problem of exposure seems a thing of the past. Still it isn’t, particularly not in another sense of the word: that of getting exposure for our work once the images are finished, printed and ready to hang or publish.

Easy enough to put them on the Web, but then it is rather difficult to ensure that these sites we make will be visited a lot. For those who feel that their work should be experienced as a print the problem is even worse because they need walls: well lit spaces visited by acquisitively minded wealthy collectors, in short, galleries. The talent of getting your work accepted by a gallery is arguably more important than that of making great pictures when it comes to making it in this difficult world. Some seem to stream without delay from the art college to the art gallery and even museums, others toil for a lifetime in the sidelines, hanging their work in cafes and restaurants, cultural institutions or anywhere else, sometimes at their expense and with little or no reward. After a while this effort can become both daunting and discouraging, one tends to lose heart.

Far from having cracked it myself I have become something of a collector of both success and toil stories, anecdotes, and theories. Most success stories are second hand though: somebody else’s rendition of the facts while those who make it seem to be understandably secretive and evasive as to the reasons of their success – other than their great personality and talent that is, more implied than openly stated for the sake of modesty-. My good friend Mrs. G. swears by socializing at gallery openings and art fairs and names the capacity to take huge amounts of alcohol on board without incurring in loss of speech or dignity as a major asset. This approach involves a lot of traveling, since art fairs are all over the place, so nothing short of a Paris, Basel, Miami via New York triangle will do, better make it a pentagon to include Tokyo and Peking really. Oh, and spread it over a season lasting at least six months. In the time left the artist is to recover his sanity, revolve back to his photographic endeavor and work, in between AA meetings I might add. It may work, but it’s obviously not for everyone. Even when you have made it as far as getting your work under the nose of some influential person you are likely to find their response cautious and rather neutral. This happens for the simple fact that as an unknown photographer, it is a risk to support you, a liability to one’s reputation as an expert should you prove uncool, a commitment not worth making.

So I find it highly commendable that photographers who have been through this devilish mill for years find the energy, dedication and enthusiasm to land their prints on a good wall in a public building, albeit being aware of the staggering odds stacked against them. I also believe that the best honest work is produced without any hope or thought of success, beyond that very way of reasoning and being, but purely for the sake of it. Christopher Regis has done just that, and from the 5th of February to the end of March you can see a selection of his nighttime Amsterdam work, beautifully printed on fiber base and framed as good photographs should be, in the OBA (the capital’s central library). Since I have known Christopher for years I have no fears in vouching for his integrity. As for the pictures, they speak for themselves.

Where You Are Going.

According to Oscar Wilde, passing it on is the only sensible thing one can do with a good advice. So this is what I am doing in quoting this true statement recently aired by the BBC through the mouth of Mrs. Thatcher (not the baroness, her daughter): “do not look back, it’s not where you are going”. Its implications are wide, connected with the process of moving on, related to the need to let go, possibly a warning against the dangers of nostalgia and an invitation to the future. But to look forward is usually not an easy thing to do. By definition things to come are uncertain, aleatory, so any decision taken today for tomorrow unavoidably involves a certain risk. And this is scary. Hence the temptation to ignore the passing of time and stick to the well known. Understandable it may be, but this attitude is a luxury very few can afford.
Think of your computer: if you were to stop updating it, it will be obsolete in one year, and in two years possibly you won’t be able to work well with it by the increasing incompatibility with modern systems around you. We are spurred on by this relentless logic.

Painful it is at times to let go, of trusted tools for instance, and then for a very low price. It felt quite uncomfortable to sell my Mamiya RZ system, body and five lenses in all + accessories, for less than what I had originally paid for the body alone.
Still I could count myself lucky – as I watched the back of a very happy amateur photographer walking away with his prize- for having sold at all, since the market for medium format analog equipment is totally frozen and my advertisment had been out one year with no reaction. To be able to look back on many years of professional use is a consolation, and one that will not be attainable with my present and future hi end digital cameras. Their value simply plummets steeply from the moment you buy them, and they are almost immediately phased out by a newer model. So your investment must pay for itself through its use in the short term, you must write them off quickly, and the object itself seems to have no intrinsic value to speak of. Is there a collector’s market for old digital camera’s? I doubt it.

So the future is dynamic: fast and constant motion. At 46 I count myself relatively young, but need to apply a few tricks to prevent my head from spinning out of control and keep some bearing and sense of roots through change. I feel it is a good thing to keep a few analog cameras around if I use them. Hasselblad, Sinar, Linhof, Leica range finder are for keeps, at least for as long as I will be able to find film. I only collect Nikon F’s, my weakness, as I actually do not use them much and have a penchant for those old “white” nikkor lenses from the sixties that do not fit on newer or digital bodies. Polaroids I am dumping fast, to the point of giving them away, and am probably stuck with the 8x10 manual processor for having been late in putting it out for sale. Also I have embarked on a studio lights renewal scheme, and plan on shifting to digital flash generators and suchlike modern amenities as soon as I can.

I have also made peace with the need to buy a new computer every year and a half of so, accept the must of the megapixel race to an extent, have become photoshop literate, embrace professional work on digital camera’s and yes, I will update them, change them, buy them on and on to their makers’ – and hopefully my own - content. But strangely enough I still need to spend some time making my own experimental wooden cameras, trying things out in the darkroom, and shooting on film. It’s where I come from, and part of where I think I am going.

No Pictures at Magnum 60 years!

Apparently, and most of all ironically, if you are caught taking photographs at the Magnum 60 years exhibition at the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum you are likely to incur in serious sanctions, ranging from verbal abuse up to immediate expulsion from the exhibition or indeed the prohibition of ever visiting the museum again. I am of late increasingly angry at the growing photo prohibitionism that seems to be spreading out over the country. More often than ever security people of all kinds approach me and prevent me from doing my work - perfectly innocent unobtrusive architecture or city views in large format - on some legal pretence. Needless to say, such an attitude would have made most of the Magnum photos on display impossible, maybe even mean the kiss of death for all candid photography and photojournalism. You can't have it both ways: either you accept photographers and let them go about their business and get the pictures or you don't and put a blindfold on the medium. You can always punish the "bad guys" later. If you feel that some photographs shouldn't be published take the authors to court, by all means. But now there is a witch hunt atmosphere out there that I find very frustrating, worse than any censorship: we are prevented from working to start with, presumed guilty by suspicion. The camera, especially when on a tripod, is a thorn in the eye of the security man. Now I think that the very censors would be hard put to name what evil exactly could we perform with our photographs, but this doesn't seem to quench their thirst for regulations and limitations nor sooth their rampaging paranoia.

Of course I am aware that the point of the prohibition at the museum is to prevent visitors from taking unauthorized reproduction shots of the work on display, and is therefore meant as a protection of the author rights. Still there is in that respect nothing in there to reproduce, because in a way there are no pictures at the exhibition (!).There are no fine or vintage prints on display, but the all set up is more a multimedia style presentation on huge screens, with beamer projections that could be rewarding in the size of the image, were it not for the clearly visible pixels that make up the photos. Furthermore anyone can see or download every photograph on the Magnum site from his PC at home, much of the work is so well known and widely published that most of us are likely to own a copy of each photograph in some art book already. No, there is nothing to shoot in there, but maybe the visitors, or parts of the set up, or some funny combination that would be interesting and perfectly in the spirit if not at the level of the very Magum heroes that are being celebrated.

Magnum is an institution, part of the history of photography. As Martin Parr puts it, it is a temple (one that he has rocked with his work, being at the same time proud to be a part of it while allegedly himself an agent of its decadence). Problem is, temples are places of worship, and worship is by definition not critical while progress is always to be found in a challenging attitude of research and renewal. Capa and the other founding fathers were in their time adventurous, I suspect nowadays it is a form of conformism that motivates photographers to join. They want to be sacred and established, while I am convinced that young photographers should found their own new agencies and move on boldly. Do not constantly look for granddad’s approval, not even when he was called Cartier Bresson. Respect the past, and move on.

Blow Up (that elusive quality of the Real)

Antonioni’s film, based on Julio Cortazar, is in a way the quintessential portrait of the commonplace successful photographer, possibly accountable of having laid the foundation for the modern perception of the profession in the eyes of the public: from poor artisan to rich artist, the slightly ridiculous 19th century “look at the birdie” humble portraitist for the people turning into the present myth of the jet setter top photographer we all set out to become as we start in the profession. But having seen the film again, after many years, I am starting to think that all this is more than anything accidental, a set dressing, the backdrop to another story that the master film maker is trying to tell us. Photography can be a life style, but also a quest for reality, a phenomenological representation, the collection of proofs of authenticity and, especially in its failure to deliver – based on the false assumption of its objectivity, therefore inevitable - the perfect way to tell us that nothing is real but what we choose to believe in or can prove beyond reasonable doubt. Proofs are difficult to get by, though, and we are left in doubt more often than not.

As a movie it does have many funny elements to a modern photographer.
Imagine speaking to a model that way now? Call them Baby? Photo sex with Veruschka – or Kate, or Naomi - on the set?

The protagonist is horribly arrogant, absolutely politically incorrect, macho male chauvinist. Cynical, bored, totally obnoxious: utterly believable in fact. Based on the stories and accounts that I have happened to collect in my early years as an assistant, working for photographers that were active in that era, I am tented to believe that life was more or less like that, to a certain extent. You do lose the daily feel of the past, always in hindsight, but as a detailed sketch of a moment in the sixties it is fairly plausible. Is it David Bailey? Maybe.

This photographer is also an idealist. Regardless of his success in fashion photography and with women, his fancy car and money, he is still courting the friendship of a serious writer and working at a socially engaged photo book. Obviously hasn’t lost the sacred flame as he excitedly pursues the proof of a murder that he has inadvertently recorded with his camera while stalking a couple in a park, in an increasingly dangerous quest for reality that will lead him to finding the body of a dead man only to lose all evidence but one print with an almost indiscernible grainy abstraction on it.

Having it all and not giving a damn, then finding the spark and setting out in hot pursue of what we really care about.
Failing to do that, we might as well go through the motions of our life in mindless stupor, as a man playing tennis with an imaginary ball.

So let us redefine the very notion of top photographer in the process, shall we?

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being Jan Saudek.

Nothing light about one of the latest Taschen volumes, a huge retrospective on Jan Saudek’s work that has appeared on the shelf of my local book megastore. So I dove into the depth and length of it, trying to make sense of this author in the midst of Christmas shoppers and Saturday afternoon rush. Shameless and absorbed, isolated from the noise and impervious to distraction, oblivious of anything but the photographs. Nothing, not even the preface or any caption, was to distract me from the images, and these alone were to tell me whatever was worth knowing about Jan Saudek, at least to me. Occasionally I would glimpse at the date, in order to put the images into some kind of historical contest. Not just his personal life, of which I know very little, but the European political situation in which he happened to live and work.
The story begins with black and white photographs of Jan and his brother, and their lives as young east Europeans, stuck on the “wrong” side of the iron curtain, pathetically trying somehow to partake in the American dream, being conscripts, students, workers, but most of all young. Young Jan has talent, this much is evident, and doesn’t seem much impaired by the lack of fancy western equipment or money. The fascination of these images lives in the universal aspiration to happiness that transpires from them, regardless or in a way made stronger by the society in which they live, restrictive and authoritarian. They are young, good looking muscular men, and display an appetite for freedom, a lust for life and love, an interest in the open air, nudity and sex. Nudes appear almost immediately in his work, not so much in an aesthetic classical way but transgressive, liberatory, uninhibited, symbolical. From the innocence of children nude in a landscape to grown up men and women, sometimes against the unlikely backdrop of industrial socialist developments. A contradiction quickly appears, the paradox of a man built like a working class hero but with a tormented ill adjusted soul that doesn’t seem to bear the communist regime very well. They seem happy enough, Jan and his young family, riding motorcycles in the summer, playing in the sun. And yet inexorably this man would drift from his sunny beginnings into a mouldy cellar, a room with a window overlooking a blind wall, a striped curtain on top and no other view but his inner vision. In this humble studio setting he was to develop the style that he is mostly known for: the strange combination of 19th century photography techniques, sepia hand coloured prints, and the weird characters that inhabit this dreamlike space. His models range from young to old, male and female, beautiful or grotesquely horrible, often naked, and are engaged in mostly anguished unsettling scenes, sometimes frivolous, rarely romantic, increasingly obscene explicit sex and violent as time goes by. His vision seems to spiral down into a Dantesque hell, chasing his demons all the way down to the darkest pit of his subconscious.
If Saudek’s trigger is indeed to be found in the oppressive communist regime, why is it so that international recognition and the very crumbling of the iron curtain and dismissal of his alleged oppressors haven’t brought about an opening in his cellar? Not at all, the most recent work is bleaker than ever. Nor is our western thirst for his imagery in the least quenched by the fall of his detractors: the communists.
As the legend would have it, Jan was a suppressed dissident. Forced to work in a cellar and in secret by the socialist police, he was hence to produce symbols of his legitimate aspiration to freedom and denouncing the injustice of the political system through his disconcerting – but possibly titillating to a western public – images. While one of the first images that filtered through to the west was an enchanting view of Prague, with a small naked girl walking innocently among white geese in the foreground, back to the camera, it was quickly to be followed by his other more “adult” cellar work. I am not questioning Saudek’s honesty (a true and conclusive exploration of his motives would require a longer inquiry) but have doubts about our integrity as Westerners when confronted with this work, and other east European expressions of the period. Just think for a moment of the way in which Milan Kundera’s “The unbearable Lightness of being” was filmed to realize that to us, well fed and spoiled Westerners, Eastern Europe was mainly a décor for self complacent commiseration and possibly stimulating erotic adventures. Made strong by the dollar, many crossed the border and were catered for sexually, proving undeniably that if real socialism was a system cruel enough to drive people to prostitution, capitalists didn’t prove to be morally superior by refraining from taking squalidly advantage of the situation. In truth both were victims of their respective systems, fellow human beings unable to break the bounds of their times and cultures, prey of oppression and neurosis, ultimately not free.
This is why Jan Saudek’s descent didn’t stop but was possibly made worse by the realization that whatever his expectations and dreams as a young man, just crossing a political border or gain international recognition as an artist or even the total fall of a political system wasn’t going to deliver him from his inner nightmares. This seems to me the story told by his oeuvre down to his gruesome latest work: helpless desperation, boundless expression of anguish at recognising that not dictators but our own human nature will drive some of us unavoidably to madness. Jan is free at last, one would think, and can do whatever he likes. Still he can’t escape himself, has no choice really but to continue on his course, maybe even committed to it by the pressure of our unsavoury voyeuristic appetites. Nothing, not even the probable success of this latest hardback by Taschen, will deliver him from that hell. A strange proposition for your Christmas coffee table, wouldn’t you say?