Susan Sontag

For those of you who have been complaining that my posts here aren't nearly verbose or esoteric enough, I'd heartily encourage you to check out Susan Sontag's collection of essays: On Photography. If you're a fan of intense ruminations on the nature of this art, peppered with obscure references and replete with a greater density of poly-syllabic words than the ingredients list on a Twinkie wrapper, this is the book for you.

A passage that I find particularly interesting follows:

"The camera can be lenient; it is also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste Thus, while fashion photography is based on the fact that something can be more beautiful in a photograph than in real life, it is not surprising that some photographers who serve fashion are also drawn to the non-photogenic. There is a perfect complementarity between Avedon's fashion photography, which flatters, and the work in which he comes on as The One Who Refuses to Flatter-- for example, the elegant, ruthless portraits Avedon did in 1972 of his dying father. The traditional function of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has a much more limited career in photography considered as an art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias."

"Chance Favors the Prepared Mind"

Throughout my life I’ve been an active participant in various competitive sports: soccer, hockey, baseball, water polo, and lacrosse among others. In all of these sports, I was a goaltender (or catcher). In all of these sports, both conscious and unconscious decision-making took crucial roles in determining my performance. On the conscious side, my team would practice plays, scout the other teams, and consider various strategies in advance of the game. Once the game began, I maintained a conscious awareness of the locations of the various players on the field, and attempted to anticipate certain eventualities. However, when the shot came and it was time for me to execute, carefully tuned instincts and muscle memory took over the performance of my duties and conscious thought took a back seat.

Over the years, I learned that my ability to cultivate particular states of mind was absolutely vital to my performance in the instinctual phases of play. Athletes frequently develop rituals or superstitions that help them to evoke a certain mindset that has facilitated high performance in the past. In many ways, I believe that photojournalism requires a similar blend of conscious and unconscious decision-making. Awareness of the impact of our mindset on the instinctive portions of timing and composition may enable a photographer to improve overall performance.

By my estimation, there are three discrete phases in the creation of a photojournalistic image: strategic planning, tactical planning, and execution. Each of these phases of creation are progressively shorter, less controlled, and more dependent upon a combination of intuition and “muscle-memory.”

The strategic planning phase includes all of the basic things that a photographer does to prepare to take photographs: the shooter decides what type of photos he is going to take, purchases the gear that he feels will best enable him to achieve his photographic objectives (within budgetary limitations), and learns what he can about his subjects, the location, and the situation. Strategic planning, therefore, is a period that extends from years in advance of the actual shot, right up until the shooter sets foot on the objective location. Strategic planning controls what techniques and tools the photographer must utilize within a given situation, and provides the framework for understanding and anticipating the events as they unfold. The strategic phase is made up almost entirely of conscious decision-making.

Tactical planning begins once the photographer sets foot onto the actual objective. Tactical planning begins with an awareness of events as they unfold around him. Once the photographer identifies the subject matter of his shot, he will assess the lighting situation and compositional elements to ascertain the best shooting position given the circumstances. He will consider using flash or other lighting devices, and determine camera settings that control depth of field and motion-stopping. The tactical phase ends when the camera is actually lifted to the photographer’s eye. The tactical phase is significantly shorter than the strategic phase, and begins to mix in unconscious decision making with the conscious choices. The photographer may consciously consider the lighting and composition of the scene or consciously anticipate the actions of the subjects, but an element of instinct and intuition begins to come into play here: not all of these factors may be consciously considered.

The execution phase entails all of the actions taken once the photographer is looking through the viewfinder. Here, there is frequently far less conscious thought. An experienced photographer will make minor exposure adjustments and achieve focus primarily through “muscle memory,” and the finer points of composition will often be handled in a subconscious “it just feels right” fashion.

I’m highly skeptical of any photojournalist who claims to consciously control every aspect of composition. First off, there simply aren’t enough rules or guidelines for composition to mentally articulate a justification for the placement of every object in a frame. Second, there is seldom time to internally verbalize every aspect of the framing decision, even if the language exists. This is not to say that these decisions are random or haphazard! Rather, the more subtle compositional choices are made with a combination of the photographer’s innate sensibilities and the visual compositional catalog that he has developed through exposure to other artwork. At most, a photojournalist might consciously decide to place the subject on a third or at the end of a leading line, but the real grunt work of making the composition “just feel right” occurs beneath the surface.

This is why composition is so difficult to teach and learn. Many of the other choices we make as photographers are controlled in the strategic or tactical phases and rely heavily on conscious decision-making. However, even in photographic disciplines, such as landscape or static portraiture where there is plenty of time to consider every compositional option “above board,” as often as not, the complex analytical language is applied later to justify an instantaneous intuitive recognition of the most graceful arrangements of the object in frame.

Louis Pasteur once said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” One might say the same for creative composition. As it is difficult or impossible to think our way to better reactions, the challenge becomes cultivating a sense of preparedness, which makes our minds attuned to greater possibilities and possesses us of a repertoire of building blocks to make the most of our opportunities. The most obvious course of action suggested by this theory is that a study of patterns will render us more likely to recognize organizations of content through our viewfinder. However, a more tantalizing possibility exists that careful circumspection might reveal a certain mental state in each of us, in which we possess the greatest capacity to see. Rigorous mental discipline and conditioning may grant us the tools to invoke this state more frequently and for longer periods.

Trying to document one’s state of mind at the moment inspiration strikes is like trying to capture lightning in a bottle--but that doesn’t stop me from trying to find just the right jar…

Documents of Family History

Edward Nigel Morris Baines
photographer unknown

On a black shelf overlooking the maelstrom of clutter that is my office rests a small reproduction of an aged photograph of my grandfather: Edward Nigel Morris Baines. The photo is a drug-store reprint made from the scan of this old image, sitting in an embellished silver frame likely purchased from the same drug-store. The original photograph is a hand-colored black & white, and either due to the ravages of time, the deletorious effects of reproduction, or the lack of brilliance on the part of the original artist, the colors aren't exactly spot-on.

My grandfather is depicted as a young man in his British paratrooper's uniform during World War II, posing for a formal portrait. His jump wings are barely visible on his right shoulder, and the emblem of the airborne engineers is present on his dark beret. He looks young in a way that is hard to connect with my memories of him: the classicly reserved elderly British gentleman. Seeing this picture forces a paridigm shift in the way I think of him not totally dissimilar from when I discovered that the long-buried geneology of his nickname "Claude" derived from his not-so-endearing term for other drivers.

Claude passed away after a long and heroic battle with leukemia in 2001. I had never really noticed this picture, nor given his military service any particular thought. I loved my grandfather and mourned his passing, but my connection to him had always been somewhat abstract. I'd spent my life a continent away, with only periodic visits to bridge the gap of his typically reserved character.

After a series of tumultuous events in my life that year and a catastrophic event for the country, I made the decision to enlist in the military. Never one for half-measures I became a triple-volunteer: I volunteered for the Army, volunteered for Airborne training, and volunteered to join the Special Forces Regiment.

While visiting my father on leave a few years back, I finally noticed these pictures of my grandfather hanging along with a regimental portrait and his old unit patch. Not only did my features resemble his, but I suddenly realized that we both belonged to a fairly elite group of soliders foolish enough to jump out of perfectly good airplanes. Even though Claude was a few years gone, I suddenly felt closer to him than I ever had in life. With his blue eyes and rakish beret, exuding confidence and perhaps a thirst for adventure, my grandfather could have been my comrade, my brother, or myself.

This image is, for me, a priceless document of family history that connects me to my forebear in a way that wouldn't have been possible based purely on the abstract knowledge of his service.

When I photograph portraits or weddings, I constantly remind myself that perhaps the single greatest gift that I can give to my clients' families is the potential that one day in the future, a young person may find in the characteristic expression captured in one of my images a deeper connection to their heritage and a more profound understanding of their roots. I owe a debt to the nameless photographer who gave me the gift of a more profound relationship with my grandfather's memory, and I'm conscious of that every time I lift the camera to my eye.