Well written piece that I greatly relate to and appreciate. I'd even suggest that the need to relinquish the technical aspects of photography to allow for creative renewal have always existed, pre and post digital. I could understand a case for it being greater today with the steady flow of new technical advancements in equipment and software. Irregardless, the message in your piece, I believe, is incredibly important for photographers and artists alike, that there is a need to free your creative process to ensure its ongoing existence. Thanks again.
Thank you, Bill. Yesterday I was scanning some black and white negatives from 40-plus years ago, trying my best to make them sharper, when in reality they were just fine as they were.
I’m quite sympathetic to the thrust of this piece - I recently sold off some of my most high resolving digital cameras because I found the files past the point of useful - hyperreal, in an almost nauseating way. Absolutely amazing files, and at least for me - nothing really to be gained from them.
There’s also the idea of what happens to how we think about the world when we keep “perfecting” it by editing out the things that are viewed as flaws. A whole separate discussion. This is a failure of culture - or something like that - more often than not, I think.
Funny thing - when I was teaching I often referenced Migrant Mother’s back focus as an example of not getting too obsessed with technical perfections. There’s probably no better example!
I was a professional photographer for 30 years. I mostly worked on film sets. I traveled a lot with bags of equipment. But I always brought along my plastic Holga camera. It used 120 film but the lens was plastic and the camera had light leaks. Whenever there was down time I'd slip away and pull out the Holga to take photos. There was no aperture setting or focal range, just close, kinda close and far away, sunny or cloudy icons. It was so exciting. I just pointed and "click". The images were always my favorites. I was never the "tech guy". I knew what I needed to know to get the job done. If you're only concerned with tech you're missing the excitement and pure joy of photography. Thanks for a great article..
Totally agree. I miss using my Holga which gave me great years of pointing and shooting when I was on sabbatical in photogenic places (twice at least) with some time to go out and look and film and developing it weren't so expensive and inconvenient (can't dump that waste into a house's septic system.) Plus the unexpected unplanned or uncontrolled light leaks and blurs added some unexpected je ne sais qua to the results that often tickled me.
As a commercial and fine art photographer for several decades, I’m now six years into my latest project, shooting with a 75-year-old lens from which I stripped out the aperture. It is fairly soft. I also mounted it on a bellows that I had custom-machined to introduce even more uncertainty and blur. One camera, one light, one backdrop, 400,000 images so far. I’m really enjoying it.
Before this latest project, I published 20 years of my photography in Cuba. Because I had a clear publication deadline and enough time, I decided to start from scratch and reprocess all the digital images for publication. About 40% of the book was digital images.
Starting from scratch, I wanted things to be as perfect as possible, so I went into the Lens Corrections panel in Lightroom’s Develop module. There are two buttons there:
Remove Chromatic Aberration
Enable Profile Corrections
Since these images were going to live in book form for hopefully a long time, I wanted things to be “perfect.” So I enabled both buttons, and the images went from interesting and lively to flat and dull. I was horrified. By way of background, most of the images were shot with very fast lenses. The centers were very sharp, and the edges were not quite as sharp. Enabling those two buttons flattened everything out and made the images look incredibly dull. Needless to say, I didn’t use either setting on any of the images in the book.
I took a workshop a while back with Keith Carter, one of my favorite photographers. He uses a lot of blur in his images. If you know his work, it is incredibly evocative, and he is quite a character and an amazing person. I remember him saying something along the lines of, “Sharpness is overrated.”
If you look at his iconic image of the two boys holding up fireflies, he tells a story about how he actually missed the focus. The trees in the background were in focus, and the two boys were out of focus. He was profoundly disappointed because he felt he had missed the shot. Then the light bulb went off, and he realized what he had. It changed his whole way of looking at photography.
If you look at his work, he does a lot of tilt-shift photography, and his images are absolutely gorgeous. I basically stole the concept of tilt-shift photography from him and others for my latest project. As I often say to my workshop students (and I’m sure I stole this from somebody else): “Shoot emotion, not information.”
I love that. Thanks so much for the thoughtful comment.
It is tricky, for sure, to figure out how much abstaining from perfectionism is too much.
I recently found myself looking at some sort of gallery akin to "the greatest photographs of the 20th century" and essentially all of them, to my chagrin, were real technical achievements. The technique absolutely was instrumental to their creation. It was humbling, in terms of my subversive "technique doesn't matter" line of thinking.
I'm hopeful — if not confident — that someday I'll find a happy medium.
Like you, I love reading about how great artists work. Their techniques, their inspirations, the way they move from one project to the next. Something I keep coming back to, both from studying photographers I admire and from reviewing portfolios of the workshop students who travel with me on tours, is this: the only way out of technique and into pure emotional work is through technique, not around it.
The masters I study are all, without exception, masters of craft. Their technique is so deeply internalized that it disappears. What's left is the art.
The clearest example for me actually has nothing to do with photography. It's music. My first book was live concert work, everyone from AC/DC to ZZ Top, but I know almost nothing about music as a practitioner. I've wanted to play guitar my whole life and never gotten close. As a fan, though, Jimmy Page is probably my favorite musician. He's the prime example of someone who mastered his instrument so young that he got past the mechanics and spent decades just playing. The result is some of the most memorable work in recorded music.
So your point really resonates with me. If you want to leave technique behind, I think the only path runs straight through it. Master it, then forget it. That's the path.
My initial reaction was “oh no, I haven’t mastered it yet!”
But maybe a more optimistic way to view it is… I have. At least, I have to the extent that the things I now want to learn are not tied to technique. I have mastered the techniques I need to make the pictures I want. The things holding me back are not a lack of knowledge or skill with the tools.
This is, it seems to me, a more thoughtful and elegant way of thinking about my thesis.
When I say I went all the way around to find myself back at the beginning, maybe this it? I went through and came out the other side.
> My initial reaction was “oh no, I haven’t mastered it yet!”
Impostor syndrome?
I think those of us who are professional photographers can be pretty brutal to ourselves. I’ve been reviewing portfolios and studying photographers for decades now, and one look at the work on your website makes it clear that you’re fully in command of the medium.
I think you’re pointing to an interesting distinction: how other people judge your work from the outside, and how you experience your own skill set from the inside. To me, that’s what you’re describing here. You’ve reached the point where your technical skill is no longer the thing holding you back from realizing your vision.
Years of teaching in Cuba and watching photographers work the streets have led me to believe that you have to reach a certain point where the equipment and techniques no longer get in the way of the picture you’re trying to make. Once you reach that point, you can move through it and come out the other side making work that is more direct, more heartfelt, and more emotional, as you’ve clearly done here.
And of course, the circle comes around again, because once we produce what we feel is more emotional work, as I’ve been trying to do with my latest project, other people still have to judge whether we’ve succeeded.
Thanks for the post, Andy, and thanks, Bill, for your thoughts. It's always interesting for me to see the evolution of different photographers and their perspectives on what makes pictures that are meaningfully, lastlingly good. A good photo is not always sharp, a sharp photo is not always good. Ah, yet there is something about the photo that is good and sharp, n'est-ce pa? As Bruce Lee purportedly said, enter with form to exit from form.
I've always believed in the snapshot. It is easy to decry, as absent the achievement of some techno-mechanical exercise to result. Sneering abounds.
Then there is luck; the happenstance that the simple box and lens can embrace a light and focus range.
And anyone can do it. It only requires that you see and know and you are there. Maybe that is where the technos bridle.
Of course not all snapshots are great, or even good, or tolerable. Yet they can have an immediacy to them, a moment of brilliance, an apprehension of understanding often precluding thought.
I used a Kodak 'Brownie' box camera and a Kodak 'Instamatic' camera all through the 1960s---I simply didn't know any better. I truly wish someone--anyone---had told me there were actually really good cameras available for cheap, I would have bought one and made far better images. I still have the pics, and they tell some cool stories, but they could have been soooo much better. My iPhone is a superb camera machine, I prefer it to my expensive cameras for night work. far better light balance---and remarkably sharp, hand held!
Lovely article. I've always used film and have hidden or discarded many images because they weren't technically precise. But is that dismissing the actual reality of your view? I discussed this in my article yesterday "What is failure" (https://fridgedoorphoto.substack.com/p/what-is-failure) as I was influenced by a quote from Garry Winogrand "Great photography is always on the edge of failure." which highlights his practice of pushing the boundaries of the frame to capture that fleeting moment.
Thanks for your thoughts on this and sharing I've worked as photographer for 40 years, many of those as a newspaper photographer. I have never owned more than 2-3 bodies or 3-4 lenses at one time. 90% of my images over all these years were shot on a 17-35 and 70-200. (maybe its just a newspaper photog thing) Its never been about the gear or numbers for me. Always about moment, feel and light. (and a clean background if I can make it work LOL!) Of course when I was young I thought me images were way better than they were, don't we all?
I have too many words to describe how this resonates with me. Thank you, Andy for publishing, and thank you, Bill for writing. I share your perspective and find personal freedom in this way of thinking. It allows a release of my (ingrained by film) grip on technical concerns for a pursuit of something even more rare than perfection: capturing the ephemeral moment.
I sometimes wonder whether we learn / are taught art / photography back-to-front. So much of the emphasis at the beginning of our learning focuses (pun sort of intended) heavily on the technical aspects - almost to the exclusion of all else. I can understand this approach when learning to drive or use dangerous machinery but it occurs to me that, with photography and other art, the most common objective is to produce something aesthetically pleasing. Being able to become sufficiently proficient at the craft / technical aspects is a relatively quick process.
Well written piece that I greatly relate to and appreciate. I'd even suggest that the need to relinquish the technical aspects of photography to allow for creative renewal have always existed, pre and post digital. I could understand a case for it being greater today with the steady flow of new technical advancements in equipment and software. Irregardless, the message in your piece, I believe, is incredibly important for photographers and artists alike, that there is a need to free your creative process to ensure its ongoing existence. Thanks again.
Cheers, Chipper. Thanks for reading!
Thank you, Bill. Yesterday I was scanning some black and white negatives from 40-plus years ago, trying my best to make them sharper, when in reality they were just fine as they were.
Exactly, in focus but not shrp - can't to that with a modern digital camera - it won't let you! I'm experiencing the same with my 40 yo archive I'm documenting. https://kentjohnson325603.substack.com/p/when-i-did-this-photoshoot-in-june
I’m quite sympathetic to the thrust of this piece - I recently sold off some of my most high resolving digital cameras because I found the files past the point of useful - hyperreal, in an almost nauseating way. Absolutely amazing files, and at least for me - nothing really to be gained from them.
There’s also the idea of what happens to how we think about the world when we keep “perfecting” it by editing out the things that are viewed as flaws. A whole separate discussion. This is a failure of culture - or something like that - more often than not, I think.
Funny thing - when I was teaching I often referenced Migrant Mother’s back focus as an example of not getting too obsessed with technical perfections. There’s probably no better example!
AMEN!
Thanks so much. Well said!
I was a professional photographer for 30 years. I mostly worked on film sets. I traveled a lot with bags of equipment. But I always brought along my plastic Holga camera. It used 120 film but the lens was plastic and the camera had light leaks. Whenever there was down time I'd slip away and pull out the Holga to take photos. There was no aperture setting or focal range, just close, kinda close and far away, sunny or cloudy icons. It was so exciting. I just pointed and "click". The images were always my favorites. I was never the "tech guy". I knew what I needed to know to get the job done. If you're only concerned with tech you're missing the excitement and pure joy of photography. Thanks for a great article..
Thank you for reading, and for the thoughtful comment!
Totally agree. I miss using my Holga which gave me great years of pointing and shooting when I was on sabbatical in photogenic places (twice at least) with some time to go out and look and film and developing it weren't so expensive and inconvenient (can't dump that waste into a house's septic system.) Plus the unexpected unplanned or uncontrolled light leaks and blurs added some unexpected je ne sais qua to the results that often tickled me.
Great article, Bill.
As a commercial and fine art photographer for several decades, I’m now six years into my latest project, shooting with a 75-year-old lens from which I stripped out the aperture. It is fairly soft. I also mounted it on a bellows that I had custom-machined to introduce even more uncertainty and blur. One camera, one light, one backdrop, 400,000 images so far. I’m really enjoying it.
Before this latest project, I published 20 years of my photography in Cuba. Because I had a clear publication deadline and enough time, I decided to start from scratch and reprocess all the digital images for publication. About 40% of the book was digital images.
Starting from scratch, I wanted things to be as perfect as possible, so I went into the Lens Corrections panel in Lightroom’s Develop module. There are two buttons there:
Remove Chromatic Aberration
Enable Profile Corrections
Since these images were going to live in book form for hopefully a long time, I wanted things to be “perfect.” So I enabled both buttons, and the images went from interesting and lively to flat and dull. I was horrified. By way of background, most of the images were shot with very fast lenses. The centers were very sharp, and the edges were not quite as sharp. Enabling those two buttons flattened everything out and made the images look incredibly dull. Needless to say, I didn’t use either setting on any of the images in the book.
I took a workshop a while back with Keith Carter, one of my favorite photographers. He uses a lot of blur in his images. If you know his work, it is incredibly evocative, and he is quite a character and an amazing person. I remember him saying something along the lines of, “Sharpness is overrated.”
If you look at his iconic image of the two boys holding up fireflies, he tells a story about how he actually missed the focus. The trees in the background were in focus, and the two boys were out of focus. He was profoundly disappointed because he felt he had missed the shot. Then the light bulb went off, and he realized what he had. It changed his whole way of looking at photography.
If you look at his work, he does a lot of tilt-shift photography, and his images are absolutely gorgeous. I basically stole the concept of tilt-shift photography from him and others for my latest project. As I often say to my workshop students (and I’m sure I stole this from somebody else): “Shoot emotion, not information.”
I love that. Thanks so much for the thoughtful comment.
It is tricky, for sure, to figure out how much abstaining from perfectionism is too much.
I recently found myself looking at some sort of gallery akin to "the greatest photographs of the 20th century" and essentially all of them, to my chagrin, were real technical achievements. The technique absolutely was instrumental to their creation. It was humbling, in terms of my subversive "technique doesn't matter" line of thinking.
I'm hopeful — if not confident — that someday I'll find a happy medium.
Bill,
Like you, I love reading about how great artists work. Their techniques, their inspirations, the way they move from one project to the next. Something I keep coming back to, both from studying photographers I admire and from reviewing portfolios of the workshop students who travel with me on tours, is this: the only way out of technique and into pure emotional work is through technique, not around it.
The masters I study are all, without exception, masters of craft. Their technique is so deeply internalized that it disappears. What's left is the art.
The clearest example for me actually has nothing to do with photography. It's music. My first book was live concert work, everyone from AC/DC to ZZ Top, but I know almost nothing about music as a practitioner. I've wanted to play guitar my whole life and never gotten close. As a fan, though, Jimmy Page is probably my favorite musician. He's the prime example of someone who mastered his instrument so young that he got past the mechanics and spent decades just playing. The result is some of the most memorable work in recorded music.
So your point really resonates with me. If you want to leave technique behind, I think the only path runs straight through it. Master it, then forget it. That's the path.
I love this. Thanks so much.
My initial reaction was “oh no, I haven’t mastered it yet!”
But maybe a more optimistic way to view it is… I have. At least, I have to the extent that the things I now want to learn are not tied to technique. I have mastered the techniques I need to make the pictures I want. The things holding me back are not a lack of knowledge or skill with the tools.
This is, it seems to me, a more thoughtful and elegant way of thinking about my thesis.
When I say I went all the way around to find myself back at the beginning, maybe this it? I went through and came out the other side.
Thanks so much for the thoughtful comment.
Bill,
Thanks very much.
> My initial reaction was “oh no, I haven’t mastered it yet!”
Impostor syndrome?
I think those of us who are professional photographers can be pretty brutal to ourselves. I’ve been reviewing portfolios and studying photographers for decades now, and one look at the work on your website makes it clear that you’re fully in command of the medium.
I think you’re pointing to an interesting distinction: how other people judge your work from the outside, and how you experience your own skill set from the inside. To me, that’s what you’re describing here. You’ve reached the point where your technical skill is no longer the thing holding you back from realizing your vision.
Years of teaching in Cuba and watching photographers work the streets have led me to believe that you have to reach a certain point where the equipment and techniques no longer get in the way of the picture you’re trying to make. Once you reach that point, you can move through it and come out the other side making work that is more direct, more heartfelt, and more emotional, as you’ve clearly done here.
And of course, the circle comes around again, because once we produce what we feel is more emotional work, as I’ve been trying to do with my latest project, other people still have to judge whether we’ve succeeded.
Thanks for articulating it so well.
I love this discussion! Thanks so much, @Lorne Resnick Photography and @Bill Sawalich!
Thanks Andy!
Thank YOU for articulating it so well. You’ve elevated my fairly base premise. And thank you for the kind words!
Thanks for the post, Andy, and thanks, Bill, for your thoughts. It's always interesting for me to see the evolution of different photographers and their perspectives on what makes pictures that are meaningfully, lastlingly good. A good photo is not always sharp, a sharp photo is not always good. Ah, yet there is something about the photo that is good and sharp, n'est-ce pa? As Bruce Lee purportedly said, enter with form to exit from form.
I've always believed in the snapshot. It is easy to decry, as absent the achievement of some techno-mechanical exercise to result. Sneering abounds.
Then there is luck; the happenstance that the simple box and lens can embrace a light and focus range.
And anyone can do it. It only requires that you see and know and you are there. Maybe that is where the technos bridle.
Of course not all snapshots are great, or even good, or tolerable. Yet they can have an immediacy to them, a moment of brilliance, an apprehension of understanding often precluding thought.
Something is seen and captured and it IS.
I used a Kodak 'Brownie' box camera and a Kodak 'Instamatic' camera all through the 1960s---I simply didn't know any better. I truly wish someone--anyone---had told me there were actually really good cameras available for cheap, I would have bought one and made far better images. I still have the pics, and they tell some cool stories, but they could have been soooo much better. My iPhone is a superb camera machine, I prefer it to my expensive cameras for night work. far better light balance---and remarkably sharp, hand held!
Amen, bro!
MK
www.matthewklein.com
True dat.
Lovely article. I've always used film and have hidden or discarded many images because they weren't technically precise. But is that dismissing the actual reality of your view? I discussed this in my article yesterday "What is failure" (https://fridgedoorphoto.substack.com/p/what-is-failure) as I was influenced by a quote from Garry Winogrand "Great photography is always on the edge of failure." which highlights his practice of pushing the boundaries of the frame to capture that fleeting moment.
Thanks for your thoughts on this and sharing I've worked as photographer for 40 years, many of those as a newspaper photographer. I have never owned more than 2-3 bodies or 3-4 lenses at one time. 90% of my images over all these years were shot on a 17-35 and 70-200. (maybe its just a newspaper photog thing) Its never been about the gear or numbers for me. Always about moment, feel and light. (and a clean background if I can make it work LOL!) Of course when I was young I thought me images were way better than they were, don't we all?
Great piece. I feel much the same way but never put it into words like this. I really like your Billstagram, too. Wonderful image there!
I have too many words to describe how this resonates with me. Thank you, Andy for publishing, and thank you, Bill for writing. I share your perspective and find personal freedom in this way of thinking. It allows a release of my (ingrained by film) grip on technical concerns for a pursuit of something even more rare than perfection: capturing the ephemeral moment.
I sometimes wonder whether we learn / are taught art / photography back-to-front. So much of the emphasis at the beginning of our learning focuses (pun sort of intended) heavily on the technical aspects - almost to the exclusion of all else. I can understand this approach when learning to drive or use dangerous machinery but it occurs to me that, with photography and other art, the most common objective is to produce something aesthetically pleasing. Being able to become sufficiently proficient at the craft / technical aspects is a relatively quick process.
Love and relate to this 100%. I’m right behind you. The Billstagram is great. Much gratitude for the clarity of your expression.