I was reading in Nathan Armes’ blog earlier today when I stumbled across this TED story on James Nachtwey. This 20-minute video is well worth the time to watch. Nachtwey makes several important points in this monologue that really make me think about the role of journalism in today’s society.
I wonder how the infield dirt tastes? I didn’t stick around to ask. I wanted to get home in time to watch the NCAA finals.
I’m starting to feel the itch again… Minor League Baseball here in Hickory kicks off on Thursday, April 3rd, which is less than two weeks away. I’m going to be spending most of the day on Saturday at the stadium for “National Goof Off Day” with my camera and camcorder. There should be some fun photo opportunities and it will give me a chance to meet some of the new faces in the Hickory Crawdads organization.
I went to the stadium Friday afternoon to meet Mike Janela, the new director of broadcasting and media relations. He’s new in the organization and he won’t be around on Saturday, so I took the opportunity to meet him prior to the start of the season. We spent a little time talking about what he wants this coming season as far as images are concerned, and it seems like the organization may want to make more use of photos this year than they have in the past, so I’m happy about that too.
Of all the sports I photograph, baseball is one of my two favorites. I enjoy being outside at these games between the first of April and the first of September. The Hickory Crawdads have 70 home games this season, and I expect to attend at least 55 of them, and also go to a few games on the road. I’ll be doing my regular routine of providing images for the club for publicity as well as making the team’s baseball card photos for the season.
Another fun project I do during baseball season is another blog around this team’s activities. I don’t post much in this blog about baseball or sports in general, but my Crawdads Blog will contain a lot of information and images again this season. Since I picked up a cheap camcorder back in December, I’ll probably be posting occasional video clips from these events as well. I do plan to shoot some interesting video on Saturday, so check back for that…
The newspaper sent me on another very interesting non-sports assignment this evening. In celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, the Catawba Science Center held a U2 concert and laser light show in the Millholland Planetarium. I wanted to get some photos of the laser light show but I didn’t want to try to set up a tripod in an environment with a lot of people. I went to the 6pm show in hopes of having less than a full house of people, and it paid off. I was able to sit in one of the recumbent chairs with an empty seat next to me. I set my camera bag in the seat beside me, put on my 17-40mm lens, and just set the camera pointing upward on the camera bag. I used my cable release with the camera in bulb mode to capture a series of longer exposures of the laser light show.
Sadly, today was my first trip back to the planetarium since October 5, 2007, when I covered the opening of the new facility with the planetarium and aquariums. I really want to go see some of the shows at the planetarium, and being back in there again tonight reminded me of this. I think I’ll try to catch a couple of their shows in the coming weeks…
In the mean time, I have a pint of Ben & Jerry’s “Willie Nelson’s Country Peach Cobler” ice cream staring me in the face… later :)
High school baseball season is rolling, and it’s renewing my hunger for the minor league season that starts up during the first week of April. I was in the dugout at a local high school game this evening and decided to look around for some type of photo opportunity that speaks of the season opening. This bag of weathered baseballs partially open with a few faces shining through seemed like a good image to go along with the idea.
This image also shows bias from the photographer ;)
The Hickory High Lady Tornadoes varsity basketball team is on it’s way to another run for the state championship. I’ll have to admit that the Lady Tornadoes didn’t look their best tonight against the Lady Bears of Bunker Hill. Three of Hickory’s starters were in foul trouble, and Karsyn Jarrett ended up on the bench with five with just under two minutes to play. Bunker Hill’s Kellie Rhoney also reached the foul limit before the end of play. Tonight was one of the first times this season that Hickory’s full-court press wasn’t particularly effective. Hickory didn’t produce the number of turnovers that they normally do, and they actually trailed Bunker Hill by two points at the end of the first period. I think it was just an off night for Hickory. Hickory won the game, but not by the margin they are used to. The Lady Tornadoes are still undefeated this season and will compete in the conference finals on Friday night…
I went to the Olde Hickory Tap Room this evening to photograph “Pan Jive” performing their steel drum sounds for the Sunday evening dinner crowd. Shooting in poor light is always a challenge, so I try to take advantage of blur when I can in these situations. The space is also tight in this local restaurant, so I can’t get more than a few feet away from the action for photos. I also shot a video clip of Pan Jive performing one of their original tunes…
I stumbled across this scene when I got home today around lunch time. This Sharp-shinned Hawk had just captured a Blue Jay and was in the process of killing it. There were several other Blue Jays in the trees squawking at the scene. I ran in and got my camera. I wasn’t able to get much closer than this before the Hawk carried the Blue Jay away. The Blue Jay was still making noises as the Hawk flew away to a safer place to eat. I thought about a possible ‘intervention’ but quickly realized that it would not be the right thing to do… The Hawk would have done exactly what he did, carrying his capture off to a safe place. I also consider this to be natural selection…
Oh well… It’s just a scene that I don’t get to see very often. I see various types of hawks frequently but rarely making a kill…
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I got to cover the infamous Cat Square Christmas Parade on Saturday. This is definitely a unique Christmas parade, and well worth the visit just to see what sort of fun things you will stumble across from the side of the road, other than the occasional horse poop. I put my camera in program mode and stood along the side of the road and just snapped away at people and things as they passed by… Click on the photo to see a slide show of a few of the images I made at this event…
Is Photography Dead?
Article by: Peter Plagens
Newsweek Magazine – December 10, 2007 – pages 94-96
I was browsing the current issue of the current Newsweek magazine when I stumbled across an interesting article titled “Is Photography Dead?” As a photographer, headlines like this one always catch my attention. I have seen and participated in so many debates on issues of photography that my mind immediately starts to roll with ideas of what might be found in articles like this one. The first two sentences in this article grabbed my attention…
“How is that even remotely possible? The medium certainly looks alive, well and, if anything, overpopulated.”
How could photography be dead? Is it remotely possible? It seems like everyone has a digital camera or a cell phone camera. In fact, overpopulation is an issue. The author of the article brings William Henry Fox Talbot to the table early in the article by including an 1844 Talbot photograph right under the main headline. For anyone who has studied the history of photography, we know that Talbot is really considered to be one of the fathers of modern photography. Using a Talbot photograph to launch this story creates an anchor or starting point to help describe how photography has evolved since its beginning. Modern photography, as we know it, began in 1839.
“In the 1920s, small, inexpensive fast-shutter cameras like the Kodak Brownie appeared. By 1950, according to Kodak, nearly three quarters of American families owned cameras and took 2 billion photographs with them. By the 1970s, they were taking 9 billion pictures a year, and most of them quick, informal snapshots.”
I would hate to see what these numbers look like today. The advent of digital photography makes it extremely difficult to estimate how many photos are taken annually. I’m sure a large majority of them never get printed and are only displayed on computer screens. Once the initial expenditure of a digital camera is made, it doesn’t really cost anything in terms of film and processing to make photos. Any way you try to imagine this, the numbers of photographs being made are increasing exponentially, and will continue to do so.
After reading through this Newsweek article several times, I have I keep coming back to one simple conclusion about the author. Peter Plagens, like many other viewers of photography, has his own expectations about what he’s supposed to be seeing. His pre-conceived notions about what photography is supposed to be clouds his view on what photography can be. The following quotes from the article support this evidence:
“Yet wandering the galleries of these two shows, you can’t help but wonder if the entire medium hasn’t fractured itself beyond all recognition.”
“But it’s also a major reason that, 25 years after the technology exploded what photography could do and be, the medium seems to have lost its soul. Film photography’s artistic cachet was always that no matter how much darkroom fiddling someone added to a photograph, the picture was, at its core, a record of something real that occurred in front of the camera.”
“By now, we’ve witnessed all the clever tricks that have turned so many photographers – formerly bearers of truth – into conjurers of fiction.”
“Photography is finally escaping any dependence on what is in front of the lens, but it comes at the price of its special claim on a viewer’s attention as “evidence” rooted in reality.”
“The next great photographers – if there are any – will have to find a way to reclaim photography’s special link to reality. And they’ll have to do it in a brand new way.”
The repeating pattern in all of this shows Mr. Plagens’ notion of what photography should be. He believes that photography should remain a simple documentation of reality in some way or another. In fact, photography is probably one of the first artistic mediums that has been held to such standards. I’m burned out on listening to this type of commentary.
Maybe the term photography itself is subjective. That, in a way, differentiates it from other art forms as well. It’s not often that people view a painting and find themselves questioning whether or not it really is a painting. Most sculpture is fairly obvious as well. Photography isn’t so cut and dried. Maybe we don’t really know how to define photography, but we seem to know it when we see it. The line gets hard to distinguish when we start looking at photographic art. Sometimes the art may be pure and simple photography. Other times the medium may be obscured. We may be looking at some form of art that contains photography, or is loosely based in photography. How much straight-from-the-camera material must an artwork contain for it to be called photography? 51%? More? Less?
There are a couple different schools of photography that must be considered when talking about the validity of photography. Photojournalism seems to be the preferred method of the author. The purpose of photojournalism is to describe reality. Manipulations and editing of photojournalistic images doesn’t include the introduction elements that did not exist in the original image. Legal manipulations of photojournalistic images should not include modifications that change what the viewer would think of the photograph. It’s also generally unacceptable to remove any element of the image in photojournalism. You can crop an image as long as it doesn’t change the original theme or idea of the image by doing so. There are also numerous accounts in recent history of photojournalists getting caught and fired for falsifying reality through the process of image manipulation. Some of the more interesting cases of this include instances of photographers staging a scene to create a story rather than capturing life as it happens. This can be just as deceptive as digital alteration of a photograph.
Another school of photography is photographic art. Photographic art encompasses a lot of different ideas, and it is also difficult to define. When I view my own portfolio of work, I have some images that are photojournalistic in nature others that are photographic art. I have staged scenes that either mimic life or create an altered reality. I have also manipulated images in such a way that they would not be photojournalistic in nature. In my opinion, to be considered an artist, I have to inject some of myself into the final product. That injection may or may not allow the final image to remain within the realm of photojournalistic imagery. In this article, the author cited works of quite a few photographers to make his points more clear. Some of the classic great photographers such as Dorthea Lange, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, and Robert Frank were used to illustrate the author’s idea of photo realism. On the flip side of the coin, photographers such as Andreas Gefeller, Didier Massard, Thomas Struth, and Cindy Sherman were used to illustrate the broken aspects of photography. If you should decide to Google a few of these photographer’s works, you will see the chosen line between what the author believes photography is or isn’t.
Maybe at some point in the future, viewers will learn how to look at photography. Critics shouldn’t really concern themselves with how an image came to be. Ultimately, one of two things will happen when we look at any image. We will either like it or we won’t. There is always the possibility of indifference, but if we are thinking about like or dislike of images, it’s fairly easy to classify them. If we spend too much time trying to classify images by type, we won’t really see what the artist is showing us.