Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Photo Journal One - Nick Brandt, Lion Portrait
Normally, if you go all the way to Africa to shoot wildlife you bring a telephoto lens or two. Not Nick Brandt. He brought a Pentax 67, generally using normal to wide lenses. It was such an inspired choice, a portrait camera and in the case of this photograph, he used a shallow depth of field to “black” out the background.
He used a portrait lens. He made portraits. There is this criticism often leveled at the ethnographic photographers of the 19th century, much later after the fact, that somehow they were denigrating the subject by posing them or by creating situations that were artificial. It was the way of the time.
Like Avedon said, there is no truth in photography. There is a millisecond of time captured that we decide is the truth, it looks like the truth. So they never got at the truth. Their pictures created the idea of the subject that the audience could hold onto. Brandt creates the idea of humanity in animals that we can hold onto. He does it by taking apart reality, by softening, by making it fantastic and just unreal. There is an intimacy, a closeness both from proximity and something else.
On the particular trip he took to Africa that generated his book "On This Earth" he took something like forty rolls of film. Only four or five survived the trip and even many of those negatives were flawed and damaged. The one we are looking at, in fact, is one of those.
Mr. Brandt’s image is so strong it seems to defy the damage done to it. It exists despite that quality. This is very interesting, how do you decide to give up or when do you decide to give in? That is to say, how and when can it be alright to be imperfect? Photography has a long recent history of photographers bashing it out over the hair line difference between two “near” perfect lenses. Photography is a craft built on perfection. It seems so dizzying sometimes.
How do you live in the face of perfection? How do you address each imperfect day with such a challenge. There is the argument that control or mastery of the tools you have makes stronger. There’s no arguing about that. This isn’t about that at all. This is about that moment when you say, even wrapped in flaws such as this image might be, what separates it from any other images, what makes it so clearly better, more direct? When do you say, it does not matter that this image is flawed because at some level something is happening, some alchemy that is stronger than flaw.
The purpose of the oversized negative carrier, to show how you didn’t crop the image at all, has been superseded by the “cool” roughness it lends the image, the extra cache it gives the images, the authenticity. The question might be, what separates that from the image whose “authenticity” occurred naturally? Yes of course, there is the control aspect creeping in. One artist made it and one artist stumbled onto it but what does that matter?
It is the central struggle for me right now. My prints are generally flawed, marked my haste or sloppy technique and I have struggled to overcome this with few good results so what am I to do?
I use distilled water when I can. I clean everything religiously. There is just some glitch in my ethic that roughens things up, darkens things. I can struggle against it and be miserable or I can give in just a little, just enough to see if it will work for me, the way I use my hands in the lab is my voice as a photographer. It is an exacting craft but it is one of hand and eye and mind. The eye sees, the mind decides and the hand does.
Nick Brandt’s tender eye and his rough hand made this portrait.
He used a portrait lens. He made portraits. There is this criticism often leveled at the ethnographic photographers of the 19th century, much later after the fact, that somehow they were denigrating the subject by posing them or by creating situations that were artificial. It was the way of the time.
Like Avedon said, there is no truth in photography. There is a millisecond of time captured that we decide is the truth, it looks like the truth. So they never got at the truth. Their pictures created the idea of the subject that the audience could hold onto. Brandt creates the idea of humanity in animals that we can hold onto. He does it by taking apart reality, by softening, by making it fantastic and just unreal. There is an intimacy, a closeness both from proximity and something else.
On the particular trip he took to Africa that generated his book "On This Earth" he took something like forty rolls of film. Only four or five survived the trip and even many of those negatives were flawed and damaged. The one we are looking at, in fact, is one of those.
Mr. Brandt’s image is so strong it seems to defy the damage done to it. It exists despite that quality. This is very interesting, how do you decide to give up or when do you decide to give in? That is to say, how and when can it be alright to be imperfect? Photography has a long recent history of photographers bashing it out over the hair line difference between two “near” perfect lenses. Photography is a craft built on perfection. It seems so dizzying sometimes.
How do you live in the face of perfection? How do you address each imperfect day with such a challenge. There is the argument that control or mastery of the tools you have makes stronger. There’s no arguing about that. This isn’t about that at all. This is about that moment when you say, even wrapped in flaws such as this image might be, what separates it from any other images, what makes it so clearly better, more direct? When do you say, it does not matter that this image is flawed because at some level something is happening, some alchemy that is stronger than flaw.
The purpose of the oversized negative carrier, to show how you didn’t crop the image at all, has been superseded by the “cool” roughness it lends the image, the extra cache it gives the images, the authenticity. The question might be, what separates that from the image whose “authenticity” occurred naturally? Yes of course, there is the control aspect creeping in. One artist made it and one artist stumbled onto it but what does that matter?
It is the central struggle for me right now. My prints are generally flawed, marked my haste or sloppy technique and I have struggled to overcome this with few good results so what am I to do?
I use distilled water when I can. I clean everything religiously. There is just some glitch in my ethic that roughens things up, darkens things. I can struggle against it and be miserable or I can give in just a little, just enough to see if it will work for me, the way I use my hands in the lab is my voice as a photographer. It is an exacting craft but it is one of hand and eye and mind. The eye sees, the mind decides and the hand does.
Nick Brandt’s tender eye and his rough hand made this portrait.
# posted by Mike : 10:24 AM
