Truth, devastation and beauty: Japan Earthquake: Six Months Later - Alan Taylor - In Focus - The Atlantic

This is a hard one: the link below leads to pictures of sadness and grief, disaster and devastation, but also of how much has already been done to overcome the earthquake and tsunami in North-East Japan in the past six months. Gripping pictures, yet beautiful photographs. Which emotion should reign, when looking at such a pitcure: compassion with the victims, or admiration of the beauty and intensity of the picture? Why would we have to choose between those emotions? I for one feel both at the same time.
Japan Earthquake: Six Months Later - Alan Taylor - In Focus - The Atlantic

Do not forget to click on many of the pictures, because they give exact 'replicas' of photos taken immediately after the great earthquake and in September 2011, half a year later.

Colouring truth--before Photoshop

'Kapuscinski - non-fiction' is the title of the recently-published biography of travel journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski (1932-2007). Author Artur Domoslawski calls Kapuscinski his 'mentor', but he did not turn a blind eye on his mentor's shortcomings. For he uncovered that Kapuscinski sometimes 'gave reality a bit more colour' by inventing things that had not happened.

How like the Photoshop discussion is that! There is no problem at all if a writer of fiction invents stories, invents even an whole world, just like 'art' photographers and Photoshop-buffs may do. But journalists (and that is how Kapuscinski presented himself!) to me must abide by the same rules that govern photo journalists: no fiddling with reality!

I have a couple of books by Kapuscinski and loved to read them, but mostly because I thought I could learn something about the problems of Africa, about the horrors of Russia. It was a good read and I admired his ability to give style to reality. But now it appears I basically was reading fiction (more style than reality) and I feel betrayed. IFFFFF Domoslawski wrote truth--whose writing can we trust more?

(Domoslawski's book is not yet available on Amazon; does it exist at all, then?)

Photos, photoshop and reality

'Between all the plastic surgery and Photoshop, who knows what celebrities really look like anymore?' Something I just stumbled upon here.
Just for fun ;-)

Robert Capa's Dead Soldier: Truth or Fame?

The solution to the question if Robert Capa's iconic picture of a Loyalist soldier dying in the Spanish civil war in the 1930s was true or false was the subject of an article in the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad on October 9 (the article itself is not in the public part of the website--sorry!). It was a long article, so the answer was not simple.

First of all, the answer did not come from the 'Mexican suitcase', the suitcase full of negatives made by Capa that surfaced in 2008 in Mexico. The negative of the famous photo was not there; it has been missing for years. Second, the state of the art on this question will forever remain a matter of debate between experts and would-be experts. It is, so much we can take from the discussion, probably not a photo of a soldier dying in a large-scale action. Probably Capa went on a small tour with a group of soldiers for a photo shoot; it was a staged photo. Some stories have it that the man in the picture was shot by a sniper at the moment Capa pressed the shutter--to my mind too good a story to be true. It was said that Capa himself never claimed it was a picture 'at the moment of death'.

The impression of authenticity of the photo may have been a trick: Capa may have made a slightly unfocused photo on purpose (no autofocus in those days, of course!), and moved his hands a bit to give the impression he himself was diving for safety while pressing the shutter.

And then there is the role of the press. Capa's picture was first published September 1936 in two French magazines, Vu and Regards. In Vu they published a whole series of the young photographer (he was 22 at the time and not yet famous) with poetic, symbolic captions going with the photos. When the same picture was republished later in world-famous magazine Life in the USA, July 1937, there was a much more dramatic caption, talking about the photo being made at the moment the soldier was killed. Being published in Life, and with such a dramatic caption, were the occasion for Capa to become world-famous--and he did not say that the caption going with his photo was not truthful. He did not even lie, he just did not tell 'the whole truth'. What would I have done--what would you have done--if fame suddenly beckons?

Footnote: the picture can be found on many websites so have a look at Google or better the Wikipedia if you do not know it, but is copyrighted.

Protocol for News Pictures: End of Discussion?

Two major players in the Dutch news market, press agency ANP and photo agency Hollandse Hoogte agreed on a protocol for news photographers. Their aim is to end the discussion about trustworthiness and reliability of photos in the news. The protocol rightly starts from before the photo is taken: no manipulation of the situation. And then the simple rule is: no change of the photo afterwards. This means: no elements put in, nor taken out. All the old-fashioned dark room techniques of adapting white balance, changing contrast or burning are allowed.
Seems a decent end of the discussion to me. And we amateurs can of course still do whatever we like--which for me is not much more than what a journalist may do! For me personally the difference is that I do not have to convey a news-type message, but want viewers to see reality in a different perspective--in a new light, perhaps.

Believers in reality--aren't we all?

Every now and again the discussion flares up: is post-processing of photos allowed? The main problem is of course that "the belief remains that
when there are no obvious clues concerning image manipulation, the image must depict reality" as a student in Media from Amsterdam, Alexander van Dongen, wrote in his 2006 thesis, which I stumbled upon in the Net. At the same time: the charm of photography is precisely its 'believability', its truth-likeness. It would not be fun if viewers did not believe that the photo was real.
To me the issue remains contextual--and then it's simple: if you want to convey a message of reality, then no fooling around is allowed beyond general interpretation of the sensor data (i.e. making truthlike colours by adjusting the white-balance, adjusting erroneous exposure and the like). If the aim is just to please the viewer's eye, then all is allowed.
But we don't believe in the self-organising force of the market anymore: it has become only too clear that markets may be good at coordinating supply and demand of simple goods, but when cheating is possible, it will happen, so that controls on honesty are necessary. Newspaper editors, photo award juries etc. are the public's agents in that respect. How they make their "contracts" with photographers, may be an interesting question for researchers of property rights theory, or principal-agent theory. For me the poitn is: I want to trust my newspaper--and I want to enjoy pictures at an exhibition for what they are.

Oscar van Alphen (2): The Photo as a Shroud

"The photo shows reality as the shroud shows the dead body
without identification, without name, without history.
What remains is the external intensity of the neutral,
the fascination with the ever-recurring question about concealing or revealing."

Thus reads the first of two stanzas copied into an "Untitled" picture of 1987 by Oscar van Alphen—I promised I'd come back to him. The photo is a black-and-white one, with a large, rolled-up white sheet (the shroud of the poem) in the foreground; the rest is a Dutch, flat landscape. A rather empty picture, accordingly. Which fits the poem alright.

Van Alphen's photo is the only one of over a hundred in the 1991 exhibition catalogue 'The Decisive Image: Dutch photography from the 20^th century' with a text in it. (Must have been difficult in those pre-digital days to get a text into a photo with darkroom techniques rather than printing techniques. Probably a slide of white letters on a completely black background copied into the large photo. But that was not the point of my blog entry.)

His text is indeed a question about the truth in photography: what is "in" a picture? What is its relation to reality? How external is what we see in a picture? These are not easy questions—were not easy in the analogous days, and have become more complicated in the digital days in some (but not in all) respects. It is too late in the day for me to even try to approach the question intellectually. Perhaps Van Alphen was not so crazy when he tried to do it with a photo surrounding his text. Roland Barthes' 'Camera lucida' with his musings on the photo of his deceased mother are not a very readable alternative... Strange that death plays a role in Van Alphen's picture as much as in Barthes' classic text on photography. Or has Van Alphen read Barthes'text? For although we see only the 'external intensity' of the photo, it may lead to the thought of where it came from: what was the photographer trying to tell us? Why was s/he trying to tell us precisely this? That is where Van Alphen's reading on photography may come into play.

Even more to muse upon, when the evening gets still later.

Oscar van Alphen - Dutch photographer

Photo magazine 'Focus' in its December 2008 issue has an article on photographer Oscar van Alphen--a bit of an advertorial, since they are publishing a book about him. I did not find his documentary photos that remarkable, but was triggered by the remark that he was a pioneer because of his 'asking often fundamental questions about the medium that others found to be essential only much later'. How could I--thinking that I too am interested in the question of what does photography do?--be unaware of him?

After all, he is mentioned in the standard anthology 'Fotografen in Nederland' (not at Amazon, but sold by Proxis) and there I may find the clue why I was not triggered to his work: one of his major books is praised for being an 'associative whole' and that is the type of artistry that puts me off: I want a formal Auseinandersetzung with basic questions, even if I have to admit that photography works more directly through the senses than through formal logic and reasoning. At least you should know why it works the way it works, I'd think. Stil this Van Alphen seems an interesting guy to look into. Some of his photos from Amsterdam (oh, how 1968!) are found at the local council archive, and one of his apparently most famous installations is revived in an exhibition right now in the Rotterdam Fotomuesum.

If I find time [big if!], I'll check his basic questions (he wrote some books about photography) and then I'll come back to him in due course.

Black-and-white photographers, be free!

A simple trick I finally learned from Lightroom is how in black-and-white photography, we should feel free from the rules. Until recently, when making a black-and-white print, I started from a colour picture that was more or less optimised. Not completely finished for printing in colour, but with colours corrected, the right white balance, etc. With some (pedantic) disdain, I never used Lightroom's presets to convert that picture into black-and-white, but did so by and, fiddling carefully with the greyscale controls that work more or less like the channel mixer in Photoshop: you can control how light or dark eight parts of the spectrum (from red to yellow, to purple and magenta) will be represented. And then I'd adjust the overall contrast to get nice dark, yet sufficiently detailed shadows and good highlights. That was before LR2; since then I'd add some dashing and burning in parts of the picture.

Once I tried the LR presets though and found that they used different effects: no use of the grayscale mix at all, but simple desaturation and ruthless adjustment of exposure and white balance! I won't follow their route completely; I'll keep using the grayscale mix to have better control of how my blues (sky!), reds (skin!) and greens (plants!) are converted into tones of grey, but radically changing the white balance (usually to a low temperature setting, say 4000 K) was an eye-opener that helps to get strong effects that work well in black-and-white. For it is the effect that counts, and we are not accountable for the numbers of the colour temperature to be correct!

The photos are symbolic of 'working'--seemed fitting to today's theme. They were was taken in Hanoi, earlier this month.

Photographers, be free!

When we heard Frank Boots, spokesman of the jury and president of the national association BNAFV, explain his judgements on the photos in the regional contest, two remarks stood out for me.

The first was that amateur photographers are not accountable to anyone. We should feel free to make any photo we like. He did not go into that any further, but he must have meant something like our not being bound to be faithful to nature or facts, since we are not journalists or documentary photographers. Nor are we bound by the canons of art—Mr. Boots made this remark as something coming out of a public discussion he had had with a museum director. That part of his implication was not so clear to me: I thought that if any group were good at breaking canons and being free, it was artists.

His second remark was that there were typical camera club pictures: details of buildings, dilapidated window sills, and similar still-life pictures. Or portrait and model pictures that were neat, pretty-pretty. Mr. Boots wanted more than that, wanted something 'crazy', something personal, something (in the words of last year's jury in the same regional contest) 'authenticity'.

The photo that goes along with this blog, then must be an homage to camera club traditions, but after his remarks I did put it through Lightroom once more to make it something a little more personal. I'll spare you the details, but in the words of Dolly Parton, 'it takes a whole lotta money to look this cheap'—it took me a whole lot of fiddling around to make it look this cheap. By the way, the photo was made last week in Vietnam, just a wall on a street in Bat Trang, a village near Hanoi.

Munching magazines

Lately, I have been looking at different photographic magazines, next to my ‘standard’ (but still highly-valued) Focus. I was looking for a magazine with less stress on the technicalities of hardware and camera testing—I knew what my next camera would be. And one buys a new camera or lens only once in so many years. My wife—and even more importantly my savings account—would not let me more often... In the meantime, what do I care about tests of camera brands I’d never buy? And video! On the contrary, I wanted to know more about how to use my photo gear to greatest effect. How to get the best photos on the wall.

First you need good pictures, and I wanted more guidance on that from magazines. I guess that Outdoor Photograhy, with its double aim of wildlife and landscape photography, will be one of my favourite magazines; I mentioned it before. Many pictures, tips & tricks on composition, lighting, etc. The pictures showed the British publisher, of course: there was an item on ‘the quintessential British landscape’ (field flowers making the foreground way too colourful to suit my taste, but indeed very recognisably British), and it carried stories about pictures made in (between) wind and rain. Never before did I realise how many landscape pictures had moving trees in them—long shutter speeds were quite common (make sure you have a sturdy tripod in your survival pack!). During my trip today, at one of the stations where I had to change trains I found a somewhat similar German magazine, Naturfotografie (oh, the costs of writing a blog that is read by only two people!). I have not read all of it yet, but was struck by the editorial, which asked the eternal question about the reality of photos and especially how much pre- or post-processing is ‘allowed’ in nature and animal photography. The obvious answer was ‘it depends’: in documentary photography none is permissible, while if it is just about the esthetical effect, it is hard t set any limit (apart from normal decency, of course). In another magazine, Digital Pro Photo, I learned that serious photo editors of National Geographic Magazine and the like demand the original memory cards from the photographers, or at least all[!] ‘raw’ picture files, to be certain that the chosen photos are not hoaxed. The other thing one can take from magazines on landscape photography is that large-format cameras (like 4x5 inch) are still popular among serious photographers. Good for keeping in shape, too, carrying such a thing up a mountain...

Sure, the technicalities of post-processing, especially in Photoshop and similar complex programmes remain interesting. Focus, CHIP Foto-Video but also the other magazine I mentioned before, Practical Photographer, give a fair share of that type of stuff. Quite useful, though only as reference material, for I find it impossible to read an article full of ‘click this’, ‘click that’ and ‘set the slider to 27’ when I am not at the computer trying to do a project as is being described in the magazine article.

And finally, the files have to get printed. The close to ideal magazine for me with my predilection for black-and-white photos seems to be Black & White Photography, from the same publisher, incidentally, as Outdoor Photography, and thus equally British, which shows mainly in the advertisements with prices in £, but to some extent also in the civilised tone of the language. It is not too thick for its serious price (over € 10) and still has too much on chemical photography for a digital ‘believer’ like me, but with so many magnificent black and white prints that I can watch them for hours. And with tests of types of printing paper—that’s something I must come back to in a later blog...