Coach Pāṇini ®
petapixel (unofficial)Observation and Investigation for Documentary Photography
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No Photography is Wasteful If It’s Part of the Growing Process
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Should Black and White Imply the ‘Age’ of a Photograph?
In many art practices, a new method or process does not usually automatically override the old one. You can still use berries and charcoal to paint a cave wall, paint on a canvas, or put pencil to paper. These do not become irrelevant just because a Wacom tablet can be used to make a digital illustration or a VR for a 3D painting.
Once a technique enters practice, it can be noted as an early example, but one could paint a renaissance-style piece today and be seen as a contemporary example of the genre, not as something fundamentally different.
It is with this perspective that I approach the perception some may feel towards black and white photography as “feeling” older as misguided.
In 1936, Kodak’s introduction of Kodachrome for home use in the 35mm format represented commercial availability – although it was still rarer than black and white at the time.
This is about 80 years after the earliest glass-plate formulas and only 47 years after the first transparent plastic roll film, which was introduced in 1889. While that represents about 1/5th of the history of photography in which black and white was the practical default (aside from outliers), it was also still the early development and adoption period of what is still an extremely young technology.
For perspective, the distance from the inception of “photography” to the introduction of commonly available 35mm color film is roughly the same as the time between the accepted beginnings of the hip-hop genre and culture and today. While some greats in both arts have come and gone there is still an incredible amount of room to explore and discover.
Color has played as much of a role in documenting history as black and white, although it is rarer to find from those early adopters up through the 1940s for reasons including survivability, expense, practicality, and availability between large and small formats, and the practicality of using cameras of any kind for journalistic purposes, with slower lenses, and less sensitive films.
We start to find uses of Kodachrome by Julien Bryan in 1939 to document the German bombardment of Poland, and in 1940 color film was used by William Vandivert to photograph the results of the German blitz in London.
Through the 1950s, we have a saturation of color photography that most enthusiasts will be aware of, and similarly the 1960s, '70s, '80s, and of course into the ’90s and early thousands we are more familiar as we arrive at our own lifetimes, family albums and personal histories. However, throughout those decades and up until today, black-and-white photography has remained relevant, not replaced but adjacent to other formats.
Flick through a compilation book like Century published by Phaidon, and you’ll see early years populated in monochrome, then a mix of black and white and color, not a boundary across which it becomes color only.
The same is true of movies, although not as much in mainstream cinema as when it was the standard, there are still some good examples of this application of black and white are in some modern films – Fury Road: Blood and Chrome and Logan Noir are monochromatic renderings of movies that were made in color to begin with, but they translate well to black and white because of the way they were shot. The Lighthouse was shot on black and white film, relying on that aesthetic as a foundation to the atmosphere.
The monochromatic presentation sets these films distinct, not quite timeless but in their own visual realm; set in past, and fictional future with aesthetics layered onto the psychological landscape of cinematography assists in the storytelling.
Only one of these had an exclusive release as black and white, but for the others, it was more than just applying a filter, time, and effort regarding these films cost money and fulfilled a vision that stands as its own statement, reframing the original.
Black-and-white does not live only in the past. It does not have relevancy only in the past. So a photograph today made in black and white ought to have as much signifier towards the past as a charcoal-on-canvas portrait should.
Attachment to a photograph is always a personal relationship, and the subjective experience of any single image will almost always vary from person to person based on what semiotics they bring with them to that interpretation. For some that may mean that a black and white photograph is a window to the past regardless of when it was actually made – their understanding of black and white photography is that it is inherently “old”.
This becomes an issue when we bring this understanding to photographs of very present issues, which to some feel distant if seen through that black and white lens. Color photography has an immediacy to it, well balanced it is closest to what most eyes see; in a way for many it is life. Black and white can have a mythical quality to it and can make situations and characters seem larger than life when used appropriately.
However, I don’t think that this automatically means that one is more connected or disconnected from “reality” than the other. For some monochrome can detach from being to empathize with something present, or to make the image seem distant from the here and now. For others, color can feel irreverent, non-standout from a sea of other colors, not stark or distinguishable from an advertisement or a family snapshot.
My perspective is that black and white photography has a weight and somberness, seriousness even when the images contain happiness, playfulness, wholesomeness, and fun. To me they feel like the essence of what is left in a memory when some of the details have faded, leaving only the fundamentally significant pieces to tell that story.
While color photography can highlight exact specifics through a more accurate replication, it can feel less impactful as a direct result. Those perspectives may be entirely the reverse of other peoples, but they are an informing aspect of my own practice, and part of the reason the vast majority of my current work exists as black and white negatives rather than C41 or E6.
I think that modern color photography and other contemporary practices like 3D photography, VR worlds, and whatever comes next feel like they lean towards attempts to become indistinguishable from reality, whereas black and white photography is very distinguishable as its own thing. It doesn’t try to be anything other than a photograph, which means it can be used to relay ideas and illustrate stories which could be very difficult for someone without good visual literacy to understand if presented in another way, even if that way was more “real” for them.
As such, all of my photographs from the “present moment” I make them in will have a mostly consistent palette to the ones I will hopefully be photographing ten years from now, meaning that the story must be contained in the subject and situation rather than in the aesthetic. If I want to ground a photo essay in a specific time or place I must either find a way to produce establishing images featuring that information, or provide it in the captions, title, or other context in the presentation.
Whatever my perception may be, I can understand how to others it can feel like black and white offers more separation than attachment from a photograph. Without that wider context of photographic visual literacy, it won’t matter that overall we are only a few generations away from the start of photography in the first place: we are not really too distant from any photograph, even the first one ever. All photographs that exist are of recent history from our perspective; none show anything older than 200ish years.
While black and white images for some may feel like history, that doesn’t mean it’s ancient history – and history itself doesn’t directly mean that something has “passed” just because it’s in the past. Many significant historical images which are black and white remain relevant not because of the aesthetic but because of the meaningful human truth they may contain. Work made during Apartheid in South Africa during the early 1990s for example is well within many of our current lifetimes, not distant at all, even though there is a good quantity of both black and white and color imagery.
Many contemporary photographers continue to work with black and white photography to tell immediately impactful, current work; doubters of this should have a look at the work of Aiyush Pachnanda, Mavis CW, Sagar Kharecha, Frank Thorp V, and Mel D. Cole.
Color photography is now so accessible to the majority that color may not even be a consideration, compared to options that could be a priority like AR filters or sequential collaboration. The choice to desaturate is one possible direction among multitudes, and the decision to do that preemptively may be interpreted as part of any number of agendas, not only artistic or documentarian.
I think the translation of this intent remains the responsibility of the author and cannot rely on photo literacy, the context of photography within its own history, or overall history. If a photographer presents work without being able to support the process behind something that may require explanation to an audience that may require it then choosing to not do so may have consequences, just as offering such an explanation may also frame work in a certain way.
I do my best to offer context around the way I work in writing like this, and also on my personal blog, so that the process is available for those interested, but not necessarily printed on the page next to images when publishing.
About the author : Simon King is a London-based photographer and photojournalist, currently working on a number of long-term documentary and street photography projects. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. You can follow his work through his documentary collective, The New Exit Photography Group, and on Instagram.
#educational #inspiration #opinion #bw #blackandwhite #philosophy #simonking #thoughts
emulsive rss (unofficial)Anatomy of a long term documentary project – by Simon King
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Producing Narrative Photographic Work for a Small Audience
Producing photographs, writing, and ideas to share with others is such a wonderful way to direct creative energy, and for many, this approach involves setting themselves up as a photography business practice in some way, whether that’s offering the work as a product or as a service.
If offering photography as a product, as an object worth desiring, then there are many parallels to the way traditional artists run a business, which relies on a dedicated audience of collectors and appreciators with whom the work resonates to the extent that they want to make it a part of their everyday life by hanging it on a wall at home, or filing in an archive or album.
Social media presents a very smooth methodology for building an audience that pre-social media visual artists could rarely achieve. The sheer quantity of eyes seeing that work, comments, and feedback rushing in by the thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions, is overwhelmingly more than any pre-mass communication artist would be able to manage within their lifetime.
These huge numbers can set us up to expect that as the norm and make us feel inadequate if we fail to meet those expectations. In some genres, there can be real financial consequences for not having an appropriate social media presence, and this can act as a chip on the shoulder of photographers who may be capable of so much more than is possible from simply following these trends.
In my experience, working for a smaller, intimate audience who truly connect with me and what I am trying to achieve with my vision has been the most rewarding dynamic, and the strongest foundation I could imagine to build from for the rest of my career. The truth is that it doesn’t matter how many multitudes of followers a photographer might have on any platform if those followers are only interested in what is being made available for free as “content”.
A while ago I adjusted my output on social media to the extent where I don’t think it’s really photography at all, I plan out my “content” for tiny screens in order to offer something small to people who enjoy it but which points towards the existence of the real thing, the scale of the work in print, the presentation I actually want the work to have.
The size and scale of the work do have an effect on the impact it can have, and there’s simply no substitution for that in a handheld digital screen. Even a double-page spread across A7 is a better way to feel the image than the screen, even if viewed full screen but absolutely not in a small square.
It is hard to rely on people who are used to receiving your “product” in the form of those social media samples when it comes to purchasing from your business, especially when they have already appreciated and enjoyed the exact same images on their phone – there is no drive to buy the same image on paper. There seem to be so many prints and books released currently which just act as bigger, printed social media feed, and that’s a literal hard sell to an audience who don’t appreciate why that leap may offer them a different experience to simply scrolling through a feed.
I would prefer to avoid bringing in an audience of people who like the content I offer for free, which is why I try to always offer something with value even when it’s being given away. My personal blog often has more than just imagery but also insight and anecdotes, which bring a greater depth to the stories I am telling.
I’ve run my blog since 2017 and in that time across a few hundred entries have gained a small audience of readers, nearly 300. That’s far fewer than the followers I have on Instagram, but they are engaging with me and my work in a more intense way, with richer insights and a greater range of content on offer beyond tiny squares on a phone screen.
For as long as I’ve been working with film, I’ve been building up an archive of images that can be grouped together and sequenced into full, long term projects that can be experienced the way I want them to be; connected, complete with a beginning, middle, and end. These will replace my previous business model of working as a service-based photographer which involved client-oriented gigs.
The individual heavy hitters in my lineup work as darkroom prints; aesthetically beautiful, invoking the classic methods, and have the built-in value from the manual labor production aspect which can be harder to justify for digitally mass-produced prints within that electronic workflow. I make my decisions for these based on what would work well for walls and collections, which isn’t necessarily always my best work, but I understand that the more graphic or intense imagery from my work won’t find a place as a print to my current audience base.
These heavy-hitting images are sometimes but not always also integral or breakout images from my photo essays and stories. This is where my main attention resides, and where the majority of my effort is concentrated. I started off with experimentation using some of my archival work to produce small runs of Zines, which were popular enough to sell out quite quickly. This gave me a sense of what kinds of things people were interested in and how much they were willing to spend on an actualized physical piece of work.
Proportional to my “following,” my customers are not even a full percent, but this means that I can give my attention more specifically to those I know actually value it. Nurturing them at the expense of those who are only after my free content doesn’t cost me anything, as the growth from the positive feedback, word of mouth, and those followers sharing the work of mine they like brings in more of the kind of audience I would prefer than those who are just looking (who I don’t especially mind, it’s just I want to allocate my attention carefully and with discretion in order to be in the best position to produce the work I would like to through my career).
I don’t want to push work out just for the sake of it, I want to have something to say in these pieces, which means that after these initial productions to demonstrate the direction I would be taking I took myself mostly offline to work on sequencing a fuller narrative piece, which contained work I’d made in Bulgaria over Christmas in 2020. Coming in at 100 pages I was happy with the result after a couple of test iterations, and when it was ready I listed it for pre-order.
Taking pre-orders meant that I didn’t need to invest in copies that would never sell. Instead, my print run would be dictated by the audience that responded via the platforms I marketed on – Twitter, Instagram, my personal blog mailing list, and a few outlets I write for. Aside from the time I spent on marketing pieces, I didn’t “spend” on this campaign.
I ran pre-orders for about a month before I started to fulfill orders, after which I raised the price a little and bought some reserve copies as extra so that people could still buy ahead of this. I had plenty of people thank me for doing it this way, as pre-orders rather than sales from limited stock meant that people could buy at their own pace and to their own financial convenience – things like payday could come and go and my timetable wouldn’t exclude those with odd income situations.
I sold just over fifty copies by pre-order which was enough to cover the expenses from the trip, the print run, and with about 50% profit overall.
After this, I invested all of my evenings into putting together a hardcover book – although Bulgaria had been a dense project it still felt zine-styled to me, whereas hardcover has an entirely different connotation. For this I set my expectations a touch lower, as the cost to print was quite a bit more expensive, meaning to cover the cost and make a profit on top I needed to charge close to double Bulgaria, but also wanted to make sure the content was as valuable as I would be assigning the monetary worth.
When D.C. Exclusion Zone was complete and I had run my test copies to satisfaction, I knew that while I was very pleased with the piece itself it would have a niche appeal to those interested in me, the conditions in D.C. during the Inauguration, or those interested in this kind of situational documentary work.
At £55 per copy, I would be making roughly £25 on each book as the hardback cost was around £30 for any reasonable quantity I was likely to print – I did estimations on 20 through to 50 and decided to try for 20 as I could always print further runs if demand exceeded my expectations. The format was physically larger than Bulgaria, and while only 30 pages more contained 121 photographs that all genuinely work together to convey the ideas I want them to, with very little excess – hopefully something unique and enjoyable and rewarding with every page turn.
It may not be a grand ambitious number, but I decided to realistically aim to sell 20 copies by Christmas, with an October launch date. At the time of writing this, I have sold 18. These are not huge production runs where economies of scale come into effect, and many of the people who bought a copy are those who have supported me previously, although a few were first-time buyers of my work they are people I’ve spoken with on social media or interacted with in some way in the past.
Although I made less than on Bulgaria with this, I actually preferred the feeling of tight communication with those few people, who were able to access a serious in-depth print production, and not just see some superficial, contextless images on a social media feed or website portfolio. Instead of spreading myself too thinly, giving myself away, I felt fulfilled.
At one point I would have been disappointed with the idea of not selling a large run of 500 copies, and it would obviously be incredible if I had the capacity to sell 500 copies of any of my work, but there are many practical hurdles to overcome for a feat like this – the cost of production, let alone storage of what would amount to hundreds of kilograms of books in my small shared apartment. That’s the strength of large publishing houses with distribution deals, and until I attract the attention of one of those realistically I and many others along this road should continue to approach the process within our means, looking to slowly and steadily build up, snowballing effort while rewarding that dedicated audience with something they genuinely can’t get elsewhere.
It’s difficult, but it is a strong foundation to continue in small steps, with patience to produce value to those waiting to enjoy it. True connections with that dedicated audience who know me beyond scrolling past my work on social feeds.
The next move I’ll be trying to make is to reach out beyond the bubble of a photographic audience – that is, to concentrate on those who are not photographers or interested in photography much themselves, but would see a different appreciation in my images. I mean the broader art and documentary world, including sociologists/anthropologists, humanists, commentators, who may derive interest from my studies of humanity which converge with those fields of interest.
I know that the people who bought D.C. Exclusion Zone were about 50/50 people who liked my work purely as photography, and those who were interested in what the project represented culturally and politically, and many orders shipped to the US, as well as a few to other countries, which was nice to see.
Interest in photography is a low threshold to meet, as of course everyone with a smartphone is technically a photographer the interest reaches further than those who own dedicated cameras, which leaves little to be gatekept. However, this does often make me wonder if the audience for photography is just other photographers and if there is any merit in wanting to reach people with a message contained in photography but not exclusive to it.
Books and gallery shows and even online spaces are geared towards communities of people engaged in the same practice as you which sort of means you take interacting with those practitioners as if they are the audience when there is a world outside of them – perhaps this is my perspective because social media is where I started out, but more and more I don’t want it to be a major aspect of how my work is seen at all.
Essentially, I don’t want my main audience for my photography to be people who “know.” I want my photographs to have a role in reaching people who “don’t know”. Having a small, dedicated audience is a good foundation, but also allows me to partially rely on those people while focusing my attention on new people who are outside of this photography bubble. It means I can accept pre-orders to fund a project that can then reach out to people outside of that dedicated audience.
About the author : Simon King is a London-based photographer and photojournalist, currently working on a number of long-term documentary and street photography projects. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. You can follow his work through his documentary collective, The New Exit Photography Group, and on Instagram.
Composing Photographs Across a Double Page Spread
If I can afford to, I always try to spend time in shops where I know there is a good selection of photo books. The books offer me inspiration for my photographs as well as the way I present my own work in printed publications.
A few books will stand out from the rest based on the quality of the work, the quality of the design and print techniques, or ideally a combination of both. One of these books that especially stood out to me was a large hardback compilation of work from dozens of outstanding photographers both historic and contemporary.
I would often leaf through the display copy I had access to until one day it vanished during a shop-floor rearrangement -- hopefully it ended up in a good home. Not long after this, I found a brand new copy at a great price and bought it, but when I received it I encountered an aspect of the book I had never considered with the display copy: the double-page spread.
The presentation of the images is very simple -- mostly landscape-oriented images at classic 3:2 aspect ratio, with only a few portrait, Polaroid, and square format images interspersed throughout. The majority of landscape images lie true to their original framing across the double-page spread throughout the majority of the book. It doesn’t look like they were adjusted to accommodate any of the physical aspects of the binding of the book, which means that many suffer greatly as a result, far from the ideal presentation.
Embarrassing presentation of an otherwise superb portrait. The central fold element goes straight through the subject and distorts the rest of his face.
The reason I didn’t pick up on this with the initial display copy was that it had been opened out many times, and lay flatter, something that my copy will hopefully do. Even so, there will still be noticeable aspects of some truly incredible images lost to the central gutter.
Again, right through the focal point of the image. Only readable at all after I flattened the pages down with a second weighty book.
Such a simple characteristic that pretty much every mainstream book will have in terms of the binding fold separating one page from the next seems to present such a challenge to design around this “problem”. If considered at all, it seems that many designers find themselves weighing up what can be sacrificed to this fold when it comes to double-page spreads, or avoiding what it can offer by having facing pages form diptychs by separating out a sequence into individual pages.
I find it easier to accept the fact that there is going to be some kind of line down the center between two pages, even if working with a flat-lay, and to work it into a “composition” in the same way I would when working a scene to make a photograph. Revering the photograph over the page will mean failing to make compromises that enhance the experience of both.
Instead of presenting only one photograph per page spread, which can feel like just scrolling through a printed social media feed, I prefer to really embrace the physicality of a book and to present two images side-by-side, which complement one another as a diptych.
I will find photographs with a thematic connection and then work to “compose” them together into a result that is greater than the sum of its parts. This spread is from a digest containing work I shot in India in 2019 and has the continuing element of the rope which leads through from one frame to the next.
I positioned these deliberately so that there would be continuity between them.
I really enjoy matching up elements so that they continue across the page, really guiding the eye between the two images, prompting the reader to make connections, keeping the energy flowing from one page to the next, and encouraging the next page turn.
Pages from my book Transiting Bulgaria that mesh the lower edge of the windowsill on the page on the left with the row of tungsten lights on the page on the right.
One of my favorite recent applications of this was this from my book D.C. Exclusion Zone, which has a matching element in the lines leading through into the road markings, and the edge of the frame on the left flowing into the frame on the right.
For a double-page spread presentation of a landscape-oriented image, I will adjust it so that no essential element falls into the gutter. Sometimes this is easy if you compose in advance in a way that takes into account the potential for use with a double-page spread.
When composing my photographs, I have become very aware of the potential something will be lost. If I look through my viewfinder and feel that there is potential for this work to be printed as a double-page then I will deliberately tweak my composition to ensure nothing is lost. All of my projects will hopefully live their best life as printed publications so this is something I will always be considering while out in the field.
When I made this image in Margate, I deliberately made use of the possibility for negative space in the middle so that the two main elements could be balanced on the left and right-hand pages of a double spread, with the pattern of the water in the foreground guiding the eye and offering depth:
I’ve presented this photograph here in the workspace of Affinity Publisher, which is the software I use to design all of my publications. I rarely work with book formats at 3:2 (the classic 35mm aspect ratio), which means that I’ll often lose parts of the image, and on top of that a 3mm bleed will always remove slight details on the outermost edge of the image.
In the above image, the red lines show the margin area and the outer blue lines represent the end of the bleed. You can see that there is a part of the image extending beyond either side, but this is not essential to the image, and I can afford to lose it for the sake of maintaining the rest of the photograph.
I am often careful in general to not have anything essential in the dead center or extreme edges of my compositions, as they are easily lost on the page – although if I know the image is destined to exist as a single one-off print then I will be more comfortable working within those parameters.
Much harder to work with are photographs like this one which feel well balanced as an individual frame but which become very difficult to present as a double-page spread without making compromises.
To my eye, this photograph is well balanced with effective negative space on top and to the right, allowing an area for the boat to be dragged into. However, if we try and work this image into a full-page spread using the same ratio pages as above we soon find that we will lose what makes the image work.
Centered, we will lose the back end of the boat and the tip of my finger, which is where the pivotal interaction is taking place -- not ideal.
Dragged to the left or right and we still have quite a bit of the essential element that will be either lost in the gutter or curved by the page fold enough that it won’t really be visible.
My solution if I didn’t want to compress the image down and have some kind of border around it or change the aspect ratio of the pages to accommodate, would be to make the image larger, so that the boat was clearly on one page, as below.
The issue with this compromise is that you lose quite a lot of the rest of the image. Even though it is negative space, it isn’t empty space, and as a result, the image presented on the pages loses its sense of balance. In a real scenario, my answer would be to reduce down and present with a white border rather than having the image edge-to-edge.
I’ve found that some of the best things to study for composing across two pages are comic books and graphic novels. As these are made from scratch on blank pages the physicality is already taken into account, and the flow from page to page, and between panels can offer some really interesting applications to a photo-book.
For my upcoming projects, I will be looking at the ways I can piece together many complex structures on the page made of my individual photographs, and exploring what potential there may be for a unique reading experience based on that construction.
About the author : Simon King is a London-based photographer and photojournalist, currently working on a number of long-term documentary and street photography projects. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. You can follow his work through his documentary collective, The New Exit Photography Group, and on Instagram.
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Pricing your work: Economies of print, or “assigning worth when value is subjective”
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Pricing your work: Economies of print, or "assigning worth when value is subjective"
When looking back on my photographs, even as "recently" far as 2019, I feel an abstraction in what my role in these images ought to be. In the moment of pressing the shutter, I feel I am the photographer, I have taken this picture.
Whatever Story You Have, Tell It Slowly as a Photographer
There's an expression in relation to investment banking I've heard which I think translates quite well into advice for documentary photographers: "it's not timing the market, its time in the market."
When I eventually start to put together compilations of my work it will be the London stories that contain the most depth, not because there's something inherent to those images but because it's simply the place where I have, and will likely continue to, produce the majority of my work. Time IN the storytelling process.
It's the streets and characters I'm most familiar with, the attitudes and sensibilities I can interpret, the stories that hit quite literally closest to home. It's the reason why I dislike a lot of the work produced during my travels so far, I simply haven't invested myself in the same way, to the level of day-to-day existence I have in London. Moving beyond that context my work becomes superficial and disconnected, and it's really only towards the end of any trips that I feel that I'm just starting to find a groove.
I've recently returned from my longest time out of the UK, and I think that even with the most critical of eyes my work is some of the strongest I've produced, if not aesthetically then in the narrative potential, in the content underneath the surface looks – this improvement as a result of nothing more than the investment of more time.
I spent from late December until early February working on assignment around the eastern coast of the United States. I covered more ground than in any of my previous trips to the states, but more importantly, I was able to spend time immersed in a level lower than spectacle.
I had the breathing room to notice the details in the smallest of mundane things. For example, I never knew that store-bought plain flour in the States was bleached white as standard (illegal in the UK and EU as far as I’m aware) as I had never previously used a kitchen there for anything more complicated than microwaving. Might sound silly to some, but different details will always stand out to different people, that’s what makes a subjective experience so special and worth recording.
It’s those details that are missed while rushing from one “exciting” composition to another, and I think it’s the ability to recognize and appreciate these, which makes not just photography, but life, a little more worthwhile. Rushing has little place in long-form documentary storytelling and restricts many from producing something coherent.
There is such a rush to publish the images, to break the news, that the story itself is missed. Articles are rewritten and updated as things are still happening, and audiences don’t have the space to settle in and adjust to the flow of events, understand the players, and contextualize the implications.
I think it’s very likely that this urgency isn’t coming from you, the storyteller, but from other things like deadlines, editors, commitments, and expectations. Simplifying your workflow and moving at your own pace is an excellent remedy to these distractions. I work as I go, making my own adjustments and revisions to the story I am working on.
Simplicity is the easy part; I carried two M cameras, mostly with 50mm and 90mm, occasionally switching to 35mm. For my approach these allow me to just focus on what is happening in front of me, on noticing those details and responding to them quickly.
Working on film means a removal of immediacy, which is a huge help to simply working on the story at your own pace. If my photograph is good and has value today then it will have value ten years from now, even if that value changes – which can happen faster than you think.
For example, this photograph of a live-feed, frozen as impeachment proceedings were voted on, now holds little weight as the eventual result of those proceedings, weeks later, was acquittal:
The story was still in motion when I made that image, whereas now it is more complete.
It also means that the photograph taken moments later showing the sun emerging from the clouds near the Statue of Liberty also hold less weight as a storytelling tool, regardless of the aesthetic merit:
It simply no longer represents what it once did when shown next to its preceding frame on the roll – which will always exist physically and consecutively on that film roll.
More time means I don’t need to prioritize locations and can balance the potential for something to happen against my ability to explore and feel out new spaces. I am less pressured to hit the highlights and can breathe and just exist in a space. I can talk to people and make friends and pull on threads and not feel a ticking clock pressing me to just make something passable, rather than intimate.
Time spent in the active process of telling the story counts towards the final story, even if the end result is a single standalone print. Allowing yourself more avenues for trial and error, experimentation, exploration, and investigation, will lead you towards photographs you would never have imagined if you’d just gone out to meet your expectations. Make the photographs carefully and publish when you’re ready to, not when others expect it of you!
P.S. You can find a selection of my in-print Zines, as well as individual darkroom prints on my website. If you’re interested in the last collaborative publication I worked on, have a look at BARDO: Summer of ’20 while copies last! You can keep up to date on my current work on my Instagram. I did an in-depth webinar on my recent time shooting in the States with Leica Akademie UK, which can be reviewed here.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
About the author : Simon King is a London-based photographer and photojournalist, currently working on a number of long-term documentary and street photography projects. You can follow his work through his documentary collective, The New Exit Photography Group, and on Instagram.
#editorial #inspiration #tips #approach #documentary #mindset #simonking #thoughts
Giving My Audience a Reason to Care as a Photographer
When competing in an attention economy, giving your audience a reason to stay rather than scroll onwards is one of the most essential paths to retaining that attention.
Offering value in some way that makes people want to see the next slide, turn the next page, or even buy a print or publication to see a completed work can be a difficult balancing act -- too much value and there is no incentive to continue investing in that work, not enough and people will lose interest.
Currently, this has been the priority at the front of my mind when working on my projects, in shooting, sequencing, publishing, and marketing. I want to give those who choose to spend their money and time viewing my work something more than a collection of images. I want there to be a reason to stay invested in a project, a flow that demands the next page turn with a real narrative unfolding across the publication.
Truly outstanding individual photographs in any genre can be found on any of the current sharing platforms and forums, but it isn’t enough for me to allow this to be the way I present work when I have something to say. When I want someone to care about a character or cause it isn’t enough to me to have one transcendent image that says everything, I’d prefer to do a deep dive and really spend time with my audience unpacking these ideas from my perspective.
Looking back on my time when street photography was my main focus -- now it has evolved into structured, long term documentary work -- I struggle to find this core driving motivation of work that has anything to make an audience truly care about the story being told. This is mainly because they are one-offs, or sequences based on themes and locations rather than a narrative involving who, what, when, where, why, featuring a beginning, middle, and end.
For all the genuinely fantastic images that fit the street photography genre, very few, especially in the new wave style, seem to be actually satisfying in a narrative sense.
There is little reason to care about a street photograph if all it does is pose questions, offering no resolution. Who are these interesting or mysterious characters? What are their stories? What can we learn from these ideas, often so beautifully presented? It’s all build-up, no payoff; all joke, no punch line. Little continuity, just themes, and iterations. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, but when looking for value in even the best examples of contemporary new wave street photography, it is fleeting at best.
There’s a chance that forty years from now there will be a nostalgic and historic value, which is what we find today in the work made in the 70s/80s, but that will only be true for a fraction of work being produced today; and again in reference to the new wave approach, will we really look back on silhouettes walking through beams of light with a nostalgic twinge? Will “timeless” work really be useful to history when it’s been made not as a documentary of the present but in the mindset of existing nostalgia?
A street photographers “legend” can seem to be about themselves, their personality and context, rather than about the content of their images, the stories of their subjects, who are preserved as caricatures, very little grounding them to anything other than their likeness (those who aren’t silhouettes, who are grounded to, and represent almost exclusively emptiness for the audience to project onto).
Characters and visceral emotion: these connect an audience to an image, not geometry and light, the way some talk about geometry in photography you’d think they were mathematicians! Searching for shapes, for light, these are decisions made from photo to photo, which fit around a true emotional core, not something that should define a career. Story and narrative arcs are the glues that connect one image to the next and are what make your audience want to turn to the next page.
If humanism and the exploration of humanity through photographic anthropology is genuinely what drives your work then I truly believe that you will find the most reward in finding answers and realizations to personal struggles through your own observations rather than to pose ambiguous questions, set atop aesthetic pedestals. Maybe that’s enough for some, but not for me. I spent too long chasing images that ask questions rather than ones that offer personal resolution, and I see a lot of the time spent on those early street photographs to have been wasted, aside from less than a handful of gems, just a lot of regret and wasted potential.
A few humanist photographers worth studying with cohesive bodies of work presented in a way that offers genuine value in every page turn are Jim Mortram, Tish Murtha, Sagar Kharecha, and John Bolloten, all UK based documentarians.
Like these photographers, I do my best to extend the offer of value to my audience beyond the confines of single images and into the way I prepare my projects in print. I want people to engage and invest in the story I’m telling so that every page turn presents them with new information and keeps them moving through my sequence, not just hitting them with constantly context-less but pretty iconography.
If pages aren’t harmonious, if there’s no conversation between spreads or if it’s simply presenting individual images with no relation other than the same photographer made them, then there’s no real reason for a reader to turn to the next. If a prose book tried to tell a coherent story by putting disjointed sentences sharing no connective tissue with one another, jumping from idea to idea with every turn of the page then unless there’s a strong conclusion to tie this gimmick together it would not be particularly compelling -- it would be a confusing, incoherent mess. Where this comparison may work is in an anthology book of individual poetry or shorts, where each page is self-contained.
Translating this idea to photographs allows something like a box of prints to be an effective and powerful way of showcasing photographs, but as soon as you stitch those into binding they are permanently sequenced; if done randomly without intentionality for a flow then it reverts to that random, disjointed, motivation less experience for an audience.
Working on my publications once I’ve curated the soul of the project the rest of my time is spent weaving my images into each other, composing new “complete” pieces across spreads of two or more pages, so that everything works together and keeps the eye moving constantly in the direction I want to guide my viewer. In the same way, movies work with beats, the best examples being ones that hit the right emotional beats at the same time as the narrative ones whether they involve silent contemplation or explosive energy, I want to lead into an emotionally resonant moment at the same time that my page designs line up and offer a moment of clarity and realization.
Whether or not my audience does in fact care about the way my work is presented to them in this way is down to what they end up bringing to the process. I’m open to understanding that even though I invest a lot into presenting ideas in a way that makes sense to me, it may not land with everyone in that way.
Having said that, I think it's still important that I do my best to offer value in some way rather than thoughtlessly generating content that relies entirely on what people bring to it when viewing. Even a modicum of artistic direction can go a long way, and the feedback I’ve had from those for whom my work does land is a testament to this – I value that input far more than social media platitudes.
Where some may find value in the social media grind, I think that it contributes to one of the least caring attitudes to consuming photographs. The number chasing aspect makes the “wrong” part of things competitive, instead of looking at who makes the best, it’s about who can gather the most following regardless of the actual results. Ultimately, all of the social media game is for the sake of work that is scrolled by in seconds, very rarely making any kind of impact at all.
I feel the opposite of competition can be not only possible but effective and positive. When I collaborate on publications and print set sales with my collective, it is without individual ego. The summation of our work would not exist without all our efforts. When I put out an individual publication or print sale, I don’t think it’s in competition with anyone else because no one else is truly offering the same product.
Of course, two darkroom printers can each sell their prints without stepping on the toes of the other, because the work itself is different and will appeal to different people. If you look beyond the fact that it’s a piece of paper or pages, the actual nature of the product becomes clear. Just because I sell a book with pages doesn’t mean I’m competing with the Tolkein estate just because they also sell book publications.
If someone likes what a photographer is putting out then they can support that photographer, and if they like the work of two photographers then that’s even better. It simply isn’t a zero-sum game, but that is how social media can make things seem, a twisted landscape to operate within.
Once you have my zine, book, or print in hand, I am no longer competing for your attention -- something not very possible online, undivided attention. It wasn’t too long ago that you could watch a video online with no adverts, now there are minutes of un-skippable ones, not just before the video but interspersed inside the content, literally dividing the attention.
I am sure we are not too far away from having to see a slide or two of adverts on a carousel before we are able to get to the actual image content we are after. Not yet mainstream, but not difficult to imagine.
If your photographic identity is tied to that icon in your phone then you will not escape from leaning towards producing meaningless work to feed the serotonin trap. Come up with something vaguely pretty and bold so it fills the phone screen and the little numbers will give you the brain feel-good reward, and you’ll spend your whole career or time as a hobbyist chasing that high instead of the deeper, harder earned ones which only come from challenging yourself, your process, and your audience.
Just because my photographs are not something that exist in a meaningful way digitally, on digital spaces, doesn’t mean that they are unavailable. It’s not a return to a bygone time, or moving backward, or refusing to progress.
Look at the language we use when people remove themselves from social media entirely, like “unplug”, or “disconnect." It’s not some grand ceremonial exiting of society, it’s just using a device slightly less. We offer all this grandiosity to platforms when we should be assigning it to ourselves.
My work exists in the present, physical now, not a transient space. Once you’ve swiped past a post, it usually ceases to exist at all. My work on walls, in collections, folders, shelves, binders, will continue to last if treated well. They don’t simply vanish into vaporware.
I think social media does have its place but not as a space to showcase powerful ideas, but rather to discuss them. When I put my handle out there and say follow me it's not so that I can blind you with special work because I don't want to waste the impact of an image with the first time you see it being on a screen, no matter how large, I want it to be on a page where I've made the decisions, the texture of the fibers, so you feel it as you see it, its own artifact.
Instead, when I suggest that people follow my social feeds, it’s an invitation to be part of the community of people finding value here. Talk to me, send a message, engage in the comments: the social of social media, it’s not about the media but the social community it gathers in, from all over the world. Some great figures like Andy Adams are leading many to move to the Twitter platform which allows a much smoother conversational system than some photo sharing sites.
It’s why the direction of our collective New Exit Group’s presence on Instagram isn’t a highlight reel of our own work but somewhere we share our process, as well as a selection of work from people we’d like to draw attention to, in a way that pulls ideas together rather than single images one at a time. We rarely share individual pieces, but we instead use diptychs and slideshows so that we aren’t just talking amongst ourselves but showing that work can coexist in sequence harmoniously and collaboratively.
Of course, the things any of us may care about are entirely subjective. Some may not care for images showing people and their stories at all, some love nature so will respond better to a beautiful vista or still life of a leaf in a frozen puddle.
However, the way that work is presented in a cohesive way transcends documentary photography, so there is still something to be taken from these ideas, and true value can be found in bodies of work presented in a mindful way, leading your readers and audience to truly care about what you’re offering them.
About the author : Simon King is a London-based photographer and photojournalist, currently working on a number of long-term documentary and street photography projects. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. You can follow his work on Instagram and you can read more of his thoughts on photography day-to-day over on his personal blog. Simon also teaches a short course in Street Photography at UAL, which can be read about here.
#editorial #inspiration #advice #attention #ideas #insights #simonking #thoughts
