The Gentleman Amateur's Blog

Walker Evans's Polaroids

2009-08-08T18:10:00.038+01:00

There are many reasons why I started shooting Polaroids; many photographers who inspired me. Walker Evans was one of the first.

I came across the story in Geoff Dyer's book, The Ongoing Moment:

"By the Spring of 1973, Evans was in the deep twilight of his career. He was almost seventy [and] lounged his days away... On occasions his second wife, Isabelle, entered his workroom to find her husband 'mesmerized by a pornographic magazine'. When she finally left him there seemed nothing to prevent Evans, whose drinking had contributed to the collapse of their marriage, lapsing into sodden befuddlement."

And then something miraculous happened. He got himself a Polaroid SX70 camera and an unlimited quantity of film, and began shooting again: anything, everything, all the time.

"I bought that thing as a toy, and I took it as a kind of challenge," Evans explained. "It was this gadget and I decided that I might be able to do something serious with it. So I got to work to try to prove that. I think I've done something with it. After all, I am getting older, and I feel that nobody should touch a Polaroid until he's over sixty. You should first do all that work. It makes things awfully easy to have that thing pop out. It reduces everything to your brains and taste. It interests me very much, too, because I feel that if you have these things in your head, this is the instrument that will really test it. The damn thing will do anything you point it at. You have to really know something before you dare point it anywhere."

Rejuvenated by the immediacy of instant prints, Evans revisited many themes familiar from his classic work: houses, streets, railways, signs. But the colours of the SX70 film gave them a new magic. Dyer puts it beautifully:

"The weird colour saturation had an immediately oneiric quality. Walls became insubstantial. The sky became as turquoise as De Chirico's. These were colours that emptied the world, made it seem like a dream - not a human dream, but the dream a room or a road might have of itself."

In the 14 months before his death, Evans photographed feverishly, producing 2,650 Polaroids. He accepted a bunch of teaching jobs around the USA, just so he could get out there and make more Polas.

"Wherever he taught," notes Jeff Rosenheim in the beautiful book Walker Evans: Polaroids, "Evans made daily forays into the streets, returning to the classroom to share with his often bewildered students Polaroids of crushed soda cans, wig shop windows, gingerbread trim and plastic fruit displays. He taught by example, and what his students remember of these episodes is the uncommon pleasure of watching Evans handle his miniature Polaroid prints like a man playing games with a peculiar deck of cards."

Now that, I think, is a feeling many Polaroid photographers share. The whole Evans experience seems very familiar to me; Polaroids certainly reignited my interest in photography at a time when I couldn't get any further with digital. The magic of Pola is something I've thought about a lot, but I've never been able to properly articulate it. I even found it hard to write this post; I almost just put up the pictures without any words. But I think Evans's experience gets at something that remains true of Polaroids, even now.

We can talk about the immediacy, indexicality, artefactuality or whatever - we can even talk about De Chirico and the colours of dreams - but in the end, isn't it just the magic?

Edward Weston's Colour Photography

2009-08-02T16:41:00.037+01:00

Last month, I did a post about William Eggleston, often called 'the father of colour photography'. But who were the real pioneers of colour photography?

I think there's a case to be made for Edward Weston. Of course, he's best known for his black and white work, but from 1946-1948, he worked briefly with Kodachrome and Ektachrome. At the time, Kodak were commissioning notable photographers (also including Ansel Adams and Paul Strand) to produce images they could use to promote their colour products. Though Weston said he knew nothing about colour, he embraced the experiment.

"I spent a pleasant couple of mornings using up the two dozen [sheets of Ektachrome], and sent them to Los Angeles to be processed," he later recalled. "I wanted to see what they looked like... My first batch! – I remember looking at them just like an amateur looking at his first drugstore print and saying, 'Gee – they came out!' I decided I liked colour."

He then revisited many locations where he'd made classic black and white images: Death Valley, Big Sur and so on.

"I didn't want to do again what I had done in black-and-white, so I took along nothing but color film. I wanted to think exclusively in color. As in black-and-white one learns to forget color, so in color one must learn to forget the black-and-white forms."

"In Death Valley... he saw an old boot hung on the wall," notes the critic Nancy Newhall in the fine book, Edward Weston: Color Photography. "Both were burnished gold by the sun and the freezing wind. To make the rich colour live, he needed a dark accent. With the same sense of revealing, not arranging, that helped him with his great early series of shells, peppers, artichokes and so on, he hammered an old nail he found nearby into the wall and achieved his accent."

The quality of colour that Weston achieved makes me wish he'd done more than the 60-odd images that survive. There's an incredible luminosity to it. It's got that ultra-vivid hallucinatory sheen we associate, perhaps, with early Technicolor movies; it looks almost hand-painted, and feels redolent of dreams and subjectivity, rather than clinical records of some objective reality.

Of course, that's partly to do with the materials that Kodak were then making: those 1940s Ektachromes are nothing like the stuff you get now. But it also owes something to Weston's understanding of photography not as a mechanical record, but as an imaginative creation.

"As a creative medium, black and white photography has, at the start, an advantage over colour in that it is already a step removed from a factual rendition of the scene," he once wrote.

I think this understanding informs his use of colour very deeply: these images are not about facts, but fantasy. I can't help but see them as prefiguring a way of working with colour that runs from Eggleston's super-saturated dye transfer tones, to the crazy cyan skies you can still see in Polaroid photography today. This, I think, may be where all of that begins – and as such, it should be celebrated more widely than it is.

Light, Landscape And The Sky

2009-07-26T22:42:00.033+01:00

I've been thinking a lot about light lately.

(John Constable. Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead. 1821-2)

There's a tendency in photography to view the bluest skies as the best. I love a clear blue California sky, with its rich golden sunlight – but in Northern Europe, the sky is more likely to be lowering grey, full of ominous clouds. I'm used to thinking of such skies as rubbish for photography; many times, I've not taken a picture because the light has been 'bad'. But then I found myself looking at 17th Century Dutch landscape painting.

(Jacob van Ruisdael. The Mill at Wijk near Duurstede. 1670)

Back then, it seems, Italy was the California of its day. Italian light was what all painters aspired to. Landscape was a genre associated with the ideal; landscapes were therefore meant to be beautiful and transcendent – and nothing was held to be as beautiful as Italian light.

It took the Dutch, and especially Jacob van Ruisdael, to break through this orthodoxy, and to insist that, no, a lowering grey sky full of clouds could be just as good for a landscape painter as an azure-and-gold Italian one. So that's what Ruisdael painted, again and again: the Dutch landscape and the sky, as it really seemed to him at the time.

(Jacob Van Ruisdael. A Landscape With A Ruined Castle and A Church. 1665-70)

Not everyone liked the results at first; it took other painters to see the achievement. John Constable said:

"Ruisdael delighted in, and has made delightful to our eyes, those solemn days, peculiar to his country and to ours, when without storm, large rolling clouds scarcely permit a ray of sunlight to break the shades of the forest. By these effects he enveloped the most ordinary scenes in grandeur."

(John Constable. Hampstead Heath. 1820)

Then there's Constable himself. It's strange: he's become associated with stodgy heritage art – but by God, he could paint a sky. When he did grim English days, no-one did it better.

(John Constable. The Gleaners, Brighton. 1824)

Look at this picture of Brighton beach. The weather is horrible. But there's no attempt to soften it, prettify it, make it into eye candy. It's just a grim day on the beach, and looking at it, I feel like I am there.

(John Constable. Seascape Study with Rain Clouds. 1824-5)

And here again. The rain is coming to get you; chances are you'll get a soaking, if you haven't already. But look at the colours in those storm clouds! The energy of that sky! I think I'd be happy to get wet, to see such things.

(John Constable. View at Hampstead, Looking towards London. 1833)

Because our skies – when you really look at them – are not just grey. There are all sorts of colours there – fleeting, perhaps, but intense. And so, since filling my head with Ruisdael and Constable, I've been turning my camera onto lowering English skies. The results so far amaze me; I don't think I've ever been happier with my attempts at landscape photography. From now on, I refuse to believe there is such a thing as 'bad' light.

Nancy Rexroth And The Diana Camera

2009-07-12T23:05:00.039+01:00

How do you photograph a memory? How do you photograph a dream, or a hallucination?

Nancy Rexroth (b.1946) was not the first person who ever picked up a Diana camera. They were originally made as novelties and were very cheap, so lots of people had used them before. But Rexroth was among the first to see their potential for serious photography.

She turned the Diana's supposed weaknesses into strengths. The plastic lens didn't produce sharp images and the viewfinder made it impossible to frame precisely. So she embraced chance, distortion and blur instead – and that, it turned out, was what allowed her to make photographs with all the resonance of memories and dreams.

"The Diana's made for feelings," Rexroth has said. "Diana images are often something you might see faintly in the background of a photograph... sometimes, I feel I could step over the edge of a frame and walk backwards into this unknown region. Then I would keep right on walking..."

All these pictures come from her series Iowa, made in the 1970s. She had set out to evoke her childhood memories of the American Midwest. Yet can you really fix a precise location or date to these pictures? They seem to me beyond time and place, in a way that connects them to the Julia Margaret Cameron work I was thinking about last week.

Others have compared Rexroth to Walker Evans and Alvin Langdon Coburn; clearly, these images stretch back in time. But I think they also stretch forward, into the territory of film-makers such as David Lynch, and even beyond, into territories that have still not been explored.

It's wild stuff, the stuff of dreams – and for anyone trying to get beyond the surface of things and explore those territories, it remains a massive inspiration.

Julia Margaret Cameron

2009-07-10T15:38:00.024+01:00

I've been thinking a lot about Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) lately.

She was known for two things: illustrations of poems & other texts, and portraits of her Victorian contemporaries. The illustrations look a little contrived today; but the portraits, especially the monumental head-shots she did towards the end of her career, remain mesmerising.

All these portraits were made with very long exposures - typically 8-15 minutes, as the wet plate collodion technique demanded. Those long exposures are partly responsible for the wonderful softness and blurring in her images, but I think there's something in the quality of collodion itself that seems richer and deeper than any negative film or even slide film I've ever seen. It just seems to contain more time, somehow.

In her own day, the softness of her images was not always accepted; she was criticized for poor technique. They may have seemed fuzzy in an age when photographic sharpness was prized - yet more than a century later, her images retain their power, in a way that many other collodion images do not.

I think Cameron knew exactly what she was doing. She was using the collodion's unique texture and capacity for depth to create images that appear to come not only from another time, but from somewhere altogether timeless - so, for me, transcending time in the most extraordinary way.

William Eggleston

2009-07-02T13:07:00.027+01:00

William Eggleston (b.1939) was the first photographer whose work I fell in love with.

His sensibility is radically democratic. He takes pictures of the everyday people, places and things most of us take for granted. But the way he looks at his subjects – from strange angles, saturated with intense light and colour – gives them an iconic stature, investing them with mystery and grace. He is one of those artists who really can make you see the world differently, because his pictures reveal the magic and terror that's latent in the everyday, if only we look for it.

Eggleston is often called 'the father of colour photography', though he started out in black & white, influenced by Walker Evans and, especially, Henri Cartier-Bresson. You can still see traces of that influence in his work.

"His were the first pictures I'd seen which weren't just straight-on pictures like everybody else's," Eggleston has said. "He had angles like Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec – one picture after another. I think I understood Evans, but my real discovery was Cartier-Bresson."

Eggleston moved onto colour in the mid-1960s, making his breakthrough in 1973, when he discovered a dye transfer process that intensified his already saturated colours and his amazing eye for light. Everything in Eggleston's world glows, no matter how mundane it might be. Under his transformative light, everything is illuminated; everything matters.

Without Eggleston, I can't imagine Stephen Shore, Nan Goldin, Richard Misrach, or any of the photographers who work in colour today; I can't imagine film-makers like David Lynch, Gus Van Sant or Sophia Coppola doing what they do. It's hard, in fact, to think of another living visual artist who has influenced more people – and I feel lucky to count myself among their number.

He was my first love in photography, but every time I go back to his pictures, knowing a little more about what it must take to make them, they only seem better and better.

August Macke

2009-06-28T21:06:00.027+01:00

If you're interested in colour, then August Macke (1887-1914) is the man – one of the greatest colourists who ever lived.

His paintings are wonderful glowing worlds of light and colour, poised between abstraction and representation. You can see the real world through the soft lines and floating planes of his pictures, but it's transformed into something more beautiful, more vivid, more alive.

He was loosely affiliated to German Expressionism and Der Blaue Reiter, and was influenced by French Impressionism, Italian Futurism and Robert Delaunay's Orphism, but his work took elements from all these sources and developed them into something new.

When he died, tragically young in the First World War, his friend and fellow artist Franz Marc said: "We painters know that without his harmonies, whole octaves of colour will disappear from German art, and the sounds of the colours remaining will become duller and sharper. He gave a brighter and purer sound to colour than any of us; he gave it the clarity and brightness of his whole being."

I don't think anyone since has come close.