Personal photography
Tracy Friedlander’s post on the three Substack creator type appeared on my Substack timeline one Sunday morning. I found it interesting and it got me thinking about what these types were. But thinking about them made me realise that they were simplistic and I wondered how I could reduce them to something more flexible. The [ ]
Street photography is something that bothers me, so I want to understand it. And to understand things, I need to classify them and understand how they relate. Call it professional bias. With street photography, I quickly hit a wall: the term clearly covers many disparate activities and everybody has a point of view on what [ ]
The number of women war photographers is incredible. I wasn’t expecting to fins so many. I’m only going to cover some of them in this series. I’ve never been to a war zone. The closest I’ve come is a photography exhibition in the Jardin du Luxembourg, where someone else’s images of conflict hang on metal [ ]
I’ve seen a number of people creating curated lists of Substack photography newsletters lately. Some are just blunt lists that are hard to use, others have categories, but all are missing some of the newsletters I subscribe to. Also a plain list is not very digest: how do you find what you’re interested in? There [ ]
Years of landscape photography eventually crystallised into something I could trust. The experimentation settled, the instincts took hold, and I started recognising my own hand in a frame before I could explain why. A composition either felt like mine or it didn’t. Then I started shooting street, and shortly after that, documentary work around people [ ]
1. What does your creative ritual look like? Do you have specific habits or conditions that spark your creativity? First, I need to make clear that I don’t consider myself an artist and I don’t think of creativity as something specifically linked to artistic endeavours. For me creativity is the process through which ideas are [ ]
I hadn’t planned to make a series on women war photographers. When I started looking into Lee Miller, I found references to a few other women of the same era and in the present and I got really interested in them. With the war in Ukraine, the risk of global war is the highest since [ ]
Photography is in essence a conversation between you and the world, not you and an audience. There is a reason why it’s not a public activity, even if you take into account photo walks. The moment you photograph for likes on social media instead of for personal motivation, your photography become predictable, safe, bland. The [ ]
She opens her TEDx talk talking about a blue vest. It’s a flak jacket. Twelve pounds of Kevlar, in the specific shade of blue the UN adopted in 1947 for its flag. The colour that says: neutral press, not a combatant. When it’s 120 degrees in the shade and you’re running from mortar fire, she [ ]
I travel roughly 2,000 kilometres a week for work. Sometimes, on the train, I put my phone away and sit with nothing. No book, no podcast, just the landscape moving past and strangers shifting through the carriage. On one of these journeys, my mind drifted to a photograph I d never quite got right, a recreation [ ]
I m into deep dives at the moment and I think I ll make this a regular feature. I first came across Dickey Chapelle by accident. I was reading about war photographers, having arrived on the subject via Lee Miller. Someone mentioned a woman who wore pearl earrings into combat and whose last photo was recovered from [ ]
I stopped photographing for many years. Nothing dramatic happened; it was a slow fade. I d go out with a camera, walk around, come back without a single frame worth keeping. Eventually I stopped going out at all. The problem wasn t burnout or crisis. It was worse: complete indifference. I tried the usual remedies. Looked at [ ]
Juliette wrote last week about Deadpan photography. I was intrigued because it s a term I had seen start appearing all over the place lately and I wasn t sure what it was. So I did a deep dive to understand for myself (unpublished on Substack as it s not an opinion piece). But in turn it got [ ]
The photography education industry runs on a specific kind of desperation. Browse Instagram or scroll through YouTube and you ll find an unending parade of people promising to unlock your potential, offering preset packs, weekend workshops, and masterclasses. The transformation you re looking for is always just beyond your credit card details, and the entire industry is [ ]
I first encountered the phrase deadpan photography around Youtube, of all places. I was watching one of Tatiana Hopper s videos I think (I don t remember which one). I didn t think much of it at the time but I was intrigued by the term (file for later examination). Then I started seeing the term more and [ ]
My view of Japan is cartoonish. It s built almost entirely from exports and a European vantage point. When I watch how other countries portray France through their own exports, the caricature is cringeworthy, so it stands to reason mine works the same way in reverse. I ve never had a Japanese friend. Growing up in the [ ]
For a while I assumed the relationship was simply doomed. Photography requires patience: you develop a project over months without knowing whether it s working, improvement arrives slowly, the feedback loop runs on timescales that platform culture has trained people to experience as failure. For a generation whose entire media experience has been structured around instant [ ]
The standard advice for lens selection follows a simple formula: match the focal length to the genre. Portraits need 85mm or longer. Landscapes want 20mm or shorter. Street photography lives at 50mm. This reasoning isn t entirely wrong, but it misses the more important variable: you. I don t normally talk about specific gear because it s a [ ]
There is no shortage of people eager to tech you photography online these days. There are probably many tens of thousands of videos on YT. Maybe millions of tutorials about everything touching photography. But the vast majority will be useless to you and won t better your photography. The algorithm keeps suggesting photography tutorials. Ten tips [ ]
The justification photographers reach for when defending raw files is technical: more latitude, recoverable highlights, adjustable white balance. Sound in principle, largely irrelevant in practice for photographers making personal work rather than delivering to clients with exacting technical requirements. Shooting raw is really about refusing to commit to decisions you make at the moment of [ ]
After mentioning this idea of somehow being able to authenticate the source of a photo, I ve implemented and tested the idea. Here is an update on the project. I added the ability to federate the system using only a DNS dependency. The point is that for those who are very privacy conscious, they can handle [ ]
Projects change. Photographs move from person to person, from tool to tool. A crime-scene photo passes from the investigator s camera to a forensic analyst s workstation to a prosecutor s presentation software. A heritage digitisation travels from the conservator s studio through an editor s desktop to a public archive. At each step someone asks: is this still the [ ]
The saying has earned its place through repetition: the best camera is the one you have with you. There s obvious sense in it, and a significant problem with it. When I started landscape photography with the kit lens that came with my 350D, a basic 18-55mm in full plastic (28-88mm equivalent), that camera was with [ ]
Gear Acquisition Syndrome operates on a simple mechanism: attributing the limitations in my work to the limitations of my tools. When I look at my photographs and feel dissatisfied, it s easier to blame the camera than to blame my seeing, my timing, my compositional choices. The camera is external and replaceable. My ability is internal [ ]
I took this photo a good while back. I was arriving in Paris by train, and a commuter train overtook us (for some reason I was allegedly in the fast one). I took a photo after I was struck by the visuals and the story I could see in the first few cars. I woke [ ]
On paper, photography looks like a bad coping strategy. You take a heavy thing with you out the door, walk around, and come back with the same weight plus some pictures. But it works. Everyone who shoots knows this, and we tend to give the same reasons: it distracts you, it gives you something to [ ]
Photographers will tell you a good photograph needs to stand on its own. No explanation, no supporting text; what s in the frame is what you get. If the image only works when you explain it, the thinking goes, it has already failed. There s a problem with this I can t get around, which is that I [ ]
Digital photography gave us something film never had: an instant undo button for our own judgement. See an image on the back of the camera, decide it fails, press delete, and it s gone. Film made destruction harder; you could bin a print, but the negative sat in its sleeve unless you went out of your [ ]
We re wired to look for faces. Show someone a photograph with people in it and their eyes go straight to the faces, searching for expression, emotion, identity. This reflex runs deep enough that many photographers treat it as photographic law: people in the frame means visible faces. It doesn t. Think about dreams. People appear, play [ ]
The ongoing challenge in teaching photography to a young person is protecting them from gear culture. Marketing is sophisticated and pervasive. Social media shows photographers with expensive equipment. Friends will get newer, better cameras. The pressure to upgrade is constant. My niece needs to understand from the start that gear is just a tool, and [ ]
Over the past few weeks or months, I ve noticed more and more people in the photography community sharing their zine experiments online. Last week alone both Rick and I published posts about it. Some are elaborate, beautifully printed things. Others are rougher, more personal, made on kitchen tables when the kids are in bed. What [ ]
I recently reviewed my library of posts and it gave me an idea. What began here as a random series of posts about photography turned into something different as I went through them: an argument about the last two centuries of human record-keeping, about what it cost us to have a medium we trusted automatically, [ ]
When you photograph someone and they notice you, something changes in both of you. For them, it s brief: a moment of self-consciousness, a decision about how to respond, then absorption back into their day. By evening, you re probably forgotten. For you, that photograph might stay for years. You ll return to it, edit it, refine it. [ ]
My father died of cancer in November. After the funeral, the paperwork, the strange silence that follows all of that, my doctor was a bit concerned. There had never been a serious illness in my family before, no cancer, no heart attacks, no leukaemia, and then my dad had cancer. So he sent me for [ ]
After the first six weeks, my niece will have foundation: purpose, seeing, basic technical control. Now the teaching moves from building fundamentals to developing her particular vision through structured assignments. Each one has clear communicative goals, and success is measured by whether she achieved what she intended. These assignments will continue for months, probably years, [ ]
There s a special feeling that comes from holding something you made yourself, something printed or folded or stapled together, knowing it only exists because you willed it into being. I first felt that in a high school hallway, sometime in the late 1980s. Someone had been posting anonymous anarchist texts on the public display boards [ ]
Every photograph exists in two phases: the taking and the revisiting. Most photographers never consciously separate them. That s part of why so many pictures feel flat on second viewing. I care about the process of making pictures as much as the pictures themselves. If not more. Aperture, shutter speed, how a particular lens renders a [ ]
My niece has spent four weeks photographing on full automatic. She understands what photography is for, she s developed her eye, she knows how images communicate. Now she s encountering situations where automatic settings prevent her from achieving what she wants. That s perfect timing for introducing technical control. We won t teach her everything the camera can do. [ ]
The universe doesn t care about us. That s not pessimism; it s physics. We re pattern-seeking creatures dropped into a system operating on principles entirely indifferent to human comfort. Entropy increases, complexity spirals, and meaning is something we have to manufacture ourselves because the cosmos isn t providing it. For a long time I didn t have a practical way [ ]
Week four combines analysis with continued practice. My niece has been making photographs for three weeks, and she s developed intuitions about what works and what doesn t. Now we ll make those intuitions conscious by looking at strong work and breaking down how it functions. We ll dedicate three sessions to this, each one structured the same way: [ ]
Photography has a self-image problem, and it starts with the word witness. The term has circulated in photographic theory long enough to feel like settled truth. Photographers bear witness. They stand at the edge of events, recording what happens with a fidelity that makes them morally adjacent to the thing itself. The word carries gravity, [ ]
More photos I found. These are probably late winter/early spring holiday photos in the mountains somewhere in France. Easter holidays maybe. Given the snow I d think Alps. Yep, l that s a 60s Renault 4. We have been on holiday with one of those when I was a kid. It was so weak that we had [ ]
My niece will spend weeks two and three developing her eye through structured assignments, all while keeping the camera on automatic. She s comfortable with the tool by now but not thinking about it technically. The focus is on what she s seeing and choosing to capture. The first assignment runs continuously through the week. Every day, [ ]
I was re-reading some of my old posts lately because I ve started work on a mini book based on my Substack posts underlying ideas; more on that another time. As I was doing so, I realised that some of my ideas had evolved and warranted a revisit. Street photography makes me uncomfortable. I ve thought about [ ]
More photos I found. These feel so much like photos that could have come straight out of my childhood. The clothes, the place, I ve been there To me it looks like these photos were taken potentially at a kid s birthday. I know those chairs! I could have been one of the kids in those photos. [ ]
The first session with my niece will establish what photography is actually for, but not through abstract discussion. She ll have her camera in hand from the first minute, set to full automatic, and we ll be taking photographs while talking about why we re taking them. The easy answer, the one she probably expects, is that photography [ ]
You already know the photograph. Nick Ut took it in 1972 on a road in Vietnam: a girl running, napalm smoke behind her. It may have shortened a war. Not because it was beautifully composed or appeared in the right publication, but because it was real. The girl existed. The road existed. Light bounced off [ ]
This is another of my found rolls of negatives. This time, it isn t about avant guarde theatre. It s really traditional (AFAICT). The roll shows that the photographer had access to preparations and then photographed the stage, either during rehearsals or during a public show. The negatives are in better condition than in some previous rolls. [ ]
My niece is twelve. She loves taking photos with whatever s in her pocket, but the 550D I gave her sits mostly untouched in a drawer. Too much camera. Too serious. Too intimidating. That fact made me think carefully about how in my opinion photography should be taught and what order things should happen in. I ll [ ]
I ve been thinking about how photographers develop over time. Looking at what I ve been writing over the last few months, I see contradictions and incoherencies that bother me. So I set out to find the underlying thinking or framework that would unify these ideas. There s a tempting narrative that treats development as linear progression: you [ ]