I had a brief conversation with Cheryl Jacobs Nicolai the other day about how bad many people (even photographers) seem to be at reading facial expressions in pictures. We both agreed it's something a lot of viewers seem remarkably blind to. Another thing people seem especially bad at reading in photographs is the participation of the photographer in the scene and the implications of where exactly he or she had to have been when the picture was taken.

The exception seems to be photographs taken from tall buildings or from flying machines, looking down. "Now where were you when you took that?" is the usual response to the only aerial shot in the portfolio I show most often. Otherwise, it doesn't seem to be something most people concern themselves with*—the common assumption seems to be that the camera is an omniscient eye and it's perfectly explicable, if not natural, for it to have been where it was.

I thought about this again yesterday when reading about Elliott Erwitt and encountering again his once-famous picture of the laughing lovers in the rear-view side-mirror. (I say "once famous" because I don't think it's particularly well known any more, except perhaps among older photographers—even though it's on the cover of his Personal Exposures.) I've never liked that one, particularly. The first time I saw it, many years ago now, I blurted out something like "who is he, the hook?"

My friend who showed me the picture said, "what?"

Photo by Elliott Erwitt

I was referring to an old campfire story that circulated widely when I was a boy (and may still, I don't know) about a pair of lovers in a car in the woods where an axe-murderer with a hook for a hand is known to be roaming. In one variant of the story, they end up falling asleep in the car and, in the morning, awake to find the hook hanging from the door-handle. (I guess you know this is an older story, because only old-fashioned car door handles would have a place for the hook to hang.)

Anyway, that's why this picture has always struck me as unsatisfying—because I instinctively place the photographer in it. He'd have to have been virtually a stalker in order to take such a picture naturally. The picture was a setup, not a candid. That seems obvious to me at a glance.

If it's not a setup, then it's disturbing, rather than all happy, sunsetty and romantic.

Eyes, balls, and a camera
One of the funniest—and most cogent—answers to my question the other day about the three things you most need to practice your photography was provided by a reader named Nick, who said "eyes, balls, and a camera." Amen, brother Nick. A little crude, but that nails it.

My teacher and mentor Steve Szabo, who had been a top photojournalist for The Washington Post before retiring to become an art photographer with a view camera, once showed us a photograph of a Central or South American peasant wedding that amazed me. Nobody else in our class responded the way I did, but all I could think of when I saw it was "where were you when you took that?" The picture was taken during the ceremony from directly over the priest's shoulder, with the bride and groom and all the guests in attendance. When I put Steve in the scene it just stunned me. Steve answered my question by saying he'd just walked right to the altar as if he had every right in the world to be there, and started photographing. He said it almost with a shrug: "It's just what you have to do." I've mentioned before that I could never have been a photojournalist because I would never have the stones to do things like that. Or, more accurately, the confidence to pull it off without creating an unpleasant spectacle. Some people can; not I.

A lot of the work of photographing is getting yourself to where the picture was taken—whether that's Simon Roberts setting up his tripod on top of his strategically-parked motor home, or Jim Nachtwey wandering the scene of 9/11, or the indefatigable Robert Cameron, who died last November 10th at the age of 98, up in a helicopter above a big city in good light. But most viewers, most of the time, are perfectly happy to collude in the illusion of the omniscient camera, and simply ignore the implications of the photographer as a presence in the scene.

Candid photography as misdemeanor
Another story I think about in this context is one I had occasion to tell the other day when I had a lunch with a local reader, Jack McD. (Jack also let me "unbox" his new gray Leica M9—way cool—but that's another story.) It was a picture taken with a wide-angle lens, looking directly down on two sunbathing young women dressed in bikinis. The women were both asleep on the grass, and they each had the back strap of their bikini tops open so as not to ruin their tans. The picture was taken by a woman I taught with briefly many years ago. She was small, quiet, and unprepossessing in her manner, even though she was actually quite assertive in terms of how she actually acted. Here's more or less how that conversation went:

Me: Do you know these girls?"

She: No. They were just sunbathing in the park.

Me: Were they really alseep?

She: Yes.

Me: So how did you take this?

She: I just walked over and put one foot in between the two of them, and leaned in.

(In other words, she was straddling one of the sleeping young girls in order to get herself in position to take the picture.)

Me (laughing): Do you realize how fast I'd be arrested if I tried to do that?

I'm 6'2", and I weighed 200 lbs. at the time, and if it's been a while since I've had a haircut I somewhat resemble Ted Kaczynski's post-capture mugshots. If I tried to take a picture like that of two sleeping teenage girls who were strangers to me, it would practically constitute assault. All I could picture was one of them waking up to find me hulking over her, and the scream she would have let out as a result!

No credit
As photographers, we're preoccupied with where we were and how we felt when we took our pictures. In fact, I think a lot of photographers often allow their memories of how hard the picture was to get to affect their editorial judgment about how good a picture it is. (A clue: it has nothing to do with it. A great picture can be a toss-off, and one you work and work to get can still suck. You've got to detach yourself from all that when you edit.) But it's not something you get much credit for from viewers. They take it for granted—if they even think about it at all.

Mike

*There's one other exception—the moralistic and unreasonable one that we discussed recently about the common kneejerk reaction to a photograph of a crime or atrocity in progress—"how could he (or she, or you) just stand there?" In a sense, though, that also assumes a sort of omniscience—it assumes the photographer as omniscient actor, as if anyone who could intervene in a scene enough to photograph it should also have the power to alter the event, whatever it was—even though that's seldom the case.

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ADDENDUM: Doug Boller sent me this, an outtake from a late '70s project of his, calling it "a confluence of reflections"...the man in the mirror is Steve Szabo! Quite a coincidence considering the contents of this post....

Featured Comment by Ben Rosengart: "Movies and television have trained us not to ask about the camera-wielder. IMHO."

Featured Comment by Ed Nixon: "I always thought that Erwitt picture was a self-portrait (with friend). Still do, even after reading this post. My interpretation does a better job of explaining where he was than a 'stalker' theory. Why would he have to be looking through a camera, particularly given the obvious attributes of the lady in question?"

Featured Comment by David Lykes Keenan: "Elliott told me that this particular picture was not immediately seen as he reviewed his contact sheets. He 'found' it some time (years?) later. He also told me that he knew the couple in the car."

Featured Comment by David Brookes: "I like your Steve Szabo story, Mike. Before I retired I was an Anglican priest, and I was taking a wedding service one day in a small church in the North of England where I was Vicar. It was a small church with no side aisles, so it was impossible for a photographer to move to the east end unseen: for that reason no photographs were ever taken from behind where I was officiating.

"One day, however, a vestry door had been inadvertently left unlocked, and the wedding photographer sneaked his way in. Unfortunately this particular fellow had a bad limp and walked with a stick: he also used a Mamiya RB67. You can imagine my surprise when I heard this three-legged creature clumping across the church behind me, followed by the crash of the Mamiya's shutter (which, for your younger readers, sounded like someone dropping a tray of cutlery).

"Needless to say this particular photographer was banned from my church after that!"

Featured Comment by Andreas Manessinger: "The image is also on the cover of one of the best albums ever made, Fairground Attraction's glorious 1988 debut 'The First of a Million Kisses.' I knew the image long before I knew the photographer."

Featured Comment by Robert: "This is a quote from a recent Erwitt lecture I attended, regarding said photo: 'The story about this picture is that I discovered it 25 years after I took it. I happened to be looking through my contact sheets and thought that it might make a nice print. I advise everyone to look through their contact sheets.' Later he related how the couple were friends of his, and someone tried to sue him claiming to be one of the subjects. He produced the contact sheet with the rest of the photos and never heard from the person again."

Simon Roberts, South Downs Way, West Sussex, 8th October 2007, from We English

By Ailsa McWhinnie

Simon Roberts is a British photographer who for a number of years worked on assignments for magazines and weekend supplements. His eventual disillusionment with being asked to produce what he describes as "the definitive story" on a topic, and then being given three days in which to do it, led to him embarking on a year-long trip across Russia. The resulting images were published to great acclaim by Chris Boot, under the title Motherland.

The success of Motherland put him in the position where he was able to raise funding for his next project from Arts Council England, the National Media Museum and the John Kobal Foundation. His latest book is We English.

Simon lives on the south coast of England with his wife Sarah and their children Jemima and Florence. Of his daughters, he says, "Jemima was conceived in Russia and Florence as we traveled through England, so I can’t go traveling any more as we can’t afford any more children!"

Ailsa McWhinnie: We English is photographed in a quite different style from Motherland. What prompted the change?

Simon Roberts: It’s not quite the departure it might look. There are a couple of pictures in Motherland that inspired the direction I took with We English. One in particular shows a Victory Day picnic at Yekaterinburg [a major Russian city on the eastern side of the Urals]. Victory Day is a very important public holiday when the Russians celebrate victory over Nazi Germany. When I blew the picture up for an exhibition I became really interested in the relationship between these constellations of people and the geographical space. There are all sorts of little signifiers in the photograph, such as the silver birch trees—which are a motif in Russian landscape painting—but also when you look more closely you’ll see balloons in the trees, so it becomes a natural landscape adapted by human presence. It was something I decided I’d quite like to explore in the England work.

Sunday picnic, Yekaterinburg, from Motherland

AMc: What inspired the project that became We English?

SR: I was quite struck by the relationship between the Russians and their geography, and it started me thinking about my relationship to England. I started to want to explore that sense of identity. There’s a very rich tradition of British photographers photographing the British landscape, from Benjamin Stone in the 1890s to Bill Brandt and Tony Ray-Jones, but there had been a bit of a lull more recently, so it felt quite timely to go on this journey. My generation has travelled abroad a lot, there’s this sense of the "exotic other"—and I’ve done it myself with Russia, albeit trying to take an anthropological approach. However, it was really important I wasn’t derivative of what had gone before in terms of photographing Britain—I had to find my own voice. So in summer 2007 I started exploring different ways of photographing.

Motherland was shot using a Mamiya 7, because I needed a light camera when travelling—but this time I started playing with a 5x4-inch camera and began to see something quite interesting when the people in the picture appeared small in the frame. I wanted the landscape to be as important as the people within it, but to make sure the people weren’t so small you wouldn’t be able to make out the detail of what they were wearing and how they related to one another.

AMc: So did you try to avoid the places that have formed parts of other photographers’ work?

SR: No. I deliberately went to New Brighton [the seaside town photographed by Martin Parr in his book, The Last Resort]. The pictures didn’t end up in the book, but I certainly went to some of these places because they’d been done before. I was intrigued, because historically we’re doing many of the same things we did a hundred years ago, it’s just we’re wearing different clothes. A lot of old traditions and festivals are being revived by local councils who are looking for new ways of getting tourists. Actually, there are very few photographs of that sort of event in the book, because I wanted to steer clear of events that were being quite deliberately marketed and promoted. The images that ended up in the book often depict quite mundane activities.

AMc: Were there any surprises as the project got underway?

SR: It was interesting to see that people are quite parochial. They end up doing things very close to where they live: the guy fishing on the banks of the river, or the Sunday-league football, these are very ordinary things, but to the person doing them they’re very important, so I wanted to make them more grand—and that was one of the challenges. When you’re doing a project in your own back yard you have to learn to tune into the ordinary things you see every day that you don’t consider to be a photograph—so in many ways I was looking for the "non" photograph.

AMc: You invited members of the public to submit ideas for places or events to photograph. How successful was that?

SR: What I liked was not just the suggestions themselves but also the way that people talked about them. What’s interesting is the way they think about England. A lot of it is about memory—how they remember a place and how that might be different from how they experience it now. If the person was writing from abroad, it would often be to suggest something they missed about England. I probably photographed only five or ten percent of the ideas, but it was a great way of generating interest. Other ideas would come from local newspapers, or I’d stop by the local village hall and see what was posted on their noticeboard. There were probably 12 main anchorpoints—places I wanted to be at particular times in the year, such as Ladies Day at Aintree—and then I’d build in other places around them.

Ladies’ Day, Aintree Racecourse, Merseyside, 4th April 2008

AMc: Even though you worked with a 5x4 camera, which by its very nature slows things down, the pictures are still very much about the "decisive moment"—I get the sense of you waiting for the choreography to come together.

SR: It was very challenging because often there were a lot of people in the frame, and how do you find the decisive moment when there are a hundred people moving around? Sometimes I would just take the picture and not really be too bothered if one person was standing in front of another, or if a lamppost was coming out of somebody’s head. But another reason for using 5x4 was because everyone’s a photographer now—whether with a mobile phone or a high-end DSLR—and I had to ask myself what differentiates me from them? So by using a 5x4 I was actually making a very public statement that I was there to take a photograph of this landscape.

People were quite interested in what I was doing but, more importantly, they didn’t feel threatened. If I’d been on a beach walking around with a 35mm camera I suspect people would have felt a lot more threatened. Funnily enough, I was getting quite spontaneous pictures with a very cumbersome piece of equipment. It would take five or ten minutes to set the camera up, so people would get bored with watching me and end up carrying on with what they were doing. There are only a couple of frames where you can see in the distance that someone’s looking at me, but generally it’s almost as if I wasn’t there.

AMc: What other considerations were there?

SR: I shot using only a 150mm lens, which is pretty much how the human eye sees, and I always wanted, where possible, to have an elevated position as this gives a greater sense of the people and their relationship to the landscape. So often I would photograph from the roof of my motorhome.

I wanted to explore the notion of leisure because often this is something we do quite subconsciously, and what people do with their leisure time not only says something about them as individuals, but us as a collective, too. I also knew I only wanted to work outside, to give a sense of the pastoral. And even though I worked in cities, too, there is still a sense of people gravitating towards the green spaces.

AMc: Why England and not Britain?

SR: Because of devolution, and with Scotland and Wales having a lot more local power politically and to some extent economically, there is a sense of Welshness and Scottishness, but people often see being passionate about being English as rather dirty. I deliberately put the flag of St. George on the cover because I wanted to be quite provocative and suggest there don’t have to be right-wing connotations to it. I’m not suggesting I’m a nationalist, but I do find it interesting how people align themselves with a geographical border.

Saunton Sands, Devon, 23rd May 2008

AMc: Would you say the photographs are romantic?

SR: I was certainly inspired by romantic paintings of England, but even so there are probably only one or two images you would describe as picturesque. I did deliberately photograph in quite evocative light sometimes to try to generate a particular feeling, but yes, I did want to create quite beautiful pictures—and unashamedly so.

AMc: Thank you very much Simon.

SR: Thank you.

Ailsa

We English, by Simon Roberts
Hardback, 112 pages
Published by Chris Boot Ltd. 
Price £26.20

(U.S. link)

For more information visit www.we-english.co.uk

A major exhibition of the work will be on show at the National Media Museum, Bradford, from March 12th to September 8th, 2010

Motherland, by Simon Roberts
Hardback, 192 pages
Published by Chris Boot Ltd
Price £15.75

(U.S. link)

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My friend Ailsa McWhinnie, now a freelance writer and book editor, was founding editor of Black & White Photography magazine. My thanks to both Ailsa and Simon. —MJ

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Featured Comment by Len Salem: "I would also recommend Simon Roberts' blog. You can go back through its archives and see how the project matured, how he interacted with contributors to the blog to research ideas for his work, how the project grew, the final sequencing and editing and so on—as well as lots of interesting asides of a photographic nature on the way. I find it really interesting to follow such a motivated photographer as he develops his work."

There's a small show of Andy Warhol Polaroids of 1970s and '80s sports stars at Danziger Projects, partly viewable online. You can also read Kathy Ryan's admiring comments at the World's Greatest Photography Magazine. (Note that this appears in a fashion section, not an arts one.)

I'm not sure I agree with her about the intrinsic merit of the photographs; seems more like celebrity culture cutting both ways, with the photos themselves left over as talismans, artifacts. Is it really so deathlessly fresh to picture Jack Nicklaus nuzzling a golf club, Ali with his shirt off, Dorothy Hamill with her skates slung around her neck? Not convinced. Of course I haven't seen the actual...artifacts. The show is up until December 12th at Danziger Gallery, 534 West 24th Street, New York City.

The vagaries of taste
I was never grabbed very hard by Polaroids per se. Taste is a strange and mysterious thing—I love snapshots, have a protean appetite for looking at them, adore books of snapshot collections (in fact I have a veritable pile of snapshot books here that I've been meaning for some time to write up in a massive group review). Show me a large enough pile of snapshots and I will find you an inadvertent masterpiece, with all the charm and magic that only serendipity can create. 

Above are two samples from a new group that Rodger Kingston recently uploaded to his SmugMug page of his Kingston collection. Of course we're not looking at "mere" snapshots there, but expertly chosen ones. Rodger is a rare connoisseur; his selections are, in effect, edited. Curated. I'm not saying "found" ephemera and snapshots are all I'd want to look at. Still, I have great natural affection for that stuff.

You'd think I'd love Polaroids. And I'm not saying I don't appreciate the high points—I think of Jamie Livingston's great archive, preserved by Hugh Crawford. You can't help but be moved by that. And yet, I've been meaning to write—trying to write—trying to find the right things to say—about The Impossible Project for some time now, and the words have a hard time coming. The only thing that come easily to mind are flip jokes about the appropriateness of the name. The project seems quixotic even to me, and I'm a very impractical guy.

Roped in
And the other day, when I bought PHOTO:BOX at Stan Banos's recommendation, Amazon's "Frequently Bought Together" come-on roped me in, and I bought The Polaroid Book along with it. It should be the kind of book I'd just love. Another copious, well-made, almost ridiculously high-value book (I mean, for less than eleven bucks, they're giving this away—it is a very generous and well-made book for that price—or twice or three times that price). It's part of Benedikt Taschen's 25th Anniversary Special Editions series (his is a story in itself). It has an incisive Introduction by the last Director of The Polaroid Collections, Barbara Hitchcock, and the selection of pictures is an embarrassment of riches. To circle around to where this started, there is even a Polaroid of Andy Warhol wielding his Big Shot. And yet, I've paged through The Polaroid Book three times now, and can't sort out how to feel about it. I like it. I just don't love it.

There's something so self-conscious about Polaroids....

It doesn't seem enough to say that anyone who loves Polaroids should own it. I know there are people who really love Polaroids, who are genuinely excited about, and fervently hopeful for, The Impossible Project. Here's where I need a guest reviewer, someone with deep, real enthusiasm for that particular medium. Maybe I should ask Hugh....

Mike

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Featured Comment by charlie: "I have owned The Polaroid Book in its last release for I think four years. Since then, it has become my go-to book when I need a good dose of pure photography. Were I forced to choose just three photo books to have for eternity , this one would be in that list. I also prefer the cover as it mimics the old Polaroid logo and packaging."

Mike replies: Now you're making me feel bad...what's wrong with me, anyway?

Featured Comment by Sean Murphy: "I'm trying to decide, was it instant photography or Polaroids that I loved. I love slides and instant photographs, because they are the actual picture. Made right in your camera that you can view directly without intervening tools and tech. But the slide still had to be developed somewhere else in space and time. With instant, the alchemy of the darkroom tray happened in broad daylight as you watched, right in your hand! Its getting hard to appreciate in our digital-camera-wifi-upload-to-the-web times, the satisfaction of making a picture on the spot that you could give to a friend or family member on the spot.

"Shooting with folding Polaroids using 'wink lights' and 3000 speed B&W that you had to rub that acrid fixer on, the sleek metal and leather of the SX-70 and pack film that always came with fresh batteries, sometimes morphing the image with a stylus for goofy effects, waving the print by the white tab at the bottom, as if that would make it develop faster, all the variations that came after down to the cameras for kids that shot little Polaroid stickers.... I guess I do love Polaroids, they were just plain fun!"

Featured Comment by Hugh Crawford: "Well Mike since you handed me that can of worms and that fine looking can-opener...

"As a fan and for many years a user of Polaroid, a big fan of Andy Warhol and his work, and sort of an obsessive about on-axis and penumbral lighting, I thought I'd like the Warhol show at the Danziger Gallery more, but it didn't do that much for me. The best thing about it was that it was that it is right across the street from the Bruce Davidson show at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, 505 West 24th Street. that show is quite wonderful. It's an interesting show to view with the Robert Frank show up at the Met.

"Odd coincidence number one: today's photo on my wife's blog otbkb.com was taken walking out of that gallery last Friday.

"Maybe it's the white seamless backgrounds or something, but those Big Shot photos look a little to much like they were made with a photocopier or a stat camera. Writing that down makes me think 'of course Andy wanted to become a photocopier, well duh...', but the qualities of the Big Shot pictures shot against white seamless that are so good when they are made into silkscreen paintings just don't do a whole lot for me in their original form.

"It's funny, I took a lot of photos of Warhol, and I took a lot of Polaroids of artists , but no Polaroids of Warhol.

"Odd coincidence number 2: a video of Andy Warhol and Truman Capote taken while I was photographing them showed up on youtube recently; I think it was maybe my first job after college. 

Hugh photographing Warhol not with a Polaroid. Note Alfred Stieglitz moustache.

"As for Polaroids in general, for me a lot of what makes them interesting it that they straddle the boundary of being an image and an object. Unlike most modern photographic prints, a Polaroid is fixed in its final form in the context of its making. A Polaroid portrait has most often been held by its subject at the time of its creation. These are qualities that Polaroids share with Daguerreotypes and wetplate collodion processes like tintypes and ambrotypes, but I think that the quality of the Polaroid being an artifact possibly held by its subject is much stronger with the Polaroids.

"The other interesting thing about Polaroids is not so much that they are imperfect and idiosyncratic visual interpretations of the world (because all photographic processes are imperfect and idiosyncratic visual interpretations of the world) but that the success of the Polaroid practitioner depends on anticipating and committing to that translation before the moment of exposure.

"Conventional late 20th century photo processes all allow or even demand a considerable amount of post exposure manipulation and visualization, and digital photography demands even more, whereas Polaroid demands that all decisions about the image be made prior to exposure.

"I just happen to be in the midst of cataloging another Polaroid based project (it's Mnemonic, it's Mimetic, and it's Memetic!) that encompasses all of this.

"Odd coincidence number 3: Andrew Lampert, Czar of the Cosmic Baseball Association, figures mnemonically in the the Robert Frank show, the Jamie Livingston Project, and this other thing I'm working on."

Featured Comment by Bill Poole: "I love The Polaroid Book, and I have always loved Polaroids for many of the reasons already mentioned. They hold a fascination as one-of-a-kind objects, like Daguerreotypes and tintypes. And they do have a view-camera-like quality, since the image is recorded full-sized. And then there is that soft color, which Cosindas exploited so expertly—Portra-like before Portra came along. Ya gotta love it—I did, and my Polaroids from the '70s are among my favorite images (and not just because my friends all look so young in them)."