Battle Photos: Figures

In the spirit of Amy Stein’s Battle Photos, I bring you work by Lissa Rivera and Bill Durgin:

© Lissa Rivera

vs.

© Bill Durgin

See Lissa’s figure work in her blog and take a look at Bill’s website then go at it with the compare and contrast.

work I love right now

What photography is making me happy lately?


Ye Rin Mok’s work

Kevin J Miyazaki ’s tinytinygroupshow #6

Pieter Hugo’s Nollywood

This image by Raina Kirn

Vincent Laforet’s from-above diving shots from the olympics on 8/23/08

and I’m still in love with Jesse Burke’s work from Intertidal Photo

Young artist voices

I really enjoyed reading the Diaries of a Young Artist feature in the July/August issue of Art on Paper. The only problem I had with it is that all the artists seem much busier than I am. But the introduction mentions that they’re all in their 30s, so I guess it’s more tolerable since they have a couple years on me. Maybe ;)

If only I lived in NY

Then I could be applying for this job with Amy Stein and be working on files like this:

© Amy Stein

Sounds like a dream job to me.

shooting for fun

I remember that when I was at NESOP and I would use the expression “shooting for fun” someone would invariably respond: “shouldn’t that be what all shooting is?” I guess I use it to describe shooting when I have no plan, no agenda, and where I’m more interested in just having a good time and enjoying the process than in the end result. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately, despite my schedule getting more and more busy. Here are some late-night portraits of trash that people have left outside in my neighborhood. I’ll post some of my film work (totally different stuff) once I get it all developed and scanned.

Literally “working” on my project

Over the summer I’ve continued shooting for my series on Twist of Fate Farm, in Dunbarton, New Hampshire. This is the farm that my father, Ray, and his partner Jen own, which is small, all-natural, and of course struggling. There’s more background information on my website if you’re interested. What’s new for me that I want to discuss is that something has changed recently and I’m curious to see how it will affect the project – which is that I’m now working on the farm as well as documenting it.

This mostly came out of my own need for paid work. I’ve learned that it’s difficult to concentrate on making great photos while also constantly worrying about rent and bills, and often having to prioritize non-photography-related jobs over shooting or promoting myself. Fortunately I have a variety of skills and have been managing somehow, but just barely. When my father offered me some work each week on the farm I gladly accepted. Keeping a distance has never been desirable to me with any documentary project, and I saw it as not only a way to spend more time being at and learning about the farm that I’m shooting, but a way to pay the bills at the same time. It’s a win-win, right?

Then I realized the first morning I worked that photos were happening right in front of me, and instead of holding my camera, I was holding a shovel. This was frustrating, and I soon learned that having my camera nearby helps a little bit, but I generally have to separate working for the farm and working for myself in order to get anything done. It started bothering me that I had to do this because each moment I spend there without camera in hand, I know I’m missing things.

It took me some time before I finally came to peace with this division of my attention. I realized that every day I’m home in Boston, I’m also missing things on the farm. Every day that I work for others as an assistant, doing administrative work, or any of the other various jobs I’ve been doing this summer, I’m also missing things on the farm. In fact right now as I type this, I’m missing things! But those working days are necessary in order to secure the shooting, editing and printing days that the project needs.

So my resolution is that when I’m working at Twist of Fate Farm, at least I’m working where I am immersed in the place that I am documenting, spending time with my subjects and constantly learning more and more about the farm and what it takes to run it. That definitely doesn’t hurt. I actually think it’s teaching me more about what the lives of my subjects are like, and to explore areas and facets of the farm that I hadn’t paid much attention to before. Plus it hasn’t been difficult to find extra time to shoot there as well.

I’m interested though, to hear what others think. I know there are a great many photographers out there who have focused on subjects very close to them, whether it’s family, a workplace, a home, etc. I’m wondering if any folks think that time spent with subjects not shooting has been a problem (or a benefit), and if working for a place one is documenting – like I’m doing – has any positive/negative (or just different) affects on a project.

Honestly, I think that if it was up to me and I could do it however I wanted to, I’d live there in order to make the pictures I want.

If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough. -Robert Capa

Seeing is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph. -Andre Kertesz

Photos © Steph Plourde-Simard

confidence

Twice in the last week I’ve had someone describe me as being confident while shooting, an adjective I would probably never in a million years think to use to describe myself or my shooting style. It’s not that I’m terribly timid or unsure, just that confident doesn’t seem a very fitting word. So either I’m unknowingly tricking other people or my own perception of myself is flawed— so what sort of baggage or extra connotations am I bringing to the word that lead me to shy away from using it to describe myself?

Maybe I have some sort of misconceived notion that confidence = feeling 100% sure, knowing ahead of time, never questioning oneself. Writing that out seems ridiculous, but I know in part it must be true (that I think it). I also worry that I avoid thinking of myself as confident because confident is only a short step away from cocky or conceited or all of the things I never want to be. There is a line, though, and avoiding the line by not ever coming close to it isn’t really the answer.

I was also told in the last week (and many many times in the last couple years) that confidence is everything– I see this in the world around me. My peers who are most confident get the jobs and the opportunities. They believe that they deserve the work and can do the jobs well; they convince the client or their employers because they are confident, they believe. I do my best to “fake it until I make it” but I have a sneaking suspicion that life is forever faking it but never making it. That kind of freaks me out. I suppose it isn’t faking if someone really believes… so is that the key, really believing? How does one get to that point?

I’m seriously interested: What makes someone a confident shooter? And what can someone do to feel/be more confident?

Steph interviews Allison Pharmakis

Throughout school I was always amazed at the work of Allison Pharmakis, particularly the documentary of her drug-addicted family and how she navigated telling this intense story about subjects she has a very personal connection to. Her images are very moving and honest to me and capture intimate moments in a way that only someone who is so in tune, in touch, and paying close attention to her subjects can do. Allison shoots editorial as well and I also really enjoy that work, which you can see on her website.

You chose very personal subject matter for your project Tell Me You Love Me. Will you talk a bit about how it felt to document your family and their relationships to drugs and to each other?

Over the past few years, I have watched as addiction has progressed within my extended family, namely in the lives of a few specific family members. The project actually chose me. It was an organic development, really. It was subject matter that had been tip-toed around in my family. Photography for me needs to be direct and truth-telling. I don’t like to cover up the harsh realities with sugar coated fantasy.

It was a difficult project that required me to constantly check in with myself and make sure I was mentally prepared to handle the chaos. There are small children who have been affected by this disease and most of the project was geared towards giving them a voice. It required a delicate balance of true documentation and of play. In hindsight, that combination may have been my saving grace.

With addiction, the substance takes on a presence which is almost human. So the relationships my family has to drugs and to each other is strikingly similar. There are a lot of secrets and there exists a constant sense of push and pull.

What do you see as the significance of projects like these, where a single family or subject’s lives are documented? How do you find that others relate to or are moved by the project? Are you working to tell a larger or more universal story than theirs, or not?

For me, isolating a specific family or individual in order to tell their story is important. I find that it helps me to reach into a situation with more clarity that way. If I had been documenting something open and less detail specific such as drug addicts, I would have a harder time trying to reign in a specific aim or message. I would get lost in what I am trying to say because there are so many facets to that area – so many lives warped. I have found that in choosing this one family, I am able to be aware of the nuances, the changes happening in each person even in the most subtle gesture. I can lend my attention and stay true to my aim.
Most of the feedback I have gotten from people who’ve seen the book has been a look of shock. Followed by them asking me about the children and the family and some have added their own stories that had been triggered by an image.

During the course of this project it has become clear to me that part of my own story had been infused. My own addiction echoed in the photographs. My own childhood emotions bounced back to me through the eyes of the little girls. I began to see that this story was not just about this one family. It is a story of wanting love and of the various routes we journey down in order to try and find what we think we need.

What do you see as upcoming challenges for you as an emerging photographer?

I see my upcoming challenges as ones of balance. The realities of human need (ha ha) such as food and shelter and transportation have become my first and foremost responsibilities. So finding time to continue with my work and keep myself available to make supplementary income has been a strange adventure which is gratefully subject to change! Also, locating funding to continue on with Tell Me You Love Me is yet another challenge.

What projects are you working on or continuing right now?

I have a few different mini projects evolving right now, which happen to walk the line between documentary and editorial. I am about to start back on the Tell Me You Love me project. It is far from being complete, for there is a well of discovery there. I did need a break from that for a while to recharge my batteries and to give myself a lot of love…

Note from Steph: Tell Me You Love Me, the book, is for sale on Blurb.com.

Photos © Allison Pharmakis

Beaches

This week I spent a few days in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. It’s the only piece of ocean I remember going to as a kid, while living in rural, working-class towns in southern NH. I also skipped a lot of school to hang out there as a teenager. I was pleasantly surprised during my visit this week to see that not much has changed (I know, when do I ever say I’m happy that nothing has changed? Who am I?) And I found myself not only shooting, but planning for more and thinking about the long-term. I would love to spend more time photographing there, and realized my thoughts and motivation were mainly driven by the idea of documenting the place and the people who populate it. I am fascinated by the fact that places I used to hang out at are still there, that you can still play many arcade games for a quarter (there are hardly any new games, actually), and that the social/economic class of people who go to Hampton Beach for either a day or a week, has pretty much remained the same, despite the fact that this is one of the few vacation spots I know of where most of the inhabitants are affected by the economy. I wonder if this will change, and if so how long it will take. Will it be slow? Will it happen quickly, with a few large land sales or condo developments? What will the social landscape look like 5 years from now?

These are all questions I need to answer through photographing. I think this might be a new personal project of mine. I’ve struggled with how to show a location changing through images before, and this might be what I need to tackle that head-on.

By the way, here’s an image I took at Revere Beach in 2007, an oceanfront that has changed a lot in recent years.

On Format

After reading not one, but two recent posts about format, and thinking about my own internal debates on the subject this weekend, I knew I needed to hash things out in a post. When I was thinking a few months ago about what to shoot next besides more self-portraits, I wanted to jump into doing some of the stuff that’s more outside my comfort zone— shooting strangers (which terrified me) and shooting film (which I loved to do but didn’t feel as skilled at doing as working digitally).

I’m already on my way to getting comfortable with shooting strangers, but in the initially uncomfortable situation of shooting people I don’t know, of feeling the weight of their expectations, I’m more often than not leaving the Mamiya in my camera bag and reverting to what makes me feel more competent and sure, shooting with my DSLR. The thing is, I really do want to be shooting more film, and not just because I want to push my limits or brush up on certain skills. For me, the tools I use have a dramatic effect on the end result. Not only are there differences in color, tonality, sharpness, and depth of field, but the emotional tone of my images changes, not as a result of the format but because of the way I approach shooting with a different camera.

I’m not sure I can really explain it, but the world looks different through the viewfinder of my 645 compared to through the viewfinder of my DSLR. I don’t look at the configuration of objects on a plane, but rather see the expansive space, see the looseness and openness of the world rather than how tight and controlled it might be. Darius Himes explains that “the different physical interface with the tool leads to a corresponding different mental interface with one’s surroundings. Walking around with a 35mm SLR is simply physically different than walking around with a tripod and an 8×10.” And even though my DSLR and my 645 are both handheld cameras, the weight of my Mamiya, the sound of the shutter and motor drive, the smooth glide of the focusing ring, and the finite number of exposures on each roll give it the feeling of being special somehow, and that affects the way that I shoot. I shoot with that feeling, a sort of tingly excitement, inside of me. I think that feeling shows in my images (I’m basing this assertion on an admittedly small sample of less than a thousand frames— I’ll get back to you once I’ve shot a lot more film). I feel like the images are more gentle, less cold. I don’t know if that’s the way I want my images to look (I promise that I’m not putting film on some sort of pedestal or privileging it as more real or arty than digital, because depending on the subject matter I many times prefer the look of digitally-created images) but I do know by now that I can’t force my work to be something it’s not. I am excited to develop some of the portraits I’ve taken recently and compare them to the digital ones I’ve made of the same subjects.

Liz Kuball writes that “maybe the projects a person is drawn to are the ones that are also best suited to the camera he likes. Maybe the two decisions are nearly inseparable.” I wonder if my uncertainty over the format for this project and uncertainty about the content/tone/direction are linked; I’m sure they are. The question is, which decision will come first, the format or the direction? Or maybe the two decisions really are inseperable. Maybe it will just fall into place and the decision will be made through the process of working and making more images.  That’s my plan, anyway.

alive and feeling good

After a career-related crisis this weekend, today I feel alive with the promise of unlimited photographic possibilities— and no, that’s not the many delicious homemade espresso beverages talking. In the past few days I’ve shot three complete strangers and not only are the images better and better with each session, but I’ve also been pleasantly surprised at how wonderful and generous people can be. For the first time in a long while I feel at least a little bit competent, feel like I’m on the path to something that might end up to be great. I don’t want to show any of the work just yet… I want to sit with it, make sure I still like it when a little time has passed. Suddenly I feel superstitious. But as it turns out, shooting strangers isn’t nearly as scary as I thought it would be, not nearly as awkward or as hard. I’m excited to keep shooting, can’t wait really, and that’s a feeling I’ve been searching for and feel so grateful to have found, even if it doesn’t last.

In unrelated news, I’ll have an image in the upcoming NESOP Alumni/40th Anniversary Show, and I was just asked if the school can use my image as the image to represent the show in its promotional materials… woo! I’m psyched, and a bit surprised that they chose my picture. This is it:

Quick update and Seesaw

Well, I’ve been in New Hampshire for much of the last week, shooting a bit at Twist of Fate Farm, but also working. More thoughts to come on what it’s like to be working semi-regularly at the farm I’ve been documenting for well over a year now. I’ve been thinking about it constantly and how it could affect the project.

But right now I’m about to disappear again for a few days to Hampton Beach, which I haven’t been to since I was a teenager. I plan to shoot while I’m there, but it’s also a vacation and so I’m really excited about the arcade and photo booth and people-watching.

Since I don’t want to leave you without anything of substance until later in the week, I’ll mention my favorites from the current issue of Seesaw, an online photo magazine. Click a photo below for the series it belongs to. I also want to plug Verve Photo: The New Breed Of Documentary Photographers which I read often and really enjoy.

China: Between Love and Duty, Rian Dundon

Latvia: Terminus Riga, Iveta Vaivod

Two Gallery Firsts

I had two gallery-related firsts this week:

1) I confirmed my first solo show at The Artists Foundation Gallery. November 8th to December 20th. I’m super excited.

2) I turned down my first offer of gallery representation, which was scary but necessary, because I knew it wasn’t a good fit for me.

I want to write about both of these but am exhausted and need to get up early tomorrow. Saturday will be a long day of driving to Vermont to (second) shoot a wedding and driving back super late only to wake up early again on Sunday to shoot a few models for a new project I’m working on. I guess that being busy making art and making money, no matter how little, is better than doing nothing.

Because I feel as though I haven’t offered anything interesting in this entry, I leave you with two related posts by Edward Winkleman:
Selling Solo vs. Working with a Gallery
Alternatives to the Commercial Gallery System for Selling One’s Art : Open Thread