Introduction

With the end of Expressing Your Vision in sight, I was fortunate to travel to New York to celebrate my birthday.  As with almost everywhere I go, I took a camera with me but instead of simply taking holiday photographs as souvenirs of the visit, I decided to practice the whole concept of EYV.   Prior to this course, I had prepared for a holiday by assembling my camera gear from my large collection which was driven by a whole host of potential ideas of what I might shoot while there.  What I’d learned by Assignment 5 of the course was that the equipment is actually not all that important unless there is a specific project or genre that we have in mind.  My desire to use as much of my collection of cameras as possible on a trip was both tiresome from a carriage point of view and wasteful as much of it went unused.   For this trip, I decided to take a single, simple camera system that I could easily carry around the city and by limiting the equipment choices I could make while there, I was able to start thinking about what I wanted to practice photographing instead.   In the end, I took my Nikon D300 with a 35mm prime and a pair of zoom lenses (one tele and one wide angle).

Once in the city, I started to think about how I felt about the place.  This was the fourth time I would be visiting New York, so the usual tourist stuff had already been more than covered.  For this trip, I wanted to explore the way of life and create photographs that reflected how I see New Yorkers in their environment.  I also wanted to take conventional scenes that ‘everyone shoots’ and seek an alternative way of looking at them.

The first experience when we landed was the traditional New York winter weather, very cold and for one day only, snow.  We took a walk up to Times Square from our hotel in lower Manhattan and I took my camera with the 35mm lens attached.  I shot the following images.

In Photo 1, I saw the blizzard of sleet ahead of us with Times Square emerging from the gloom and what struck me was the way that New Yorkers take this weather in their stride. We were tourists so we had to go out exploring, but these people were just going about their business and were prepared for the conditions.  It contrasted with my own experiences of similar weather in the UK, where the place almost shuts down at the first sight of snow.   What made this image for me was it being set against the bustling Times Square, which was a destination for these people in midtown Manhattan.

Photo 2 was a scene we came across in the street as we approached Times Square.  The see-saws were a permanent fixture in the pedestrian zone and I guess popular during the rest of the year.  The weather wasn’t stopping these girls from enjoying them and the contrast of the struggling man carrying the sign against the snow, with the spectators set this image off for me.   In both photographs, I was practicing looking and seeing, which is something I wasn’t really actively doing before I started EYV. 

The next day, the snow had disappeared completely and we woke to the weather we would have for the rest of the trip; very cold but sunny with clear skies.  The danger here would be that I could fall back into shooting ‘nice’ exposures of interesting subjects, rather than creating something different.  I decided to simplify my shooting workflow by using just the 35mm lens with the camera set to 400 ISO, and to leave the lens at its widest aperture, which was f/1.8.  This meant that I was setting boundaries for the camera (and for me) where I could only achieve a perfect exposure if the camera could adequately control the shutter speed.  Given the brightness of the day, it could easily be the case that the shutter wouldn’t go fast enough and overexpose.  I was curious to see what the photographs would look like if that happened as well as how my own intervention with the shutter speed might impact the final image.  I had been used to shooting manually, but this could be interesting.  To make things more so, I switched off the automatic preview display on the back of the camera so I couldn’t ‘chimp’; an expression for pawing at the screen to see what you’ve shot.  Now, my DSLR would behave more like my older mechanical film cameras.

The next sequence of shots show the result of taking this approach.

Photo 3 was shot quickly in the subway station after I saw the guy framed alone in the train window.  His impassive expression as he looks at his phone, sums up what taking an underground train means to me.  People are isolated from each other, even though they all share the same tiny space.

Photo 4 was a pagoda in Central Park.  I was struck by the symmetry of the composition and the harshness of the light as it streamed through the gaps in the structure.  The camera overexposed this image which made it even more dramatic.

Photo 5 was as the sun went down in the late afternoon.  I saw the gentleman walking slowly ahead of me and the two women approaching, seemingly engaged in conversation but with one distracted by her phone.  The complete disconnect between the characters in this photograph appealed to me in that it reinforced how disconnected city life is.   The whole scene is framed by the scaffolding of the building which reminded me of Lorca DiCorcia’s work when shooting Heads.

Photo 6 was in the evening on the way back to the hotel.  The city comes alive in artificial light at this time, so I wanted to emphasise the clinical use of  it to light the roads.  It reminded me of my Assignment 4 submission, which had the theme of revealing dark corners.  I manually opened up the shutter for this image which created the movement and brightness contrasted against the blue sky of the early evening.

I had certainly moved away from what I was used to with this series of shots.  I quickly got into the rhythm of trying to say something as I saw a composition and then trying to make the message have impact.  My wife was recently describing the shooting of Assignment 5 to a friend of ours and she said that once I had the idea for an image, I could then fall back on my technical knowledge to make the picture look how I wanted.   The main challenge was to understand what I wanted to create rather than how to create it.  The next series of images show how my thinking has changed over the course of EYV.

Photo 7 was a piece of graffiti that made me smile when I saw it.  It’s a humorous take on ‘Post No Bills’ that is often painted on walls of building sites in New York in an effort to stop posters or advertising.  When I looked at the area around the writing, I saw that some bills certainly needed paying.  The complimentary colours of the wall and the rust also made the image pleasing on the eye.

Photo 8 was one of a number of shots I took when I saw this attractive young couple emerging from the shadows.  I had first noticed the high contrast between light and shadow and hoped that I could achieve the symmetry when cropping square.  This was the moment that worked as they are slowly being revealed by the sun.

Photo 9 was another scene that could be described as ‘only in New York’.  The two dogs riding the skateboard seemed like the most natural thing in the world, but the other people on the sidewalk were amused by the sight.  I didn’t have a composition that included them, but I noted the comedic slogan on the backpack of the dog-walker which created the impression of humour that I was looking for.

Photos 10 and 11 were shot in the iconic Grand Central Terminus.   I’ve seen thousands of pictures of the main hall, so I thought about how I could shoot it differently.  I’ve seen the room many times and it always has a cathedral feel to me.  The huge windows that Berenice Abbott famously photographed in the 1930s, stream light into the space, supplemented by the artificial lighting.  Oddly, the beautiful ceiling is often left dark when the whole room is photographed, which I’ve always felt was a shame.  This magnificent building is to me then, a cathedral for the traveller.  My photographs show the movement of people through the terminus as they pass through an almost divine light.

Photo 12 was taken when we went to see the iconic Flatiron Building which again has been photographed many times.  Disappointingly, the building was undergoing a huge amount of renovation work, which meant that it was entirely covered in scaffolding.  I decided that a conventional image of the building would look boring or worse still, not easily identifiable as being of the beautiful wedge shape.  I elected to shoot into the sun and capture it in starburst as it edges past the building’s knife-like prow.  This composition reminded me of Brassaï’s shots of Paris where light was used to envelope the subject rather than simply light it.  I was particularly happy to capture the birds in flight, which contrasted with the aircraft vapour trail.

Conclusion

In seeking to shoot differently on this trip, I rediscovered my love of photography that had been dented slightly during Assignment 5.  I feel as though I’m getting better at letting go of my preconceived ideas of what photography is and what photographs mean to me.  Although I appreciate that I’ve only really just begun to develop as an artist and that there is a great deal more of this degree ahead of me, I’ve had a lot of feedback from friends and family.  The majority of it centres on how I’ve started to chose different subjects in a less obvious way, adding visual tension as well as humour when able.  It’s clear to me that the influence of the artists researched and the feedback from my tutor has begun to shape who I want to be as a photographer.

 

Introduction

Having completed Expressing Your Vision, it was time to reflect on how this course has gone and more importantly what had I learned from it? I’ve said throughout that my comfort zone in photography has always been the technical aspects. When I started this course, I mistakenly thought that there would be more of the technical aspects of taking photographs. My first impression of the coursework was one that I would take through the whole course; one of finding a way to convey meaning in not just one image, but through a series. This was a concept that I was completely unfamiliar with. When I received the feedback on Assignment 5, one of the comments made was about what I would be doing with my photography if I wasn’t doing this course. At the time, I was at a pretty low ebb, considering not continuing with the study because I have a very busy life generally. The suggestions behind the comment was that learning how to make a photograph is one thing, but progressing with it as an art form was something entirely different. The first thing I learned from EYV was that becoming a photographic artist is hard. In my case, with 30 years of engineering behind me and a strong interest in collecting and using film cameras, this was reinforced throughout the year that EYV took to complete.

The course started with the introductory assignment ‘Square Mile’, which I found to be a great introduction to the idea of a collection of photographs that tell as story. Oddly, I didn’t find the task of coming up with a theme all that difficult because I was staying in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales. The beautiful scenery offered a huge variety of subjects concentrated in a small area and because I’ve spent many summers there, it was a square mile that I had a great familiarity with. When I had the feedback from my tutor on the assignment, I was struck by how my imagination had gone a little crazy, the main point being that I could have had multiple themes from my original idea. The concept of less is more is something I have been aware of in my photography before, but only in making a single image, e.g. a landscape with a point of interest in the foreground but without distracting elements in the rest of the frame. Keeping the ‘message’ of the series simple was a new experience for me. Square Mile taught me to think about the subject but also to be wary of diluting the impact of the series by over complicating the theme. I see this pattern of overall restraint in most of the photographers that I’ve studied during EYV.

I progressed to Assignment 2 which presented a new challenge; making the series challenge the viewer to see the connection that unified the photographs and to make them work as a set. My subject was inspired by seeing a film where a particular lighting technique drew attention to the eye area. It wasn’t the light itself that my idea developed from, but the attention to the eyes. I started to research the idea that people can get a sense of someone’s emotions through looking at the eyes rather than the whole face. I found the subject fascinating and ended up with a series that I was very happy with. The feedback on the assignment suggested looking at how actors were lit during the film noire era of cinema, which I duly did. What was a more important comment, though was the need for me to test my images on other people. I had freely admitted that I wasn’t really interested in the EYV email group that I was subscribed to as I didn’t really observe the feedback as all that constructive. However, I started to share my images with a number of people that I trusted to give me an honest appraisal of my work. It could be argued that this was a safe idea for me; that my chosen reviewers knew something about my photography already. I refute this, though as I’m someone who gains benefit from being able to challenge perspectives; I didn’t get the sense that I could readily do this with the EYV group. The feedback was very interesting with it being clear that people saw the obvious and less obvious emotions in the eyes of my subjects. One person found the collection disturbing as I had presented it in its entirety as a 3 x 3 panel of images rather than sequentially. She could see the merits of the collection, but found herself not wanting to study them closely. I was later reminded of this by the comment Nan Goldin made about how we look at things in the social media era; a fleeting glance at Instagram on a mobile phone not being an appreciation of art. I learned from this the value of a variety of viewpoints and, more importantly that it doesn’t matter to me that people like the photographs, just that they react to them.

On to the most challenging assignment of the course, The (in)decisive Moment I found this really difficult as the whole idea of looking and shooting in support of Cartier-Bresson’s iconic concept terrified me. I could have broadened my perspective on it at this point, but it was still fairly early in the course and I hadn’t yet fully appreciated the importance of that. I chose to shoot in support of the decisive moment because it made me uncomfortable and got my inspiration from Martin Parr, a photographer that I greatly admire for his often humourous perspectives on divisive or controversial subjects. I looked for moments where I would wait for some humourous form of partial obscuration before taking the photograph. Suffice to say I made things very difficult for myself as not only do I not feel confident with street-style photography, I had to look for something particular to shoot. The more I looked actively looked for the moment, the more elusive they became. I reached a point where I had 3 images when I needed between 6 and 10 for the submission and all inspiration had abandoned me. My wife took me out for lunch to take my mind off the frustration and I took my camera with me as usual. It was only when I stopped thinking about it, did I start to see moments happening in front of me. I shot another 3 images and submitted them, which was essentially the minimum that I needed. The feedback that I got pretty much echoed that and I elected to respond by continuing to look for subjects whenever I was out with my camera, resulting in 2 more shots added to the collection months later. What I learned here is that the mind works much more effectively when not being put under pressure to perform with frustration preventing any form of creativity in me at least. In conjunction with this, I also learned that a series can always be improved upon even after we think it’s finished. Although OCA made this clear in the guidance about responding to tutor feedback, I didn’t learn this lesson until I saw it for myself. I think I now have 8 really strong images for Assignment 3 which resulted from me walking away and then re-visiting it much later.

Assignment 4 was much more in my comfort zone as it was an exercise more in the technical appreciation of light. I used the opportunity to try to combine both the quality of the image and a theme of revealing details in dark spaces with artificial light. At this point in the course, I realised that all of my work to this point revolved around a theme of ‘revelation’ which I decided to continue with. My images were shot around my home town of Malvern at night and in the main I was happy with them. There weren’t any significant lessons learned as result of this assignment other than the feedback that I needed to flex my creativity muscles when it came to the final assignment of the course, Assignment 5.

Assignment 5 was the completely open-ended brief “Photography is Simple”. Unlike the previous assignments, I settled on portraiture as the theme for my series fairly quickly. It developed further when I combined portraiture with another aspect that I really don’t feel comfortable with, self portraiture. I intensely dislike being photographed and am inherently a very private man so the challenge of making a series about me with revelation as the theme was going to be very difficult.  The feedback from my tutor was that the series was an accomplished from a technical perspective, but fell back on what I was clearly most comfortable with.  He also said that my research was limited to a small number of photographers that I admired, some of whom worked over 50 years ago.   The feedback was fair and I sought to address it with more research into the suggested artists [1] and by re-shooting 3 of the series [2].  The key learning from this assignment was that I should look for inspiration across a genre, not just with artists I like or admire.  It’s as useful to understand why a piece of work provokes a negative response when viewing as that might work well in a different scenario or combined with other elements.  The result of mixing styles can produce a higher level of creativity.  I believe I achieved that with the revised photograph One in Assignment 5.  I mixed the visuals of Hosoe and Woodman to create something that my wife referred to as perhaps the most creative photograph I’d shot to date. I also learned from Assignment 5 something that I’d experienced throughout the course, that it was good to move away from what is comfortable.  Until this assignment, the piece of work I had found most difficult had been Assignment 3 because of my belief that I was somehow intruding when taking photographs of people.  Overall, I was happy with that re-worked collection and delighted with how Assignment 5 turned out.   I’ve changed as a photographer over the duration of Expressing Your Vision and am excited to see where my study takes me next.

References

[1] Fletcher, R, 2019, “Looking at Contemporary Portrait Artists”, blog post, https://wordpress.com/post/richardfletcherphotography.photo.blog/1420

[2] Fletcher, R, 2019, “Re-working Assignment 5”, blog post, https://wordpress.com/post/richardfletcherphotography.photo.blog/1491