Mitch Alland's "An Approach To Street Photography" Article

[Jack_Flesher]

So I feel that you, especially, might have a very firm notion of at least "street photgraphy" since there are enough famous photographers who we know stamped their names on that so-called "genre".

Okay Asher, UNCLE! (Sheesh... the vagaries of knowing each other too well and for a long time ) I do have a pretty firm notion of what those terms mean to me, but honestly I formed them probably 20 years ago and am still young enough (hah!) to understand that things change... So I really would like to use this opportunity to hear what others currently "doing it" and "viewing it" think -- I think it could provide some meaningful and beneficial dialog for all. But it won't be meaningful (at least to me) if I start off and impart my own biases to the discussion before others have responded. Fair enough?

,

 

[Ray West]

Snapshots are more important then you may first think. Anything 'journalism, afai'm concerned, is black and white and grainy. Street photography is taken in a street. Next?

As I ain't finished with Mitch yet, it ain't my parting shot. I'm actually going to have to spend some time looking at his photos.

 

[Asher Kelman]

Okay Asher, UNCLE! (Sheesh... the vagaries of knowing each other too well and for a long time ) I do have a pretty firm notion of what those terms mean to me, but honestly I formed them probably 20 years ago and am still young enough (hah!) to understand that things change... So I really would like to use this opportunity to hear what others currently "doing it" and "viewing it" think -- I think it could provide some meaningful and beneficial dialog for all. But it won't be meaningful (at least to me) if I start off and impart my own biases to the discussion before others have responded. Fair enough?

,

Exactly my point! I really do not want to be the guru and spoil it for everyone else and give my opinion first. Since you raised the subject, already knowing perfectly well what you have in your pants, you should show yours first! That's only fair.

Asher

 

[Ray West]

Its a bit late over here in the UK, need sleep...

But, can we move this bit, re street, journal snap photog. to a sep. thread. I always thought I didn't do it, other than snap. But, I have an idea to better illustrate what my previous response meant.

 

[Asher Kelman]

Its a bit late over here in the UK, need sleep...

But, can we move this bit, re street, journal snap photog. to a sep. thread. I always thought I didn't do it, other than snap. But, I have an idea to better illustrate what my previous response meant.

Ray,

That's our idea eventually. just wake up bright and bushy eyed and come back with your ideas. By that time, we might get Jack's contribution. Everyone hates to go first, but the guy who starts a card game better be prepared to put his money down on the table first. Jack, our have our attention!

Jack,

your question is entirely legitimate! This is an excellent topic. Photojournalistic wedding photography. That does sound new age and almost healthier than multigrain bread. Then street photography, what is that? These terms are bandied around but what do they mean? Since you say that you developed your ideas from as long as 20 years ago, and you yourself have not stopped thinking, you obviously have, as you say, some good idea of what these terms have meant and might mean now.

You obviously were impressed that when using your own long-held definitions as measures, some images packaged as street photography fall short. So, now I ask what your own ruler is by which you evaluated thse images purporting to be photojournalistic or Street in genre.

Yours, after all is the only definition we know of for sure, by which at least some of the images seem to come short and therefore be perhaps better termed "snapshots". I'm not saying you are wrong. Looking at them, one always wonders. But you at least, have some formed definition to reference.

So we'd like to know at least what is your own, even "years-back", idea of what should be included in the genre, "street photography".

Asher

 

[Maggie Osterberg]

The artist says it's more than a snapshot, so it's more than a snapshot. The viewer then gets to decide if she agrees or disagrees.

Simple.

(and there's no such thing as "street photography")

 

[Mitch Alland]

The Snapshot Aesthetic

It's 6:30am here and I'm off to London, where I may end up having 4-6 meetings a day as well as having to have breakfast, lunch and dinner with people, and will be back in Paris on Saturday night, which means that I don't have much time to formulate a complete answer to Jack's questions now but hope to pick this up when I'm back. In the meantime, let me just say that the snapshot is not necessarily a lower order of photographic life: there is, for example, the "snapshot aesthetic", a photographic outlook shared by some photographers like Eggleston. Of course a lot of people still don't like Eggleston because they think that many of his pictures are "just snapshot". As an aside, when I had seen Eggleston's work only in books I thought that each of his photographs posed the question, "why is this a photograph"; but when I saw his huge retrospective exhibition a few years ago at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, I saw in the original prints that his sense of colour was excellent and profound essential to the way his photographs spoke, something which doesn't come across in the books.

In the late sixties or early seventies Moriyama Daido published a seminal book called "Farewell to Photography", in which the pictures were barely snapshots, which implicitly attacked the "exquisiteness" of much photography that, in Moriyama's" view, took itself too seriously to sustain much meaning. More currently, his expressionist style of photography is often based on the snapshot aesthetic and burning and dodging is often intentionally made obvious by "haloes" as a reminder that "this is a photograoh" and not the"real thing".

—Mitch/Paris
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10268776@N00/

 

[Asher Kelman]

Mitch,

There is the photograph. It is what it is. It carries with it something beyond the recording of light in some pattern or other from "stuff" that reflect or transmit light.

Let's take your pictures. I rarely look at more than 10-20 pictures in collection. I looked at all of yours in the Bangkok collection. We could discuss copyright, good manners in photographing and objectifying people, dishonesty in smiling and at the same time stealing someone's likeness with no consent. This is obviously a flagrant violation of the sanctity of the individual. When the subject is in a 3rd world country, that village, those naked people not knowing our delight in deconstructing their ways of life, are not objects in an exhibition for our entertainment, but yet they are.

It's all a beautiful cruelty to "document" the homeless and show the sadness in poor children's eyes.

For all these sins and much more I am the worst! Yes I have a conscience and it hurts but I admit a need, an almost self-righteous but hollow drive to make a record in my camera of what is and what should not be, what delights and what makes me fear or be ashamed.

I say this as a background to looking at the Bangkok pictures. This is from memory.

Streams of people with no smiles. I've seen that too in New York but this is almost uniform, like observing people in suspended life as they go from place to place like parts of some giant wigget factory.

We see crowds of people and rows of dead fish waiting to be consumed by more hoards of somber people. There are animals hanging by hooks and animals with hollowed insides like some haunting spector of death had gone on his rounds having his will with the helpless.

Even people in restaurants seem to be mostly in a trance. Once in a while there is a smile as a girl is engaged. School girls stop a while and one covers her mouth to hide a laughter that youth still allows.

This is a somber vision, even with the neon lights and the obvious bustling commerce going on everywhere. But it's just a treadmill, a part the widget factory.

If this had been a poem, it would have been written by the brilliant poet who I both admire and revile, T.S. Elliott. What long poem would he have written on Bangkok? It for sure would be mocking and full of invective. However, he would not be indifferent or bother to ask, "Is this street Photography"

I must take the mass of Bangkok pictures as a poem and then hear in my mind a voice of Miles Davis, "The music is not in the notes you play, it's the music between the notes. The value of Mitch's feverish snapping of the shutter is not in any individual picture. Rather it's the life portrayed in Bangkok, there in a far off land with people passing, the fished packed, the dead animals picked, the portions eaten in the restaurant and the hand passed over the mouth of a girl so young that she still laughs.

Then, when we think we might know what we've seen, we realize it's not that at all, it's just another widget factory in B&W and we are locked inside.

So where in this does it matter a hair on a rat's arse what the collection is called?

Asher

 

[Imants K]

 

[Asher Kelman]

Imants,

i take that as a salutation and a thumbs up and a vote of confidence. Thanks for arriving here and welcome!

The music is still in my ears from your synthesis of music style by your car! Maybe you have pictures of that time, before people realized the world was already punked out!

Asher

 

[Ray West]

OK, the following hopefully shows how I , as a viewer would categorise the snapshot, street and photo journal styles. Each style, in my mind, overlaps, and is inclusive, and I could use different, better illustrations, but this is what I've chosen, to illustrate the inclusiveness.

So, here is the snapshot, as it was taken, more or less. Depending on the subject material, then horizons need not be horizontal, in this type of image.

Then, as a street photo. it generally, needs more of interest, perhaps some people, or some foreground activity. Usually, it is a crowded scene, plenty going on. But, in my mind, it captures the street part of the place.

then the photojournalist. Well, for me, it's associated with black and white newspaper images. Often they have text - so, you could invent your own, with this bland image (maybe just a circle, highlight round the two escaped convicts further up the street, or perhaps photo shop in a shoe in the bottom right corner ;-)

Earlier, I mentioned that a snapshot was more important than you think. It is a term often used in a derisory way,as are other phrases, such as 'spray and pray', 'point and shoot'', etc. All techniques are valid, if it gets you an image where you want it to be. But, generally, every image you see here is a snapshot, wrt the time the shutter is open, a frozen moment in time. In many circumstances, nothing else is possible, other than being there, with a camera, aim and fire. Once you have the image, you can decide what to do with it. If you can't get the image, then you are stuffed. This is a 'proper' snapshot from last evening.

Best wishes,

Ray

 

[Imants K]

Plot losing abounds ..................this is all starting to reach the nonsense level

 

[Kathy Rappaport]

Discussion

Sorry imant, but this is the very kind of discussions we have valued here at OPF and we have one rule of being respectful of the posters. Please read the header about what we do here at the top. BTW - Welcome to OPF

 

[Sean Reid]

Sorry imant, but this is the very kind of discussions we have valued here at OPF and we have one rule of being respectful of the posters. Please read the header about what we do here at the top. BTW - Welcome to OPF

Yes, I agree that respect is important here and I think that's something *several" people on the forum need to keep in mind. We won't always agree on ideas but there definitely are more and less constructive ways to debate them. Let's try to stick with the former.

One person's wisdom may be another person's nonsense so, if we disagree on an idea, lets stick to explaining our own positions and, if needed, challenging other positions respectfully.

Broad adjectives about a post or position, ie: stupid, ridiculous, asinine, foolish, etc. usually tend to inflame more than they advance the discussion.

Cheers,

Sean

 

[Mitch Alland]

Asher, thank you for looking at the book pictures so thoroughly and thinking about them so deeply. You certainly have a good understanding of the book and it's form which can be equivalent to a long narrative poem. By way of clarification, the young woman laughing are not school girls; they are university students: in Thailand university students wear uniforms as well. There is only one picture of school girls in this series: they're seen from the back and they're looking at a huge TV screen outdoor. Incidentally, the laughing university students were not laughing in reaction to my photographing them, although it may look like that: they were laughing among themselves at something funny that one of them said and then noticed me taking a picture of them.

On the snapshot discussion, I'm afraid I have a reaction similar to that of Imants.

—Mitch/London

 

[Asher Kelman]

Plot losing abounds ..................this is all starting to reach the nonsense level

I agree!

This is an open forum and so it is necessary, on a very rare occasion, with an important topic, for someone to pop in enough to see where we are going and succinctly balance discussion as a contagonist saying, "Nonsense!" Sometimes a jolt of reality allows us to rethink where we are.

Go to any decent fetus-inspired wedding, the bride wears white, there's a 30% chance minimum that the precious fetus in her womb is not related to the lucky groom and the preacher waxes on and on about the virtues if the couple matched in heaven! Now he may be totally right, but then it might be, "Nonsense!".

Tthere may be more validity in Ray's comments than not. Let me go back in the thread and be somewhat selfish.

No one else has addressed or perhaps even noted that I presented an entirely new way of looking at the very large number of pictures in Mitch's Bangkok. It looks at the feelings and ideas evoked by the body of work as each image is seen in succession until the end. By that time there is a picture with many dimensions beyond 3D space to transcend each image, it's composition and even particular subjects to some extent. It even moves beyond the identity of Bangkok to many massive industrial/technical service cities where we have lost our connection with the planet and become absorbed into the infectious widget factories that metastasize all over the globe.

Nonsense too?

Asher

I will address Rays work shortly.

Asher

 

[Ray West]

But,

Not all foxes steal chickens

 

[Asher Kelman]

Ray,

First, I'm not sure whether or not I myself want to break up individual images by the terms under question. Allow me to put that into obeyance and Jack and I will get down to this I hope.

OK, the following hopefully shows how I , as a viewer would categorise the snapshot, street and photo journal styles. Each style, in my mind, overlaps, and is inclusive, and I could use different, better illustrations, but this is what I've chosen, to illustrate the inclusiveness.

So, here is the snapshot, as it was taken, more or less. Depending on the subject material, then horizons need not be horizontal, in this type of image.

Ray West "Snap Shot"

Yes, the policeman are not placed exactly in the key position of the "rule' of thirds! That creates tension and discomfort. However, by shifting the frame down to place generous foreground space before the group which makes them celebrated by the tension. That does go with the presence of police or a gang or a wild animal or anything else that might threaten or question what you are doing.

I cannot fathom how you might think that this picture needs more interest. Even without the policemen, it gets my attention and pulls me in to explore this? The horizon being straight, that may be even bad. Depends on how the photographer views it. If it is "Snapped" then "Voila", this is it!

I like the photograph as is nd it would get my attention and I may even want to buy it. Who knows, maybe for one of my boys who I know likes such scenes.

The rest of the picture styles? After the first picture which actually is pretty well composed, the others are far less demanding of my attention. When the police are partly cropped and the view is tight, I'm now cheated of what one could see then and there. It is no longer satisfying. We are not seeing a picture within a picture but rather a parsimoniously delivered view.

Asher

BTW, see how the insertion of the text, "Ray West", on the lower right of his picture, adds balance to the figure on the right. Interesting and intuitive placement!

 

[Jack_Flesher]

So we'd like to know at least what is your own, even "years-back", idea of what should be included in the genre, "street photography".

Okay, you asked for it, so here goes. And FTR, Maggie O has been closest to my view so far...

First off, I group images into three categories; good, bad and indifferent. If an image rises to the level of good, I could care less what the genre is. So what do the genres mean to me? Absolutely nothing -- it's all artsy-fartsy babblespeak to force work into some predefined paradigm, which in my view art should be free of. The next question is likely going to be what makes an image good. In my view, a good image is one that captures an ordinary subject in an extraordinary way, or one that captures an extraordinary visual event itself. I do not require anything beyond those simple definitions to form my sort piles.

Mitch mentioned Eggleston. (And FWIW in my view one of the most brilliant photographers in history. Look at his images and tell me what two characteristics stand prominent? Hint: Camera positioning.) Anyway, take Eggleston, Salgado and Bresson and lump sets of their images together in a pile. Heck, add in some gross diversity like Adams, Weston and Caponigro. All decidedly different styles such that any of us could easily separate them by artist, yet each routinely captures a single, simple slice of life, a moment in time if you will, that tells an entire story -- or at least pushes us to deeper inquiry or introspection. Documentary, reportage, street, landscape, or still life? Such labels don't tell us anything other than perhaps give a hint as to content, but moreover don't matter a hoot to the final product; they are masters of the medium irrespective of genre.

Imagine a collection of 12 images all taken in a single block of any city by a single photographer. 3 show people at commute hour to work, 3 more show local foods available at a market, 3 more show structures on the block and the final 3 show modes of transportation used in the area. IMO -- and assuming each image passes my definition of good -- this can be a perfectly cohesive body of work, even though it contains a combination of what some would feel the need to label as street, architecture, still life and documentary images. However, the second we try and force it into a pre-conceived genre definition, the context of the work as a body gets destroyed.

fin,

 

[Jack_Flesher]

PS: Ray, your post is perfect, kudos!!!

 

[Ray West]

Hi Asher,

My understanding was that Jack was asking how street, photojournal, snapshot were different from each other. (a rhetorical question, but fundamental). Well, I could draw a Venn diagram or something to show how _I_ see it, but I have tried using the image to show how if I had seen the specific image presented by someone else, in a certain way, how I would 'catalogue' it. I had previously, as others, mentioned the importance of a snapshot.

So, first of all was my snapshot. obviously I prowled around a bit, to try and get a decent position. It has been posted on opf before, iirc, wrt cropping or similar. But, it couldn't be more than a snapshot, maybe the guys are camera shy, or think something else wrt my intentions, so - hand held, click, walk away. That was a snapshot, but with as much thought to it as I could give at the time.

The second, to me, if it had more people, would be a street photo in my view. Even without the people, as it is shown, I think I could catalogue it as such (although it is still a snapshot, it sort of shows more of an aspect of 'street' for me. The third image, because I grained it up - (hurriedly, and it's B&W) reminds me more of a photo journal style) It is purely a personal view, which I thought was a request here. I have this mindset, of black and white newspaper pictures - it's an age thing.

The final shot was a genuine snapshot, look, see, snap. No choice. No time. The alternative was no shot at all. Now, if you see it as is - what is it, but a few posts later? I can milk that fox for all it's worth, believe me Asher.

I would like to move these posts elsewhere. I wanted to keep it related more to Mitch's work. I want to pick his brains, see if I can trawl through any of my stuff, see if I do the same, or even if I can do the same, or even if I think it is worthwhile to do the same.

However, I think that some of what we have touched on is very relevant. Maybe when Mitch has his feet under the table at his home, we can get some traction going.

Best wishes,

Ray

 

[Asher Kelman]

I'm satisfied!

Jack,

That, post, (#49 above) reasonably describes what we all really do, but there is more, since we have a rich cultural background of styles.

For sure the Photojournalist to make a living has to produce an image that the editor can use to decorate a page in the context of some article or even with little text. But it either decorates the page or else it illustrates the text and then draws us in to the narrative.

So some of these terms are really based on an historical practical end use. Still, the picture itself must work and evoke a set of reactions, emotions, thoughts and implications or just contain information required for its end use. Then looking back at the photograph, one can decide which ruler one needs to take out of one's pocket to measure how "good" the picture is.

For art, it must bring us something emotionally and intellectually compelling to demand our attention and return to it to get further pleasure.

Street Photography is a term for the work of some distinguished photographers who dedicated art to subjects in mostly urban settings, often without a person included even knowing, The idea was to be able to sample and bring to us paradox, enigma, passion and other emotionally moving sights and individual action that if we were there and were alert, we'd also stop and say, look at that and be thrilled, fascinated, angry, offended, shocked, awed in stitches or otherwise moved.

Structure and composition must be secondary to emotional content but the best have the structure and even underlying iconic signals boosting the power of the emotional content.

I think that Mitch.'s many photographs, for me at least, aren't even in that (street photography) "Genre" but rather constitute a single moving work that has to be experienced one image after the other, as if one is actually taking the pictures oneself in rapid succession.

So what is this?

Is it "street photography"? Well perhaps it's one just particular modern derivative evolved of that art form. It's made possible by the zero-cost modern capability to take pictures at a whim. We no longer worry about running out of film or money on film and processing.

The required actual artistic importance and emotional function of individual images might then be less. Even "ordinary" can now be presented as merely ordinary. There may be no longer an absolute requirement for each picture to "work" on it's own. In fact some pictures are like bricks on a wall, only function when organized to one entity.

I have not sorted the photographs to any "categories", rather I see it as a whole the collection moves me and so it's successful. The intent of the artist, via his work, has been embedded in a complex physical medium and when the slide shoe is played back the emotions, thoughts, ideas and consequences evoked in an eruptive chain of events in my mind, completes an arc of intent. Mitch's work demonstrates art moving from the private space of the artist's mind to the public space and now it lives beyond and independent of him, the artist.

Now is it worthy. I can only speak for myself and say yes, I believe so today.

Asher

 

[Mitch Alland]

...No one else has addressed or perhaps even noted that I presented an entirely new way of looking at the very large number of pictures in Mitch's Bangkok. It looks at the feelings and ideas evoked by the body of work as each image is seen in succession until the end. By that time there is a picture with many dimensions beyond 3D space to transcend each image, it's composition and even particular subjects to some extent. It even moves beyond the identity of Bangkok to many massive industrial/technical service cities where we have lost our connection with the planet and become absorbed into the infectious widget factories that metastasize all over the globe...

Asher, as I noted in post #45 you have a very good understanding of the book and in this latest post you've extended this beyond Bangkok to modern urbanisation, which is something that I hoped someone would do. It's gratifying to see someone understand that there are broader layers of meaning that are beyond the more literal "text", the way that there are in a good poem. Though I must say that it's more difficult to read these meanings from the flickr slideshow; it would be much easier to do so in a printed book, which one goes through at one's own pace, stopping and going back where one wishes. There are very few people who have seen what you have: one is a French friend who is fashion editor of a large-circulation weekly magazine, but she deal with photographs on a daily basis; the others are Sean and Imants, but they saw an early version that had 58 rather than 192 photographs, so that the layers of meaning and denseness were not a s compelling.

Of course in a project like this the sequencing is very important. And I have sequenced in various ways: the cycles in each of the chapter that starts with fish and with a "nudre" —Asher, this system won't let me put in this word, which should be read without the "r"! — and palm leaves, which you have understood; by gesture, such as the mother in the mother and daughter picture putting her hand to her hair and the woman on the left in the next picture doing the same; by structure of composition, such as the crisscross fish starting the second chapter followed by the crisscross of the escalators of the shopping centre.

When embarking on this project and thinking of the sequencing I was inspired by some of Ralph Gibson's early books such as "Days at Sea", "Deja-vu" and "Chiarascuro" as well as the later book, "L-histoire de France", in which the sequencing is poetic and not a simpler thematic approach. It's really good to see can see the effect of the whole, beyond the individual pictures. Although the composition and quality of each photograph is important, in putting together a book of this nature one obviously needs to assess the pictures quite differently than one would for most exhibitions, for example. The trouble we all are used to seeing photographer's monographs (of well-known photographers) that contain their "greatest hits", which is another thing altogether.

—Mitch/London
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10268776@N00/sets/72157594271568487/show/

 

[Mitch Alland]

...There may be no longer an absolute requirement for each picture to "work" on it's own. In fact some pictures are like bricks on a wall, only function when organized to one entity...

Asher, as suggested in my previous post, I think that the quality of each photograph is still as important as before, but it's just that the photographer in putting together such a book has to consider each picture and the sequencing within the context of the whole project and be conscious of some of the layers as meaning — and also recognise that the viewer may discern some layers that were not obvious to the photographer, but that is true for all good art.

—Mitch/London
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10268776@N00/sets/72157594271568487/show/

 

[Sean Reid]

The trouble we all are used to seeing photographer's monographs (of well-known photographers) that contain their "greatest hits", which is another thing altogether.

—Mitch/London
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10268776@N00/sets/72157594271568487/show/

Hi Mitch,

There is a chicken and egg question in this. Since so few people have the opportunity to see most exhibitions, the monographs really are what introduce the work to people. So, many well known pictures become so because of the books. And, naturally. one tries to distill the pictures down to the best in the edit. When Ben Lifson was helping Garry Winogrand to choose the pictures for "Stock Photographs", they came upon one picture Garry wasn't sure about. I'm paraphrasing but, essentially, Winogrand said: "Its interesting and so I'll put it in so I can keep looking at it and trying to figure it out".

Editing is a very tough process, I think, because it sometimes means letting go of pictures which we feel strongly about but, which, we know at some level, didn't work out. As Ben once said to me, "It's like giving up one of your children and yet you must."

I enjoyed looking through that initial set with you and want to take some time soon to look at the new set.

Keep your powder dry.

Sean

 

[Ian Gittler]

That's amazing Sean.

Sometimes the inclusion of something less than a greatest hit — meaning an image that may not stand as authoritatively on its own from the point of view of the photographer who created it — can function in a crucial supporting role within the context of the greater narrative or project as a whole. It can be a tough decision to sideline one's critical sensibility about a particular image for the greater good of the mission. As you convey it, I am struck by Winogrand's openness to sitting with unresolved feelings about his work, and his apparent sense that making pictures is an ongoing exploration. Very inspiring.

I am usually more inclined to spend time with project or "period"-specific monographs, such as The Americans or Living Room or The Secret Paris (although admittedly, at this point all of those images could be called greatest hits). But there are exceptions, such as Revelations, the Diane Arbus companion book to that fairly recent (five years ago?) museum exhibition, which fully reopened my eyes about her work and process. She's one of those photographers whose greatest hits were somehow drowning out a true sense of the depth of her work and integrity for many of us, so this book was a great reeducation. The other exception are tiny books — such as the Photo Poche editions of William Klein, Peter Beard, Robert Frank, etc etc. Somehow those little books made letting-in these great bodies of work very easy.

Anyway, Mitch, I'm enjoying how you're building a texture or narrative wave with your Thailand pictures that seems to be adding up to even more than the sum of its parts.

 

[Sean Reid]

That's amazing Sean.

Sometimes the inclusion of something less than a greatest hit — meaning an image that may not stand as authoritatively on its own from the point of view of the photographer who created it — can function in a crucial supporting role within the context of the greater narrative or project as a whole. It can be a tough decision to sideline one's critical sensibility about a particular image for the greater good of the mission. As you convey it, I am struck by Winogrand's openness to sitting with unresolved feelings about his work, and his apparent sense that making pictures is an ongoing exploration. Very inspiring.

I am usually more inclined to spend time with project or "period"-specific monographs, such as The Americans or Living Room or The Secret Paris (although admittedly, at this point all of those images could be called greatest hits). But there are exceptions, such as Revelations, the Diane Arbus companion book to that fairly recent (five years ago?) museum exhibition, which fully reopened my eyes about her work and process. She's one of those photographers whose greatest hits were somehow drowning out a true sense of the depth of her work and integrity for many of us, so this book was a great reeducation. The other exception are tiny books — such as the Photo Poche editions of William Klein, Peter Beard, Robert Frank, etc etc. Somehow those little books made letting-in these great bodies of work very easy.

I too was struck by what Winogrand told Ben and it has stayed with me for years. My admiration for Winogrand's work and mind runs very deep.

Like you, I sometimes spend a lot of time with one, or a small set of, monographs.

As for the "greatest hits" idea. I don't think that's how many artists conceive their monographs. That's sometimes what certain curators or others will do with a photographer's work after he or she has died but I don't think the artists themselves often organize that way. Perhaps you agree? To be sure, one has to figure out if the work is strong enough to survive the final cut and that cut sometimes has to be pretty ruthless. But the choices and sequencing are, I think, rarely as random (in relation to each other) as a greatest hits music album may be.

There are curators for sure, who think they know more than the actual artist about the work to be displayed or published. That's possible but I think its a place for one to tread very carefully.

Some years ago, I was sitting with Helen Levitt at her kitchen table. We were looking at my subway pictures and her own. This was when Helen's exhibition at the Met (NYC) was being hung. She told me about a curator (who shall remain nameless) who was continually arguing with Helen about what work should and could be part of the show. Certain pictures that Helen and I both thought were strong were getting nixed by this curator. Finally, one day at the museum, Helen lost patience and told the curator: "What would I know? I'm only the artist!"

So when someone else edits and sequences an artists work I always approach the result with a degree of hesitation. Its possible that the result will be great but its also quite possible that it will be a mess. People's hubris often exceeds their grasp of other people's work.

Are we always the best editors of our own work? Perhaps not but a good photographer has some sense of what the work is and how it might fit together.

Cheers,

Sean

 

[Ian Gittler]

That's an amazing story, Sean. Thanks for sharing it. I do agree.

Interestingly, I have a story that's kind of the opposite. When I started editing the photography and creating the design for my first book, I began the process with a book editor with whom I was at the time involved. Her greatest contribution to my education had to do with inclusion, not exclusion. There was a large handful of images which I loved for their information more than for their beauty — a refrigerator covered with mementos, a dressing room table strewn with an entertainer's .. life — that I loved but wasn't confident anyone else would, or even that they had a rightful place in the context of the book I had imagined in my mind. Also, once I had the deal with Simon & Schuster, I was faced with the reality of page signatures and image counts and I think I reflexively took a defensive posture about what would have to go.

My collaborator was more experienced, and her investment not quite as personally charged. She seized upon the value of these images to the story I was telling, and rallied for their place in the narrative. From that point on, I always take a beat before dismissing a seemingly "ancillary" image, and at least examine what drew me to snap it, to see if I've instinctively located an avenue worth mining that I hadn't yet arrived at intellectually.

Anyway, thanks again.

 

[Mitch Alland]

I've recently added some 100 pictures to the Bangkok Hysteria© book project and have also added the following explanatory text:

This latest version contains some 100 additional pictures and chapter titles that I've added to help clarify the structure, with now so many pictures, While the latter must stand on their own, in conceiving the project I was thinking about the way a painting or a photograph can be "read" in the same way as a poem in understood, and wanted to see how one could conceive a book that was structured the way a longer poem might be crafted: that is what is behind the structure of the chapters, which begin and end with the same type of photographs and act in the way rhyme or rhythm or repetition of sounds or imagery might work in a poem.

The chapter names include, "Souvannaphoum/Golden Land", referring to the ancient Sanskrit/Pali name for this part of Southest Asia, and "Emporium/Paragons", referring to the names of the two large upscale Bangkok shopping centres, "The Emporium" and "Siam Paragon". As for "Mahavithayalai/Univerisiy", Bangkok has a huge number of students — there are 600,000 just at Ramkanghae, an open university — who are very visible everywhere because of the black and white uniforms that they are required to wear.

You can see Bangkok Hysteria© as a flickr slide show by clicking here. And here are a few of the new pictures that I've added:

 

[Mitch Alland]

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