Category: Thoughts on Photography

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Beautiful and simple and true

I saw a portrait in the newspaper today, and it reminded me of an issue I have with photos taken at an angle leaving the horizon line running diagonal or nearly so. To illustrate the story that went with it, this image was a portrait of a man with the foreground an essential part of the story to be told. However, everything in the picture was at an angle, even the man was leaning backwards in the frame. This type of shooting has become quite prevalent in recent years, and I really wonder why. There is nothing about the photo that demanded this shoot-from-the-hip approach. For me (old school as I am), leave the odd angles for the photographers who are grabbing a photo the only way they can: Robert Capa on the beach at Normandy, dodging bullets and trying to capture one of the momentous events in world history, for example. Or we have all extended our cameras at arm’s length over our heads trying to shoot above a crowd to capture a telling moment. There are, obviously, reasons why the world looks askew in such photographs. And I am not talking about the creativity of studio portraiture here either. I like what some photographers have done raising the bar on family and wedding portraiture. But when it comes to newspaper work, even illustrating a feature story with a portrait, I think the odd angles are as bad as a flash hot spot behind the subject’s head.

To PLAN the composition in order to distort the horizon line and give the photo some sense of immediacy it does not have within it seems to transport the photographer into the picture. Unlike other documentary work, it is true a portrait often demands more of the photographer’s invisible hand–getting the right light, moving around the subject, tilting of a head, moving in tight. In those cases, the photographer remains invisible. But warping the interior of the photographic rectangle is, well, put it this way: why not just let the photographer’s shadow appear in the foreground of the pic like those old family portraits where the photographer dutifully puts the sun over his back whenever he shoots? In a like manner, photographers who purposefully distort their horizon line shout to the viewer, I AM HERE!
To get a good example of using natural lines in a photo, look at the POYi archives for 1995. There you will find the photos of Torsten Kjellstrand, newspaper photographer of the year, who at the time was shooting for The Herald in Jasper, Indiana. Look at the opening shot of Torsten’s photo story on the farming brothers. That opening shot has straight horizontal and vertical lines–except for the two brothers who are walking along, one helping the other, bent as if leaning into the wind. In a way they are, but this is the wind of old age and hardscrabble work on a farm. To me, it is a perfect picture. It is beautiful, simple, and true. It needs the straight lines of the house and the pump and the sidewalk to contrast the bend of the human torsos. This picture opens the photo story like the opening paragraph of a great novel. It evokes emotion and gives us all the essential details that will be developed and revealed to us. Nothing is contrived. The photographer is invisible. The story unfolds.
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Fighting those winter blahs



We have had one of the worst winters in recent history in Platte County: lots of snow, extreme temperatures, and wind that commanded we mimic the horses and mules; we turned our backs to it as we walked sideways down to the barn, trying to stay vertical.

Yet, after the weather has moderated, Mother Nature left us a gift–drifted sculptures as pretty as anything in the Louvre. Sure, we had to ignore the drifts that forced us to extreme measures to get up and down our driveway, but some drifts when they caught the morning light were worth all the bitter cold and propane dollars. And they had to be documented with the camera.
Here then are some of Mother Nature’s gifts from Winter 2009-2010.
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The Pulitzer Exhibit

The current collected exhibit of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs is one of the great collections in the history of photography. Certainly, it has the power of The Family of Man, the FSA Depression Era photos of the Roy Stryker team, and the collected works of the 60-plus years of photos from the Missouri Photo Workshop.

I saw the Pulitzer collection recently with my dad at the Truman Library in Independence, MO. The exhibit will be there until sometime in January, I believe. Although the exhibit provides a powerful and necessary visual history of the last 60 years, I found that by the end of the walk through the exhibit, I was a little depressed. Individually, each award-winning photo struck me with its knife-like precision in carving out a piece of human experience for us all to see. I admired the very fact that a photographer was able to capture the image before me and, often, the composition was beautifully arranged even in the most violent and compelling images. However, the collective impact of these photos bothered me by the end of the hour-long walk through the exhibit. Frankly, I was a little surprised at my reaction since I love to view great works by great photographers.
I had a similar experience years ago when I first examined a book I bought by English photographer Don McCullin called “Hearts of Darkness.” The images collected in the book revealed McCullin’s lifelong mission to document the dark parts of the world: war, starvation, sickness, death, mental illness. His vision took him around the world and most of his adult life. His photos were beautiful black and white images, but the messages they carried were bleak and heart-wrenching. Many of us, as photographers, after shooting just a few of these images would be running to find the bluest sky or a baby, plump and nestled warm in its mother’s arms.
Certainly, there were some wonderfully warm moments in the Pulitzer collection: Brian Lanker’s 1973 photos of the birth of a child. And, tough as Martin Luther King’s death was, Moneta Sleet, Jr.’s photo of a composed and beautiful Coretta Scott King with daughter Bernice in her lap conveys hope and love as our best defense against death and despair.
So, in the end, despite my reaction that day, I admire these Pulitzer-winning photographers who had and have what it takes to bring us the images that disturb our complacency; the images that need to be made to remind us of the human condition. We need these images, disturbing as they are. Much as Charles Dickens did for Victorian England with his writing, Truth can be carried in all its terrible beauty on the wings of wonderful and compelling photographs created by dedicated photographers.
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Barn Artists show coming up


This weekend is the first gallery show for the Barn Artists. Our barn will play host to some nice art and, hopefully, a decent crowd. Saturday, Nov. 14, is 10 a.m. til 4 p.m. and Sunday the 15th noon to 4. I am anxious to show off the barn loft which houses most of my exhibit photos. It has not held much of a crowd since we first built the barn in 2000, thinking at the time that we would utilize the darkroom for workshops. Then came the digital world!! With any luck this show will be the first of several every year. Mostly it will be fun to gather some of my favorite people together and “jaw” a bit as we say in the country.

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Standing with two icons


Kent Ford of the Missouri Press Association was kind enough to shoot this photo and then send me a copy. I am standing with Missouri Photojournalism Hall of Fame inductee Bill Eppridge and Hall member Duane Dailey at the most recent induction ceremony in Washington, MO. The three of us were talking about the 1989 Missouri Photo Workshop in which Bill was one of the instructors, Duane was Co-Director along with Bill Kuykendall, and I was an anxious participant along with my wife Marcia. It was poignant to think back to that week in Maryville, MO. where Bill talked for the first time about his photographing Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. He also mentioned that he must have taught at 20 or so of the workshops over the years. I was honored to be standing with two such honorable craftsmen of the photojournalism profession. It is just another of the wonderful gifts that photography keeps sending my way.