King of the Delta Photo

Berlinmeineliebe, aka Lucía (which is a beautiful Spanish name, strong one) is some amateur photographer I know because we share a friend. We moved in the same bohemian-literary circles (lol) and eventually we discovered our photo-side, quite easily because we don’t actually hide it.

I don’t think she has still found her photographic voice, but she’s aiming to, and the way she’s moving towards it makes me feel quite proud. She’s got an eye for the general feeling of the photo, but avoids studying the most technical part of it -besides the elementary lighting, composition, etc-. However, the girl’s one of the best party-out-of-control photographers I’ve ever seen:

This is an AWESOME lomography by her. It drives me crazy. I think she would have enjoyed portraying the beatniks, that’s for sure. She deserves it. That picture didn’t mean to follow no rules but the ESSENTIAL one: be attractive to the eye, get a feeling, capture it and project it on the watcher. That’s it. This Friday I’m going to her first photo exposition in Madrid. How cool is that.

I myself, when trying to get composed a nice photo, try to forget about the rules in order to respect them in an instinctive way. This may be hard to understand –or may not-, it has something to do with the MUSHIN concept of martial arts, that is, the famous “free your mind”. The Golden Spiral, for example. I didn’t planned to get this here:

Yet it is. The rules are no laws, neither guidelines. They just make your photo good if you’re naturally following them, not if you’re trying to fit your bad photo into the rule of thirds. It’s like wearing a jacket too small for you. If the photo asks you for symmetry or breaking the Golden Spiral or whatever, do it. Probably you are following another rule that you just forgot.

Must -somehow- buy:

- A tripod.

- A Magnum photography book.

- A decent DSLR, or even a superb DSLR (Canon Eos 5D?) with some cool lenses.

Shit.

I was lurking in 4chan’s /p/ as usual and some guy showed a portrait of himself leaning on a car. Someone then asked “is this Killip inspired?” and the guy answered “wtf, I don’t know what are you talking about”. Neither did I, so I guess we both googled the man. Happens to be the author of In Flagrante, one of the most important photography books of the 80’s England (I’ll quote the foreword to it at the end). I’m probably buying it soon. Seems that he took his street pictures with a large format camera… And, as for Susan Sontag yesterday’s quote, this may look like a reply, an argument or, at least, an answer. There IS some kind of beauty and even majesty in these pictures, isn’t it? And they’re quite like… dwarfs. I understand Sontag, anyway.

The objective history of England doesn’t amount to much if you don’t believe in it, and I don’t, and I don’t believe that anyone in these photographs does either as they face the reality of de-industrialisation in a system which regards their lives as disposable. To the people in these photographs I am superfluous, my life does not depend on their struggle, only my hopes. This is a subjective book about my time in England. I take what isn’t mine and I covet other peoples lives. The photographs can tell you more about me than about what they describe. The book is a fiction about metaphor.”

Chris Killip, Foreword to In Flagrante, 1988

Whitman thought he was not abolishing beauty but generalizing it. So, for generations, did the most gifted American photographers, in their polemical pursuit of the trivial and the vulgar. But among American photographers who have matured since World War II, the Whitmanesque mandate to record in its entirety the extravagant candors of actual American experience has gone sour. In photographing dwarfs, you don’t get majesty & beauty. You get dwarfs.”

“America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly”, p. 29

Susan Sontag

I bought today -blindly following the wise advice of Estrella, as I usually do- that photographic essay called “L’instant décisif” or “The decisive moment” by Henri Cartier-Bresson, a man who said that your first 10.000 shots aren’t worth shit. That’s probably true.

Due to the holy planetary ass-fucking exams that are coming to me I haven’t read it yet, but I’ll do next week and then upload some opinions / thoughts on it, guys.

I recently discovered this guy, I was looking for some photo books in FNAC and there was this big black one called AS I WAS DYING. I read the back text, which I quote in this entry, and I looked at some of the photos. I shivered. I want to have that book. It helps you realize that photography is out there, you can’t keep taking pictures of your cat in a sofa. Well, there it goes, a picture and some wisdom of Pellegrin (joined Magnum in 2001, full member since 2005)

When I do my work and I am exposed to the suffering of others – their loss or, at times their death – I feel I am serving as a witness; that is my role and responsibility to create a record for our collective memory. Part of this, I believe, has to do with notions of accountability. Perhaps it is only in their moment of suffering that these people will be noticed, and noticing erases our excuse of saying one day that we did not know. But I also feel that it is in this very delicate and fragile space that surrounds death, the space that I sometimes have both the privilege and the burden of entering, there exists the possibility of an encounter with the other in a way that goes beyond words and culture and differences . It is about being exposed for a moment in front of each other and in front of the act and mystery of dying. In that moment I feel I am looking at something that I can’t completely see but that is looking at me. It is in this exchange that something simultaneously universal and deeply intimate can be found; in the death of the other there is a loss that belongs to everyone.”

Paolo Pellegrin

I’ve been quite into prime lenses lately. I’d rather call them fixed focal length (FFL) lenses to avoid ambiguity, anyway. Not that I can say a lot about the quality difference between a zoom lens and a FFL lens, or about the optical aberrations neither, because my eye is not that sharp yet. But I can tell that having a fixed focal length gets you more conscious of being an active part of the framing. You actually have to MOVE in order to take the picture, you’re literally one with the camera. I’m working with a ROKKOR 50mm f2 (a bit pedestrian) and another ROKKOR, a great 135mm f2.8. In the picture, my mother, taken with a 50mm f1.4 that a friend lent me.