Category: OPINION

OVERWHELMED. UNDERWHELMED.

Sometimes I’m overwhelmed by the senselessness and meaninglessness of it all. But then I wonder, how can I be overwhelmed if there is no sense and no meaning? If that’s the case shouldn’t I really just feel nothing, not care?

But the way it seems to work if you’re Human, especially a Human with an existentialist bent, is you have to make your own meaning. And that’s hard work. Much easier to go along to get along, to accept whatever you’re handed.

I see this dichotomy, too, in photography. Some photographers work and struggle to create and shift meaning, others just seem to accept the world at face value.

And that, accepting this nuanced and multifaceted world at face value, leaves me underwhelmed.

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BLAZEJ MARCZAK

Born and raised in Poland, Blazej moved to Scotland where he lived for 11 years (2005-16). There he studied photography at Stevenson College in Edinburgh. After graduation he moved to Aberdeen, and, over 4 years, shot (amongst other work) The Grey City. Last year he moved to Ottawa and sent me an email after he found my website. Now Blazej and I get together from time to time and compare notes. I asked him why he takes photographs . . .

One day I just decided that I would become a photographer, without having a clue what that really means or what kind of photographer I wanted to be.  At the beginning I used family’s old soviet Kiev and Zenith cameras without even knowing that I can change the lens on the cameras. That was in 1999.

I love all aspects of making photographs so saying that I am doing this for fun wouldn’t be far from true however there were and are many other reasons for photographing. The urge to discover, understand and document is the most important drive to me right now.

I love to be out there at weirdest times at night, to contemplate, unwind, dream, respond to the place. I want to feel local anywhere I live and photography enormously helps with that.

I am making images for myself, the choice and the way I am approaching my subjects reflect who I am,  but I also hope that other people now and in the future would relate to my work in one way or another. I am finding photography to be an important medium which helps us to look at ourselves from a variety of different perspectives and it is healthy to not be limited to one perspective.

Our multi layered world is constantly changing and I see photography as a valuable tool which could be used to grasp this “liquid modernity” we live in.

Images from The Grey City (click on images to enlarge).

Then I asked him to compare Aberdeen and Ottawa . . .

When I first arrived in Ottawa I was struck by the abundance of colours, which was notable after living in the rather monochromatic Aberdeen. However I remember that when we met you told me that I “moved from one grey city to another” which I found surprising at that time. When walking around some areas of Ottawa during bleak autumn and winter days I understood what you meant. I love the mighty winter here though. I think it’s fantastic!

I  like how nature blends into the urban environment of both cities which benefit from having two rivers flowing through them and which were extensively used by local industries.

Ottawa has a fine green belt and scenery and in Aberdeen a few minutes walk would take me to the North Sea seaside and dunes. I am missing the Grampian Mountains surrounding Aberdeen but the scale of the snow heaps during the winter makes up for that.

You can see how modernism shaped and unfortunately also scarred Ottawa and Aberdeen, there are good and not so good examples of modernist thinking in these two cities.

The level of homelessness, drug addiction and mental health problems in Ottawa is scary. Aberdeen wasn’t an idyll neither but the level of human misery I observed around some areas of Rideau Street is striking.

I can hear bagpipes in both cities and I can drink amazing local IPA’s in both but I definitely prefer the prices of single malts in Scotland.

Images from Ottawa . . .

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ONLINE PHOTO CONTESTS?

If you’re a photographer you’ve seen ’em. Online photo contests that offer exposure and, sometimes, actual rewards. Often they feature some “name” jurist or panel of industry movers-and-shakers. It’s easy to enter. Just fill out the form, send ’em the money and some jpegs and you’re in the running. It’s kinda like buying a lottery ticket, for the price of admission you get to hope and dream.

The claim is that your work will be exposed to someone or some group of people who might do your career a big favour by looking at and/or selecting your photos. Those images will then get thrown up on their website or, maybe, if you are the grand prize winner!, in an actual gallery or print publication. And you get to jump for joy and add the words “Award Winning Photographer” to your bio.

I’m sure some of these contests are legit. And I know it costs money to run these things. I’m also sure that many of them are organized and arranged for the purveyor’s enrichment. After all no one ever went broke preying on the hopes and dreams of desperate people.

And then there are a handful that seem to put industry support over profit-motive. Here are three that I know about and think are pretty damn legit: The New York Times LENS Portfolio Revue, Conscientious Portfolio Review and PhotoLucida Critical Mass. The first two are free, Critical Mass is quite expensive but has a strong history, deep roster and broad reach. I’m sure there are others that are equally well run and worthwhile but, like I said, these are the ones I’m familiar with.


For me, the best bet for career enhancement is not broadcasting, but narrowcasting. Spend time doing good, authentic, organized work, find 5 or 6 or 7 people/institutions/publications that might support that work and spend your time and money actively pursuing them. Make it personal.

Of course, in the end its your money and your time, you can spend it however you want.

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I welcome your comments. No vitriol please, but contrary opinions and insights are welcome.

Thank you for your time.
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HAUNTED

I’m haunted by questions about why I’ve started this blog up again. Wondering if I’ll just pick up where I left off three years ago, or if I should use this opportunity to dramatically change the tone of the thing.

Fucked if I know. I suppose that these questions will get worked out by the doing. After all, that’s how most stuff gets worked out . . . by applying yourself to the problem.

Path (click on images to enlarge)

One thing I do know is that we are all pretty much stuck, struck, confined and bound by certain in-born proclivities. Sure, we change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Evolution/devolution makes sense to me, so does the idea that every so often things (including us) go through radical, seismic changes.

And so it goes . . .

Mississippi River

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IF YOU WANT TO CALL YOURSELF A PHOTOGRAPHER . . .

Last week I postulated that, for me, photography is about process, growing, learning. I understand that there are other reasons folks take pictures, one of the main ones being to record an event. (Though these days the good-old record-an-event approach is more often than not tied in with the let’s-post-this-to-show-friends-my-charmed-life thing. And we all know that when photos are meant to be used as public relations it tends to shift the motivation for their creation.)

If you set out to record aspects of your life that you think are interesting, and if you want to share those images, I got no beef with that. We all do it. But if you want to call yourself a photographer, if you want to hone and learn from your practice, the only person you should be trying to impress is yourself. And you shouldn’t be too easily impressed, either.
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THE FUTURE

I’m trying to photograph the future. That’s my current project. It’s out there, the future is.

Here are a couple of quotes from author William Gibson, whose book The Peripheral has inspired and informed this project:

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

“When people write imaginary futures, they’re never about the future. They can only be about the moment in which they were written, and the known history before that. We don’t have anything else.”

I’m not going to go into any real detail about THE FUTURE right now. Over time I’ll dribble (or is that: drool?) out more bits and pieces of this puzzle as they occur to me. But I do want to say that I have noticed that this is the first project I’ve done which embraces all three forms of shooting which I seem to be interested in. Namely: portrait, landscape and street. How all these will mesh together remains, like the future, to be seen.

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I welcome your comments. No vitriol please, but contrary opinions and insights are welcome.

HELLO (AGAIN)

Back in the olden days (that’d be circa two thousand and six) photoblogs were the coming thing. If you were a photographer and didn’t have a blog you were dead in the water or something, or so the thinking went. Many photographers started a blog and most of those blogs petered out after a couple of posts. My blog, drool, persisted, from the first post on August 11, 2006 to the last on September 14, 2014, when I called it quits.

Rearview mirror (looking forward, looking back), California

These days Facebook, Instagram and other short-form social media platforms have pretty much supplanted long-form thinking in the FotoWorld™. But for some reason I’ve decided to resurrect drool, even though I’m not sure if I can keep it up (or, indeed, even get it up).

Like before, I intend to post every Sunday. Let’s see what happens.

Read on . . .

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DISCOVERY

One of the main reasons I photograph is to learn about that which I’m photographing (the subject). I spend a lot of time (and emotion) on my personal projects and they are all aimed at subject matter that I’m both interested in and want to gain more understanding of. The point of doing it, for me, is discovery. (Well, that, and getting out of the house.)

Spending a lot of time on a project allows the subject to seep into me and colour my reactions. The pictures show me my reactions and, thus, I learn. That is not to say I don’t have my own aesthetic proclivities, my own opinions. I do. And those, too, seep into my work.

But the world is so multi-faceted that it just seems silly to approach any subject in a categorical way. When you merely execute a plan to arrive at a foregone conclusion you discover nothing.
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THE PAST

This was the very first drool post, titled, of course, FIRST POST.

FIRST POST
august 11, 2006

Some people tell me I’m funny.

EXAMPLE:
Me: “Do you think we should move over there?
Some people: “You’re funny.”
Me: “But I only said ‘Do you think we should move over there?’”
Some people: “It’s the way you said it.”

Funny, I guess.

I never really got it (being funny) until I met Christina, my assistant. I’m pretty sure that she’s funny the way I’m funny . . . just the way she says stuff makes me laugh. Now I get it: funny.

I think I might be a lot less funny now. But I suppose that’s not really up to me to decide.

Anyway, it seems somehow fitting that Christina would also figure in this first post of resurrected drool. After all, besides my direct family, she’s probably the person I feel closest to. I hope I don’t sound too maudlin (see, I’m less funny) when I say she’s like the daughter I never had; and I swell up inside when she tells me I’m her number two dad.

Now where was I? Christina.

Straylight Press (my publishing company) published her first book, Back to me, a few years ago. Now she’s back in town (visiting from Cali, where she’s lived for a bunch of years) and we’re working on her second book, titled Born. About her first year as a mother.

Yes, more info/hype will be appearing here as the project progresses, but for now . . .

Christina and Gus
Christina and Stephane, our print rep

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FINALLY

I’ve taken up gardening. Here are some of my poppies . . .

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I welcome your comments. No vitriol please, but contrary opinions and insights are welcome. (As well as bugs and typos.)
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Please note: This iteration of drool is using a different template from the previous drool posts. As a result the formatting of the previous posts is a bit messed up.
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