To misquote a more insightful writer me, there are two kinds of artists: those who openly struggle with self-doubt and those who lie about it. It may be flippantly stated but that doesn't make it any less true. Unless you are terminally optimistic, or blessed with the kind of self-confidence reserved for the typical Oprah show expert, or you're on industrial strength Prozac, at some point in a long term creative project you're going to have to do battle with the black dog of self-doubt.
Why am I doing this?
Do I just suck, or do I really, really suck?
Am I just deluding myself and wasting everybody's time?
Why don't I just give up and see if there's anything good on TV?
Pieces of your work that you were happy with last week suddenly look second-rate and don't seem to measure up to your peers anymore. Picking up the camera seems more like work than pleasure and when you have a camera in your hands you can't find anything to shoot. When you do shoot something it never looks how you want it or everyone else seems to be able to do it better. You're in a slump. You're blocked. You're wrestling demons. You feel like you've lost your edge. You've lost your energy, your muse, your drive. Welcome to you're own artistic hell.
This self-doubt is painful but it is part of your artistic growth. You are not the same photographer that you were last year, last month or even last week and self-doubt can be a distressing side-effect of taking your art a little bit further. Your old work is not as bad as you think but this feeling may mean you're about to make a personal break-through.
Another consolation is that, although it feels like this pit of self-doubt is the loneliest place on the planet, every artist worth their salt has been through this before too … often more than once, but we have to get out of this place before we consider the horrible possibility of returning to it. So how do we break through and return to being productive? I say this without judgment but self-doubt is a very self-indulgent feeling. It results from being stuck in your own head. An artist must be self-aware, self-considered and reflective to work and grow but if you take it too far it can become self-destructive. To break on through you have to get out of your head; you should stop thinking and get back to doing.
This is easier said than done but there are things you can do to help your self achieve this, the most important of which is a change of environment. If you're stuck in a rut photographing the same things and places over and over, make the effort to try shooting somewhere or something else. If you have a home studio, leave it and your house and go for a walk. If you always shoot in your neighborhood drive somewhere else. If you always shoot in the day, shoot at night. If you shoot people, try landscapes. Change is a great distraction; you have to get out of your head to deal with what is going on in the here and now. You have to live in the moment and the moment is all a photographer has to work with.
But what if you can't make a literal change in your environment? What if you're committed to a studio project of there's some sort of protocol in your current project that you can't escape from? The best thing you could do is set up a side project and put your current work on hold for a period of time, but sometimes that's just not possible either. You can make changes to your environment that effect you but not your photography. For me that is often music. I usually work in quiet but if I become overly self-conscious working on something in a studio setting I find that if I crank up loud rock music it blows those thoughts out of my head – I begin to enjoy the music and forget about my block and start making pictures instinctively. I rarely walk around listening to my iPod but if I am blocked I will put in the earbuds and listen to music or podcasts while I'm walking around shooting and it does help me to forget about my funk.
It's good to be absolutely comfortable and instinctive with your goto camera and lens rig, however, if you need a distraction it can be of benefit to do something that makes you have to think about your equipment again. It can change your pace and rhythm enough to switch you focus from your block to the simple process of just making a picture. I will switch out photographic equipment; shoot with a compact point and shoot instead of a DSLR or use an old lens, or old camera I've half-forgotten how to use. If I can't do that I'll switch my lens into manual focus or use an exposure mode I don't normally use – anything I can do to stop me remembering how blocked I am and to get me thinking about just getting the camera to work and take a picture.
Beyond changing your shooting method there are other things you can do to restore your confidence about your work. You may be dissatisfied with the work you've been producing in the last few weeks but, if you go back far enough in your catalog you will find things that still make you proud or at least make you smile. If you spend a little time with your greatest hits it will help you focus on your strengths and what you want to pursue and achieve. This makes it the perfect time to make some new prints; do it right and mat, frame and hang them too. Make a Blurb book of a project you've already completed. Seeing your work in the flesh rather than in pixels adds instant gravitas to your pictures.
Take a look at your portfolio and switch out less satisfactory work with newer favorites. Create a DVD you can play on a TV when people ask to see your work. Put your portfolio photos in a easily accessible folder on your iPhone to show the curious. Create a new business card. Update your Flickr sets or your Lightroom albums – new themes and threads in your work may be emerging that you've been missing.
Beyond your own work get involved in the work of others. Seek out a mentor (admittedly that's easier said than done). Look at the new work of your peers or those you admire, and those doing the kind of work you wish you could produce. Critique other people's work on Flickr – you learn a lot through the process of critiquing others about what you already know, areas you are weaker, what you like and why. Watch documentaries and read biographies on photographers and other artists – they are not so different than you, just people trying to express themselves. Look through monographs and visit galleries but try not to see how you measure yourself against the work to see, rather find work that excites and inspires you to try to do something great.
Artistic blocks are part of the journey; if it were easy everyone would be doing it. Work through this without panicking and you will grow as an artist and produce better work as a result.
Good luck.
If this is your first year long picture-a-day project you might just have noticed that the task seemed to get much more difficult over the last few days. What's going on?
Remembering that project365 is a distance race not a sprint let's return to my favorite project365-as-a-marathon analogy. When you run a marathon there is so much preparation and effort in just getting to the start-line that, by the time you are warmed up and are hanging out in a that huge crowd waiting for the gun to fire it feels like a rock concert audience waiting for the band to come on – there is so much anticipation and nervous energy. When the race starts and that crowd first starts to jog and then gradually gains momentum you are running on pure adrenaline. For the first couple of miles you are at the heart of a huge crowd with spectators cheering the sight of thousands of people in motion, cameras capturing the event for local TV news and papers and you are just swept along, literally, in the moment. It can take a couple of miles for the pack to start to spread out and for you to find some space at which point the magnitude of what lies ahead can be daunting – you can go from feeling in the middle of the best party ever to feeling very alone in no time flat.
For the first mile or two you just run on the energy of the crowd but once that passes it's time to do the real work of the race; you're not really going to feel that camaraderie and adrenaline until the last couple of miles and, in this moment, the end of the race is a distant dream. It's time to find your space and your pace, to start listening to your body, tune out discomfort and concentrate on those things that will let you achieve your goals. Personally, I start to try to ignore the runners around me; if I get caught up in a group going to fast I will hit the wall – if I hang out with people going too slow I will get frustrated. I either look down at my feet and the ground for a mile or so or look over the heads of the other runners. I start to get a little chant, rhythm or song going in my head to run along to and I concentrate on form. At this point you are on your own.
Very similar things happen in the typical project365 group. January 1st the gun is fired and we're off! Many of us having been waiting for a long time for the project to begin and we're full of creative energy and good intentions. The first few days you can't wait to take and post your shots. You go to your project365 communities on Flickr and everyone is firing on all cylinders, posting amazing work and it's just too easy. Your fellow project365ers spend surplus energy commenting on tens of pictures everyday and participating in discussions and sub-projects; each image you post gets more views, comments and favorites than you are used to – perhaps a picture or two hits 'explore' – now we're motoring!
But, around day 20 you look around and the pack is spreading and thinning. A few participants have already fallen by the wayside, many are finding it hard to fit their picture-a-day into their busy lives. The free time of the holidays is gone – we're back to work with nothing interesting to shoot, certainly nothing explore-worthy. Your average views-per-image are half what they were last week so no one would notice if we just quit. What's the point of going on? It would be so easy to just stop; what are you going to do?
Like a marathon, it's time to do the work. You have to stop worrying about the others around you and get back to basics. Find a pace that works for you this means finding times that best work for you for making pictures and posting them. Make it as easy as possible for you to succeed – that means taking a camera everywhere so that there are no missed opportunities or excuses for not taking a shot. That means having a regular time for processing images and posting them – maybe over coffee when you first get up, during a coffee break at work or last thing before you go to bed, just make it a routine.
Pace means just plodding on forward one step at a time relentlessly. If you're running this race so your friends can see you, forget it. It's Sunday morning and they're all still in bed. Your fellow runners aren't really paying much attention to you, they have their own demons to wrestle with over the next 20-something miles. You have to run this race for you – to find out what you are capable of. Post your daily picture even if you are not totally happy with it, even if it is not half as good as the one you posted yesterday, or your buddy posted yesterday, even if it will get only 2 views and have no chance of hitting Explore. Just post picture after picture, relentlessly.
So get on pace, check your form, forget about the rest of the pack and do the work. You know you can make it to the end of this if you want to enough and you are relentless.
PS - Project 365 is not exactly the same as a New Year's resolution but they share a lot of the same characteristics. Ceratainly this post I read today seems to apply: Do You Make These 7 Mistakes When Trying to Keep Your New Year’s Resolution?
"So after the initial enthusiasm wanes it may not feel as that much fun anymore. It’s sort of enthusiasm backlash. This is the homeostasis kicking in within your mind (no matter if the goal/habit etc. is actually very positive for you). It’s a resistance to change to keep the system (you) stable. If you are simply aware of this being what it is - rather than a signal to give up - you can persevere, be patient and keep going more easily."
- "What do you shoot with?"
- "Are you Canon or Nikon?"
- "Have you tried the latest version of PS?"
- "What printer did you use to make these prints?"
- If you already have a camera that can make a good enough file stop reading magazines that are just trying to make you want to buy new equipment; instead visit a gallery or museum and get inspired. I have a decent camera but I refuse to buy into the idea that I need to buy something twice as expensive again to be taken seriously. There is no camera in the world that will make me a better photographer; I can only achieve that through applying myself to my work.
- Avoid conversations about gear; seak out conversations about art and artists.
- Spend as little time in PhotoShop as you can get away with. Avoid 'playing' with an image in PhotoShop. Instead look at the original file, previsualize what you would like the resulting file to look like, and work out the shortest route from one to the other.
- Stop studying lighting plans, HDR tutorials and ways to make your digital images look like they came out of a Lomo. Instead, study the history of photography, its movements, key players and iconic images.
- Don't be ashamed of shooting digital when everyone tells you that the 'real art' is made using film (or visa versa). It is a pissing match that has no point or end.
So you have enlisted in project365 - how hard can it be? All you have to do is pick up your camera once a day. How long does it take to make a picture? 1/125 of a second on average? That's only 1/10800000th of your day. This should be easy.
The accepted wisdom among professional misers is that there certain things you should never buy new. I can't remember the exact list but I do remember that books, DVDs and cars ranked high on it. This maybe fiscally sensible but we buy, and are sold, cars based on emotion not cold logic. The only logic and financial considerations to a petrol-head buying a car are, “What is the sexiest car with the most horse power I can afford?” And who doesn't love that new car smell? It's our god-given, American birthright to drive around in an over-powered, new car every few years!
But I am not a real American and I am not a professional miser but I am a card carrying petrol-head without a lot of disposable income to my name. This is as true today as it was 13 years ago when I took possession (read: bought) this test car. I had just moved from England to San Francisco which wasn't cheap but I needed to buy a car. I wanted something reliable, fun and sporty. Back in the UK I'd driven a Spitfire which I loved to drive but spent much more time working on it in the garage than I did behind the wheel in the drivers seat. Basically, I wanted a reliable, affordable English roadster. Back in 1995 there was still only one choice if you wanted a car in this genre; the Japanese Miata (MX5 as we knew it in Europe and the rest of the world). Being strapped for cash I didn't look for a new Miata, my no-nonsense Dad had pounded into me the fact that only a fool buys a car new and loses all that money in depreciation just driving it off the lot. I searched the local paper's classifieds (the internet and Craigslist were still in their infancy) and there were several 1990-3 cars I could afford as long as I didn't mind common red. After a horrible experience in a hard-sell dealers (I was kidnapped when they 'lost' my driving license) I resolved to only buy from a private party. I drove several examples but then found a totally base and stock '91 with low miles that a yuppie needed to sell for the down payment on a new M3. $10,000 bought me few creature comforts but exactly the car I had been looking for. From day one, every time I went to get in it, it put a smile on my face. A large part of the reason I had moved to California was to escape English winters so I took perverse pleasure in driving around with the top down whenever the weather permitted; I didn't really care how cold it was as long as it wasn't raining. The first Christmas I stayed in the US, though I was a little home sick, I delighted in telling all my family on a long distance call that I'd been driving down Highway 1 with the hood down just for fun that morning.
The Miata performed exactly as advertised. It was 100% reliable, cost little to run but was every bit a true roadster. Don't confuse 'roadster' with 'sportscar'; they're not the same thing. A sportscar is designed to be powerful and to go fast and is usually expensive. A roadster is designed to be fun. A roadster can be quick but the engine shouldn't be overly powerful. It should feel quicker than you are going; 60 should feel like 80 in a normal car - 90 should shake your teeth out. The driver should feel part of the car and should not be isolated from what is going on; you should be able to feel the road through the seat and steering, and hear the air rushing by and the exhaust disappearing behind you. It should be designed to be a rag top from the get-go not have the tin roof cut off a coupe a couple of years after launch to boister slowing sales. A roadster has 2 seats, the engine in the front and the power going to the rear wheels. A roadster is all about handling; it must be light, nimble and balanced. It should be practical enough to be a daily driver if you are willing to put up with a few compromises in convenience and comfort; in fact it should be impractical enough to put off those who just want a cute car. A roadster must have a manual gearbox that has to be worked to get the best from the car. A roadster should look good without being overly flashy – everything on the car should be there for a reason – there's no room for fake brake ducts or empty bonnet bulges on a roadster. You should want to drive a roadster more than you want to wash and clean it so a roadster looks good covered in bugs and brake dust.
This may be only a personal definition of a roadster but by my standard the Miata delivered every day.
People who dismiss the Miata as just cute, or worse, just a hairdressers car just don't get it. The Miata is every bit a drivers car. Just because it isn't that fast 0-60 or through a standing quarter doesn't make it less so. It is a rewarding car to drive without being aggressive or expensive or exotic.
For 13+ years my Miata was my daily driver on my work day 45 mile round trip commute. The clock is fast approaching 200,000 miles but the engine, transmission and running gear are all still solid and it bellies both its age and mileage. I have looked after this car but it has not been babied. The paint is a little faded in places but waxed and polished it does not look old (unfortunately, the same cannot be said for it's driver). It has had its oil changed every 3000 miles, 1 new top (after some thug decided to jump through the roof for giggles), 3 new batteries, a new clutch @ 120k miles. It's due another timing belt change about now and it would really benefit from new shocks but I'll leave that to the new owner.
From the factory this was the base 1.6 long nose crank (more reliable) car. It came without power steering or air conditioning; “Just two more things to add weight or to go wrong” my Dad would have said. It came with steel wheels which were one of the few things I swapped out when I treated myself to simple 5-spoke alloys a couple of years after I bought it. As cassettes gave way to CDs, which then gave it up for MP3s I've swapped out the audio head a couple of times, supplemented with replacement speakers and a cheap power amp without which voices on NPR aren't audible over the wind noise on the freeway with the top down – my concession to civility.
The car has had minor damage occasionally. A couple of years after I got it a truck chewed up my fender with his lug nuts when he merged into me without looking. Last Christmas a pickup hit me from behind at about 10mph when I was stuck in traffic on a local off-ramp. A year ago some yahoo stole my driving lights while the car was parked outside my house. Before that some jumped through the hood and tried to kick the stereo head unit out of my dash. It's the usual litany of urban living and car ownership which slowly takes it's toll on a car. When I bought the car there was only one shape of Miata; we're now on the third and waiting for news of the fourth. From a distance the car still looks good but up close it is starting to look a little tired. I could keep driving it for a couple of years until it really became impractical to maintain but I've decided that it is time to let her go. I'm 'upgrading' to a newer model but staying with Miatas and I'll be sad to see my old friend go but it is time. I can't bring myself to drive her totally into the ground and then watch her scrapped or parted out. I'd rather see her drive off with a new owner looking for an automotive bargain and keep my fond memories of her as shinny, 100% reliable and 100% fun, every bit a roadster.
Postscript: I bought a 2004 MazdaSpeed (turbo) Miata. I then put my old '91 on CraigsList for $1900. I sold it to the first person who came and drove it for the asking price.
I hit a small milestone on Flickr this week as I passed over half a million views on my stream. Of course 500,000 views is small potatoes for the flickr-concienci but for me it is vaguely thrilling idea that I have an 'audience'. I come from a culture where a photo enthusiast might show the work (s)he was proud of to a couple of family of friends, at the very most they might show the image at a camera club or competition. These days we all can put our work out there for ourselves and connect with others just as obsessed with making images as ourselves across continents, languages and timezones.
A quick calculation reveals that, averaged across all my posted images that is a little over 150 views per image. If only it were so. In reality my average image gets somewhere between 7 and 50 views with the rest of my hits skewed amongst a few 'popular' images. My most popular image with more than 14,000 views is an image I mercenarily titled and tagged “Live Nude Girls” - the horn dogs on flickr far exceeded my expectations and Patti feels that I should take this image down. I agree with her but I'm competitive enough with her, and she is so rapidly gaining on my little success, that I can't give up the steady stream of hits my tabloid bait image generates.
My next most popular image is one of Desi as a puppy – actually it is slightly soft but everyone loves cute puppies so they overlook this technical faux pas. Cute dogs are just occasional fair for my camera these days but they do generate me a lot of hits. Also consistent earners for me are pictures of cameras I have taken to illustrate Camerapedia. Related to this, pictures of other equipment and my desk setups in my home and work offices are incredibly popular – equipment nerds are my tribe. Amongst my top 20 most popular images 1, possibly 2, are pictures of an artistic leaning that I am proud of. In fact, the images I am actually most proud off hardly register on my stats radar which goes to show I have very little idea what I am talking about.
That said, I did enter 2 images in our camera club's session judged by an outside expert yesterday and they both placed in his 5 selected favorites ( http://photochrome.org/2008/09/05/september-judge-choices/ ) - one of Patti's placed too so we both went home happy. The truth is I was going to show 2 completely different images but Patti persuaded me to switch. She was right of course; she (nearly) always is.
The conclusion? I know I can take a good picture – I just don't know which one it is.
My wife and I recently took advantage of a required trip back to the UK to spend a few days in Paris. Aside from a dollar that sucked and the 100% smoking rate of Parisians the trip was wonderful and one of the highlights of our trip was the opportunity to see the Richard Avedon retrospective at the Jeu de Paume more than a year before it will arrive at SF MoMA.
It is difficult not to lump Richard Avedon in with other successful giants of modern portrait photography; Diane Arbus, Erving Penn, Annie Leibowitz (with whom he shares top billing this summer in Paris). They are the first wave of modern portrait photographers – the first to reject beauty for 'reality' which some critics condemn as 'cruel' photography. More on this later, however, the influence of these rock-stars of portrait photography is impossible to ignore and to pass up the opportunity to see this exhibit would have been spiteful.
Love him or hate him (and all these photographers have something of a polarizing effect on audiences and critics) you have to admit that Avedon's work is impactful especially in the flesh. He was one of the first photographers that pioneered the bigger-is-better philosophy to his prints and so you encounter many of his subjects in this exhibit larger than life size with every pore, blemish and hair high lit. A modest print of Warhol and the Factory crew that we had seen a couple of days before in the “Street and Studio” exhibit at the Tate Modern was interesting but seen 9 meters long its impact and implied gravitas was infinitely greater; I don't know if that makes it a better photo or not – that's a question for a more knowledgeable critic than I.
But I get a head of myself; the exhibit itself was laid out chronologically and is exhaustive. True, you've probably seen most of these pictures before in books and a few of them in other exhibits but you're unlikely to have seen this volume and depth of Avedon's oeuvre as exhibition prints before. In the Jeu de Paume the exhibition filled much of display space of two floors of the building with rooms devoted to specific periods starting with his earlier fashion work and progressing through celebrity portrait work to his common man opus, In the American West, and beyond. It took a good two hours to go through.
The lighting of the prints was top class, a standard I hope SF MoMA will live up to, as was the spacing and pacing. Most of the standard prints are presented in plain white gallery frames with white mats against white walls. Captions and commentary (both in French and English thankfully) are applied directly to the walls themselves as seems to be the modern custom. Overall the effect is conservative but it allows the prints to speak for themselves. The larger prints are displayed mounted on aluminum and they tower over the viewer, especially when you consider Avedon's penchant for cropping the head of his subjects close to the top and in the top 20% of the frame. Half of the larger prints are displayed against black walls as opposed to white – exquisitely lit they glow like black and white windows into another time and place.
Some think that Avedon is over-rated – a charge that seems to be leveled at anyone in the art photography field with a commercial background or achieving great commercial success, both blasphemies Avedon was guilty of. I'll concede that he wasn't the most innovative or intellectual of photographers but this did not lessen my enjoyment of this exhibit. I did not tire of his simple trick of isolating his subjects against the plainest of white backgrounds, of capturing excruciating detail and of printing in dramatic sizes. Once I got away from his celebrity subjects and to the hard working oil men, ranchers, homeless and manual laborers it was hard not to stare and wonder if you were looking deep into someone else's life and soul. Perhaps that isn't the heart and soul of his subjects but instead a grotesque world from the imagination of Avedon himself, it really didn't matter to me; I went away moved and inspired and I personally can ask no more of art.
The exhibit tours other venues in Europe before coming to San Francisco in the Fall of 2009. When it arrives I'm sure it will be a massive hit here as it is the kind of photography and blockbusting exhibit the West Coast loves. I look forward to seeing this exhibit again and, in the meantime, I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to see this preview in Paris.
Preface: I just wrote this piece for an art-photo-history course I'm taking and wanted to put it somewhere on the web - it's pretty long and involved so I won't be insulted if you don't read it all:
Love him or hate him, there is no denying the contribution to, and the influence on, the contemporary, fine-art photography world of the British photographer Martin Parr. A polarized opinion of Martin Parr and his work has followed him throughout his career, from his first exhibitions in the mid-1970's through to the present day. The breadth of this polarity is wide stretching from the working class, English layman who has encountered the the Parr controversy in the tabloids; through the educated middle class, whom Parr targets with much of his wit; through art patrons, gallery curators, and picture editors who cannot get enough of Parr's work; through Parr's influences and students even, and especially, through his contemporaries at Magnum where he is the agency's most controversial member and one if its most financially successful. It seems that in Parrworld1 there is little middle ground and to paraphrase reviewers of Parr's work, one is either a fan of his stunning and vivid imagery or one is a critic of his cruel and lurid work.
I myself am very middle class. One of the things I wanted to do as a photographer was to connect the subject matter which I was actually part of with the photography. Photographers tend to be attracted to things very different to where they are from .. they tend to like things very different from their own lifestyle, so one of the rules I try to engage with is to try to photograph things that I am part of. So all the things like consumerism, tourism and being middle class is something I've been very interested in.
Martin Parr2
The above quote applies well to Parr's most famous, color work and to his most recent projects which focus on consumerism, wealth and globalization which I will consider shortly but this is not where his photographic career started out. In the 1960's when Martin Parr was attending the equivalent of high school in Surrey, in the South of England, an area that is part of what is colloquially known as stock-broker belt, and in the 1970's when Parr attended the Manchester College of Art, there was a huge North / South divide in England. Residents of both sides of this unofficial dividing line were highly suspicious of each other. The caricatures were, and still are but to a lesser extent, that the North was uncultured and industrial, whereas the South was seen as wealthy and the predominant habitat of the middle classes. Growing up, Martin Parr, as he admits himself, could not have been more middle class; “I'm so middle class it's unbelievable. [...] My father was a civil servant. I was brought up in middle class Surrey. That's it – it's the perfect middle class pedigree.”3 Growing up Martin Parr did have a connection with the North of England through his grand parents, particularly his grandfather George Parr, living in Yorkshire. He took regular vacations in Yorkshire as a child but it was a romanticized view of the North that Parr experienced on these visits. His grandfather was an accomplished amateur photographers who introduced Parr to the magic of photography and the darkroom and took the family on day trips to local sites and landmarks. Parr saw a holiday Yorkshire idyll not the everyday reality that is his stock and trade.
Parr's childhood Northern adventures must have influenced his choice of college to attend as he escaped the boredom of the suburbs to the northern city of Manchester to go to art school. We know that his projects while in Manchester reflected his new 'exotic' environment. We see pictures of interiors that are much more working class than his upbringing. We know that he tried to locate the real Coronation Street4 to use as a photographic subject as if the popular television soap opera had a real-life alter-ego but it is Parr's graduation project, Home Sweet Home, that seems to be his first, deliberate use of photography as an ironic weapon. The project consisted of a free-standing, full-scale model of a working class sitting room. Kitsch furnishings and decorations were used as a backdrop to Parr's own black and white photography. The photographs were mounted in cheap frames of the day perhaps to remove them from the preciousness of art photography. It is a two pronged attack; on one level the sitting room setting can be seen as a criticism of popular tastes of the day – a theme that continues though most of Parr's work to the present day. On the other hand Home Sweet Home was a gauntlet slap in the face to many of Parr's teachers at Manchester Polytechnic who Parr felt were totally unaware of what was happening in the art photography field of the day. If Parr was looking for a strong reaction he got it as he managed to split the opinion of his faculty lecturers. Graduation projects are usually exhibited no further than graduation shows but Parr's notoriety ensured that Home Sweet Home got broader coverage at two further English galleries.
After graduation Parr and several of his peers from Manchester moved a little way out of the city and into a new kind of photography when they formed a loose, artistic community in a slightly run-down, rural village called Hebden Bridge. Although, or perhaps because, Hebden Bridge was in a state of neglect and decline it became a sort of semi-pastoral Eden for Parr and his cohorts. Moving away from the conceptual art photography of his student days Parr seems to fall more under the influence of the American FSA style than the beatnik photography of Robert Frank that Parr cites as his major influence as a student .5 Martin and his future wife, Susie Mitchell, zeroed in on a small, declining community based around the Methodist chapel of Crimsworth Dean as a subject for a social documentary project that resulted in some of the most powerful and intimate images of Parr's career. Mitchell seems to have acted as an agent who allowed Parr who was already used to working from a slightly stand-off or aloof perspective, emotionally closer access to their subjects. With Mitchell, Parr became embedded with the congregation of Crimsworth Dean; Mitchell taught Sunday school while Parr helped the church raise funds by holding slide-shows. The great images resulting from these four years demonstrate that the congregation must have been aware that they were the subject for Parr's photography and Mitchell's interviewees were certainly aware of her tape recorder but when the Parrs were outed by a chapel elder for having more artistic than spiritual ambitions for being involved in the parochial community it was painful for both sides. The photographer's usual line of there being unwritten consent between themselves and their subjects does not stand in this case. The photographs were powerful, unsentimental and comprehensive but Parr has never got emotionally that close to his subjects again. Perhaps it is the Crimsworth Dean controversy that defined Parr's modus operandi on future projects of stepping back and being removed from his subject. The experience may also be responsible for Martin's often repeated and quoted philosophy that all photography is exploitative. "My line is that photography by its nature is exploitative. [...] It's unavoidable, especially if you are earning money from it. You're basically earning money from other people's image. Most photographers would never admit that photography is exploitative; they try to hide it because of their humanistic ideals."6
After the Crimsworth Dean experience and a couple of years self-imposed exile in isolated Ireland, the Parrs returned to the North of England. During this time England had changed and was now firmly entrenched in the era of Thatcherism which had created a devolution of the English class-system and embraced new-money and consumerism. Parr's photography had also metamorphosed during this time. No longer was he concentrating on quaint, gentle, disappearing communities and rituals but his eye had turned to more contemporary subjects. Some argue that Parr's work became politicized at this time but Parr denied this claiming that he was still just photographing people going about their everyday lives but the emotion does seem more critical of his subjects however much Parr might deny it. The biggest visual change was the switch from a black and white, 35mm system to a medium format, vividly colorful approach that relied on a slightly wide point of view, consumer color film and a signature daylight, fill-flash technique. As previously, inspiration for this aesthetic came not from his peers in the UK but from the US and the colorful snapshot approach that was gaining momentum with William Eggleston, Stephen Shore and their ilk.
With his aesthetic and technical approach renewed, and his subjects being an emerging, rather than disappearing society the stars were aligned for Parr's most popular, critically acclaimed and denounced work. This productive era is prefaced by the works Point of Sale and One Day Trip which both focused on Britain's consumer society but it is the work The Last Resort which catapulted Parr into the spotlight. The Last Resort documents working class families at play in a run-down and dirty seaside town called New Brighton. The work shows naked babies and children with their parents playing and eating in an environment festooned with trash and grime. Junk food and overcrowding are a constant theme through the work. Although Parr denies that this work is neither political nor critical, critics were immediately divided about the work. Some saw it as an insightful portrayal of the times but others thought it a cynical and cruel condemnation of the working class. Of course, the critics themselves were mainly from the liberal, educated middle class and Parr contends that they were being overly defensive and precious towards his working class subjects. What is undeniable is that the publicity and controversy The Last Resort created provided Parr with the financial means and the critical following to follow his muse where it would take him and, almost in direct response to the defenders of the working class, Parr's muse took him back to the South of England and to the middle class who were most benefiting from Thatcher's government.
His next large work, The Cost of Living marks his move away from documenting the working class and can be seen as a direct criticism of middle class that is Parr's heritage. The Cost of Living is no more an affectionate work than The Last Resort and, in some ways can be described as more vicious. The working class holiday makers in The Last Resort are trapped by their surroundings and economic position but the middle class subjects of The Cost of Living and subsequent examinations of a consumer society such as Signs of the Time, From A to B and Small World have the freedom and money that provide more choices of how to live and the environments they create for themselves. In many ways these works are more damning criticisms of the middle class than earlier work was of the their working class equivalents, a point not lost on the critics who felt the bead of Parr's focus fall upon them. Parr is now accused of being aloof and a cynical, arbiter of good taste for the whole nation but criticism brings with it attention and with this attention Parr's career continued to grow.
He followed up these major works with a slight change in aesthetic. His color work had, up to this point, remained slightly wide angle and medium format. This approach changes slightly with Common Sense when he returned to 35mm. This is was not a return to his early, romantic black and white work but Parr adopts a macro lens and a ring flash; he gets in really close in on his subjects and the style backs away from identifiably documentary to a more abstract and conceptual approach not seen from Parr since his student projects. His subjects remain the same: junk food, traditions, tourism, the results of consumerism and globalization. If anything, the colors become even more saturated. The tight in approach renders differing subjects in a similar way and the juxtaposition of particular images on the page emphasize this; raw bacon looks the same as sunburned skin, pasty sausages look similar to a piece of spent chewing gum. Of course, the critics had something to say about this change in direction and they found it hard to recognize the documentary thread that had run through Parr's career. They also criticized what they saw as a less hard hitting style but if you look closely the work from this period is probably the most damning of western society that Parr has produced to date.
The art photography world is badly paid for most participants compared to worlds of fashion, commercial and documentary photography. Parr saw that his work overlapped into these genres and looked around for an agency to represent him. He was already a controversial associate member of the Magnum agency but be decide to seek full membership of what was seen as the world's top photo agency knowing that he was likely to be strongly resisted by the old guard. Magnum functions like a cooperative where membership is obtained dependent upon a vote cast by existing members.
If he was expecting a fight he was not disappointed. In an open letter to the Magnum membership Philip Jones Griffiths actively campaigned against allowing Parr to become a full member of Magnum, “It would be the embracing of a sworn enemy whose meteoric rise in Magnum was closely linked with the moral climate of Thatcher's rule [...] Let me state that I have great respect for him as the dedicated enemy of everything I believe in and, I trust, what Magnum still believes in.”7 The main criticism of Parr was that, whereas Magnum prided itself on romantic, humanistic approach to subjects outside of war zones at least, Parr, in his own words, “... was one of the first to break that humanist tradition that was so strong in the previous generation. They thought I was exploitative, cynical, even fascist. All kinds of words were used.”8 It is to Parr's credit that while certain old-school members of Magnum, although they denied it, made personal attacks against his person, Parr remained, as ever, aloof and removed from the battle. He had strong opinions that Magnum's approach and philosophy were outdated but he never resorted to personal attacks. It was a close call but the younger, more forward looking but less vocal members of Magnum recognized Parr's work as different to the traditional Magnum content but also saw that it was a diversity of vision that Magnum needed to remain relevant and by one vote, Parr was accept into the agency. Financially for Magnum this was a good thing as Parr has consistently been one of their top three best selling photographers since his admission.
Ironically, one of the other leading horses in Magnum sales is consistently Henri Cartier-Bresson who had a strong, visceral reaction against Parr's work when he experienced it. Bresson rebuked Parr in public when they met in 1995. In a letter that was made public HCB later apologized for his over-reaction but said that what upset him about Parr's work was “the philosophy of a man taking himself seriously, without humor, where rancor and scorn dominate, a nihilistic attitude symptomatic of society today.”9 As HCB had been one of Parr's teenage idols this must have been tough to read but, yet again, Parr kept his cool and held his ground; “I acknowledge there is a large gap between your celebration of life and my implied criticism of it [...] What I would query with you is 'Why shoot the messenger?'”10
To say that Martin Parr deliberately courted controversy is to demonize him as being manipulative and contriving. It seems more fair and honest to say that Parr does not shy away from a fight and that he constantly stays on message addressing the themes he sees as important. It is true that controversy has, to some extent, made Martin Parr the photographer he is today both in his aesthetic approach and his resulting professional standing and financial success.
The confrontation at Crimsworth Dean after the Parr's infiltrated the community and the way their subjects subsequently felt betrayed shaped the way Martin Parr approached his subjects from then on. Although he claims to be a part of the society he portrays, and he may be part of the same demographic as his subjects, his perspective is deliberately detached and unemotional. This can be construed as heartless and cynical if this is the way you are inclined to view Parr's work. If you are more sympathetic to his agenda it can be seen as simply honest and that Parr is simply the messenger reflecting our world, and our effect on it, back at us. Parr's unsparing view of both the working and middle class have galvanized opinions in both his critics and audience. His most famous fan was, allegedly, Margret Thatcher while his most vocal and famous critic was Bresson. Everyone seems to have a strong emotional response to the social documentary parts of Parr's body of work. Everyone who knows Parr's work has a strong opinion of it and perhaps this demonstrates Parr's importance both as an art photographer and as a social documentarian; he makes people think and examine themselves. Those strong enough to take this criticism seem to appreciate Parr's work while those who are more critical of him often acknowledge that they are also disillusioned with the direction of the modern world and Parr's work, therefore, makes something of a convenient scapegoat. In the end, Parr's persistence and faith in his own vision will be responsible for his legacy: “I have kept producing new work, new books; and I guess, in the end, people take that seriously. If you're around long enough, and you keep doing new work, and it keeps provoking an audience to dislike you, and, obviously, some people like it as well, people will notice what you do."11
I hope I have demonstrated how Martin Parr's career has been followed by strong, divergent opinions of both the artist and his work. Parr does not shy away from uncomfortable subjects or from criticism. Being a popularist his work has escaped gallery walls and art magazines on to the pages of high circulation magazines and billboards and his work often makes people think. Parr does not make pretty pictures in a traditional style but he reflects back the world and society most of his viewers are part of. It is a strong message that does not show us in the most favorable light. Strong, difficult, unflattering messages often elicit a strong emotional response in those addressed but Martin Parr has made it his mission to be that polarizing force and messenger.
Love him or hate him, I began this piece as a huge fan of Martin Parr. While doing the background reading I found some of what he says judgmental and difficult to stomach. I see Martin Parr as a hard task master but remain convinced of the importance of his work and see controversy as a side effect of the themes he addresses and the way he addresses those themes. Parr still makes me think about my place in the world and shows me, in the words of Oscar Wilde “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.”12
Bibliography: Books
Miller, Russell: Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History: The Story of the Legendary Photo Agency - Grove Press; 1st Grove Press Pbk. Ed edition (October 1999 – Hardback published 1997)
Parr, Martin: Boring Postcards - Phaidon Press (September 30, 1999)
Parr, Martin: Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton - Dewi Lewis Publishing; New Ed edition (February 1998)
Parr, Martin: Small World - Dewi Lewis Publishing; Rev Ed edition (November 1, 2007)
Parr, Martin: The Cost of Living - Aperture (January 1991)
Parr, Martin: Think of England - Phaidon Press Pbk. Ed edition (November 1, 2004)
Parr, Martin & Barker, Nicholas: From A to B - BBC Books (March 17, 1994)
Parr, Martin & Badger, Gerry: The Photobook: A History, Vol. 1 & 2 - Phaidon Press (December 1, 2004 & October 7, 2006)
Poynor, Rick: Obey the Giant: Life in the Image World - Birkhäuser Basel; 2nd ed. edition (October 24, 2007)
Williams, Val: Martin Parr - Phaidon Press (February 1, 2002)
Bibliography: Audio Interviews
Bibliography: Periodicals
The Financial Times, February 16, 2007: Lunch with the FT: Martin Parr by Peter Aspden
Bibliography: WWW References
Magnum Photos:
1Parrworld is the title of a major Martin Parr exhibition to open at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, May 2008.
2Martin Parr in interview at the fotopub festival, Thursday, October 7, 2004.
3Poynor, Rick: Obey the Giant: Life in the Image World – page 18
4Coronation Street is one of the longest running soap operas on UK television. It first aired in 1960 and still runs today. It is set in a fictional working class, street of terraced houses in Weatherfield, a fictional town in Greater Manchester.
5“The first book I bought was Robert Frank's The Americans. [...] I remember [...] looking at The Americans almost as if it were a dirty magazine, you know, as if it was something naughty.” - Williams, Val: Martin Parr - Phaidon Press (February 1, 2002) page 32.
6Martin Parr in interview at the Photopub Festival, October 7th, 2004
7Letter from Philip Jones Griffiths to the Magnum agency members – reported in Russell Miller: Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History – page 295
8The Financial Times, February 16, 2007: Lunch with the FT: Martin Parr
9Letter from HCB to 'other concerned people' about his reaction to Parr's work - reported in Russell Miller: Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History – page 297
10Letter from Parr to HCB reported in Russell Miller: Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History – page 297
11Martin Parr in interview at the Photopub Festival, October 7th, 2004
12Oscar Wilde from the preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
It has been eight months since I posted anything to Vox. How funny then that the subject that inspires me to write again is the subject I last wrote about; inspiration or the lack of it and faith in your own work.
So, since we last chatted I completed my picture-a-day project for 2007 and started again for 2008. I made a new picture every day for a whole year and then some and I am proud of that. However, I am less proud of some of the individual shots than I am of the achievement of completing what I started. Let's face it, completing what you started is easy if you're stubborn enough but making each individual picture stand on its own is tough.
I was talking with a fellow photographer this weekend; a fellow ex-pat; probably someone who is somewhere about the same place as I think I am in my photographic development; someone I trust; someone who doesn't mince words. He asked me why I'd been contaminating my Flickr stream with so much crap recently. I was a little taken aback at first but then I knew what he was saying was true. I can try an justify what I'm doing by claiming that flickr is my equivalent of a Day Book, a journal of sorts - both the good and the bad - it's not a blog and certainly it's not a portfolio. That holds true to a point.
I am not in the flickr elite. I'm not even on the flickr B-list but I do have a few regulars who comment on my photos and I comment of theirs. It's a community of sorts to support each other through the project 365 death march. I do not use those comments to criticize their work and they, thankfully, return the favor. My wife knows that it is what I don't say in those comments I make that is most telling but I'm just like my friends their - I struggle enough just to make a post a picture most days so I don't want it scored on artistic merit. It's the one time I'm happy with a "nice capture", "good shot" kind of comment. And then I start believing my own press....
The truth is, my friend is right. I'm actually happy with my pictures about 1 day in 10. I know how to make something that will fool a layman most of the time but, if you really know about photography, and you look at my shots you can see I'm faking it. I can make something that looks artistic but that doesn't make it art. So why go on? I have to keep making pictures if I want to call myself a photographer. I have to go on for that 1 day in 10 when I think it's actually worth it. It's hard to make up of inspiration with persistence and hard work but I have to believe that it's worth trying.
I used to have absolute confidence in my own work to the point of arrogance. I miss that sureness but perhaps this self-doubt is something I just have to work through to get to that next, creative place. It is a hard slog but I am too stubborn to give up just because I feel like I'm producing crap. There's only two choices when you're stuck in a rut; bounce out or get entrenched and comfortable. I am working to avoid the latter.
I hate those blogs that apologize for not writing or being away. Even more I hate the excuses they proffer to explain their absence; usually something to do with being too busy or real life getting in the way of blogging. Are we d-list bloggers so egocentric as to think that we are missed when we don't write? As a reader of blogs, it's not like I'm going to run out of things to read if even half of the blogs and podcasts I subscribe to stop publishing tomorrow. My RSS reader cup would still runneth over.
I am, therefore, not going to apologize for not having written anything here lately. I am not going to make up excuses for neglecting my photoblog, or for phoning in my project 365 pictures, or for not commenting on my contacts on Flickr. My real world responsibilities were no heavier than usual - I just didn't feel like it. I do not presume I was missed nor am I fishing for comments to the contrary. Let's just say for want of a better explanation, that my creative muse left me for a while.
So what do you do when you consider yourself a creative person but you don't feel like doing anything creative? I save what little creative juice I have to keep creative commitments that are important to me, in this case my photo-a-day project for this year. Even when I didn't feel like it I took a shot each day that I wasn't ashamed of. If this meant reshooting things I'd already shot, so be it. If it meant taking pictures in the same, comfortable vein day after day, then I just rolled with it. There are times to push yourself and there are times to acknowledge your limitations and energy.
In the project365 group I am part of in Flickr we have seen a number of committed members drop out recently. Either they were pushing themselves to try to make an exceptional image everyday that stood a good chance of making explore which is exhausting, or they just tired of the project and it was either to stop than go on. In running parlance we call it 'hitting the wall', or 'bonking', or 'the bear jumping on your back'. Somewhere around mile 18 to 21 of a marathon there's a danger that you will have the overwhelming urge to stop running; this might be because you're trying too hard, or not trying hard enough, or your not well enough prepared. If you want to finish enough you will break through the wall and keep going - if you don't want it enough you'll either walk it in or stop and get a ride in from the sop wagon. If you can dig deep and run it in you're a real runner no matter what your time.
A similar analogy could apply to any long term artistic endeavor. If you want it enough and you can find the energy to keep going even when you want to stop you might learn something about yourself, your talent, your limitations and your strengths. There are mental tricks runners can employ to break through the wall; you try to divert yourself. Instead of counting steps, watching out for mile markers and all the mental arithmetic that goes into working out if you can still make your target time you can sing songs in your head that match the tempo of your steps. You can lift up your head and look around yourself instead of looking inside and down at your feet. You can talk to your peers around you. Before you know it mile 21 is behind you and the finish line is achievable again.
While my muse was MIA I picked up a guitar for the first time in forever and tried to learn something new. I sat down with the books of photographers who I love. I went to the movies. I talked to other photographers about, what else?, photography. My muse didn't come running back, banging on the door begging me to take her back but I can feel her in the house again. Artistically speaking, I'm not going to qualify for Boston but I will run it in.
