They way I see it

All of us have at one time or another written essays seeking a 'compare and contrast' between two or more subject matters. They could be theories, or objects or points of views. In contemporary photography, critics and non-critics alike are always comparing and contrasting, evaluating the unknown with the known, to form an identity of that which is shaped by how much understanding, knowledge or intellect one has in a particular genre to be able to say, "I like this photograph...it reminds me of a...(name of famous photographer)... ."

Unfortunately, the honest gut feeling of what a good photograph is - what it represents, the subject matter, its composition, its context, its purest aesthetic form, it seems, are no longer so important, but rather " .. it looks like a Stephen Shore, a Gursky or an McCurry", even.

Because of modern digital media today allows almost every camera owner to post and receive feedbacks instantly, the saturation of imagery on the internet has allowed the comparing and contrasting to go awry, with no real judgment passed except perhaps limited to a few words like to "great shot!"or "nice photo!" There just isn't the time and knowledge, to give a more constructed analysis and critique of the hundreds of thousands of pictures that get posted daily. Besides, what if you don't like a photograph? You simply ignore and move on to the next one.

A lot photographs I see now tend to be emulations rather than creations and although this isn't so bad in a sense, since "everything has been photographed" as Sontag puts it, and imitation is the highest form of flattery, it begs me to ask then, why photograph? Aren't collecting perfect picture postcards sufficient ? What do we photograph at all?

It must be because we can add value to the image through our personal expression and understanding of what surrounds us in our daily lives. Just like a painter and brushstrokes, the camera operator can mark his or her expression with the click of an f-stop, or the turn of the zoom ring, or even shoot off the hip!

Can photographers become critics and curators? I can only recall a handful of art curators that have been established photographers in their own right. As far as I know, curators and critics are nearly always taught from an art background, subjected to art history as a major or even developed their visual skills as picture editors or journalists. Perhaps curators have to be all-encompassing in their visual interpretative skills, and can see instantly what a good image is, its intrinsic 'commercial' value. Whether the general public 'gets it' is anybody's guess. This can be said of contemporary conceptual works. Working as the artist's pundit, curators must be able to enter the artist's mind and skillfully scrape out the hidden messages and meanings which often, are securely embedded. The way I see it, photographers can never be good critics, especially of their peers. Curators, cannot be great photographers, as their remit is too wide.


The Camera is your Third Eye

Unexpected things happen when you least expect it. I was going through some of images shot in Rajasthan, India recently and came across this 'odd' photo of a black cow lying on the sandy ground, with a heavily cast shadow, of which must have been from our minivan. I don't remember taking the picture but must have been one of many, shot through the vehicle's window as we drove from Jaipur to Jodhpur. I nearly hit the delete key, but had a second glance at it. Then I knew I had a keeper.

Road to Jaipur, 2010

Daido Moriyama, Stray Dog, 1971

One of the strangest and most disturbing photographs which I have come across is the image above of the stray dog by Daido Moriyama, whose work I greatly admire. This photograph at first glance, a high contrast print, grainy, seemingly unbalanced and oddly out of proportion stuck in my mind. Once you have seen it, you will never be able to erase it from your visual vocabulary. Its menacing stance and almost perceptible growl affected me subconsciously and everytime I face a barking mutt, the image of this stray comes to mind. My image of the resting cow of India reminded me of the stray dog!

Similar, yet miles apart. The perception of blackness and negativity that emanates from both images evokes the same feeling for me. A feeling of brooding intent, a kind of fearful apprehension. In breaking down the images, I see mainly dark geometric shapes in both photographs, over-laid by the image of the dog's head and in my picture the texture of the sand from the tyre marks. Positive and Negative space. Dimensionally opposed to each other, one recedes and the other approaches. It is this 'tension' in the photographs which creates the drama much absent in many photographs today. Robert Frank's photographs of American suburbia have spades of it. So has Klein and in Ralph Gibson's works.

(Click on the images to enlarge)

Istanbul : East Meets West

In 2 weeks time, I will be in spending 5 days in the great city of Istanbul, Turkey along with Andy Craggs and our workshop participants.

I visited Istanbul in 1998, on a 10 day tour which took me to the shores of Gallipoli, where many casualties were taken during WW1 when the British and French army joined by their Australian and Kiwi counterparts fought the Ottoman Turks which failed. This Campaign was made into a movie of the same name and launched the career of a very young fresh actor called Mel Gibson.

I also visited Izmir further south, Ephesus, and Pamukkale, with the amazing white terraces of calcium carbonate cliffs.

I am really looking forward to seeing and photographing Istanbul again, with a fresh eye on things. The city is the literally split up between Europe and Asia, and sits on the tip of the European continent. The busy Bosphorus river is the lifeline of Istanbul as it brought in trade by sea from places as far as China and India during the Ottoman years and also beyond that, when it was the centre of Christianity founded under Emperor Constantine. Not surprising since it was also known as The Second Rome.

How to stay relevant to your photography

Penang, 2010

Being relevant

I have been meaning to write this topic for a long time now, and finally, I am able to put my thoughts together. This past year, I have been traveling to and from the UK to Malaysia and Singapore, working on photography related projects, namely, the KL Photoawards, in its second year, and Silent Wall, a book project, documenting the Pudu Jail mural.

From this perspective, I have given much thought to how one can make photography work for you, or rather, how to stay relevant to one's own photography. I keep a watch on my friends' Facebook wall updates regularly and notice a pattern of postings that has become slightly predictable. Camera ownership has become saturated amongst social media users, taking the form of cameraphones to high-end Digital SLRs, and sites like flickr and Facebook have become a virtual instant gallery, showcasing one's latest photographic endeavour, seeking feedback, commentary and 'Likes' within minutes of one's postings. The instant sharing capability of photography today with the advent of broadband and mobile technology has, in my opinion dulled the very nature of picture-taking to the detriment of personal expression through fine editing skills. We tend nowadays to post even the mundane, lacklustre, unoriginal compositions and banal contents to provoke response. (Guilty as charged!)

Amidst these plethora of images, I see much repetition, and although they say that 'imitation is the best form of flattery', it does not lend to one's own creativity. People keep telling me "I have nothing to photograph", "There isn't anything worth photographing", "I need to travel to new locations to photograph", " I'm too busy working everyday" can be so easily answered with "What do you want from photography?"

Nice, Cote d'Azur, 2010

Many newcomers to photography often develop a passion after having thumbed through some exotic travel magazine spread, noticed some great witty advertisement campaign, have seen some peer's successful career in shooting weddings and simply want to jump in, or are simply tech-based, i.e. they have a passion for photographic equipment rather than photography. All are legit forms of entry but none I know entered photography to change the world.

Yes, you read correctly. Change the world. I qualify that by adding, 'change the world through the better understanding of the human condition'. Social photography, is the genre where it all started in the first place. As the camera was invented, photography replaced paintings of the upper classes, and brought a new media to the masses, enabling self-portraits, images of families and workers, to be recorded with much ease and lesser expense. Thus, to cut a long story short, social documentation became documentary photography, with added text, became editorial, news gathering, and only most recently, artistic and fine art photography became prevalent.

My love for the 'act' of photography, that is, the ability to operate the camera to record my surroundings and the people I react with began when I first saw amazing portraits of mercury poisoning sufferers in Minamata by W Eugene Smith in the late 70s.

© W Eugene Smith

The above image moved me to no end, and so I thought, I'd too, want to change the world. Having noble intentions is one thing, but having the ability to execute it is another. However, there's always a starting point, and this would, for most people, be their nearest and dearest. I regret I had not sufficiently photographed my own parents, uncles, aunts and cousins whilst I had the chance. I truly regret this. Not just mere casual holiday snaps in Port Dickson or Chinese New Year family portraits, but thought out and planned portraits. It always seemed that the camera is a tool for taking pictures of the 'outside', but never the 'inside'. Family pictures are sacrosanct.

I'd truly recommend any newcomer to set yourself a project to photograph your family members or close friends, just so that you would get into a zone that you are familiar with already without making things more complex than it should be. Once you begin to look at formal portraiture of family from a deeper, aesthetic angle, then the process would become easier venturing further afield.

However, being relevant doesn't mean not experimenting with or sharing new ideas with your fellow practitioners, but understanding one's limitation, knowledge and skills. Aspiration in photography is the linchpin to greater things, whilst execution is the only way to success. For without execution, all great aspirations will not see the light of day.

I find that in photography there's no shortcut. Some might well disagree with this, but I'm being general here. Photography, as in any artform, is an acquired skill, not only in the technical ability to operate equipment, and even guess the correct exposure without a lightmeter! Like the painter and his strokes, it is a learned process. One can only photograph what one knows and recognises. Kind of like the theory of solipsism. The greater one's visual vocabulary, the better one can photographically compose. After all, it is one's mind that 'sees' the image, but the finger operates the shutter release. The camera never takes the picture.



Formulate, not Emulate

London, 2010

Set your sights a little ahead of you. But always move the ahead by the same amount. That way you will make little 'progressive' steps, but progress it will, rather than setting an impossibly difficult goal that you neither have the time or motivation to achieve. I see many photographers strive to be included only within certain 'delineations' of practice, be it salon, weddings, or travel, or whatever genre they appear to be interested in. Why limit one's creativity at an early stage? A fluid but systematic understanding of the photographic processes within all fields of practice is just as important in determining one's stand in using the camera as an image capture tool. I was once told that "A good photographer can and must photograph everything". This saying still hold true. Having a personal style and visual signature however, is the key, like in art. We instantly recognise a Matisse, a Rothko or a Warhol.


Cameras today have simply become too cumbersome, and a burden to most photographers, who seem to liken them as boxes of (clever) tricks rather than picture taking machines. The 'pixel-peepers' who clearly have never printed large format have become the guru's of digital photography amongst their peers through endless on-screen comparisons. They see the pixel but miss the picture.

Cameras, The Early years.

"My first camera was a Minolta SR-T101. It came with a 55mm lens, which has a narrower depth of focus and angle of view than the 35mm lenses that many of the other students at the San Francisco Art Institute were using. I couldn't afford a new lens, so I worked with this lens for about a year. It was a good learning experience. You can be sloppy with a wide-angle lens. The 55mm made me very aware of what I was putting in the frame. It was good discipline in learning how to see and compose. The 55mm had very little distortion. If I wanted a close-up picture I stepped up to the subject and if I wanted a wider shot I stepped back. After that first year, when I decided that I was serious about photography, I reluctantly sold the Minolta and got a Nikon F with a 35mm lens. The other students at the school were using a variety of cameras, but the most common were Nikons and Leicas."

Annie Leibovitz At Work, Random House 2008

I have often tried to recall what my first camera was. I think it was a Kodak Instamatic which took 126 cartridge films, and rotating flashcubes. I often looked at the ads in the magazines during the mid 70s in awe, at the latest Nikon Fs, and the magnificent Olympus OM1 cameras and could not understand how SLRs worked. I had no concept of the internal prisms that bend light, and the interchangeable lenses, the multi-patterned metering systems, depth of field previews etc. It was all technically impossible as far as I was concerned. I was happy with my little Instamatic.

My next camera was a Yashica MG1 which was a might good camera! It was a manual focus rangefinder, with metal construction and an electronic leaf shutter. I really loved the way it operated, and was a 'serious' after the plasticky Kodak. I realised that making good clear photographs involved more than just pressing the shutter. You had to focus and set the exposure at the same time. No more Cloudy of Sunny settings. Things were getting technical, like F-stops, with unimaginable numbers, F1.8, 5.6, 11, 16 etc...It made no sense at all, but it felt good. Distance marking on the lens barrel was easy to decipher, but F-Stops?!

Several years later, my father passed me a vintage 1960s Zeiss Ikonta, which had a folding bellows lens and a knurled knob for advancing 120 film. It was a beaut. Everything about it harks back to a time of elegance in design, form and function. Precision built.

It was useless. I could not make a decent photograph with it. In fact, I don't think I ever attempted. The viewfinder had fungus haze. The shutter was inaccurate. I still have it, the Ikonta. It sits longingly on a shelf as a showpiece of what it was once, a picture making machine. The shutter has now frozen due to years of inactivity. The knurled knob is stiff for lack of lubrication, and the rangefinder mechanism is all but jammed.

As far I I'm concerned, these were REAL cameras. The photographer had to work at camera handling, setting exposure and focus in the fly. None of those plastic electronic black boxes manufacturers churned out one a month under a different guise in the mid 80-to 90s. We are so spoilt today. Auto focus, auto exposure, face detection, smile detection, even pet detection!

Horrors!

Apologies! I've been tied up

It seems like only yesterday, but my last posting was in April! I have been in Malaysia for awhile, organising the KL Photoawards finalists, Winners Awards evening and other side projects, and have not even been photographing in KL, apart from a half Saturday morning.

All these are water under the bridge, so to speak. Just last weekend in June, the Pudu Jail wall on the Jalan Pudu flank was demolished to make way for a road bypass and the rest of the prison is scheduled for demolition soon, to be replaced by another anonymous retail complex. You may wish to follow our readers photos and videos of the demolition here. I foresaw all these some two years ago when the papers reported the redevelopment of the site, and began The Silent Wall book project, documenting the external wall mural piece by piece, with the help of photography enthusiasts Roziah, Joanna, Li-Ling and Jerrica. The book will be published, in one form or another, following the working copy which is also available for sale at Blurb.com, but we are tying up the loose ends and researching into a few more items.

I have also started tweeting, and signing myself up (!) to the 365Project which I'm attempting to document 1 year with photographs on a daily basis. Please do visit and pass your comments.

More soon!

Road Trip : Snapshots

Last weekend, I was on a road trip to Northern France, in the Region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais. Only a short 1 hour drive from the Calais tunnel to our destination, a small bed and breakfast in an even smaller hamlet called Heuchin. The period house now run by a British couple Richard and Vanessa deserves special mention.


The Maison de Plumes (House of Feathers) is a charming stand alone bungalow which has 4 distinctly themed rooms based around the 'plumes', and as you can guess, is wildly decorated with extraordinary detail for a b&b. 5-Stars I would say. The courteous hosts also serve up a 5 course 'gourmand' cuisine which is superb.


The snow was still on the ground as we drove towards the coastal resort of Le Touquet. Passing fields and fields of open snow-covered farmland in this stark countryside, I saw hundreds of windfarms generating renewable electricity. This region is known for its strong Westerly winds coming off the English Channel, and how I marvel at the French for utilising this form of clean energy harness. It was a majestic sight to see these giant windmills spinning in the distant horizon, and as you approach right beneath them, the sheer size and scale of each structure simply amazes.

Le Touquet is a quaint little Victorian resort with its magnificent shady tree-lined Boulevards and large mansions, befitting something from a 1960's Californian suburb. On the coastal edge, the town is lined with charming period buildings, mock Tudor-esque designs, steeples, mini-castles, palaces, and Hansel-n-Gretel cottages. All very strange, and a bit Disneyland. We stayed at the Novotel Spa hotel which is right on the water's edge, amidst the sand dunes and wind swept grasses. Basically a 80's prefab concrete box structure, it is nonetheless comfortable, equipped with a sea-water indoor spa pool with panoramic views of the sea.



This is low season for Le Touquet, and its easy to see why. The sea is at its roughest when the wind is blowing, and the high winds blow fine sand all over you, and surely, cannot be good for cars left out for long in the open. It is also freezing cold and wet. About 80% of the accommodation in town is closed or unoccupied. It would be very different here in the summer months. The stretch of open beach in front of the town plays host to windsailing competitions.

Utopia

I was in Singapore for a couple of nights recently, and in my view, this island nation is as close to Plato's Utopian society can be in most respects, without being communistic in the process. In fact, far from it, it is the one of the most capitalistic society on earth, and where dedication, competition and efficiency is the norm in most industries. I lived as a student in Singapore in the late 70s and its always great to come back here for short visits.


I took a walk through Chinatown and found it garishly touristy, so I wandered into the surrounding housing blocks of Tiong Bahru to discover a different world, a world where living in tight confined apartments is the norm, and close quarter communal living is rather pleasant, I might add, with playgrounds and public spaces provided, which are well maintained, clean and well kept. Every thing has its place and in its place.







I see retired old folks sitting around during the day in public areas, chit chatting, playing chess, and sleeping even, or simply mingling amongst friends and neighbours to pass their time, instead of being stuck in their apartments.


In the commercial district, the situation is different. In December, Orchard Road lights up with its Christmas decorations and thousands of light displays. Giant baubles of light and faux ribbons stream down huge shady trees, lamp posts and shop fronts.



Some displays take on a 'Disney' sort of tackyness that seem to invade most Asian shopping malls, Kuala Lumpur included. It seems that bigger is better. Subtle isn't cool, which I find is the complete opposite in Western Europe. Maybe its a perception thing or the recession. London's Christmas lights are pathetic by comparison.


Reindeer and sleighs seems to be all a rave for 2009. Christmas trees must be at least 50 feet high, 100 feet is better!


Decors must be even larger and more innovative than last year. Not a Nativity crib and even Santa in sight yet, perhaps he is being fattened.

A passion rekindled

(Click on the photographs to enlarge)

I recently 'acquired' a vintage 1971 film camera from eBay, an 35mm Olympus 35RD rangefinder and just had it back from Camera City repairs in Fitzrovia, just off Museum Street. It had taken them, actually, him, Pany, a stocky built, possibly Greek descent-of-a guy 3 weeks to clean and service the sticky shutter blades, and now it triggers smoothly with a purposeful 'click' you can barely hear. Just perfect for street photography.


I still have several rolls of expired (read 2007) colour and black&white film stored in my fridge sharing the same compartment with my acidophilus tablets, so I promptly loaded a roll of Fuji NPH400 and went out with no expectation whatsoever, except I had 36 shots to prove the worth of this little charming camera.



It was a Saturday and possibly the worst Saturday this year. The winds blew horizontal rain pellets across your face, and any umbrella opened was rendered useless within minutes. Still, the brave must shop, and we ended up at Primark in Oxford Street (which is another story) bargain hunting for Christmas goodies, (yes, we shop cheap). Incidentally, one can buy a full tuxedo suit for £14 and 6 pairs of socks for £2, trendy 'Che' T-shirts for £3.50. I kid you not. (Hah! Petaling Street, you've got a serious rival).


The focusing on the 35RD is accomplished with a 1/4 turn, short and smooth and the rangefinder patch is still bright and clear of fungus etc. What I find great about using this machine is the size and stealth ability, that is, I can be right up against people's faces and no one really notices me. Ah, it's just a toy camera, its an old silvery thingy, its retro. Most of all, its quiet. Much more quiet than the clunky M8 but not as low pitched as the M6, which I think is still the third king of stealth of all time. (The quietest and quickest camera I have used is the Konica Hexar 35, followed by the Digilux 2)



I am presently in KL and just managed to get the roll of film developed and scanned onto a CD. for £4.00. The scan was way too over saturated by the film quality came through as expected. I was astounded by the sharpness and clarity of the 40mm F1.7 lens! Exposure seemed to be accurate as well and the selective focusing technique produced great bokeh too. The shots reproduced here were grab shots, pre-focussed and random, to capture the shoppers with their umbrellas on Oxford Street, so there are lots of movement and fluidity in the photographs. Most were shot from the hip which is a technique I often use in street photography.






Since then I have loaded another roll of film to finish off, possibly today in KL. Hmm, perhaps this little film revival of mine may just last a little longer, a passion enkindled 30 years ago by the draw of the tiny Olympus Trip 35 my late father gave me.

Chai with friends

On the last evening in Jaipur, our auto-rickshaw driver, Ram Hotla invited us to meet his family, in his home, just outside our hotel. Earlier during the day, Ram drove us around Jaipur, up to the Amber Fort and stopping at a few places of interest before leaving us at the City Palace. He also acted as our guide, briefly at the King's Tomb on the way to Amber Fort. He speaks great English and was a very informative guide.

He lives in a community of buildings including his extended family, all with the Hotla surname, some 200 members in all.

That evening, we met his 3 daughters who were all watching a Hindi soap on satellite TV, his wife and son. Mrs Hotla made us freshly brewed chai and posed for photos.

We chatted about his daughter's schooling, his son's job and his other extended family members. Ram has been an auto-driver for 35 years, and his wife is from Delhi. His daughters go to a local private school and are taught English there. He takes them to school every day in his auto-rickshaw which I thought was great!

He also invited us to visit his home village situated on the road to Agra. That will be for another time. Ram, we hope to see you again next year in Jaipur.

(Click on the photos to enlarge)

Head out onto the streets..

7:30am Les Halles, Paris 2001

My approach to street photography : Part 1

I'll be heading out to Paris in a few weeks to accompany a group of photographers to photograph street and architecture, along with Andy Craggs. Street photography can mean different things to different people and yes, it is one of the most challenging styles of photographs to make and highly rewarding if accomplished well.

Kosovan girl with Stars and Stripes, London, 1999

I started delving into this genre in 1998/9 when I attended my 'first' public rally in Trafalgar Square, photographing the Stop The War campaign in Kosovo. Since then, the street has been my playground, and thus led to my Outside Looking In : Kuala Lumpur book in 2000.

Some ground rules first. Street photography, because of its nature, is basically a beast. It is uncontrollable, a bit haphazard, and oh, yes, there's Lady Luck involved as well. Once you are 'in the zone' so to speak, things will become clearer, as the fog of indecision lifts. Slowly but surely. You begin with a hit rate of zero, and the odds will improve. Shooting digital helps, but not always.

In our image-overkill world of flickr galleries, facebook posts and online slideshows, we seemed hooked onto the 2-dimensionality of photography of the 'instant', constantly sharing our photographs and thoughts on a daily basis. Photography, for many, has become the LCD screen we gaze at, day in day out. Street photography brings us back to reality, where real life exists, and unscripted. The street is where you will engage with people, and existence is fluid and active. The street is your camera's playground.

Let's start with the Rules of Engagement :

Point 1 : Objective

Ask yourself, how are you attracted to street photography. Ah yes, many people will cite HCB, Winogrand or even Moriyama (and dare I say... Araki) or Doisneau's famous 'Hotel De Ville kissing couple'. Elliot Erwitt's dog series? Can you see and photograph what these masters saw in their streets? Can you walk their walk? Forget about it!

Penny for the Guy, Columbia Road Market, London 1998

You shoot your own streets and alleys. Apply your own technique and approach, and you will be rewarded. The important thing to remember is - its only street photography, its not papparazzi-stalking or photojournalism. Its photographing people like yourself, walking about your streets and pavements, your neighbours, your local fishmonger, your local cafe owner etc..so don't upset them. Its about documenting a slice of reality which is completely ordinary. Nothing fancy and nothing contrived, like a wedding function. There's no pressure to deliver, or deadlines to meet. You take your own time, go out and sit in a coffee shop and just people watch.


Point 2. Observe, observe, observe

Start with a nice cup of coffee, sit quietly and just observe. See how people behave, families with their kids, mothers with the pushchairs, waiters taking orders, people that pass you by. After a while, you'll see moments or instances that humour you, make you cringe or take you aback. These are the so-called 'decisive moments' that you are subconsciously seeking as you begin to understand the human condition.

Beggar and school kids, Chinatown, Kuala Lumpur, 1999

Take a walk, and observe the passing scenery before you. Because you are now moving, reality is quickly taking on another dimension, it becomes 3D. Your pace and your choice of lens will define the bubble of space or zone that you will encounter people and hence photograph them. Objects, people and scenes will flicker in and out of your space, and it will be at this moment that you begin to see photographs. I recommend a wide angle lens 35mm to 50mm is ideal, and pre-focus to 3m to get real close to your subjects. If you have studied what a 35mm lens will cover at 3m, you will have mindframes in your sight at all times.

Go to Part 2

More later.... (got to go shoot some fashion!)

Essay Series : SEEING POETRY IN PHOTOGRAPHY, PART I

I have been meaning to write a piece on photography and how I see it as affecting my life and vision, what photography means to me. Well, I hope this is a start of many more essays I intend to write. Blogs are a great medium to disseminate thought and receive instant feedback, so please feel free to respond, I would love to hear from you, readers.




SEEING POETRY IN PHOTOGRAPHY, PART I

The Sun Never Sets : Avoiding cliches in Photography

We all do it.

Look through your archive of images over the years and you can surely find many cliche photographs. Defining 'cliche' is perhaps just as important as knowing how to identify these images. Cliche means something that has a common banality, overdone, overstretched, trite and unoriginal. In photography, I am just as guilty as the next person in photographing cliche images.

Photographs like sunsets or sunrise (depending on your personal disposition), waterfalls with extra blurry water, HDR of all varieties, cute babies, even cuter cats and dogs with that 'aww' expression, super sharp macro images of a butterfly perched on a flower with great background 'bokeh', the ubiquitous portrait of a squating ethnic street trader shot from across the street, a three-quarter posing smiling rickshaw driver, a typical Buddhist monk walking to temple in a saffron robe, a smiling Balinese girl in ritual dress balancing a basket of floral offerings on her head, or a wannabe skinny model posing in a bikini with that 'come hither' look in a shopping mall.

We continue to shoot these images for fear of venturing outside the photographic 'comfort zone' that we are so accustomed to because of the apathy of trying.

If you look through your viewfinder and see something familiar, move on, I'd say, its already been done. Only by recognising the unfamiliar, can you then explore its possibilities in fresh compositions and new angles.

That is not to say we cannot learn to see visually by studying images of others. Plagiarism is the greatest form of flattery. Armed with a greater visual acuity in observational skills, a thinking photographer can re-invent the wheel, if needs be, to adopt a new style through the assimilation, transformation and reformulation of ideas. Photography is after all a personal artistic expression of one's visual cortex of what reality is. The camera is only a tool that achieves this expression.

Resist, resist, resist!

By resisting your attempts at photographing cliche, you will begin to look out for the unusual and extraordinary. Photographers willing to seriously step up and out of the mediocrity may need to re-invent themselves, and become artists, as opposed to mere operators. Yasmin Ahmad, who sadly passed away a few weeks ago, mentioned in a TV interview that "there are no creative people, but only good observers". To become artists, I feel that we need to be good observers first.

Observation will lead one to story-telling, and this is where the basis of documentary and journalistic photography takes form. Film-makers are terribly good observers of space and light in the 3-dimensions. Stills photographers can greatly learn from their counterparts how to see through a scene, that is, anticipation of what comes before and after the moment. By looking fluidly through a scene like a movie, the 'decisive moment' (coined by Cartier-Bresson) can be determined in an instance, where eye, mind and camera is working as one in tandem.

To continue photographing cliche imagery is akin to perfecting the perfect. No matter how many attempts in photographing the Eiffel Tower, one can do no better than the picture perfect postcards that depict the structure being sold at the tourist shops. If you are after the perfect image, go buy a postcard.


The Beholder's Eye : Interpreting Photographs

© Minnie Mouse and Eiffel, Paris 2002

I photographed the image above at the Trocadero in Paris. It was later when I had printed the image then I begin to deconstruct the photograph to its main elements.

The context was that Disneyland Paris was going through a financial bad patch and the French initially saw it's construction as an invasion of Americanism, a 'cultural imperialism' of consumerism. It is as if Monsieur Gustav Eiffel was giving the 'one finger salute' to the Yanks, being represented here as a Minnie Mouse cap-toting child, pretending to be an adult, pushing a pram, with all the insecurities and uncertainties she faces in the future. The whimsical line drawing of the flower on the hoarding adds a humorous twist to the photograph.

I remember actually feeling a bit disappointed as I got to the Trocadero that morning, to see a huge perimeter hoarding around the site, totally obliterating the view of the Eiffel Tower that day due to the renovation project that was going on.

Of course, I had not 'seen' all these elements in the viewfinder at the time of exposure. It was actually a grab shot. The child's parents were probably only steps ahead to the right of the frame. But because I noticed the Minnie Mouse cap first, and thought it had a potential story, I only then framed the child with the hoarding and stepped back a few feet to include the tower in the background. The flower graffiti was purely coincidental.

Approach is everything.


Poetry In Photographs


Why do we make photographs? To answer this question is to understand, not necessarily the process, but social art history. Why do people climb mountains? Because we can.

Similarly, with the invention of the camera lucida, artists were able to draw and thus, paint images with a remarkable likeness to the scene they see, and since the invention of the negative plate and early cameras, creating images and portraits were not only confined to the upper classes and noblemen through commissioning painters. Photography became accessible to the greater public. Men have always been fascinated by the facsimile image of themselves, at work, at play, in social gatherings, and with their families. A photograph records a moment in time, and hence it is immortal, in a skewed sense of the word. It narrows distance, and is nostalgic.

© Under the Eiffel Tower, 2001

Why do we photograph? Because we can. In today's throwaway society, we encounter an overkill of images in our daily lives, both in print and electronically. Man have always been image-led. The popularity and growth in digital photography has enabled everyone to make technically decent photographs with little or no knowledge of the processes. Such are the advancements in science, that accessibility to cameras is practically a given. What is lacking however, is the ability to produce meaningful art imagery, where the poetry of a photograph can be read, like a Haiku.

© Iban fighting cock, Sarawak 2009

Creating a meaningful series of photographs to depict a story can be compared to writing poetry. Writer's block therefore is not uncommon when I photograph. There are good days and bad. Mostly bad as statistically proven. Ansel Adams wrote that he was happy if he could photograph 12 'keepers' a year or so. That may be true for him, working with 10'' x 8'' negatives. Today, a fine art photographer must produce a higher rate of 'keepers' just to keep up with his peers, and competition is rife. There are as many different workflows as there are fine art photographers, so I have surmised that there isn't a right or wrong way, just your way or my way of working.

I prefer working in series, often medium term so as to give ample time for research, execution, fine-tuning and developing the project. Like poetry, my images must first be able to withstand scrutiny, conform to a 'system' of visual cues and can be identifiable as my work.

Next instalment :

Part II : Visual Signature