Issue 114 | Sept 23 - Oct 7, 2022

Are our pictures any good?

I had hardly begun to read

I asked how can you ever be sure

that what you write is really

any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure

you die without knowing

whether anything you wrote was any good

if you have to be sure don't write

From the poem Berryman, W. S. Merwin

It's not just writers, of course. The question haunts all artists, photographers included. How can you be sure what you're doing is any good?

What if you've been practicing photography for years now? What if you've been practicing photography for decades? You've even published photo books. Are your photos any good? Were your photo projects and series worth making? Or are they just so many more images splashing across eyes & screens for seconds before quickly sinking back into the vast digital ocean of billions and billions of photos made and posted each year?

The desire to express ourselves in a visual medium can be an arduous struggle at times. We may achieve recognition for one thing or another - a specific project or photo, but if we are practicing visual artists or photographers, most of the time, we're in the dark about the value of our efforts.

The act of making a photo is so simple that anyone can do it. You look (or don't even look) through a viewfinder, click a button, light blinks onto a sensor or film, and you have a picture. Done. A new image has entered the world. Can an action so simple as clicking a button produce something with lasting meaning? Are the photos we're making with such an easy process any good?

It's not like learning piano or guitar, where you can pluck a note with zero skills, but you face a relatively long journey to gain the physical dexterity to play the notes and chords that make up a song. And discordant notes in music are relatively easy for most people to register. It's as if our minds have an innate sense of melody and musical structure. Maybe because the visual world is so complex and fluid, it's not nearly so clear to us what a dissonant photograph is.

It may be easy to click a shutter, but it is hard to make a good picture. My path toward improvement and progress in my photography practice has been long and slow. Interestingly though, my realization of the level I was at as a photographer was often one step ahead of where I was, no matter where I was. When I started as a photographer, I made pictures of things like flowers, buildings, street art, etc., but when I was making these images, I always felt they were pretty good! My flower photos seemed as colorful and sharp as the flower photos I'd see other, more recognized, photographers make. Of course, now I look back at those images, and with few exceptions, they look to me now like what they actually were - amateur snapshots of flowers in a garden, random photos of skyscrapers, or graffiti.

As I improved over time, I gained new skills. I'd learn color correction, composition, a better sense of light, or how to make pictures of a more dynamic subject matter like people. As I became proficient in each new skill, my sense of confidence would once again exceed my actual abilities, a deception from my ego that I now view as a kindness. Without this inflated sense of my abilities, I might not have kept trying to make good pictures.

I've been doing this long enough now that I can finally look back at old work without a twinge of self-consciousness, but now, as I've grown better and become more committed to the pursuit of genuine artistic expression in the medium, I'm less sure than ever if any of it's any good.  

Posting our work on social media can give you a general sense of whether or not people connect with work, but looking at pictures on the phone is far from ideal, and the algorithms that control when and how our images are seen often work at cross purposes to our intentions. For reasons like these and many more, depending on feedback from social media seems like a terrible mistake. (Unless your post receives universal acclaim, in which case it's clearly the most accurate metric invented). A classic fail of social media feedback is that things like selfies or sunsets often receive far more positive feedback than our earnest artistic expression. 

Friends and family can give you a general sense if something's good, but… they're our friends and family, so how much can you trust that? 

Are our pictures any good? W.S. Merwin is correct - you're in the wrong game if that question has to be answered. In the end, I think most photographers will have to be satisfied that occasionally the darkness will be pushed back by the light they've collected in one of their images. If we want to be artists, what matters is to keep working. Keep plumbing the depths of our soul. Keep looking. Keep describing the world we see with our eyes and hearts. Keep making photos. Our role is like fireflies on a summer night, providing brief flashes of delight to anyone walking through our fields. I think that's enough. 

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Class Announcement:

Starting Saturday, October 29, I'll be teaching a five-session online class called 'Questionable Pictures' that will explore the written and unwritten rules shaping the photography we create. Inspired by the book Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph (Jason Fulford, Aperture, 2021), we'll explore different ideas around aesthetic and style conventions and subject matter (what can we make pictures of and what shouldn't we make pictures of? Who comes up with all these rules anyway, and how can we subvert them?) By the end, we'll be a class full of rebels, celebrating all the rules we broke along the way.

Learn More / Signup: [here]

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Issue 113 | Sept 9 - Sept 23, 2022

Inflection Point

“I am not ready for anything to happen.” -Sylvia Plath

Hello dear NYC Photo Community, photo friends, and photographers! It's been a while.

I hope everyone had a light and love-filled summer of picture-making and conversating and warm golden moments. 

The photo world was active this summer as more waves of technological change rolled through. If summer 2021 was the beginning of NFT madness, summer 2022 was when AI image generation arrived on the scene with miraculous powers to generate powerful and vivid images from text prompts. I think how this technology impacts photography will be foundational, and I'm just beginning to wrap my head around the implications for photographers. 

The other significant tech change was Instagram following through with its promises to fully embrace and elevate video on the app in hopes of catching up to TikTok's lead in social videos. You couldn't look at Instagram this summer without being bombarded by endless and almost exclusively short video reels. It wasn't a great development for folks whose primary love is still photography. Nevertheless, some photographers found innovative ways to play the new game, making slideshows or interesting process videos. Others began looking for alternate social apps where still photography might reign supreme - Flickr, Vero, TryGlass, and others. Sadly I think Instagram lock-in is so strong that widespread adaption of a competitor app is unlikely to happen soon. 

There is at least one thing I still appreciate about Instagram - the way it became an easy-to-use photo sketchbook and simple archive for some of my work. 

There's no doubt that Instagram, for all its flaws, has been able to insinuate its way into my practice, and I thought it would be interesting to consider some of the ways the app has influenced the kinds of photos I share and the way I share them:

Size: Because images on a phone screen are so small, I found myself sharing photos that are mostly close-up or medium-distance shots. If the picture is too far from the subject, or the subject is too small in the frame, the images seem less likely to 'work' on Instagram.

Aspect Ratio: My DSLR makes photos that are 2x3, my phone makes images that are 3x4, and Instagram displays portrait-oriented images at a 4x5 aspect ratio, so I often end up cropping images to the 4x5 ratio. It's a better fit for Instagram, but I like the ratio. It has an appealing sturdiness. 

Filters/Edits: Even if I've edited a photo on my desktop computer, I might still further edit the photo on the phone before posting it to Instagram due to the size difference. For example, images that look acceptably dark on a big screen seem too dark when re-sized for the small screen.

DSLR v. Phone: Often, I'll find a subject and make pictures with my 'good' camera first, and if the subject or time allows, I'll make a few more very similar images with my phone. Usually, I'll post the phone versions of the image, just to get a quick sense of how others feel about the image, which makes sense for a phone app.

I'm fascinated by how all these minor digital tweaks and compromises create a series of variations and partial duplications to the point where I'm no longer sure which of the image variations I've made is the canonical version of the picture.

Whether your photo was initially produced on an 8x10 film camera or a phone, it becomes endlessly malleable, unreliable, and contingent as a digital file.

A photo of yours, like a photo of mine, might have a color version and a black and white version, it might have a filtered version, it might have a cropped version, it might have been edited differently depending on the file size, it might have a phone version and a DSLR version. It might even have a film version. 

To give it a musical metaphor, you could look at some or all of these variations on a singular image idea as being like demo versions/alternate takes of a song we know from the album release. Only with these endlessly multiplying digital copies and variations there is no album release. It's all demo versions, all alternate takes.

Multiple possibilities existed in the film days too. I remember making slides and finding a gadget I used to print those slides on Polaroid film, and then finding that I could transfer the emulsion from the Polaroid print of the slide onto watercolor paper - a Polaroid transfer. Each new transformation of the slide gave me a psychic charge. But each step in this sequence also represented an investment in money, materials, and time - experimentation was not cheap, and that cost imposed a thoughtfulness on the process.

Now endless variations and alternate takes can be freely and instantly conjured with the tap of a phone screen. One response to this fact of modern life might be, "So what? We've all worked to one degree or another like this for years; it's just how things are now. Who cares?"

True, and maybe I'm guilty of playing too much with these image editing apps and techniques, but lately, I've felt like all these endlessly proliferating images have become an unstable and disorienting hall of mirrors. There's no 'this is the one version of any picture because any picture can be endlessly modified. I've lost my way. I feel like my instinctive rejection of the endless variations on a single theme on sale in NFT collections was telling me something.

Perhaps as artists or aspiring artists, it's a good thing to reject the simplicity of the final image and embrace this complication. We can accept that all life is change and endless variation and abandon the illusion that any canonical version of any image we make will ever or could ever exist. 

But at the moment, as image editors become more powerful and AI image generation steps onto the scene with such boldness and certainty, it feels like we are at or fast approaching a real inflection point between the old world and the new digital worlds heading our ways.

Perhaps in this state of inevitable and foundational change, it's time to take one final stand for the world that used to be. Celebrate the physical one last time. Make prints of photos. Those prints will be the canonical versions of your photos. Make a photo book, and how the photos look in your book - that's how you want them to look. That is the final version. Quit tweaking. Our souls need to finish things. There will be plenty of time for change in the years ahead. There are no stopping things now. We're the last of the real world generation.

Have a great couple of weeks ahead, there’s a lot to do and make pictures of these days and I'll see you all again on September 23!

***Important Note: I'm teaching TWO upcoming online classes with StrudelmediaLive***Sunday, September 18, I'm teaching a one-session mini workshop on how to approach strangers to make street portraits. You'll leave the workshop with the tools and confidence to start making street portraits of your own, or if you are already making street portraits, some great new ideas for extending your practice.
Learn More / Signup: [here]

Starting Saturday, October 29, I'll be teaching a five-session online class called 'Questionable Pictures' that will explore the written and unwritten rules shaping the photography we create. Inspired by the book Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph (Jason Fulford, Aperture, 2021), we'll explore different ideas around aesthetic and style conventions and subject matter (what can we make pictures of and what shouldn't we make pictures of? Who comes up with all these rules anyway, and how can we subvert them?) By the end, we'll be a class full of rebels, celebrating all the rules we broke along the way.
Learn More / Signup: [here]

Issue 111 | April 29 - May 20, 2022

In Praise of Leaning Into Photo Cliches

“This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.”
-Marilynne Robinson

I got my first camera when I was 15, a hand-me-down 35mm Minolta film camera from my grandfather, and a couple of rolls of Kodacolor color negative film. I still have some prints from that first roll. There was a photo of my grandmother that I still treasure, but most of the pictures I made on that roll were of nature - a cluster of white lily-of-the-valley flowers surrounding the base of a White Pine, a photo that peered into a fog-cloaked forest, a single summer tree isolated against a blue sky on a hilltop ridge. 

The photos are in an old photo album I recently pulled off the shelf. The age of the pictures is notable - it's been decades since I made them, but the images themselves are unexceptional. There are no signs in the photos of any unique talent or that I might pursue photography much more seriously one day. But I do find the first indications that I had found a new way to engage with the world, especially the beauty of the natural world.

I've always been deeply affected by so the pleasures nature provides us. Obvious things like the annual reawakening of the earth that occurs each Spring, spectacular sunsets, dramatic clouds before or after storms, the intense colors of tulips, the graceful and harmonious arrangements of pistil and stamen at the centers of flowers, or the way a stand of bamboo bends so gracefully in a gust of wind. 

My appreciation of these phenomena is hardly unique. Everyone is moved to some degree by the sight of dramatic natural beauty. That's where the problem for photography comes into the picture. These feelings of awe or wonder touch us all. We respond to these deeply felt emotions by making thousands, millions, and billions of similar photos in a largely vain effort to hold onto some of the unique beauty of a particular moment on earth in our life.

Why make these images when we know so many others have made so many nearly identical to our own? One thing I think we're trying to do when we point a camera at a sunset is to give someone who wasn't with us something of what it feels like to be, for example, immersed in a purple rose gold sky whose glow is so pervasive it changes the color of everything on the ground as well.

That's part of it, but I think it misses my primary motivation. For many years, especially around late Spring and early summer, the second I could leave my busy, deadline-driven job in the city, I'd race to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. I'd wander around with my camera entranced by a giant pink dogwood that blossomed in one section of the garden or the carpet of bluebells unfolding in another. The resulting pictures? Pretty, but nothing close to the experience of being there. I didn't expect too much from the photos, and the images reflected that. But the experience of simply being there delivered rewards beyond compare. Walking around the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, pulled this way and that by the beauty, would almost instantly dissolve the job stress I'd felt so intensely minutes before. I'd quickly fall into a flow state, absorbed by a colorful detail or an arrangement of branches and flowers.

Photography in nature was transporting, lifting me away from my troubles, and pushing me through a portal into a new world of pure visual exploration. I was no longer living in anxious parts of my mind; I was completely present in my wandering experiences.

When I eventually left that stressful job and finally found more time to explore my interests more deeply, I returned to photography. I learned that the flow state experience wasn't limited to flowers and pretty things. I'd quickly fall into the same, rewarding state almost every time I explored the world with my camera, whether on busy city streets, at festivals, or even in quieter domestic moments around friends or loved ones.

When I finally made more time to learn more about the medium, I started to care more deeply about the images I was making. I did want to make pictures that would break through to other people. I trusted the flow state would come no matter what kind of pictures I made. 

My relationship with photography had shifted, and I found myself on a lifelong journey to learn more about photography as a craft and art form. I began to explore many different approaches to picture-making, still out in the world, but now mostly amidst people and our human-built world instead of nature.

When the Pandemic hit back in March of 2020, just as Spring was beginning in New York, I could no longer make pictures on busy city streets. Once again, I went back to nature, into my local Bay Ridge park, a narrow strip of ballfields and wooded paths between a busy residential neighborhood and a six-lane highway. 

Being an urban green space, it wasn't a lot of nature, but it was enough. Enough to calm doomscrolling pandemic anxiety and put me back into that flow state. This time, exploring nature with the benefit of years of experience, I found new ways to approach the subject that did bring real meaning to the images. Those photos eventually became a body of work, Far Apart, that was published and represented a new stage in my work.

Reflecting on my journey makes me appreciate how vital my early attraction to an often cliche subject matter was to my long-term growth as a photographer. It turned out that for me, the subject matter wasn't too important; the pictures didn't have to be so special, but finding the subject that would make me present in the world - that would put me in a flow state - was the first step I needed to take to reveal my more profound passion for the medium.

Trust your instincts. Trust your attractions. Trust the subjects that draw you in, whether they're weird, boring, cliche, or photographed a million times before. Try not to worry about what others think or get you likes on Instagram. The real task is to find the subjects that leave you lost in exploration and immersed in the flow. These experiences, more than the resulting pictures, are the fertile ground that can help grow a lifelong engagement with photography.

Due to some family issues, I’ve been spent this spring away from NYC down in Virginia. Despite the hard times that brought me down here, the beauty of the unfolding season on these familiar streets and woods of my childhood has been an extraordinary and true comfort as always. I plan to publish one more issue towards the end of May before taking a summer break. I’ll keep the Instagram account running as best as possible, so let me know if you have any photo events or talks you’d like me to share.

Be well, and I’ll see you soon.

James Prochnik | The NYC Photo Community | Issue 111 | April 9 - May 20

Want to help out Ukraine? Here are some suggestions from NPR. Photographer Nick Turpin suggested hiring these Ukrainian photo editors for postproduction services on your photos if you have the need.