Issue 108 | March 18 - 25, 2022

On Capacious Photography

I don’t know, I must have heard it on a podcast or something, but recently I found the five-dollar word “capacious,” which is a fancy way of saying ‘roomy’ or ‘spacious’ echoing around my head like an earworm I can’t get rid of. In an effort to do something useful with this situation, I’ve been thinking about what a capacious photography might be.

When I first started getting more serious about photography, my strategy for making images was the opposite of capacious, it was reductive. I tried to minimize elements in my photographs in the hopes that a reductive approach would increase the clarity of the expression I was trying to achieve. If they were portraits, I tried to find the plainest, most empty walls to serve as a backdrop for the photos. If it was something funny or interesting I saw on the street, I’d put it in the center of the viewfinder and snap a picture so that the sides of the image hold the subject in the frame (I still have this problem). Other times I would make images with the shallowest depth of field my lens had to blur out the rich complicated world that my subject existed in. I wanted to shrink the world to achieve the big hope and dreams I had for my photography.

What I realized as I became more acquainted with photography that really moved me from the greats and my peers, I began to see that their photography was successful because of all the different ways their work would try to make the pictorial space bigger and more elastic and…capacious.

Instead of two-dimensional flat images, these photographers tried to depict a three-dimensional pictorial space by layering elements in the foreground, middle ground, and background of the image. Other photographers would crop their images so that, for example, an arm from someone outside of the picture frame would come, sans body, into the picture frame, or someone inside the frame would be looking, or pointing outside the frame. Tactics like these and others would remind me, as an image viewer, that there was a big world inside and beyond the four sides of the picture frame.

Some images would hold a visual mystery, or make me wonder what, exactly, was going on in the image. These images became more spacious because they really engaged my mind, and raised questions that couldn’t really be answered. By forcing this dilemma, they made my imagination almost a part of the image as I was being encouraged to speculate on what was happening, or imagine a story that could bring meaning to the images I was viewing.

When photos were put together, in series or photobooks, that’s where I really saw a world opening up. In photography series and projects, I began to see that one could really begin to describe a subject in a much fuller way by not only giving me the precise description of individual images but by showing me that images in sequence or juxtaposition produced something more - a sum greater than the parts. To me, a successful photo series or project or book has an almost literary quality in my mind, like reading a short story.

This week’s featured photographer, Sofie Vasquez, is a great example of that. She has done a spectacular job of opening up and expanding the world of indie wrestling she is exploring in her images. She gives us portraits of the protagonists. She shows us the wrestlers in action - all of the glamour, grit, and pain of a wrestling match. She shows us fans. She shows us the wrestlers in dressing rooms, or outside the venues. In this way, and through these photos we feel like we are a fly on the wall in their world, and our imagination is activated as we wonder and want to know more, so much more about the people who are working and hustling to succeed in this world.

There are a lot of forces and incentives in play that encourage us to see the people and world we encounter through a more reductive lens. The reality is that the world, and the people in it are always always always more complex and complicated than we will ever be able to grasp. Starting from that point and trying to make pictures that allow room for as much of that complexity as we can perceive seems like a good way to go. That’s a capacious goal for a capacious photography. And that’s what I’ll aim for in the warmer and brighter months ahead.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you all next week.

peace and love,

James Prochnik | The NYC Photo Community | Issue 108 | March 18 - March 25

Want to help out Ukraine? Here are some suggestions from NPR.

Issue 107 | March 11 - 18, 2022

Two Years Ago Today

Two years ago today, March 11, 2020, I posted the following to the NYC Photo Community Instagram account:

I’m not only a passionate photographer, but I’m passionate about the idea that in-person community is one of the secrets to thriving in any creative endeavor, such as photography.  We need each other, and together we make each other better.  So it pains me to say this, but I believe the best way I can support this community through this Coronavirus situation is to suspend promoting photo gatherings and photo events for the time being.  I trust the health experts who say the smartest way to avoid a bad outcome for our country, and those most at risk from this virus, is to hold off on non-essential gatherings and travel until we have more information, and our health system gets more prepared for the contingencies it’s already facing….Hopefully, we’ll have a better handle on the situation soon, and I can resume full operations.

I had no idea what was coming and expected things would return to normal in a month or two at most.

I started the NYC Photo Community in September of 2019, only a few months before, specifically as a way to share and promote in-person photo events around the city. My idea was to intentionally avoid online community elements in favor of simply encouraging people to get out of the house and meet fellow photographers and photography enthusiasts at photo talks, exhibitions, and meet-ups around the city. 

But then the world changed and kept changing, one dramatic event after another. 

Covid-19 began its rapid spread across the country and around the world leading to lockdowns and massive disruption of work and schools and everyday life. George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis sparking worldwide Black Lives Matter protests and social action. Ruth Bader Ginsburg died allowing Donald Trump the opportunity to appoint a third supreme court justice. Biden defeated Donald Trump in the presidential election. Effective vaccines began rolling out across the country. Insurrectionists stormed the Capitol in an attempt to prevent Biden from taking power. Coronavirus variants spread across the country. Vaccine and mask protests spread across the country. The Taliban reclaimed power in Afghanistan following the chaotic US withdrawal from our longest war. Migrants fleeing a variety of threats continued to seek safe havens around the world. Cryptocurrencies become a trillion-dollar-plus unregulated market for speculation. Climate change continues to exacerbate floods, fires, and extreme weather events in localities around the world. 

And now here we are two years on, faced with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to annex its territory - a conflict the rest of the world can’t counter directly for fear of sparking a wider war or nuclear conflict.

It’s been a lot.

While we’ve all been directly impacted, the chaotic events of the last couple of years have been experienced in very different ways by different people depending on their circumstances. Healthcare and other essential workers found themselves on the front lines overnight with all of the danger, risk, and sacrifice that entailed whether they were a doctor or a cashier at a grocery store. Many people got sick, and many still struggle with long Covid symptoms. Millions of people lost loved ones. Some folks experienced tragedies or setbacks that would have been difficult any year but were particularly difficult in the midst of a pandemic.

The pain and reckoning and protests that followed George Floyd’s murder have rippled through our society in ways that will shape our country for decades.

I think about the classic movie Koyaanisqatsi from the early 1980s that explored the dramatic and consequential effects of man and technology on the natural environment. The title of the film ‘Koyaanisqatsi,’ is a Hopi word that translates as “Life out of balance.” If life was out of balance in the early 1980s, it feels like it’s going completely off the rails right now. 

Toni Morrison wrote an essay about working in difficult times when so much of the world felt broken,

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.”

This editor’s note might read a little disjointed and all over the place because that’s an accurate reflection of how I feel almost every day these days, but Toni Morrison’s words hit the nail right on the head and perfectly express how I feel about the NYC Photo Community and what you all have meant to me during these past two chaotic years.

You and your work have been an enormous healing inspiration to me and so many others. In the beauty and creativity and vulnerability and pain and struggle you’ve shared in your photographs, you’ve helped to show us all that there is still so much that is so good in the world if you know where to look.

Thanks for being part of this wild ride, and I’ll see you all next week.

peace and love,

James Prochnik | The NYC Photo Community | Issue 107 | March 11 - March 18

Want to help out Ukraine? Here are some suggestions from NPR.