Letter to a young photographer (actually, a comment via YouTube on the Internet)
Photography is my passion in life. I have always, since I was a kid growing up in the suburbs of New Orleans, taken photographs. This includes taking all my own photos during the years I worked as a reporter and editor at small weekly newspapers in North and South Carolina. I loved it, and loved seeing my photos published.
Today I focus on what interests me most, including landscape and Nature photography, street photography, documentary photography and my own personal art photography. I share my work through Flickr and Instagram. There’s never a day they I don’t take pictures.
I am not a fan of large and fancy digital cameras. I used Nikons for many years but now I am happy with the camera on my iPhone 15 Pro Max. I have it with me all the time and the built-in camera keeps getting better and better.
I am also not interested in technical wizardry in cameras or technical details. Photography is very personal to me. The mood, feeling and composition evoked by a subject I photograph is everything. And the most important rule for me is to follow the “Rule of Thirds,” which I fortunately have always done intuitively. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thirds)
I have studied all the great photography masters. My first major influence was the FSA (Farm Security Administration) documentary photographer, Walker Evans, whose deeply moving Depression era photos from the 1930s Dustbowl days greatly inspired me in 1972. I went on to study many of the other FSA photographers. I will give you a tip here. In thinking about the vast possibilities of photography, there is no greater living master than William Eggleston. He will probably not be around much longer, but his influence is far-reaching among photographers, particularly social realism documentary photographers as I like to consider myself. I encourage you to look into his work. I have almost all of his published art photography books. His work blows my mind! I can honestly say his eye took in everything about the human condition and the constructed and material built environments in which we live out our lives .
Here is a quote I am revisiting that sums up the essence of what I consider photography to be.
Photography is fascinating to me because it’s both descriptive and symbolic at the same time. Descriptive because it shows you something that looks like the world and symbolic because the best photographs not only show you the world but also seem to reach beyond it, to speak of something more. A great photograph touches all sorts of things—other perceptions you’ve had, other things you’ve seen or remembered or felt. It’s that density of meaning that fills some photographs with feeling and makes them profound.
Leo Rubinfien
Some of my recent photos:
https://www.flickr.com/gp/camas/91uaJ115Er
Some useful links and quotes:
William Eggleston
Eggleston Art Foundation
http://egglestonartfoundation.org/
Walker Evans
The Exacting Eye of Walker Evans – Florence Griswold Museum
https://florencegriswoldmuseum.org/exhibitions/online/the-exacting-eye-of-walker-evans/
Selected quotations:
William Eggleston:
“I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more or less important.”
“You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.”
“I want to make a picture that could stand on its own, regardless of what it was a picture of.”
Walker Evans
“The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler.”
“Good photography is unpretentious.”
“The eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.”
Your early days sound like mine – I was always bugging my mom to let me use her Kodak Instamatic or whatever other such instant camera she had at the time. I did a lot of landscape pictures and sunsets/clouds as well. But one thing that’s so much nicer these days is you don’t have to wait for your film to be developed. Personally I like the look of actual film prints better, but not having to wait is a huge advantage. That, and not ending up wasting film that you still had to pay for.
Also, I love those pics with the Spanish moss…that always seems to lend a sense of mystery to scenes.
@schrecken13 Agreed. I am fascinated by Spanish moss and drawn to it, not because it’s pretty, which it certainly is not, but because it is so mysterious. Yet it seems so explicably tied to live oaks in a symbiotic relationship.
I like prints of photos, too, the only problem being I get too many enlarged to 8×10 and 11×14 and want to mat and frame them when there’s no place in my walls to hang them. Consequently, I have a lot of large prints.
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Like you I don’t care for “technical wizardry.” I belong to a FB group where people submit photographs of autumn scenes. So many of them have so obviously been “glamorized” by computer and to me they look artificial and phoney.
What a fascinating journey you’ve had! And your photographs show the results of such study and thoughtfulness. I stand in awe …
@ghostdancer Thank you so much. I do tweak and enhance my photos, adding some color and contrast, but I try to be sure they look like real scenes and objects and not obviously artificial or “glamorized.” You seem to think they are realistic enough. If you can let me know more what you think about my processing, I would like to know. And would appreciate.
To me they’re much more attractive afterward. And for a select few photos, I like to make them seem like abstract art or paintings, particularly like watercolors.
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I love Walker and I love James Agee, but I confess, I did not like their Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I remember Jimmy Carter saying it was his favorite book, but I found it tedious.
@solovoice While a huge fan of Evans, I have not yet been able, or even want, to read Aggie’s prose in that book. I always just look at the rather extensive portfolio at the beginning. Same with the follow-up by a writer/photographer tram that produced and an exceptional book, mainly to me because of the photos. Although the text is by a writer I really admire, I still prefer to let the photos tell the story, if I have a choice.
https://a.co/d/955Zy37
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