Werner Herzog

In 1958 I bought my second camera, a very good one for the time. It was a single lens reflex Pentacon-F when people were still arguing of the advantage of an SLR over the more common rangefinder cameras.

The paradox about being a photographer is that we (or at least this one) is conservative and likes stuff to stay the same while being excited about new stuff and experimenting with it. A photographer who does not do personal stuff, is dead in the water.

I taught high school in Mexico until 1975 when my Canadian wife told me (she was an early feminist) that all of us including our two Mexican-born daughters were moving to Vancouver.

By 1977 I was shooting for several magazines including  Vancouver Magazine and several business magazines.It was at Vancouver Magazine where I met up with two art directors, Richard Staehling and Chris Dahl who forced me to push my boundaries. They asked me do photographs with some effect they had seen in art magazines.

For those reading this now is when I want to press the point that the advent of photography had a small audience as these photographs (ambrotypes, Daguerreotypes, Talbot Types, etc could not be reproduced in the newspapers of the 19th century until the late 1870s when the half-tone process was invented. The previous method, the photogravure, while beautiful was much too expensive for everyday use.

What this means really is that the newspapers by the end of the 19th century and the magazines of the 20th had the money to compete for excellence and they all vied for originality. These publications wanted unique images. It was not uncommon to send photographers to circle the globe to shoot and to be paid royal wages. It was Bert Stern who in the 1950s convinced Smirnoff that Americans would only believe that a dry vodka martini was dry if it was photographed by the Egyptian pyramids. The company paid for all the hangers on, the plush hotels, the drugs and the booze. It was Stern who became the poster man that proclaimed the free-lance photographers got rich, could get boys and women of their choice plus all the drugs.

This excellence in magazine competition just about ended by the end of th 20th century with the advent of the internet.

Why pay Stern to send him to the pyramids when they could be Photoshopped in a studio shot?

In my view the Holy Grail of photography has always been the readily identifiable style of the photographer. You know it’s a Penn, an Avedon, a Leibovitz, Newton, Stern, Eugene Smith, Burke-White, etc when you see their images.

I believe that if Cartier-Bresson where to come to Vancouver (if he happened to be alive) he would be on employment insurance within a month. His photography and that of, as an example Robert Frank’s The Americans were fabulous precursors of the street photography we see today. Now it is just about impossible to note the style of the modern street shooters. One wonderful exception was Mary Ellen Mark. Her photograph of couple of teenagers with a gun taken with an extreme wide angle, really close has the impact of a photographer who did not sneak to take her pictures and was fearless.

Thus the 21st century as it is now is a difficult time for the photographer. Someone with insight may have to push forward with some unheard (now) style and method) in this era of fake news where we look at pictures and do not believe their apparent authenticity. I notice that few photographers use lighting except the one made available by nature. Shooting rock concerts is another situation where the photographer is powerless in injecting style. Camera ads parade the idea that with a Nikon or Canon wonder in your hand you can do everything and anything.

For me the breakthrough came in two paths. One path was to choose to shoot in a studio or on location with a big light. I rapidly graduated from umbrellas to softboxes, to Hollywood spotlights, grid spots, ring flashe and beauty dishes. The light that made it all possible was the venerable Norman 200-B.

The second path was to buy a Mamiya RB-67 around 1979 when most photographers who shot medium format went for the more expensive Hasselblads. What they did not understand (and the art directors I worked for did) was that the 6x7 cm format (the camera back can be flipped for vertical or horizontal shots) worked well for magazine covers, full bleed vertical pages and two-page spreads with copy on part of one page.’

My photographs were never cropped by art directors (I shot everything vertical and horizontal, just in case). Hasselblad shooters with their square format may have made money with album covers!

Another, and to me a more important path to success was to research my subjects before I photographed them. The idea when you have just a few minutes to photograph someone is to shoot three or four useable shots taken perhaps in seconds after spending more time connecting verbally.

I share with Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luís Borges the idea that soaking in a hot bathroom tub is the place to come up with concepts. The same goes for middle-of-the-night insomnia. They provide ripe time for innovation and imagination.

And lastly photography for magazines is like fishing. You can never talk (and get away) with pointing out the large fish that got away. When folks asked me for a formula of success for people magazine photography I always wrote this:

1. Make your appointment with your subject politely and without insult.

2. Show up on time. This precludes going on a previous day to explore the area you will be shooting in.

3. Take two of everything. Failure of equipment is not to be tolerated. I have always had backup in a very good support staff.

4. Give the art director one useable image – one that did not get away.

Number 4 and number 3 were dependant on the fact that in the magazine and newspaper era before scanners, original photographs had to be taken with colour slides or larger transparencies. Slides always had poor allowance for exposure error (it is called film latitude). There was one advantage, the art director was always looking at an original without the possibility (rare) of any photographer manipulating its veracity of color, etc. Now images look different on different monitors. Digital in many respects has made it more difficult to determine the photographer’s intention.

I hope that the above serves well to those reading it. I will place below links that may enlarge on the topics I mentioned above.

 Where have the Penns gone? 
Helmut Newton - Subtle Elegance 
How Images Affected Me 
Photography - Full Speed Ahead & Damn the Equipment 
Inspiration by unexpected error 
I square off with Instagram 
Edward Weston's Azotea