In photography I have memory for terms that I believe have been lost with the democratization of photography in the digital age.

As an example in the realm of magazine photography who would know what a gutter is? That is the vertical line between the pages of a magazine. When I was assigned (and here is another term) to shoot a two-page-spread it was crucial to know how the gutter would affect my horizontally shot photograph.  A full-page bleed is a term that means that the photograph (either on one page as a vertical  or in two pages as a horizontal) goes all the way to all the edges.

I was known for using studio lights and for planning my photographs. I was known to use a stylist. In one of the iterations of Saturday Night Magazine I was expressly asked not to use lights or a stylist. I obeyed on the first instruction and the light was the light of a light bulb in a bathroom. But I took a stylist under the recommendation of my wise Rosemary. I was specifically asked to be a fly-on-the-wall. My subject was Gillian Guess.

Because there is less opportunity now to shoot in a studio most photographers of this digital age like to shoot what they see on the street. It has been called street photography and it is still called that. For me after seeing 50 or 100 projected street shots in some sort of photographic evening my interest wanes.

But, every once in a while, I see something that is indeed interesting to my eyes. I call it what it used to be called and that is a grab shot. An example of that is the picture on the top of this blog which I shot at the Met last week.

Another term that is perhaps now forgotten is the charm of the snapshot. In Spanish this translates to a far more interesting word instantánea. Several times I was asked to shoot portraits with the look of a snapshot. The idea was to make them almost seem as if they were snapshots.

Plata

And of course the problem (as I see it) with snapshots, grab shots and the like is that the photographer has extreme difficulty in imposing a personal style. For me that is the shame and the tragedy of photograph right now.

A personal style in photography has to be the Holy Grail. These days not even Sir Galahad would have a chance of finding it.

A small excuse for the quality of the two-page spread reproduced here is that my scanner is smaller than the two pages of a magazine. So I snapped (a snap shot) with my Fuji X-E3 in my office.