Cul de sacs

Hana and Leila - 111610

The term cul de sac is French for "bottom of the bag."  That sounds about right.  I went for a walk this weekend in a new neighborhood full of them.  It kind of felt like living at the bottom of the bag, the end of a road.

I've been taking stock of my life a bit over the last few weeks.  One thing I've done is started identifying my personal cul de sacs.  These dead ends are things in my life I don't need to go down any further.  Some of them are hopes from my youth, desires that are no longer relevant, artistic pursuits and interests. 

DISCLAIMER - I support the LGBT community and want everyone to celebrate their sexuality.  I hope everyone has a rich, rewarding sex life. What I am about to say is not my judgment of these groups or their erotic love.  It is about my preferences.

When I look back at my images with Leila and Hana, I am now getting a feeling this is a cul de sac. 

I took those photos in 2004 and loved looking at them.  I appreciated the beauty, the lines, the moment from each image.  Hana and Leila shared the gift of their caring, passionate intimacy with me.  I was  aroused making them and working on them afterward.

Leila and Hana - 111610B

Since 2008, I've had other feelings about sapphic imagery.  These changes are due to many reasons.  One of the biggest is that I am finding them less and less arousing for my own personal desires.  Now when I see these photos, I see the deep attraction Leila and Hana felt for each other and shared off camera as well.

I wrote more about my evolving views on sapphic erotic imagery here (The appeal of sapphos and threesomes), where I go into much greater detail.  I fully support others taking these photos, but I think I am done.  I have reached the end of that cul de sac and it is time to find other things to photograph.

Photo note - I've used a black and white variation of this photo before.  I think the BW version is better, but I like the accent of Hana's red panties.  It adds a little pop to this image.  I would work with either of these models again... just not together.   The lightning struck once, and that was enough.  More photos of Hana and Leila.

My Pixel Forest Numbers Were Wrong.

Our friend Dr. L just wrote a post following on my post titled, "Thinning the Pixel Forest".  After reading hers I questioned the accuracy of my first post.

I double checked my facts on the number of photos on the internet and I was wrong.  I got the 10,000,000,000 (10 billion) from a conference lecturer last year.  According to the internet trending site Pingdom, in 2009 there were:

• 4 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009).
• 2.5 billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook. (964 per second)
• 30 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.

I was wrong.  My 10 billion number was way too low.   The overwhelming part for me is those are the numbers (34 billion) for two sites in 2009.  I will assume then Facebook will get at least another 30 billion images this year, totaling 60,000,000,000 in just two years.

I believe this gluttony of images has the same cause as the gluttony of food in developed nations.  Technology has made the production, processing, and distribution of both food and photos much more efficient, easier, cheaper and individualized.  For under $10, I can easily buy 10,000 calories.  A century ago, the cost of a calorie was much more, even after adjusting for inflation.  The same ease of use and consumption is true for photography.

We have to accept that photography publishing is no longer a medium/tool of the few deemed good enough and important enough to be publicized.  We all could take photos with our little Kodaks a few decades ago, but we had no way to mass publish them.  Most of the photos ended up in shoe box and a few ended up in an album or framed.  With new technology I can instantly publish any image for the world's online consumption, quality be damned.

I can reminisce about the good old days.  They are gone and we are not going back.  We (as a culture) eat too much and publish too many photos.   I can not turn around that global tide of gluttony.  I have to accept that so many will consume too much food and create too many photos.

My power is in what I can do with my own habits.  As with food, I can choose my nutritional and photographic diet.   I choose to ignore the trivial photos (both mine and yours (plural for rest of humanity)) and only consume the truly nutritious and important ones.  As I stated in my old post, I also choose to only publish my good stuff (both writing and photos), in a limited fashion.

After reading a comment from an anonymous reader I am thinking of holding back more photos for future uses that can earn me money or at least form the basis of my life's work.

When you get to the high end photographers such as Carrie Leigh, Kim Weston, Leonard Nimoy, Lucien Clerque etc...you will find that they post very few images.
You know that they are holding back for print, exhibit and collector value.

I've met and learned from Kim Weston.  He is a very generous and kind man.  He also knows a good bit of making sure his art gets to those who truly want it and can afford it.  My art is not at that level yet, but I have to start treating it as such.  If I don't I am just adding to the overly populated Pixel Forest.


NOTE - I just deleted over 70 less-than-stellar posts from this blog.  I have them backed up elsewhere, but since this is their public outlet, you wont have to read or see them anymore.  They live in the pixel forest's burn pile.

Feeling it Today

Some days I feel young.  Other days I feel old.  Today is the latter.  Yesterday was the former.  As I get older I realize that I can still do things I did when I was younger, but the recuperation time takes a bit longer.  It all reminds me of a couple of lines from the Toby Keith song, As Good As I Once Was.

I ain't as good as I once was
But I'm as good once as I ever was

I don't have the physical prowess I had back a few decades ago, but I can still move and do pretty well.  I think the difference now is that I am smarter and know when I need to make those youthful moves to my advantage instead of just using them all the time for no reason.  I am not better for reserving my strength and ability than a young person.  They should be enjoying their bodies every day.  It is a celebration of life and it also teaches them when they should zig or zag at the right moments.

I think this knowledge of when to zig, zag, or stand to the side applies to art as well.  Even though I continue learning new tricks, techniques and trying new things, I have a pretty good sense what works for me and is part of my art aesthetic.

Most artists start off trying everything, doing everything and exploring.  We push limits, break rules, and have lots of failures.  All this need for experimentation may even go back to when we were babies and we had to stick everything in our mouth.  Over time, we learned what was good to have in our mouth and what wasn't.

My photography continues to evolve... or maybe refine.  I like to use natural light or one or two light sources.  I took a few portrait/lighting classes and experimented with up to six light sources.  That was fun, but I found I work best with only a few and really focus on composition and subject.  That is what works for me.  I've received a few critiques where the critic looked at my photos and could tell they were mine.  The images had a certain level of detail, angles, exposure, mood, lighting, composition, message, etc. that this person could tell that was a Karl photo.

I still feel that youthful spark for my photography.  Put a camera in my hand and I still get a rush to start snapping.  I will even step outside of my normal photographic ways and push boundaries, but I know now that I may "feel" a bit worn out the next day from it.  That is OK, it is usually worth it.

Other sources - Friend UL wrote a good piece today about aging, maturity, and the excess or lack of both.  

Song note - I really like Toby Keith's song and tried to find video of it.  Sadly, the official video is not too good and would not work well with this post.  His lyrics still do though.

Part II - Thinning the "Pixel Forest"*

Part II  - Thinning the "Pixel Forest"*:
Why artistic/photographic redaction is more important now than ever before.

I was going to write a long post about the need for photographers to cull their photographic herd down to the few, the proud, the best.   I had a bunch of quotes from A.D. Coleman and other big shots to back it up.

Let me sum it up fast and dirty.  When Coleman wrote about the need for redaction, news had come out that the late photographer Gary Winogrand had left around 342,000 unseen and never printed negatives to the Museum of Modern Art.  Coleman stated that a true photographer decides what should be printed and this flood of negatives hurts art.  Coleman wrote this in the late 1990s.

There are over 10,000,000,000 images on the internet.  There are too many photos out there.  There are too many photos by the same photographers out there that only hurt the photographer's portfolio by diluting it with numbers, not quality or meaning.

 I wrote on March 1, 2009, not all images are special.  I quoted the animated movie, The Incredibles: 

Dash: You always say 'Do your best', but you don't really mean it. Why can't I do the best that I can do?
Helen: Right now, honey, the world just wants us to fit in, and to fit in, we gotta be like everyone else.
Dash: But Dad always said our powers were nothing to be ashamed of, our powers made us special.
Helen: Everyone's special, Dash.
Dash: [muttering] Which is another way of saying no one is.

I also wrote:

Not every photo is art... or is special. If you go through my thousands of negatives and digital photos, you will find 98% of them are fair at best and shit for most. If they were all special, then none of them would be special.

 That is why photographers need to only put up their best photos that support their body of work.  Get rid of the clutter of your work.  The internet has almost 10 billion too many crappy photos.  Maybe a million of them have any value beyond a snapshot.  We need to respect the art and the viewers by giving them only our best.

I make no self-aggrandizing statements that my photographs are worthy of value.  At least though I know I am no longer going to show my "kind of good ones."  They go to the garbage.  The same goes for my writing and overall creative outputs.  I am not going to put out blog posts just to show I am still existing, that is what Facebook is for.  If it is not my best work, then it gets dumped to separate "the heap from the whole." 


* The term Pixel Forest  comes from a great set of writings by Dr. L.  Please read her writing about the digital world we cohabitate.  She sums up the ethereal-digital world perfectly. 

Photo note - in accordance with my promise, no photo today because I could not find one that was worthy of posting.

Culling the Herd - Part One

Part I - Excuse me, are you going to use that?

One of the hardest parts of photography for me is the reduction process.  I've heard it called "culling the herd"," redaction", "thinning the forest", or "deductive selection."  I think of it starting out feeling like a hair cut and ending with it stinging like dozens of little skin biopsies.

In A.D. Coleman's essay, "On Redaction - Heaps and Wholes, or, Who Empties the Circular File?" from his book Depth of Field -Essays on Photography, Mass Media, and Lens Culture.  He argues for the absolute necessity of this discipline in photography and art. 

For most workers, the ratio of potential images (negatives) to actualized images (prints) is low, as is the ratio of images actualized minimally (as contact and/or work prints) to images approved by the maker for public presentation via exhibition, publication, or other vehicle.

The question of redaction - of "putting in shape for publication"- is therefore a crucial one.  To use a distinction from general systems theory, redaction is what transforms a quantity of images from a heap to a whole.  The ability to redact is a hallmark of artistic maturity.  As the photographer Lonny Shavelson has said, "Photography is about editing.  If you don't edit your own work, you're not a photographer." (Emphasis by original author)

All photographers must go through their images and throw out the ones that don't work.  The first 60% are usually pretty easy for me.  I may feel a little sadness that the image failed and I missed something special, but my heart knows it has to go.

The next 25% feel a bit more personal and painful, kind of like plucking my eyebrows.  I tell myself those are the images I can come back to some day and make something else with even though I almost never do.

The final 10-14% eliminated are very painful.  By that time I've spent hours working on them and trying to either print (if from a negative) or edit (digital) them into something magic.  At some point though I realize  there are not enough tricks up my sleeve to save the image.  It has some fatal flaw I recognize that keeps it from making the final selection.  Each discarded image feels like a chunk of my flesh was ripped off and leaves me raw for a while. 

Why must I put myself through this artistic pain?  Why not just put them all out there and let the viewer decide?  The answer is simple, dilution.  If I put out too many similar images from the same series, they become diluted and the overall punch of the series is diminishes.  The photos taken before and after the prime shot may be very good, but as a set, they can reduce the beauty of the prime one and bring the set down.

Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop. - Ansel Adams

Robert Frank had to do this.  He took over 28,000 photos for his The Americans book.  In the end,  Frank chose just 84 images to show his vision.  That means he discarded 99.7% of his photos to get to his finished product.  At a retrospective of his work last year at the SF MoMA, I saw some of his contact sheets from the series.  I could tell which ones were instantly tossed, which were ok, but should be tossed, which had potential, and which one was the "it" photo.  It would have been painful to make those decisions though because so many could have been "it."  As painful as that may have been for Frank, I doubt he could have done any better than the ones he selected.  He gave us a gift of his sacrifice.  He reduced down to a perfect set of photos that will always represent a perfect set.

As I've mentioned many times before, I don't like the photos taken by Diane Arbus.  Someday I will elaborate on why in a formal criticism of her work.  For now though, let it be simply stated I don't like her photos.  With that said though, there are some aspects of her artistic discipline I deeply respect.  I envy her ability to "cull the heard" down to about 80 or so photos that represent her body of work.  She may have had more if she had not taken her life at the young age of 48, but to have kept her total count that low is true dedication to ensuring only her best work got out there.  Each photo is an iconic representation of her work and is recognizable to the photographic arts community as hers.   I respect her passion to controlling which photos were good enough to share her name.

During the photo shoot I build a pile of images.  During the first review, I begin the reduction of the pile to find the right ones.  Sometimes I get a few true gems. Other times I get no gems.  Either way, I must make sure that my work meets my standards of my artistic vision.  It isn't easy.  If it was, everyone would be an artist.  This leads into my next post...

Part II  - Thinning the "Pixel Forest"*
Why artistic/photographic redaction is more important now than ever before. 

* The term Pixel Forest  comes from a great set of writings by friend Dr. L.  Please read her writing about the digital world we cohabitate.  She sums up the ethereal digital world perfectly.