Category: Ideas in Photography

A friend who is a fine, accomplished and well-published poet recently stopped by. She looked at one of the pictures on the dining room wall and said “Photoshop?” I said “Cerebrum.” Then I asked her what word processor she used to compose her poems. From her chastened look, I gathered the message had leaked through. 
I continue to be dismayed at how many photography publications request, and print, details of photographers’ equipment. Yet, I don’t see literary magazines demanding and revealing the kind of pens, pencils, typewriters, paper, computers, printers, word processing programs used by their authors.
What is this fetish with mechanics all about?
I think it is largely fueled by asking the delusional, wrong question: “How did you do this (so I can replicate your steps and show off my creativity?)” The right question might be “Why did you do this?” and other variations of inquiry about observation, interpretation, philosophy, mentation. I’ve been writing and lecturing about this for decades, but that’s a hint that the message hasn’t yet gone viral!
Even the world’s oldest continuous photographic publication, the Journal of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, does this. When examining a photograph do I really give a laxative about which camera, lens or tripod was used?
A few months ago, the educated, cultured, and very personable Editor of the Journal called from Glasgow to interview me at some length on my portfolio Light and Recovery. Next month, the September issue will carry some of that work. We talked of the many, many things that go into making a portfolio of images and text, not the least of it being the intensely personal history and emotions involved.
Then, at the end of the call, she asked “What kind of equipment did you use?” I responded “Mostly my brain. Does that make me different?” Other than saturated cultural conditioning, there may have been practical, subtle, even entirely unconscious reasons for the question. The Journal carries quite a few advertisements from manufacturers and retailers, and I am aware of how vitally important that support is for a non-profit organization, known in the U.K. as a “charity.” 
Less than a year ago I prevailed upon the Director-General of the Royal Photographic to terminate the Society’s common practice of limiting entries to exhibitions and competitions on the basis of when the image was made. I did this for two principal reasons: unless dealing with the scholarship of especially precious, unique, or antique photographs, aesthetics should be the primary issue, not provenance; and because of technological innovation, a photograph can easily evolve and become a combination of several images made at different times. I’ve changed or added to photographs that first began their life on film more than thirty years ago. The Society used to request information on where the photographs were made, which makes not much more sense. Mine are commonly made north of my neck and in the region of our planet, though there are exceptions.
I originally arrived from outer space, you know.
My first published photograph, a monochrome picture of runners at a high school track event, made it into a newspaper in Cape Town when I was a teenager. Even then I resisted numerical reductionism. When an editor insisted, I wrote 1/10,000 of a second at f64. I was astonished when they printed that. It didn’t have to make sense.
In previous lectures and publications I have talked about the analogy of teaching cooking by emphasizing organic ingredients, nutrition, health, presentation and sensual delight, without spending much time on the structure of a stove.
Recently I came across a short, pithy, and pointed article by Texas artist Jann Alexander “How to talk to a photographer like she’s an artist.” It’s a good read from a good artist. It must be good: she thinks the way I do.
At a reception in San Francisco some years ago, a senior Indian diplomat told me that the essence of photography is the direction in which you point the camera. He might have added that the essence of literature is in the choice of words. As a student and former professor of international relations, a similar riposte about diplomacy sprinted into my mind. Uncharacteristically, I was diplomatic enough to smile and keep my thoughts where my photography dwells: in my brain. But I confess that I took great comfort from the then-unexpressed thought that I knew much more about diplomacy than he did about photography.
As to equipment, I once insisted to a magazine editor that I wouldn’t reveal the brand of camera I used until Nikon paid me for the advertisement. 
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© Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form. 
Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries

Humanity’s major preoccupation is with humanity. We are, so to speak, of the genus homo narcissus, and that describes much of our concerns. Portraiture is the natural result of the urge to record images of ourselves, in all manner of repose and activity. As Remy Saisselin wrote in Style, Truth and the Portrait (1963),
Like all art that has survived, portraiture is bound to history, social conventions, style, and so to time; yet insofar as it may touch us in the present, draw our attention, and set our minds to wonder, it escapes the temporal and is at once of the past as well as the present.
Many years ago I picked up a small, slim volume and opened it at random, coming face to face with a beautiful nineteenth century fin de siècle portrait of my own Eastern European Jewish grandmother as a young woman. But I was quite mistaken, for it was instead a mummy portrait from the middle of the first century A.D., excavated from the Roman cemetery at Hawara, Egypt.
In 1911 Sir Flinders Petrie recovered 146 mummies with portraits, which, like the one of “my grandmother,” are splendid examples of artistic merit. They are very far removed from early pharaonic portraiture, stylized profiles with color applied flatly. Petrie’s discovery showed physiognomically-specific faces with excellent use of light and shade. The subjects are Hellenized individuals who were themselves, or descendants from, Romans, Greeks and Macedonians who had arrived in Egypt as soldiers, administrators, and merchants in the wake of the invasion by Alexander the Great.

Paradoxically, the human need to provide a record of humanity’s stay on earth has suffered from some measure of condescension by artists who sometimes find it demeaning to use their talents to flatter the tastes of a patron. Yet, virtually all of the work of Frans Hals was portraiture, as was much of Rembrandt’s. Both became quite wealthy at this trade. Though both men sought to go beyond physical appearance and reach for what may lie beneath, it had not been until the arrival of Florentine and Venetian painting, that portraitists began to obey Leonardo’s admonition that the painter must depict “man, and the concept of his mind.”
The reasons for our passion to create likenesses in clay and metal, glass and wood, cloth and paper, film, videotape and more recent technologies, are complex, and touch on the very reasons to understand our existence and to seek something beyond likeness itself. That search is fortunately endless, because portraiture finds its best expression in interpreting character, the relationship of the portrayed to their environment and in the passage of the experience between portraitist and subject, all accomplished in the language of design.
Portraitists may wish to honor patrons, to record the affections (or disaffections) of one human for another, to make social and personal comment, or simply to display artistic skill. Confucius encouraged the making of portraits of eminences, in the hope that future generations would have something to emulate. Even now, at a time when some of our environmental din is the incessant clicking of camera shutters, there is still the notion that portraiture singles out subjects as especially worthy of being portrayed. Because of my own predilection of trying to discover something beyond the surface, one of my favorite passages records what Oliver Cromwell is reputed to have said to Sir Peter Lely, painter of the Windsor Beauties:
I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but to remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.

As a photographic portraitist, I keep trying to find subjects of similar sensibility. In service to that ambition, and excepting for my grandchildren, I generally try to make portraits of those who have passed the age of sixty, and are quite comfortable living in their own (blemished) skin. I have interest neither in glamor nor in epidermal virginity.  I photograph only those with whom I’ve established some form of personal relationship, some trust. The expression of their surprise is my gift to them and their gift to me.
It was King Charles I who realized the political value of grand portraiture, just as present heads of state see the political value of modern imagery. On a visit to Spain, he had seen the royal portraits of Titian and Rubens. Those kings looked like kings. Upon his return to England, Sir Anthony van Dyck was commissioned to paint the equestrian portrait by which we still know him. If the seventeenth century was the age of manners and gesture, the eighteenth became the age of conversation, and with it a form of literature and art, which, trying to penetrate the appearance of courtliness and mask, became an ancestor of modern psychology.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, portraits of ordinary people no longer looked ridiculous. Whereas in England, portraiture, despite its omnipresence, had generally not been the preferred medium of the artist, in America that situation was reversed, and one can easily conjure social, political and historical reasons. It was the extraordinary talents of Americans Sargent and Whistler, who dominated the last great age of portrait painting.
The invention of photography in 1839 radically changed the nature of portraiture, and the evolution of more modern digital media has revolutionized the nature of photography, and with it, the ability of photography to influence the older media. If photography’s disruption of the painters’ and sculptors’ duopoly in making likenesses, it has forced a sharing of this function with photographers, and has created greater freedom in all media to explore new realms of expression.  This same realization, the ease with which the sitter’s physiognomy can be rendered by camera, has likewise imposed new obligations on the photographer. The challenge to all is the need to invest greater ingenuity in pursuit of more than mere likeness. Even a cursory look at the work of Andrew Wyeth, Raphael Soyer, Andy Warhol and French Impressionist Edgar Degas shows how deeply they adopted concepts of photographic vision. Art is neither medium-specific nor medium-exclusive.
Photography is time-based to an extraordinary degree, in which a face, an attitude, an expression, an action can be captured in an instant. That instant is no more important than the receptivity and the creativity of the photographer. Sometimes there are surprises, but luck clearly favors the well-prepared. Now, especially with digital media, in which so much can be done after the initial exposure, the release of the shutter is not a climax, but a precursor. Much labor follows.

Even without the prodigious conceptual and executive talents of photosurrealist Jerry Uelsmann, it is now more easily possible to change relationships with time and place, and even combine elements from different ages, as Rembrandt did in his painting Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer (1653). Rather less well known is my own photograph Mother and Child (2013), which offers a very different sense of time compression, in which both parent and offspring are approximately the same age, depicted together in a fanciful environment.
Photography’s immense success has also overwhelmed us with billions of poor and mediocre images, from the clichés of nature, life-passage photography, and on to the way most parents portray their children as dehumanized, pretty objects, momentarily lobotomized for the glory of the family album. My extreme distaste for the word “cheese” derives from more than my own lactose intolerance.
As I write, The New Yorker, dated September 2nd, has arrived. It contains an elegant article by Anthony Lane titled “Names and Faces: the portraits of Julia Margaret Cameron.” She lived in the years 1815-1879 and at 48 was given a camera by her daughter, in the hope that this new apparatus would serve as a genteel hobby. Instead, it became a passion, and, socially well-connected, Julia managed to photograph such people as Tennyson, Longfellow, Browning, Trollope and Darwin, to name a few. She sought the same purpose as other portraitists have done and do. “When I have such men before my camera,” she wrote, “my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty toward them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man.” 
Never before has the task of the portraitist been so challenging, or the possibilities so unlimited. All it requires is to stand confidently on a firm foundation of quicksilver.
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Clicking on the images above will take you to their position in the galleries. A second click will enlarge them.
Portions of this column were abstracted from my article “To See Ourselves,”  pubished in October 1989 by the Journal of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain.
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© Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form. 
Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.

Twenty-five years ago I first saw the wall at Battery Mendell, a reinforced concrete gun emplacement, completed by 1905, to guard the entrance to San Francisco Bay. It is situated in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, north of the bridge. In the bright sunlight one could count the generations of paint, blue, grey, brown, gold, each taking turns to escape the surface whose hold was becoming ever more tenuous. The wall fascinated me, and I wondered what I could do to portray it without succumbing to the cliché of peeling-paint photography. I concluded that an obvious strategy was to juxtapose something lively and colorful using complementary contrast for mutual enhancement. A decaying wall needed a living presence, rather than an inanimate object placed just for the sake of design. It needed the dance of life.

Weeks later, my friend Len and I returned to the wall. This time an idea had begun to form, and now I had a test model wearing purple sweats and brandishing a borrowed trumpet. I knew it wouldn’t work, at least not yet. The light was too harsh, the model the wrong sex, the clothing too inelegant, the trumpet insufficiently dramatic. I shot a roll of film anyway. The exercise allowed other images to penetrate my consciousness, especially when I removed my spectacles and saw less detail and more color swaths. Sometimes an imposed lack of objective focus can actually improve one’s design vision. Since then, laser ophthalmic surgery has given me acute sight, so I have to resort to other means of tricking my mind.
The processed slide film was exactly as I had anticipated: awful, but promising. As I thought and sketched and played with images of the wall in the ensuing weeks, I began to conclude that I needed a tall, shapely, leggy, female dancer-model. I’d always needed one of those, but this time it was for art.

Dr. Karine came into my life at the end of that July, and stayed on. She not only has the required physical characteristics, but also a deeply formed intellect and the great gift of a sense of fun. She offered to find the props, brilliant red tights and perfectly color-matched opera gloves. I borrowed a brass trombone, the length of the slide being a counterpoint to the length of the model’s legs. I found out later that, when assembling the instrument, I’d placed the spit valve wrongly, but that doesn’t affect the design. Nonetheless, I offer my apologies to trombonists everywhere.
Each day we watched for perfect light conditions, and one day we got them: bright sunlight beautifully diffused by mist, a not unusual condition for San Francisco. I posed Karine to maximize the saturated color effect, red-gloved hands holding the trombone as no musician would, red-tights-clad legs off the ground to imply dance, face obscured for enigma. To cover slight variations, I shot ninety-two frames.

I had promised to make her a cover girl. The final image, “Brass Tights,” became a magazine cover (PSA Journal) and won the second award in the Royal Photographic Society’s annual International Exhibition, then known as the “World Grand Prix.” Thus, for a glorious one hundred and twenty-fifth of a second (at f8), I became the second-best photographer in the whole damn world. It left me with a remaining potential of 14 minutes, 59.992 seconds of fame.
Because new techniques have enabled us to tinker forever with images and text, the work is never done. I’ve alluded to this in a previous column, “The Thirty-Year Snapshot.” So, I’ve occasionally worked on this image again, first changing it to a partially solarized silvery monochrome, and just recently using my remaining minutes of fame (and more) to add fruit to the original. The latest version is called “The Lemonade Trombone.” Click on the image. Maybe next year I’ll fix the spit valve.
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© Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form. 
Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.

She was so extraordinarily beautiful that I couldn’t avert my gaze for many minutes. Her eyes met and held mine for that entire time. I knew then that in the years to come, she would have an effect on my life and work. The red hair, those amazing blue eyes, the perfect symmetry of her face, as though it had been manufactured with fine tools rather than being the random product of mere human genes. I never did find out her name, but decided to call her Siobhan, Irish being somewhat exotic in my family. I met her in Santa Cruz, where she worked as a wax mannequin in a store window. That was thirty years ago, and I remember it as though it had been yesterday.

A few years later, once again heading south on one of many trips to Carmel-by-the-Sea, I spent time photographing at the Carmel Mission, particularly the south wall, where there was a lovely confluence of sculpture, foliage and weathered paint. It’s just the kind of place, I thought, that Siobhan would love, so I conspired to put them together. They’ve been together ever since, without a word of complaint. I’m sure she’s Catholic.

Several years went by and Karine and I purchased a home in the East Bay. Conveniently, the house next door was bought by a contractor and his family, and though Rob subsequently did very good work for us, he was also busy reconstructing his own home.
On his north wall, a levered bathroom window appeared, and day by day I watched as the light sketched new images through my dining room window.
By now it had reached my twenty-fifth anniversary with Siobhan, and the image of her and her Carmel Mission home continued to linger in my mind. The wall next door became more important to me during a period of illness, the difficulty relieved each time I concentrated my attention on making photographs. While Siobhan remained the exotic, the wall next door became my daily palette.

This week I worked on combining them, in what an art historian friend called “the perfect yin-yang of photography”: negative becoming positive and, upon rotation, positive becoming negative, fitted into the dual-sized negative and positive “frames” of the window next door.
This month Siobhan and I celebrate our thirtieth anniversary together. We are neighbors, now. She’s lost some pigment (as have I), but is still as beautiful as the day we met.
For decades I’ve claimed that pressing the shutter release button on a camera is an anti-climax, not a climax, or, at the very least, a premature climax. There’s so much more to be done. 
Kodak invented the slogan “You press the button. We do the rest.” Really? Did Kodak invent the term “snapshot?” They may have been right. The last thirty years have gone by in a snap. Is there still a Kodak?
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Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.
 

Earlier in my life, when I was much more engaged with politics and macro-economics, I was offered an executive position in the international department of a major bank. During the interview I was asked about my economic philosophy, particularly whether I tended to side with Milton Friedman of the Chicago School, or John Maynard Keynes. As I have never believed in rigid categories, I responded “Sometimes bits of both, sometimes borrowing from the thoughts of many, including Adam Smith, Friedrich von Hayek, Karl Marx, David Ricardo.” I declined the offer.
In the last 25 years as I’ve been more deeply engaged in the art of photography, I’ve encountered much of the same kind of thinking. During a college radio interview I was asked about my photographic inspirations, my icons, my exemplars. I knew what my interlocutor wanted – the usual names of great photographers – but I decided to be truthful: “That’s an easy question. Their names are Bach, Mozart, Shakespeare, Vermeer, van Gogh, Dali, Magritte, Picasso. Many others.” As a photographer, am I confined to the thinking and processes of photographers alone? Why can’t I take my inspiration from anything or anyone? From a Keats poem, from a friend’s letters, from the feelings engendered by embracing my loved ones, from my own fantasies and dreams?
I am so grateful for the marvelous work done in the relatively brief, but immensely rich photographic history from Daguerre, Fox Talbot, Silvy, Watkins, the early 20th century Photo Secession, to more moderns Brandt, Cartier-Bresson, Adams, Weston, Bullock, Bernhard, the brilliance of surrealist Jerry Uelsmann, the brooding, tonally rich, sometimes minimalist qualities of West Coast contemporary Michael Kenna. So much to admire, so much to learn. Comparisons are delicious. SFMOMA, in its former civic center quarters, had a major exhibition for the sesquicentennial. I recall looking closely at two adjacent pieces, one a giant flower print by Robert Mapplethorpe, the other a small contact print, titled “Nude Foot,” by Minor White. I thought the exquisite subtlety of the White dominated the neighborhood. As I stood there, the curator of photography, Dr. Sandra Phillips, passed by. I asked her the gently provocative question whether the juxtaposition had happened by chance. She cheerfully replied “Nothing here happens by chance!”
All these artists have something in common. They are all coryphaei, leaders of thought, pioneers in one form or another.
We are all familiar with the scene where painting students set up easels in museums and attempt to copy great works. That may have some utility, but I suspect not as much as it would seem. Translating that into my own medium, I know from visits to Yosemite National Park that many thousands of photographers try repeatedly to capture their own inner (or outer) Adams. It would not surprise me to learn that some have brought models to pose nude in discreet places at Point Lobos, or a nearby beach, to “do” a Bullock (Wynn or Edna). No doubt vegetable stands sell some peppers for the inevitable purpose of mimicking Weston.
A wealthy stockbroker friend (with a nice camera!) once asked me to co-author a book with him, a manual for the very busy traveling corporate executive, one that would show great spots from which to photograph when time is restricted, as in the lunch hour. I await the arrival of an “app,” which, combined with Google Earth and radar, will show the tripod holes of famous photographers.

Coryphaei, leaders, tend to create followers, who perhaps – to be truthful – create themselves. Again, much like the painting students doing copies, they are acolytes. There may well be some useful purpose in mimicking the works of the great, but it seems to me that the effort should at least be time-limited. The best acolytes serve self-imposed, intensive but relatively brief apprenticeships, then move on to their own distinctly individual disciplines. Imitation isn’t flattery. After a short time, it becomes, at best, sycophancy.
We know about the need for children to “individuate” from their parents. (As a father I’ve recently learned how important it is for parents to individuate from their offspring). Is this not also true in art? When we’ve learned from the greats, and when they’ve learned from us, their acolytes, is it not time to separate, to individuate?  How often are we condemned to repetition or even to the most benign of plagiarisms? Ted Orland, who began his career as an assistant to Ansel Adams, shows originality and great wit in his works, including a very different take on Yosemite. As far as I know, Michael Kenna, who once served as an assistant to Ruth Bernhard, has not done any nudes in boxes.
Holding a recording in my hand, I once rushed down to visit an old friend who was then the conductor of a symphony orchestra. My purpose was to persuade him to include Muzio Clementi’s third symphony (“The Great National”) in future programming.
Maestro: “Why should I?”
Me: “He sounds a lot like Beethoven.”
Maestro: “Well, if you like Beethoven, play Beethoven!”
The Maestro’s fine musicianship exceeded his knowledge of history. Clementi preceded Beethoven, influenced him and was his London publisher. But you get the point.
Epigones are the least talented of all. They may have been failed or tardy acolytes, or those who simply never had much going for them in the first place. They have a lot in common with musicologist Peter Schickele’s fictional character, P.D.Q. Bach, “the last and least” of J.S. Bach’s many children. “In an age when it was common to steal from other composers, he was the only one to use tracing paper.”
As I’m impatient, I don’t have much acolytic material in my DNA, or perhaps I choose to “borrow” subtly, carefully, widely, from the best of many diverse sources, including myself. The embedded image above, hommage to René Magritte, is probably the closest I’ve ever gotten. Click on it and it will take you to the photograph and related text on my website.
The best of the coryphaei are committed to the development of more coryphaei. I know Michael Kenna’s purpose does not include creating Kennites. I have no wish to create Raphaelites, but I fear I may be too late.
Go forth boldly. If not boldly, go anyway. But go.
(Click on the embedded image to see the story)
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Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.