Charlotte Sometimes

Tag: Academic Photography

Choosing a photographer to study with
Very early on in my photographic career I discovered that my talent was most certainly not for taking photographs (although I’m not too bad at that either) but rather for looking at other peoples photographs. I worked out that with all the business acumen in the world I would never progress above the level of a-bit-better-than-average and I’d have to be happy on a lower end, modest salary for the rest of my life. Anyone that knows me will recognise that I’m not the kind of person to settle, so I took a long time working out what part of photography I am good at.

I’m really good at looking at pictures. I can pull portfolio images together with ease that other people don’t seem to have. I can see flaws in images and identify how things could be better. More to the point I actually enjoy doings things like this far more than taking pictures. Talking about and looking at photos is what I’m good at so I decided to go to university to do a degree in History of Art. And I’m doing very well at it, getting a first at the end of my first year.

But what does this have to do with choosing a photographer to study with?

Lots of photographers claim to be able to offer an awful lot to new photographers. The reality is that they don’t. Only today I saw a wedding photographer on Facebook who was offering the ‘opportunity’ to assist him on two weddings this weekend. He said it was a great chance for someone looking to make a career as a photographer. He also said you had to provide all your own gear (a minimum of a basic digital camera and an 18-55mm lens along with a flash gun) as well as your own transport too and from the venues. Graciously he said you’d be able to take and use any pictures you like – I hope his clients are happy with that!

The big, fat cynic in me started to creep out and ask questions and provide answers along these lines:
- He stated he was shooting three weddings this weekend. Three weddings in a weekend? Fuck my life that’s alot. Quantity is certainly a viable business model but remember that you can’t have quantity, quality and low cost. One of those things has to give. He wasn’t a very expensive photographer.
- The gear he wanted the assistant to provide. Top photographers will often have gear for their assistants. That way they know it’s all maintained, insured and in great working order. However often assistants do provide their own kit, so that’s not totally unusual. It was the mention of the 18-55mm kit lens that did it for me. You cannot shoot a wedding on an 18-55mm kit lens. It doesn’t let enough light in for the ceremony or the evening celebrations. It’s not long enough to shoot much of the ceremony from where an assistant is likely to stand. It’s not good quality enough to produce a high quality result. The kit lenses are generally soft and hard to get good results from – certainly in the hands of someone inexperienced. There’s no way in a million years I’d consider using a 18-55mm kit lens for a wedding I cared about producing good results for – there’s a reason you can pick them up for less than £20 on eBay. I’m not a gear snob at all, quite the opposite in fact. But if you’re shooting someones wedding, this isn’t a time for shooting with entry level kit most of the time.
- If you’re looking for assistants who want a break in the industry you’re mostly going to be looking at young people. People who have just finished degrees or who have just finished school. Makes you a bit of an arsehole to say that you won’t drop someone too and from a train station or similar. Young people often don’t have their own transport and since they’re doing you a favour here as much as you’re supposedly helping them out, the least you can do is offer to pick them up from the station.
- He also mentioned that he couldn’t pay because he had to pay for insurance for the assistant. Warning bells, he’s not charging enough money. Why can’t he charge enough money to pay for an assistant? Must be because his photos aren’t very good or he’s a terrible business person – do you really think you can learn skills about the industry from a person who is either of those things?
- Lastly I looked at his pictures. My suspicions were correct, they were terrible.
There is so much emphasis put on taking photographs. At first glance that sounds like a silly thing to say. Of course if you want to be a photographer you have to take lots of photographs, right? Well yeah, of course you do. But you also need to look at photographs and learn what good photographs look like.

This is where you go ‘But Char! Art is subjective!’ yes well… no. But yes. It is, different people can have different aesthetic tastes, but quality is not subjective when it comes to traditional commercial photography. (I’m going to insert a disclaimer here that some people make ‘poor quality’ their style, I’m not discussing that).

Before you even think about assisting someone for experience (i.e. without getting paid) or apprenticing someone you need to take some time out to educate yourself as to what a quality photographer means. Learning to recognise bad photoshopping or things like, oh you know, the whole fucking image being out of focus are crucial skills for an assistant. I mean we all think stuff like the following shot is really funny, but the reality is that lots of photographers skills are no better. And why would you want to work with someone like that?

As an assistant your job is attention to detail. Attention to what the photographer is doing, attention to what s/he wants, attention to the brides dress and to the grooms suit. Attention to detail is one of the more relevant skills that either a photographer or an assistant can have and you need it before you even do your first job.

Learning this skill requires looking at images and learning why they work and why they don’t. My attitude to photography hasn’t always gone down well in the LRP world – I simply refuse to put pictures online that do not meet my standard. That means they must be in focus, they must be sharp, they must be well composed and they must have a good background – I’d say they are fairly minimal requirements for any photographer who wants to be half decent. You should not assist or try to learn from any photographer that doesn’t have those skills.

Here’s a good example. A few weeks ago I shot some stuff for Evenlode. I was feeling kind of under the weather, it was hot, we were doing things in a hurry and I didn’t pay enough attention. This is a photo I love. You know what I don’t love? The fact that the belt isn’t centred with the rest of the armour.

If a photographer is kicking out work with constant mistakes like this, you shouldn’t be studying from them. And you need to teach yourself to spot mistakes. That could be brides dresses being messed up, or it could be bad photoshopping or inability to focus, but before you even start to work with another photographer with the intent of learning you need to understand and recognise these things.

Working with just any photographer won’t help you. You need to be picky and as an apprentice it’s your prerogative to do so. Don’t just take every opportunity that comes along, hunt people out. You’ll learn more and you’re learn quickly. And you’ll be better.

Learning about images is just as important as learning to shoot images. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.
August 15, 2014
#NotAllPhotographers and Prison Rape

So Sean Peacock / Shaun Colclough has been convicted of Sexual Assault and banned from ever taking a picture of a female model again without someone accompanying who knows of his convictions.

A quick summary of the background. In 1996, aged 22, he raped an 84 year old woman. During his sex offenders rehabilitation he was taught photography and discovered he was pretty good at it. He was very good at it actually, I certainly admired his work when I was starting. He began to intimidate models with sexual discussion, exposing himself to them and assaulting them. The actual details are elsewhere on the web, it’s kind of beside the point for this blog. The judge argued that his behaviour was an escalation because he had gone from a drunken rape to systematically planning to sexually assault these female models. Right on sister, etc.

I have nothing but the deepest respect for those women who have gone through the process of being a witness at court, leading to his conviction. Truly, that must have been a terrible experience. It can be hard for models to be taken seriously in instances like this because you know, they’re getting almost naked for strangers. It’s a bit like ‘She was wearing a short skirt m’lud’.

But that’s not what I want to discuss here. I want to discuss the community reaction.

Violence. That was the initial reaction.

I keep my eye on lots of the amateur photography websites due to my job (hey, I write about photography professionally, in case you didn’t know). Even the websites I’ve been banned from for upsetting the managerial staff, I still keep an eye on those for what’s happening in the community. So when I saw last night that Roswell Ivory had posted about the conviction of Peacock / Colclough I had to stay up late for an extra couple of hours to keep an eye on the reaction.

Violence and rape. The first responses I saw. Some lovely photographers actually wrote down that they hoped he went to prison and got raped by other men. Male on male rape is a serious crime and if you know anyone who’d ever been affected by it then you’ll know that it’s one of the hardest things in the world to deal with. Why would we wish someone to be raped in return for committing any crime? That’s a horrific thing to say.

From PurplePort.com. Hilarious.

(Highlighting not my own – I just scrubbed out the usernames and avatars.)

These photographers are potentially a danger to any model that they work with. Why? Because they consider violence and rape to be a casual, trivial thing. Let’s hope that a model never upsets them and they decide that they deserve to be raped for their misdemeanour, because clearly they believe it’s a worthy punishment for some crimes. Which crimes do they think it’s a worthy punishment for? Who knows.

Discussing prison rape isn’t funny. Male on male rape isn’t funny. You know who else believes that rape is a suitable punishment for comes committed? Illegal kangaroo courts in rural India. Then even in this country there’s the violent drug dealers who think that rape is a suitable punishment.

So when these photographers joke about how they hope Peacock / Colclough gets raped in prison as a punishment for sexually assaulting female models, they’re associating their views with these people. I’m sure that they’re the first people to say that they didn’t mean in in that way, but honestly, is there really a good way to say that someone should be raped? Is there ever a time that saying someone should be raped is funny? Is male on male rape funny while male on female rape is serious? Are the men that made these comments a bunch of fucking homophobic bell ends? (The answer is yes, btw. They probably are.)

Male on male rape victims are considered weak and unmanly, which is why it’s considered a fitting punishment for criminals. Well, you know what? Male rape victims are anything but weak and unmanly and it’s about time we just stopped perpetuating this disgusting myth. Men get raped by other men. It’s every bit as awful as a woman getting raped. And we’d never say that a woman was weak for being raped, so why do we make that insinuation about men?

I was going to rant more. But it was about to get personal. Read this instead. Especially the bit about unfortunate consequences.

#NotAllPhotographers

Then there’s the reaction of it being good to have that guy locked up because real photographers don’t do those things.

From an early blog post about Peacock / Colclough.

I’ve seen several instances across the web this morning, but this one seemed to sum it up best. Also some of the others I’ve seen have been on private Facebook pages and I’m not quite comfortable sharing those on my blog. Although this one was public:

From Facebook.

Well, sorry guys. Peacock / Colclough was a real photographer. A bloody good one at that. Let’s face it, he took better pictures than most amateurs (and many professionals) could manage. This term ‘real photographer’. I’ve seen it bandied about in the past. It seems to be used by guys who want to give naive young models a ~~false~~ sense of security about working with them. Me? A cynic? No, you’ve got the wrong person there.

And it’s not a shame he called himself a photographer. He was a bloody excellent photographer. What else should he have called himself? A man who owns a camera and take pictures of people?

It’s dangerous to start labelling people in these terms. If there is one thing for certain though, it’s often the people who use the term ‘real photographers’ that aren’t actually very good. So what makes a real photographer if it isn’t about taking good picture? To be honest, I have no idea, and I don’t really care. I’m sure I don’t fall into their definition of a ‘real’ photographer because I’m not politely taking pictures of T&A, but there you go.

So this… #NotAllPhotographers thing. Of course, I’ve not seen that term used but there are parallels to be drawn with the whole #NotAllMen thing that happened earlier this year.

Saying that not all photographers act this way is a slightly weird and extraordinarily infuriating defence. We know that not all photographers act this way. Those of us who work towards attempting to eradicate this sort of behaviour from our beloved industry and hobby aren’t stupid. Cases like this don’t need a devil’s advocate. They don’t need someone saying ‘he wasn’t a real photographer, real photographers don’t do this’. At worst it redirects the discussion away from the topic at hand and back to the fact that most photographers are well behaved. We don’t need to talk about how great lots of photographers are, we need to talk about how fucking awful a minority of them are.

People who complain about these guys not being ‘real photographers’ aren’t engaging with the subject at hand. They’re derailing the discussion and doing a bit of white-knighting in the process. Yes, they were real photographers. Lets not ignore the fact that they were photographers.

These people are not predators who own a camera, they are predators who are also photographers. Sometimes they do use photography to get what they want, but guess what, they’re still photographers. Removing these people from the community by basically saying ‘they’re not one of us’ is a problem. It means that we can’t deal with them. We can’t come up with strategies to root them out and figure out how to attempt to prevent this kind of thing happening in the future.

At it’s very worst, if these guys aren’t photographers… then why are young women going to their houses/studios and taking their clothes off for them? If these guys aren’t photographers, then the models that are assaulted by them are just strippers and suddenly you’ve made it a whole lot worse for the models to do something about it. Because if you think that the authorities don’t take models seriously, then strippers and escorts have a whole extra layer of difficulty.

July 30, 2014
Austerity for Photography

OR: WHY LESS REALLY IS MORE

So I woke up this morning to another comment on my blog from a chap called Michael. He said:

One thing you missed in the reasons why we like photos. They are a massively useful tool for convincing non-larpers to give it a try. No words can convince a person that LARP is more than just a bunch of sweaty nerds in cheap costume waving toy swords around quite as effectively as a picture of neat Roman battle lines squaring off against a horde of Carthaginians.

Over the past eighteen months I’ve had a fair amount of disappointed players ask if I can put all my photographs online, even the outtakes. Last week it was suggested to me on a forum (I can’t find where though now) that perhaps I could even publish my ‘outtakes’ under a different name just so that people had a chance at seeing themselves.

There is a huge amount of demand for me to publish ‘just one more’ picture from my collection of images so that someone can see themselves. I’ve done this before once when I made a video of my editing workflow and a shot caught someones eye. It’s something I don’t make a habit of.

Shall I show you why I don’t make a habit of it? Here are some of the kinder outtakes from the last Odyssey. With my deepest apologies to my friends.

Here is a photograph where the subject is primarily out of focus, there is motion blur because my shutter speed was too low and it’s just generally poorly composed:

Here is a photo with poor timing where poor Tom is getting stabbed in the eye with a foam sword. Which admittedly was better than breaking multiple fingers during takedown:

Here is a photo where Harry looks like he’s been suffering from insomnia for six weeks and is willing the game to be over. No, that’s not all make up… (I jest of course). And his costume doesn’t seem to be fitting properly. It’s also out of focus:

Here is a photo of Illiani doing… well I don’t quite know what he’s doing, it was one of those unfortunate timing moments where he was pulling a stupid face and doing something weird that makes his neck disappear. One thing I do know for sure though, is that this is not a photograph of the Beast of Carthage:

You get the idea.

I also get lots of moments like this, where I choose one or two from a handful of very similar image:

This is before we begin to talk those other moments we know and love about Odyssey; the underwear malfunctions, the accidental lunges and yes my favourite moment during post-processing: the penis houdinis.

One of the most convincing arguments for not just blindly processing all my Odyssey photographs and sticking them online, is that there would be far too many pictures of accidental cock slippage introduced into the LRP hobby.

I’m saving y’all from yourselves, honestly. You wouldn’t thank me. There’s nothing sexy about a stray Carthaginian knob. (I was promised golden phalluses Mr Andrews – instead you gave me this to deal with after each event.)

Bad photography, stupid faces and escapee penises aside, there’s a serious point here.

I strive to take great pictures that look like they could have been shot on a movie set because I think that LRP is cool. I mean seriously, this is a cool hobby. I know that lots of people inside the hobby think it’s not, but as an outsider looking in I can tell you that it really is.

The quote at the top of this post can from one a made a few days ago where I briefly mused on Shit Photos vs No Photos. I don’t think I really expressed myself very well on that point, so I’m going to expand it further here.

Cultivating an image of something visually is as much about what you leave out as what you put in. When that something is an event that has traditionally been considered ‘sad’, ‘weird’ and basically the bottom of the geek-pile it can be challenging to attempt to find the right way to express how cool it is in a way that outsiders and other people understand.

Last year after the first Odyssey Annual that I shot, MattP – our omnibenevolent god – posted this image on his Facebook:

Please, no more abuse related to the fact that his grammar is awful. He went through that last year.

I’m going to also post what he wrote about it:

I don’t generally go in for wasting my life making demotivational posters, but I love this picture so much that I wanted to use it to illustrate a very serious point. This is a great picture – firstly it’s an amazing set – we’ve had the Odyssey set for a while so we tend to forget that. Secondly the kit is fantastic. You’d expect Big Richard to have great kit of course and it helps that he’s built like a brick shithouse, but everyone’s kit in the photo is great.

And the net result? It doesn’t look good, no, no, no, no, no. It looks cool. It looks fucking *cool*. Look at that picture. I wish I was *that* cool. Fuck you Hollywood, take your six pound two hour long Too Facile Too Futile experience and shove it up your ass because I want to be as cool as the bad-ass dudes in this photo.

I’ve picked this photo from Odyssey, but it could have been Empire, it could have been from DC or HnD. It could have been from a few games over here or from one of scores of games on the continent that I’ve seen. And that’s the critical point, it’s not a one-off carefully staged photo – it’s a snapshot of a part of the hobby now.

LRPs is developing in so many ways and there are many great games that don’t focus on the visual spectacle. But many of us are used to thinking of our hobby as something to be hidden away from ridicule – and in the 90s much of what we did looked pretty ridiculous. Mum’s old curtains, trainers, jeans, gaffa weapons and people shouting fireball. It was cool in our head, but we were painfully aware that to anyone watching it, it was as cool as two twenty-five year olds playing Mary and Joseph in the infant’s school nativity play.

But LRP has come of age. It’s as fun as it ever was – but now it’s fucking cool.

I must remember to chastise him for referring to my work as a ‘snapshot’, but other than that I think he says what I’m trying to say very well.

The hobby generally looks pretty cool. Well at the events I’ve been to anyway. But it still does require a bit of careful cultivation to keep up with the Joneses, so to speak.

No words can convince a person that LARP is more than just a bunch of sweaty nerds in cheap costume waving toy swords around quite as effectively as a picture of neat Roman battle lines squaring off against a horde of Carthaginians.

This is really interesting, going back to how I opened this post. I’ve read a little Odyssey fiction and I find some of it really rather exciting. However in conversation on Facebook I expressed my frustration that it was so often kept behind closed doors and not available to the general public without signing up for websites and being allowed in by a gatekeeper.

Privately one of my friends pointed out that this was at least in part due to the fact that lots of people think that their homemade efforts at fanfic aren’t actually that great and don’t make the hobby look very good. The stuff that gets out more widely tends to be better.

So I found this fascinating. And I’ll say now, this was just one friends opinion and I don’t know how wide spread this view is, but in my brain I made the link to photographs that people take at LRP who aren’t what I would consider to be ‘photographers’. In this sense a photographer, to me, is someone who is attempting to express something (hopefully successfully) beyond ‘I was there’.

Why isn’t there this sense in the LRP community about photography?

If someone writes bad fanfic that includes your character then that might make you remember something poorly. It might be inaccurate for example or suggest that your character did something that they did not. In my mind the same is true about photography. If a photograph is produced about your character that portrays them in a different light to the person they are (see the Illiani shot above) then doesn’t that impact the way you feel about them?

Of course this doesn’t mean that I get it right with my own photographs, but I think that I scrutinise them a little more closely than many people do. I try to avoid weird face pulling moments, I try to pick images which seem to tell a story and if I know a character then I try to choose photographs that show off the characters personality. While I’m processing of course, not generally while I’m capturing them at the event.

I feel personally that this kind of thing is a basic responsibility to the people that I’m photographing. It’s my job as a photographer to not show images of people that don’t show them in a flattering way. Of course that’s subjective for each photographer, but when I see snaps that people have taken where people are gurning or half way through a blink, for example, I have to wonder why they would present those images publicly. I know that people have photographed me several times at LRP events and I’ve quietly rejected the tag, because a picture of me with my front teeth sticking out and a massive spot on my cheek isn’t something I want to be reminded of every time I look at my pictures on Facebook. I look hideous when I am photographed laughing or smiling, thanks to an unfortunate foot-teeth (and no mouthguard) incident while playing water polo. I don’t need to be reminded of it in pictures that lots of people are going to look at. I’m sure lots of other people feel the same.

So I was chattering about these things with Simon (our not so benevolent Odyssey overlord) a while ago since we both have interests in photography and overthinking things and he came up with something interesting. He said bad photos of LRP are like bootleg CD’s of good gigs. The quality is a bit dubious, some people like to listen to them to remind them of the experience, but they’re never going to do the performers any favours.

And you know what, he’s right. I remember getting hold of a bootleg Placebo CD from a dodgy market stall when I was about 14. The CD convinced me not to pay to go and see their gig because I thought if it sounded anything like that then I really didn’t want to go. Actually I saw Placebo play at Leeds Festival a few years later and they were blindingly good, I even managed to get hypothermia between them and Stereophonics after crowd surfing in the rain.

Anyway.

I think it would be interesting from an academic point of view to do some research into the effect that images have on people deciding to come to try LRP for the first time. There must be some kind of blind test you could do, showing control groups different sets of images. Perhaps that’s something for the future. Not for any particular reason other than I’m interested.

ETA: Simon just told me that I misunderstood him, he was talking about people who sell CD’s of phone images of gigs on eBay. Seriously. I misunderstood him because I didn’t even believe that could be a thing.

Where was I going with this. Putting all the images online, that was it.

Leaving out images that don’t portray the world accurately is as important as including images that do. Unfortunately I can’t do that as much as I’d like to do because players love to see pictures of themselves – understandably so.

Last winter, when I was sulking because there was no LRP to photograph, I entertained myself with a little exercise. I went through and picked out a small portfolio of images from each event that were my favourites. I limited myself each time to about 20 images or so. So that you can see what I’m talking about, here are my portfolio selects from Odyssey 7.
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If I did it again, I’d probably cut it down to about ten final images.

It’s not that I don’t think that LRP isn’t full of cool moments, but rather than it’s often full of cool moments that aren’t actually very easy to capture with an image. Showing only the very best of those would be preferable to me personally, showing lots of them is a compromise.

Through my photographs I’d love to make everyone who has even an ounce of doubt that what they’re doing is fantastically cool believe that it is. Because it is.

Currently doing the rounds is a set of images from what I think is a Czech LRP. It’s a Western anyway and it looks fucking awesome. The photographers bad-ass skills are generally adding to the amount of fucking awesomeness in no short amount.

Hell on Wheels LARP

There’s just 24 images here, but don’t they really capture the feel of the event from an outsiders perspective? Don’t they make you want to go? Don’t they manage to tell stories without being repetitive?

That’s my main frustration with putting up hundreds of images of an event, it just feels repetitive. It’s often just the same photograph shot over and over with different participants. From the last Annual there are probably only 20 images or so that I really feel tell a story. That’s mostly my problem at not being good enough at photography yet, but I’m working on it and I feel like every event my story telling improves. This is a huge thing for me because I was turned down to study photography at university because my story telling wasn’t good enough. It might have become a bit of a personal crusade.

So less is more, restraint with photography is good and selectively displaying images helps to create a tighter and more awesome public face of a game. Images that tell stories are the way forwards from my point of view. Telling stories with an image is different to looking at it and remembering the story. To tell the story you have to successfully communicate something to someone with no recollection of the event because they were not there.

But you’re never going to get away from the fact that everyone wants to see a nice picture of themselves in their kit.

June 26, 2014
Why your pictures of naked chicks aren’t art

OR: I BELIEVE IN A THING CALLED CONTEXT

I want to start out by saying that this is a huge topic. I also think that the question ‘What is art?’ is a bit of non-question, so I’m going to skirt round it because really there’s only an ‘answer’ in the context of particular approaches to the academic study of art, and each approach has it’s own answer.

“It’s art because I say it is”

Dude, I totally understand where you’re coming from. You took a look at Duchamp’s ‘Readymades’ and reached the conclusion that if the world thinks an upside down urinal can be art, then certainly anything YOU make can be labelled art too. Or possibly you saw a Rothko, a Mondrian, or even an Emin and thought ‘I can do better than that’.

Well, Duchamp has an awful lot to answer for, I’m telling you now. You see these artists, they have context to their work. There is a message or a story in every image or sculpture, a reason why those works look the way that they do. Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ in particular is an expression of frustration at the art institution, subverting the salon culture (to which many of you aspire, I know) and rallying against the system. In some ways it was him that helped to *allow* you to say it’s art because you say it is. Instead of thinking ‘I could do better’ perhaps you should see his upside down urinal for what it is – the metaphorical great-grandfather of your naked chick. I know, that must really suck. An artwork that everyone thinks is so utterly banal couldn’t possibly be your inspiration.

However you are onto something with this argument. Clive Bell did write something persuasive about work needing to have “aesthetic emotion”. He argued that artwork should be a visceral experience that prompted a response. However both Bell and Kant argued that formalist qualities like composition and colour were the defining features of something being art, and that the most developed work had no subject, only form. I’m afraid that your naked ladies will almost always count as a ‘subject’, so that argument goes out the window too. (Plus… I’m not sure that photography in general has yet has grasped the importance of form – a discussion I’ve had several times with some rather good photographers).

“But X painted naked ladies”

I know, it’s so unfair. All these incredible artists in the past, they painted naked ladies. However you have to take into consideration the movement of time and culture when you’re making these kinds of comments.

For instance, during the Italian Renaissance nudity appeared to be primarily about the artist showing off their skill as a craftsperson. The meticulous observation and skill involved in painting the mens rippling muscles and the women’s contorted torso’s were really quite something. I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever studied anything in the way that Da Vinci or Raphael did, but then again I’m not quite sure I fancy cutting up dead bodies and observing the way that the internal organs sit under the skin. Thankfully we have books for that now. But my point is that they were doing something genuinely unprecedented. As Vasari waxed lyrical, their ‘truth to nature’ was truly the high point of art. (Except later it turns out it wasn’t, he was wrong). But the sad fact is, that as a photographer you’re not producing groundbreaking pieces of artwork based on many, many hours of anatomy studies. You’re photographing a naked chick. It’s not quite the same and it takes an awful lot less skill… dedication… motivation… and so on.

I guess you might wonder why I’ve put a picture of Édouard Manet’s Olympia next to this paragraph. After all, Manet was famously part of the Parisian flâneur culture that basically objectified women for a laugh. Flâneurs were intelligent men in the 19th century who would stroll the streets of Paris and take trips to the parks or the theatre in order to watch people. Mostly women. Some of them, like Manet and Baudelaire would draw the women that they saw on these outings too. I mean, the modern day equivalent is a male photographer following a young woman around with his camera and long lens taking pictures of her. Oh wait…

But anyway, I included the very naked Olympia here for a reason. You see, although Manet was pretty much a pervy creep (although, he is marginally forgiven because he was ‘of his time’) he did paint his naked chicks with interesting context. You see, Olympia broke the mould (as did his painting of Suson in A Bar at the Folies-Bergère) because he understood that him and his mates were being creepy pervs and was actually commenting on it within his works.

Olympia isn’t just a naked chick lying on a bed in her finery being served by her black slave. No. She’s a prostitute. You see the way she’s staring at you? That was unprecedented for the time. She’s looking at you and accusing you, and I guarantee when you went with your wife to view the work in the polite company of the French Salon you would have been rather flustered and embarrassed. You see, she’s not only displaying herself as a prostitute, she’s reminding you that you use her services.

All that wonderful French Realist and Impressionist art that photographers love so much? Quite a large proportion is exploitative and objectifying images of hookers that they enjoyed fucking. Not sure I’d take that kind of culture as my inspiration. Unless of course I was producing some kind of counter-culture, revisionist comment on the dispositif of the white-male dominated art institution. However, I think most photographers are not.

A two-tier art system

Mostly art is defined by the art institution. Yeah, I’m afraid that’s people like the galleries, the dealers, the critics and the art historians. You’re probably not part of the art institution and so in the academic sense, you don’t really get a say on what counts as art. You almost certainly don’t get to judge your own work as being art. ‘So it’s all about the money!’ you cry. Well, yes and no. Money and art are intrinsically linked. As an artist gets more well known their work becomes worth more, and then when it reaches a certain point as an artist is worth more their work is more well known. (However, can you name the guy that exhibited at the Erotica trade-show several years ago who sold a single painting for £125k? No, nor can I. Worth doesn’t mean fame.)

However I suppose what I’m getting at is that, in my belief, there’s a two-tier art system at play. The top tier is obviously what we call art. It’s the works in the major galleries and art museums and the stuff that investors look to collect. It’s the pieces that we write about in essays for our undergraduate degrees and the stuff that regularly hits the news headlines. That’s fine, we’re pretty clear about what art is.

What about the second tier? I’d like to propose the use of the words craft, craftsmanship and artisan. But they’re shameful words aren’t they? We’ve been taught that craft is a thing that primarily women do in their spare time or to make practical items for the home. It has a bad reputation and the recent hipster interest in ‘making stuff’ hasn’t helped with that perception.

However craftsmanship is a wonderful thing. It relies on dedication, knowledge, skill and countless hours of practice. At the end of the day, most photographers are primarily interested in the technical side of photography, with creativity as an afterthought, it’s just the way that the medium has grown.

In fact, photographers regularly look down on artists who don’t appear to have a good technical grasp of photography. Just look at the response that artists like Andreas Gursky get. Despite his image ‘Rhein’ being the most valuable photograph ever sold, and it appealing to Bell’s ideas of significant form and therefore being wholly placed in the category of art by both academic writers and the wider art institution, we as photographers love to knock it down and say it’s not ‘proper’ photography. Whatever proper photography is.

But I saw this happen with the rise of ‘Front’ style images too (Yeah, I’ve been around the internet photography community for far too much of my relatively short life – about a third of it in fact). Initially lots of photographers really complained about Front style images (which I don’t really want to include here because I think they’re pretty abhorrent) but then after a few years they realised that they were a very quick way to gain popularity with the models. And so we’re now in some kind of weird Frontism era, with some photographers straying into Post-Frontism.

I’d love to see photographers being more honest about their work in the future, identifying as craftsmen instead of artists. Because if you’re focussing on the technical skills that’s really what you are. Lets reclaim the word away from the shameful label it has become and take it forward as a label for ourselves instead of the word art.

At the heart of it: Objectification

This is a really difficult thing to discuss and that’s possibly why I’ve left it until last. In a few paragraphs it has to be pretty simple too, so please excuse me if things are glossed over – I’ll address things further in future blog posts.

I wrote yesterday about how being a feminist is scary. You put your head above the parapet and write something about how you think that people treat women unfairly and you get rape threats. Yeah. It’s true. I’m telling you this because I want you to understand that lots of women are afraid to speak out about issues like this, especially in a hobby/industry that is still so dominated by men. Mostly I’m telling you this so that you think twice before making comments about how I mustn’t be getting any sex, which is so often said in response to women talking about the way that photographers tend to objectify women (those comments even come from female models themselves sometimes – thanks ladies) or before superimposing a labia on my face, as happened to Mary Beard.

Anyway.

We don’t live in a vacuum. Just as we have to think of the context in which we produce ‘art’ we also have to consider the context in which we live. When you get down to it, the images that we make of models are loaded with cultural context and we simply cannot escape the fact that we live in a society that is still dominated by a patriarchal way of living. For the last several hundred years women have existed primarily as a thing to provide for men. From having babies and keeping the house clean to not being allowed their own sexual pleasure we’ve not really had the easiest time of it.

Where this comes into photography is that this patriarchal view of women informs the way that we look at them. John Berger, as early as the 1970s, wrote about how men watched and women watched themselves being watched. Laura Mulvey picked up the baton later and discussed the male gaze within cinema and you can largely extrapolate her views out to photography and then other kinds of artwork too. She argues that women are generally objectified because heterosexual men are in charge of the camera.

You might decide from this that the way to go would therefore be by trying to produce work that looks from another point of view, however this is very difficult. I am specialising in gender studies within photography as my academic discipline and despite understanding the arguments and looking at endless images, I find it extremely hard not to produce images that have a male gaze. You see, I’m cultured into it. I’ve been brought up being fed images in advertising that tell me how I should view the world. It’s only now that we’re starting to see things change, but that does hopefully mean that future generations should grow up being fed a more balanced diet of imagery.

But how does this affect your naked chicks being art? Well, it’s really quite simple. The objectification of women is rapidly becoming completely unacceptable. Viewing a woman as an object for sexual pleasure is an attitude that is slowly but surely being left in the past. Posing a woman for gratification of the male gaze is about as desirable as casual misogyny. In fact it is casual misogyny.

I know that lots of people will be reading this who are from a slightly older generation. I’m very tolerant, it’s taken me a long time to explain to my wonderful father why things like Page 3 are unacceptable but he gets it and understands it. The thing is, you have to remember that casual misogyny belongs to the 1970s. The 1970s was a time when things like driving home from the pub after a few drinks with no seatbelt on and Jimmy Saville were also acceptable.

There’s no place within the the world of art or photography any longer for casual misogyny, which includes the objectification of women. If you’re objectifying a woman there had better be a damn good reason for it and you’d better be making an extremely salient observation on the world around you. It’s as much as a faux-pas as casual racism – which unfortunately still has a place within amateur model photography too.

So when can I photograph a naked chick?

You can photograph a naked chick anytime you like.

I’d like to encourage a liberated wave of photographers. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with photographing a nude woman, except when it’s nasty, objectifying titillation that you’re pretending is art.

I dream of a world where people shoot fantastic images of nude people that don’t outright objectify them and draw from an oppressive culture. This is a long way off though and it needs some bold photographic pioneers. And we won’t always get it right, but sometimes we won’t get it wrong either.

Here’s hoping.

May 13, 2014
The ‘Woman’ point of view
I met one of my photographer friends for lunch the other day. She said ‘Char, I’ve done something awful’, I leaned in tentatively, expecting her to ask me to help her get rid of the body. ‘I’ve registered on a photography critique site… as a man.’ Leaning back in my chair to take a thoughtful sip of my achingly-fashionable flat white, I was somewhat thankful that she hadn’t killed someone. That would have been rather a lot of hassle.

Now, I have registered as a man on photography portfolio sites before. I mean, you can get these creepy guys who think that younger female photographers are some sort of challenge that they can try to convince to take their clothes off for their eyes only. Fortunately I’m not so young and desirable anymore. But a critique site? Seems a little odd.

It comes down to the fact that she got sick of hearing photographers utter the phrase ‘it’s nice to have a woman’s point of view on my images’.

You see, she doesn’t have a woman’s point of view. She has her point of view. You might think it doesn’t matter, that it’s just a casual phrase used to illustrate the fact that there aren’t so many women photographers, however this is the very problem. Perpetualisation has always been the enemy of the minority. If we’re always told ‘white men can’t jump’ and ‘women can’t parallel park’ then guess what? We’re going to believe those stereotypes and, to some extent, live up to them. When things are repeated so often as to become dogma, they become dangerous to progress in the group they describe.

Linda Nochlin makes the point in her landmark essay Why have there been no great women artists? that women cannot be treated as a hive mind. She argues that ‘no (…) common qualities of “femininity” would seem to link the styles of women artists generally, any more than such qualities can be said to link women writers’.^[2] At first glance it may seem that male photographers have little to gain from pointing out that someone holds a specifically female point of view, but if you dig a little deeper then things become a little less optimistic.

You see, when we view Western art we are cultured to view it through the lens of a man. John Berger asserted that ‘Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.’^[4]

So if when you consider that amateur model photography is dominated by men taking pictures of women, it should come as no surprise that there is an interest in holding onto the privilege of being men producing images for a male audience and a male gaze. Laura Mulvey also says:

‘In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.’^[7] This myth was further perpetuated by writers of classic set texts such as E. H. Gombrich who within his 400 page tome given to all history of art students did not mention a female artist (unsurprising) or account for the fact that they were ‘missing’ (until 2002 when he was dead and his female editor adds a chapter on modern artthat women are simply not simply as good at science and technology and you have an environment that can be potentially toxic to the female critic of imagery.

So my friend, she feels guilty about what she did. She feels guilty that she is somehow letting down her fellow female photographers and critics. But all she wants is to have her considered opinions (and her photographs) viewed with the same ‘neutral’ judgement as everyone else. Of course, that judgement is truly far from being neutral.
References
1. Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” [1971], in Linda Nochlin, Women, Art, and Power, (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 148. ↩
2. Nochlin, “Great Women Artists?”, 152. ↩
3. John Berger, Ways Of Seeing, (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1972), 47. ↩
4. Membership Manager – The Royal Photographic Society, “RPS Membership Gender Statistics”, 28th June 2013, Personal Email. ↩
5. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Screen, 16:3, (1975): 6-18. ↩
6. Beth A. Eck, “Men Are Much Harder: Gendered Viewing of Nude Images”, Gender and Society, 17:5, (2003): 691-710. ↩
7. Nochlin, “Great Women Artists?”, 156. ↩
8. Roger Clark, Ashley R. Folgo, Jane Pichette, “Have There Now Been Any Great Women Artists? An Investigation of the Visibility of Women Artists in Recent Art History Textbooks”, Art Education, 58:3, (2005): 7. ↩
March 16, 2014
I’m a photographer

I’m so fucking fed up of the way that female photographers are treated by their contemporaries on the internet.

Only today did I get an email today that said ‘I assume the man in you photos is your boyfriend?’. Why would you assume that? I do not assume that the men and women in your images are your boyfriends and girlfriends! This was from a so called professional photographer too, so you would think that a professional would have at least a modicum of sense. Could you imagine the outrage if I went around emailing photographers and saying “I assume you’re fucking all the models in your portfolio”. Why is it acceptable to assume that a female photographer is sleeping with her male subjects, but if anyone assumes the other way around then all hell breaks loose!

I can only imagine it is because so many male photographers are so completely lost in their own little world of tits and arse glamour that they cannot imagine a model without pert breasts. This would lead logically to the conclusion that you would only photograph a man (or any model without pert breasts) because you could not convince a ‘proper’ model to work with you, thus meaning you have to settle for shooting your boyfriend/friend/family member.

Well I’m afraid that just isn’t so. I know it’s a shock and goes beyond popular belief, but many of us ladies do indeed enjoy looking at men. This meads to the next logical conclusion that we might even enjoy photographing men for the same reason that many male photographers enjoy photographing women!

I guess all I want is to be treated in the same way that any other photographer is treated. Just because I was born without a penis doesn’t mean that I’m any less deserving of respect.

In future, when asking something along the lines I’ve written here, perhaps you could stop and think to yourself if you would ask a middle aged male photographer the same question. If you wouldnt ask the same question or male the same comment, do me a favor and don’t ask me. Just give me the professional respect I have earned and deserve.

May 15, 2012
On Women Photographers (and their rarity)

I suspect that the low numbers of women practicing photography is very little to do with gadgetry and everything to do with culture and expectations.

In the 1850’s or so, photography was actually quite commonly a womans hobby. The reason being, that once rich women had birthed their husbands children and told the maid what to do for the day, she had very little to do with her time other than look wistfully out the window while attending to her needlecraft samplers. Clearly, some women wished for a more interesting and adventurous hobby. Cue photography. There are some photographic historians who believe that at least 50% of photographers in the early days of photography were women, but this is hard to demonstrate because so little of the material is actually recorded in any meaningful way. We can find shoeboxes of photographs at any flea market full of photographs, but very few have any identifiable information on them. Some of the early leading and prominent art photographers were women though, and a fair bit is known about them.

Over the decades that follow, it became more normal for even wealthy women to work. Families became less flush with the cash and dropped essential services such as maids and nannies. Women looked after the family, women did the household chores etc, more “upper class” families became considerably more “middle class”. This was particularly compounded by the Wars, which of course sent even more women out to work, because the men were away getting shot at, amongst other unpleasant things. When these men didn’t come home, the women obviously had to juggle working, rearing children and looking after the house – leaving very little free time for anything resembling a hobby.

As we went though the 1940’s and the 1950’s, there was an uncomfortable air of division between men and women. On the whole (at least my research shows) women often worked, ran the houses and looked after the children. You think this left spare time for fun? Men were free to take up their own pastimes. Photography was having a bit of a golden age at the time, with cameras coming down in cost and developing becoming much more accessible at time. Attitudes at the time too, were that science and art was something that was mans work, something a little lady couldn’t possibly get her head around. Why this change of ideas from the Victorian era and before? Who knows, but I’m researching it.

As my Grandmother puts it, the 40’s and 50’s were a “dark time” for many women. They struggled to find their own identify in a changing world. For women spending their formative years in this decade, a hobby is something that they generally didn’t have. Yes, there are exceptions to the rule, but pastimes were something best done when the housework was in bed and the children were asleep. How much photography can you really do while you’re checking on the kids every half an hour? On the contrary this was a time of clubs and societies for men. Photographic societies were booming again, populated largely by men looking to get out the house and spend time enjoying themselves.

You didn’t really start seeing more freedom and equality for women until you start looking at those born in the late 50’s onwards. Growing up through the 60’s and 70’s passed on values of equality between the sexes. These women still weren’t generally encouraged by their parents to live a free and independent lives. But crucially they were forming their own shared experiences as a generation, and they would pass those experiences onto the next generation.

My generation. Born in the 80’s. Encouraged as a child to have a go at anything you want. No longer are there social barriers to entry for so many hobbies. No longer are women expected to only take up hobbies that can be fitted around their own domestic life, because quite frankly most of us women don’t have a “domestic life”. We are no longer expected to marry, settle down and have kids before we hit our mid twenties. That gives us YEARS of time to figure out what we enjoy doing. Plus at school everything is taught equally – and that has only been in force in the last twenty years – if that! Boys are taught cooking and girls are taught woodwork. No one says that we as girls can’t do anything just because we were born with a vagina instead of a penis.

The world has wised up.

Amongst photographers my own age, I know considerably more female photographers than male photographers. At least a 75%/25% split. I only know two or three female photographers above the age of 35, compared with dozens of male photographers.

Plus of course, the cost of entry has been levelled. It has always been in the past, that women generally earned less than men. There is still a pay divide, but not on the same scale has it has been in the past. Plus as less women are choosing to have children, that means that women on the whole have more earning potential and more money. That means more money to buy the gadgets that we lust.

Society is changing considerably. We are the first generation of women that has truly found it’s voice – thanks to our parents. We are the first generation who can do anything we want to do, without feeling male dominance breathing down our neck.

And it’s fabulous.

March 7, 2012
Women are more beautiful than men

Really? Are they? Someone must have forgotten to send me the memo.

Whenever the subject is brought up in various guises about why there is less sexually enticing imagery around of men the same old cries are heard “It’s because women are more beautiful than men!” The reasons seem to range from the naive to the idiotic. I’ve heard that women are more beautiful because they have curves for example. I mean, what the hell? That’s like saying that a Ferrari 599 GTO is better than a Ferrari F40 because it’s got curves. Just no. Besides men have curves, they’re just in different places.

It’s generally accepted in todays modern world that men are the ones who spend time lusting after women, while women want to have their “emotional” and “sensitive” needs met. Newsflash guys, I’m afraid we women have those same physical needs that you do. We like looking at men, it gets us a little hot and bothered under the collar in the same way that it does for guys. Why do you think the Diet Coke adverts were so successful over the years? It’s because they rang true to just about every woman I know!

Anyway. I feel sad for anyone in this modern world who cannot appreciate beauty because of an arbitrary piece of equipment attached (or missing) between the subjects legs. It seems so sad not be able to find beauty in 50% of the human population just because you’re so culturally conditioned to believe that you couldn’t possibly look at someone the same sex and appreciate that they look good.

Seeing that someone looks good, or is beautiful is a completely different thing to being attracted to them. Why can people not fathom this?

I look forward to a time when men in this world will be able to look at another man and see beauty and attractiveness, even if he is not sexually attracted to the subject. But until society changes it’s attitudes about being gay, this will never happen. In our modern world men positively encourage lesbianism, but fear homosexuality between men. (It’s ok guys, don’t worry, you can’t catch gay!)

I fear that these attitudes will not change within my lifetime.

March 5, 2012
Page 3

Page 3 is outdated and sexist.

There. I said it. Lots of people frequently suggest that it’s just a piece of harmless titillation. I agree, it is harmless titillation, I don’t see any problem with glamour photography at all (in fact, I shoot glamour myself, it’s my favourite genre).

The problem is, that Page 3 is all a bit one sided. It’s always one or two girls (white, size 8 and “healthy” looking), baring their boobs with some rubbish babble about how they like doing it in bed. Where are the guys? And if we can’t have guys on that page 50% of the time, how about we just get rid of it all together?

The thing is, those who say it’s harmless fun are mostly guys. Think about this scenario gents: You’re sitting on the train on the way to work, minding your own business. A woman sits down next to you and opens her reading material, only to spend most of the journey studying a naked version of her perfection. That’s right, she’s sitting next to you eyeing up fit naked blokes (sometimes two of them embracing if she’s really lucky and they’re running a special). How would you feel? Intimidated? I bet you’d feel a bit intimidated if some chick was sitting next to you looking at pictures of naked blokes.

How do I know you’d feel like this? Because someone said it to me a while back on the train. I was sitting working on my iPad, minding my own business and replying to some emails from potential models. I was selecting images and sending them over to them to provide inspiration. No one sat next to me, until I was almost the last seat on the carriage. Then one guy sat down nervously and after a few minutes said “Do you mind not looking at that kind of thing please?”. The thing is, normally I would have been more embarrassed than him, I hate to think that I would make someone feel uncomfortable. Until I noticed a copy of The Sun under his arm, which included all the usual Page 3 junk. I decided to ignore his request.

So guys, before you continue to support Page 3 and everything it stands for, ask yourself this. How would you feel if the newspapers in question ran shots of hot naked blokes on Page 2? Would you mind if the girl (or guy) on the train next to you sat there for the duration of your journey gawping at some guys cock?

March 4, 2012