Passe-partout

Untitled, San Francisco, March 2009.



These pictures are as much about spaces as they are about the people in them. Choosing the space comes first, which can be anything that attracts my attention: the magnificent monolith of the Contemporary Jewish Museum, polygons on the sidewalk, wood grain in plywood, a fire escape ladder that hangs precariously from a red brick building, a bistro's brightly colored neon sign, or just fierce blackness.

Sometimes it's the way light casts shadows on the space, creating a veritable gateway to Hades, a sharp diagonal or a leafy foliage that looks like Chinese brush painting.

The space is the canvas that awaits the emergence of figures. Like Doisneau said, they will come. When they arrive, one looks for the way they order themselves against the canvas, for gestures and silhouettes that complete the image itself.

Writer Kerstin Engelhard of Leica Fotografie International said the spaces reminded her of passe-partout, the multi-layered mats used to frame a picture. The space is a frame. Inside it is a moment of sheer ordinariness, invariably of figures walking, but a portait just the same.

. . . but it's blurry!

Untitled, Oakland, October 1997.

Conventional wisdom would tell us that in order for a picture to be good, it has to be as sharp as a tack. In Internet forums, photo enthusiasts split hairs over sharpness and how much noise is acceptable in a picture. The desirability of digital cameras rises and falls by how noisy they get at high ISOs. In the face of all this obsession with crystal clarity, whither the blurry shot? The trash bin?

Hello. My name is Eman and I like blurry pictures.

Pictures come out blurry for many reasons: the thing itself moves too fast, the photographer moves too slow, not enough light, too much light, the camera shakes, the eager hand shakes, the lens can be better. In short, shooting conditions are not ideal. But unless you're in a studio or (God forbid) shoot with a flash, street conditions cannot always be ideal.

Perhaps a better gauge of a good picture is its power for storytelling, whether the stories are intended or not. In this context, blurriness to me would suggest that the thing itself is not a still life; that it moves and breathes, that the moment captured will be followed by another moment and yet another one.

Czech photographer Antonin Kratochvil is a Magnum correspondent who occasionally shoots celebrity portraits for magazines. Unlike other celebrity photographers who work with an army of assistants and an armada of gear, Kratochvil shoots his portraits in the same way that he would cover a war -- alone, with a hand-held camera, and with natural light. His blurry portrait of Rod Steiger (below) may not be flattering, but its dynamism and mask-like countenance reveal more of Steiger's qualities as an actor than any technically perfect shot.

The faces in the pictures by Miguel Rio Branco and Flor Garduño below can barely be gleaned from the blurriness that results from shooting under low light. This "flaw" renders the subjects anonymous, but it also imbues them with universality, a metaphorical significance that would be absent otherwise.

The unintentional blur in Raymond Depardon's portrait of his mother becomes the central focus of the picture itself, transforming the subject into a spectral image that intimates suggestions of memory and mortality.

Before trashing your next blurry picture, look at it again; it may possess qualities that make it worth keeping. When it comes to "interestingness," a little blur can be your friend.



















Antonin Kratochvil, Rod Steiger, Prague, 1998.
Antonin Kratochvil, George Clooney.
Miguel Rio Branco, El Cabrero, Sevilla, 1993.
Miguel Rio Branco, Coconuts to Be, Cartagena, 1990.
Flor Garduño, Santiago, Temalacatzingo, Mexico, 1987.
Flor Garduño, Yatiri, Isla del Sol, Bolivia, 1991.
Raymond Depardon, During the four-minute exposure my mother moved slightly, 1984.

Hats

Man on Train, San Francisco, March 2009.




There are many things about my personal appearance I don't like, but what rankles my vanity most of all is that I look silly wearing a hat. More than any other fashion accessory, a hat has the power to summon images from our memory. Most of them, of course, are movie images: gangster shootouts from the 30s, Cary Grant, Preston Sturges screwball comedies, Indiana Jones on horseback losing his Fedora again and again, Jack Nicholson in Chinatown saying "I'm just a snoop." My own memory of hats takes me back to Philippine cockfighting arenas in the 1960s, where hundreds of men wearing straw hats and closed-toe leather slippers screamed and hollered in the bleachers while two fighting cocks decked it out in the center of the sandy ring.

The sight of a man in a hat never fails to put my photographer's instinct at attention. Add a trench coat and I hit the ground running. It's almost impossible to take an uninteresting picture of a man wearing a hat because the drama is right there, sitting on top of his head.

In his book, The Ongoing Moment (a must read for photography lovers), Geoff Dyer said that the story of the Great Depression can be told simply by looking at pictures of men's hats. Poring through Dorothea Lange's portfolio of the depression years, Dyer looked at all the pictures with hats. He discovered that the hats, once signs of affluence, became more and more battered with each passing year until finally, in photographs of Skid Row, men slept on sidewalks using their hats for pillows. Dyer observed that by the 1950s "the great era of hats in photography has passed" and "it was no longer a reliable indicator of the ravages inflicted on men by economic forces..." As in the picture above by Garry Winogrand, "the hat was [now] just a hat."


Garry Winogrand, Untitled, 1950s.
Dorothea Lange, White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, 1937.
Tina Modotti, Workers Parade, 1926.
Saul Leiter, Harlem, 1960.
Dorothea Lange, Ball Game, Migrant Camp, Shafter, California, 1934.