Skip to main content

Intent content

When I bought a camera recently it was probably the camera I would have preferred to be using for the last year - it has a lot of pixel power.  It can do everything.  It was the most expensive camera I'd ever bought.  It is even marketed as semi-pro.

But being an amateur it seemed to come with unreasonable expectation and added responsibility built in - features that hadn't been discussed on any of the review sites.  The casual and fun aspects had been completely engineered out, unless I've missed those in the complex set up menus.

So after this brief upgrading I only took a few photos and decided to downsize.

Interestingly, seeing the technically bad Disuke Yokota photos a few days ago made clear that I don't relate very well to doing things very well either.  So, it's not just me - as well as it's just not me.  There are a lot of serious art photographers with very high production values - which goes far beyond their equipment, extending to research, travel, pre and post production assistants, ancillary technical equipment, print manufacture and presentation, etc.  Taryn Simon, Geoffrey Crewdson, Ed Burtynsky, Andreas Gursky to name a few.

When photographing just about anything the not insignificant matter of the Dusseldorf/New Topographics influence also needs addressing.  Be it observational or constructed, it's become a style that is so all-pervasive that to frame in any other way is either an act of ignorance or subtle indifference.  Even documentary photographers assert their fine art credentials when adopting its very stylised manner in their people projects.  The gravitas of cool objectivity is embedded in the DNA of  formal denotation.

For years I've found that pointing a camera at stuff - be it five tons of of excavated earth, a demolished factory, or (through a self-timer), myself, has meant at least considering framing it properly.  Most attempts at deliberatlely not framing it properly look (even more) pathetic.

 Cycling for hours recently with just a tiny camera in my pocket was liberating, even if the files aren't up to capturing detail (particularly the gritty texture of smashed concrete or the patina of piled earth) as the software smears much of it away (thinking it's small sensor noise).

I still think a small camera is the downgrade route for me, and have ordered a dinky camera which seems to have set off from New York and has detoured to Leipzig in Germany already on its way here.  (It's reminscent of tracking 'Park City' which came from Victor Borelli's bookshop in Albequerque recently.)  It's like a compact but with an APS size sensor.  It can fit in a coat pocket, with the 22mm lens.  I nowadays keep thinking of the word notebook for the kind of downsized photography I might be up to doing next (if I haven't completely run out of steam), and I'm hoping this might make a good notebook camera.  And without a viewfinder it may be good for learning to take more imprecisely framed pictures.