Roberto Westbrook: New Photographs and Thoughts

My wife sent me this story from the Rumpus that loosely fits with a few other posts I’ve written about photo manipulation in the 19th Century. There is a show right now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York featuring collages made by women in the 1860s. This is 50 years before Picasso and Braque are credited with inventing the form. I love the colors in these old collages. The one below is by Constance Sackville-West. It reminds me of a song (Jerusalem) by Dan Bern in which he sings:

She believed collage was the greatest of all the arts

And was busy pasting pictures of horses

Next to ads for laundry soap

Next to Mohammed Ali

I have written a little bit in the past about manipulated photos. Today, the NYTimes has a short story with some good examples here. In the slide show, slides 3 and 4 about a 1902 Ulysses S. Grant photo are particularly interesting because of the level of compositing.

I attended one day of the Look3 Festival this past weekend thanks to John Loomis who kindly gave me two tickets for free when he learned he could not attend. I went mostly to hear Gilles Peress speak. It was definitely worth it. Some of the most interesting photographers are the ones who do things far outside the visual realm. Peress for example has a degree in philosophy and teaches Human Rights. I was familiar with a lot of the work featured in the slide show Saturday, but two pleasant surprises were Real Beauty by Jodi Bieber and Greenland by Ragnar Axelsson. The festival was interactive in that it asked attendees to share work via a slide show. A photo of mine was selected and is the last one in this show below. The theme was Fortune. This dog is fortunate to get such good health care, probably better than my own. Also, he is adorable and his name is Cash.

Look3 – Day 3 – Images by Festival of the Photograph

I have known for a long time that my dad had an old wood field camera up in the attic. I know this because I broke it when I was a kid. I was running around the house in my socks, slipped on the hardwood floors and slid into the camera which was on old wood legs. It fell to the floor and the brass plates that connected the camera to the legs popped off and bent. It’s been stored away ever since. I decided recently to restore it and take some pictures. The camera is probably turn of the century. It was designed to hold glass plates and film came on the scene in 1888. I have fixed most of the light leaks, but still need to repair the brass.

While doing some research on old photography I discovered Sergei Prokudin Gorskii. He made color photographs in the early 1900s by shooting one scene with 3 B&W glass plates with red, blue and green filters respectively and then combining them later. It’s ingenous, really time consuming and beautfiful to look at.

this is my camera. I’ll post photos from it as soon as I can.

On the way to the polls today, I saw this sign. It was kind of funny so I had to take a picture. I know for a fact that signs have been stolen from both sides. This is the first election in which I have volunteered my time on several weekends to a candidate. It got me out in to parts of the community I don’t often visit, and I am really grateful for that. I hope that I and others stay involved.

This post is related to the previous post about altering images.

A few weeks ago I was at the Chrysler Museum of Art and bought the catalog for a 1994 exhibit called Pictorial Effect/Naturalistic Vision: The Photographs and Theories of Henry Peach Robinson and Peter Henry Emerson. It has some really interesting text about what Brooks Johnson refers to as “the contest between ’straight’ or ‘manipulated’ photography.” Johnson, the Curator of Photography at the Chrysler, goes on to say, “…the debate today is not about why one is better than the other. Instead, it is a decision as to the approach chosen to best serve the needs of the artist.” I agree with him.

Manipulated photos are here to stay and might eventually be usurped by complex graphic animation. As an evolutionary process it’s really interesting to compare what H.P. Robinson was doing over 100 years ago in the dark room to what Erik Almas and many others do today in Photoshop. Below, you can read the two men describe the picture making process. The photos they describe are found at the end of this post.

H.P. Robinson quoted in Pictorial Effect describing his 1890 photo When The Day’s Work is Done:

The first negatives taken were the two of which the background is composed. The division runs down the centre, where the light is relieved by the dark beyond it. The two negatives were not printed separately…but were carefully cut down with a diamond and mounted on a piece of glass…making, in fact, one large negative of the interior of the cottage, into which it would be comparatively easy to put anything. The next negative was the old man. This included the table, chair, and matting on which his feet rest…The old lady was then photographed, and is simply joined round the edge; so also was the group in the corner, and the glimpse of the village seen through the window.

Excerpt from interview with Erik Almas in F STOP discussing a 2007 photo:

…there’s usually three elements to my images. But with the fisherman image, I used so many more [about 20]. It was three like little coves sitting next to each other. Like each one I wanted to shoot at. And then I thought, why don’t we put that arch into the other scene. So I decided I’d shoot in pieces. A wave like this would be perfect next to that, and this would be perfect next to that…you just see the picture in front of you, and you just start gathering pieces to recreate that. Then of course it didn’t look exactly like that because when you sit down with it on the computer, you have this framework and you start building the puzzle and putting the pieces in. It was a fun exercise… You really have to see the picture and photograph for that and then you put it together. I think I sat there for a day, I just put it together, you know. Then I probably spent another few days making it seamless.

Here is a link to an article by H.P. Robinson discussing his methods in the THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY. April 2, 1860.

Norm Shafer, who I know as a photographer at the Virginian-Pilot (an awesome photo paper where I have freelanced occasionally) recently raised questions about my use of both advertising and editorial content on the same blog. He had thoughts which I think other people share and which are worth discussing. His full comment is here. Basically, he thinks it is misleading and unethical to combine or “composite” photos. This got my mind working and rather than bury my response in the comments page, I chose to share it as it’s own post. Below, is what I wrote to Norm.

I only alter images for advertising work and anything I post on the blog has a note about the alteration. As I build more advertising work, I’ll eventually place it on my main website in it’s own advertising section, which is very separate from my journalism work. You said, “I feel that the viewers of these photos are led to believe that they are a truthfull representation of reality, and when they find out they’ve been fooled it puts into question the truthfullness of photography.” I think the truthfulness of photography has been in question since it’s invention. You should read this link about a composite from 1860 involving Lincoln. There are countless examples like this. In fact the Chrysler Museum currently exhibits an interesting series of pictures by Henry Peach Robinson who was famous for combining 4 or 5 negatives in the 19th century. For me advertising and fine art photography should be read like a fiction book. The events, characters and plot are invented, but if done well, the reader believes it. He might even find truth in it. Photojournalism is like a non-fiction book. It should be accurate but it is still subject to the bias of the writer. A lot of writers engage in both worlds and I think photographers should be able to as well, as long as they are honest about it.

This is an age-old discussion, but please leave your thoughts if you have any.