I’m going through a lot of old magazines ripping out the photos I like and tossing the other 99.5% of the paper.

One thing I noticed in the stack of what I’ve kept, the models don’t look at the camera very often. I sometimes tell new models “don’t look at the camera unless you mean it.”

I look at all of these thousands of images in the magazines I’m tossing out, and I have a visceral reaction to compelling lighting, compositions, dances of color on the page. When I look at a photo in which the model is just standing there deer in headlights waiting for the shutter to click, supremely unconfident, no matter what is going on in the rest of the image, I have a strong dislike for the whole. If it is an interesting setting, I am even angry at the photographer for wasting it on an uncompelling subject.

To me, photography is only a rush when it feels challenging, and if the model just stands there looking at the lens, waiting to have their picture taken, it is uninteresting. I don’t like when they submit to the process, when they are having their picture taken rather than being interesting.

Unless you have the confidence to stare down the lens or tell a story, don’t go near it, the lens will know you are weak. The lens is predatory. To use it is always to be hunting for something. When the prey is immediately submissive, the hunt is dull.

I have been working as a fashion photographer for several years, and I have amassed a small but vital collection of images. I would like to make a book displaying a selection of these images. Each contribution of $60 toward this effort will entitle the contributor to receive one signed copy of the finished book.

- Ched

contribute here: fundable.com

I haven’t wanted to post much about the new radio show I’m producing, but I wanted to give an update of some sort here. I can’t say where the show will be aired yet, or who the first few guests will be, because we’re still working out syndication and some other things, but hopefully I can post that information soon. I’m almost afraid to jinx it, things seem to be going so well on this project. Cross your fingers!

The show is going to be called Light and Gravity. It is about photography and cinematography, but more generally about images and applied creativity. The “light” part of the title is pretty obviously relevant for photo and cinema, light is how you record images. The word “gravity” refers not to the Newtonian force, but to the importance of images as communication. We will be talking a lot about artist intent, editorial images, and viewer perception. In other words, it will be some pretty deep stuff.

Sandy Ramirez is going to co-host with me, and has been a big help in working to line up master photographers to interview. Currently looking for a cinematographer to join the on-air team.

The first few episodes should be done and ready for air in late February.

For each weekly one hour show we will have a main guest to interview live on the air, along with discussion of news from the photography, film, and creative arts worlds, and usually a pre-recorded feature or two. I’m up in the air about doing call-ins. We may take questions live from the forum on modelmayhem.com.

“Quaint my ride.”

ARTICLE

This article on Karl Lagerfeld was in the March 19Th issue of The New Yorker, and though it is quite long I really enjoyed the reading. It’s good to know that the people at the top of the fashion food chain are crazy-seeming artists just like me. I especially liked the part describing the work environment in his home and the descriptions of his diversity of interests.

This question was posted to an online forum:

“What makes High fashion photography?”

My Answer:

The difference I think you’re reaching for is catalog vs. editorial style. In catalog photography you shoot the entire collection. In an editorial style you try to sum up the entire collection in a short series of images.

In real editorial fashion photography, at a purist level, you look at what is now and what is past and you create a very selective visual essay. It doesn’t always work that way. Most magazines want their advertisers’ products represented in the editorials, so what you see in Vogue etc. is not normally true editorials because the editors are influenced by a need to keep their employers happy.

“High fashion” is a bad translation of the French “Haute Couture,” which is a very specific kind of clothing, and actually translates to “high sewing.” Haute Couture is the very highest level of fashion in terms of craft and quality workmanship. They don’t sell it at Macy’s. They barely sell it at Bergdorf Goodman. It’s one of a kind pieces, usually made for a specific person. It is actually a legal distinction and only a small group of fashion design companies are allowed to call their work “Haute Couture.”

I only made it to a few of the Saturday events for Meatpacking District Design Week, but there were a lot of interesting things to see.

I attended a seminar in Bumble and Bumble’s education center at their downtown compound. Titled “Colliding Worlds of Design, Fashion, and Art,” it was moderated by Barbara Bloemink (curator for the Museum of Art and Design) with panelists Mary Alice Stephenson (contributing editor for Harper’s Bazaar), Shonquis Moreno (design editor for Surface), Catherine Malandrino (fashion designer), and Janet Ozzard (strategist editor for New York Magazine). I love these sorts of discussions about media crossover. Although I arrived on time, the event was standing room only when I got there, and it was difficult to hear most of the discourse. One of the panelists was apparently from Iceland (and had some interesting things to say), but I’m not sure which one she was or if she was a substitution panelist.

There was some mention of furniture versus fashion and the disposability of current clothing market leaders’ products. This is the H&M wear-it-for-a-month trend compared to the implied (or assumed) permanence of a couch in the living room. I wish this had been discussed a bit more by the panel but only one panelist seemed really interested in it. I like thinking about furniture and objects and spatial relationships as fashion and parts of a story. Like Andre Austin was saying about creating a character from clothing, you can certainly do the same thing with props and furnishings. I would like to use my photography to expose more people to not just wearable art but environmental art. Environmental textures fascinate me almost as much as stories and light, and I really want to incorporate more physical things into my images, beyond just shooting the model and their clothing, make a whole world around them. Having been exposed to good design all my life, thanks to my mother’s involvement in the industrial design world, these things speak to me in a way I think most other fashion photographers probably cannot experience. I have developed an innate connection to forms and surfaces over a long period of time, and want to explore that much further in my photography and filmmaking.

Barbara Bloemink made a comment about the difference between art and craft. I’m not sure if she was quoting someone else. She said that a crafts person is an extreme specialist and spends their entire career perfecting command of one simple material. This is opposed to the artists, whose career hops from one material to another, always exploring.

I suppose, you could say craft involves the microscopic examination of material properties and art is the macroscopic, or blue sky approach. This poses the question, can you be both a macroscopic and microscopic thinker. Probably the best artists and craftspeople are predisposed to hybridize. I think of myself as an artist, having leaped from animation to acrylics to dramatic film to fiction writing to video documentary and currently being into fashion photography, but also I recognize a long-term relationship with attention to light and sequence and time. Those ties pint more to craft than art. The disciplinary dividing line, as I described in my last entry referring to photography and acting, is hard to nail down and often when approached and considered seems almost non-existent.

When I was in grad school for film, I took a sculpture class with Mark Oxman, a really talented sculptor and educator. Working three times a week on the same sculpture for several months really taught me a lot about the shared properties of the multitude of fine arts disciplines. Although my command of sculpting technique was primitive at best, while working I could see threads connecting to story, awareness of light, form, and texture and that fashion essential mood/vibe. Am I a filmmaker or am I a photographer or am I a writer or am I a storyteller? If I’m all of those, am I a generalist and is that lack of focus detrimental to my command of craft in any one discipline? Is it therefore damaging to my ability to communicate clearly? I think the answer is no, that all art is communication, all art is metaphor. In craft the one medium matters greatly, but in art the metaphor is medium-independent, and you can and should hop around a bit and see what works best for specific expressions.

So are a craftworker and an artist that different? Yes and no. It’s all relative and there is a lot of crossover, but the artist moves. I think you don’t have to be an artist to be a craftsperson, but to be an artist you need to have craft tendancies. Even if you don’t always work with wood, you may always work with materials that have grain, or like me moving from medium to medium with relative frequency but still being tied to story and light and spatial relationships.

There was also a discussion of the misuse of the word Couture. I am guilty of that faux pas, though, much more when I first started than now. I think it’s all Carson Kressley’s fault. He really threw the term around a lot on Queer Eye for The Straight Guy. Is that show still on? The first two seasons it was so fresh and interesting. Don’t get me started on reality TV, it goes bad faster than chinese food left in the sun. Ever see the Far Side cartoon where there is a picture of the planet Earth and then there is this line of clowns in orbit, and it says “The Bozone Layer: protecting the universe from Earth’s harmful effects.” I love that cartoon. Anyway, until a few months ago I just assumed anything that was created by a senior designer and really expensive was “couture.” It’s not. Haute Couture is a legal distinction, and true Couture is produced by a very specific group of accredited Parisian designers, essentially the French knights of clothing design. If you think a featured dress shown in Bryant Park is amazing, you would be truly astonished by the true Haute Couture outfits. They represent literally hundreds and hundreds of hours of precision crafts work and cost anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. I’ve only seen a few pieces of the real thing, but they were truly absolutely over the top of the breathtakingly gorgeous chart.

I also walked through the Valvomo-sponsored exhibit on new Finnish design at Down East Fish Locker on 13th St. The fashion on display from CTRL Clothing was interesting. They has some great jackets. I asked the rep if I could borrow a few of their pieces to put on a model I plan to shoot on Tuesday, but they’re unfortunately leaving to go back to Finland that day.

I am always looking for formulas and keys so good performances can be repeated. Sure you hit a good shot once in a while, but often it’s on a test and not an editorial so I can’t send the images out. Serendipity is great for art, but it has to be repeatable to be profitable. There is less difference between performing on stage before an audience and walking into your own gallery show than one might imagine. In both cases you must attempt to pre-cognize the experience of others. In both cases, getting it right in the shower doesn’t count. Some artists prefer to satisfy only their own needs and leave the viewer on the wind. I have gone to far too many art galleries and left confused to not give a decently explanatory label to the viewers of my own work, even if I make them look around for it a bit first. I feel indebted to the audience for taking the time and energy to view my work, and therefore strive to satisfy both my own needs as an explorer and to communicate my experiences on the journey to viewers as a reward for their own curiosity. Curiosity should always be encouraged.

There exists a requirement in the fashion photography I favor, that the model should exist in the environment of the image and be somewhat connected to that world. Most often when I find myself believing my work on a constructed image to have yielded a failure, it is the result of an apparent lack of connection between the model and the other things in the frame. If that is not the case, the second most common culprit is having failed to control the light. Both can be improved with practice, as my own work has shown. What I refer to as the model being connected to the world, director Richard Donner calls “verisimilitude,” meaning “the truth of the thing” or “self-truth.”

There may be some universal formula for projecting how a model will play off a given prop or costume. I have not yet found it. Perhaps it is too complex and individualized to forecast. Possibly at least some generalizations could be divined, but then would their employment by an artist be detrimental to originality? I think such things are better left to instinct honed by experience, for my own work at least. Yet, still I wonder if there could be a primer written to guide outside of instinct. Can you bracket models and props like they do sports teams in a tournament?

I believe that tension, composition, and detail are the keys to a great image. The viewer must be presented with drama (or the equivalent), context, and a visual focal point in order to relate to most images. Drama is given by any notion of tension within a frame, whether that is interpersonal tension, spatial tension, or implied kinetic tension.

The story of the single frame must have a context, as all stories presented visually do. The context is revealed and highlighted (successfully or poorly) by the composition. In this use of the word “composition,” I mean the juxtaposition of complimentary and contrasting areas of color tone, hue, and saturation (or simply brightness in a black and white image). Void and filling shades and levels between them must be shaped to draw the viewer’s attention to your intended purpose in presenting the image. With multiple frames, a sequence of images, it’s a whole other ballgame.

The visual focal points are also of great importance, and without these details the image will appear totally meaningless. In photographing people, the visual focal points of an image almost always include the eyes. The detail need not be overpowering. It could be as simple as a green dot on two hairlines intersecting. What is important is the presence of an anchor of some sort. An image that is totally unfocused cannot ordinarily hold or even momentarily capture the viewer’s attention.

In most cases, a formulaic approach to fashion photography would be counterproductive. However, if one is conducting some sort of experiment to find the subconscious mechanics of one’s work, looking for patterns in the behavior of subjects would probably be useful. Finding such patterns would be a step in a long path to allowing for a conscious and controlled paradigm shift in production and visualization methods.