Tools and Work
I made the mistake of thinking that a camera would improve my photographs and it is starting to make me a little bitter.
I have been shooting 6×6 medium format almost exclusively for the last two years and, looking back, I think I was starting to get a little restless. This seems to happen to me pretty often. I started working with color film again over the winter after a long hiatus and was beginning to flesh out a some ideas for a new project. Everything was clicking and I was very happy with my progress for the first couple of months.
Somewhere along the line, though, large format started calling out to me. The thing that probably put me over the line was seeing Joel Sternfeld’s show at Luhring Augustine last fall. Although I thought the prints were too big, the luscious descriptiveness and pure beauty that Sternfeld had captured in his Oxbow Archive had planted a seed in my mind.
My 4×5 camera had been sitting up on the shelf for over a year, unused. I had fallen in love with my Hasselblad in the meantime and hadn’t given the 4×5 a second thought for quite a while. But there’s always something, isn’t there? Some magic bullet that is somehow going to push my work to the next level, and I had gotten the idea that large format was it.
I have been using my 4×5 camera quite a bit over the last couple of months months, and the results haven’t been promising. While I’m out working, things feel good. I am taking the same pictures I’ve always taken. When I get home, however, the story changes. Something is getting lost in translation between the pictures that I think I am taking and the pictures that I actually take, and what’s left feels like a pale facsimile of my original intent.
The problem is that I know that large format is probably the right tool for images I am trying to create. The lush and descriptive image quality and the methodical nature of my process are pointing me in that direction. The question is how long I can continue to struggle before I give in.
Darius Himes writes about the choice of tools on his blog:
The methodical precision required by the 8×10, I’m arguing, leads to a methodical precision on the mental level. Because a relatively large amount of time is required to simply deal with the equipment, a corresponding large amount of mental time goes into the image—the type of image—that one makes. The camera physically and mentally slows you down, makes you more attentive in certain ways.
I think that’s exactly what I need. I often feel that my photos are just a little bit too loose. I know that one can develop the necessary attention without actually working with large format, but along with the other benefits, that feels like a step in the right direction for me. So, even though I am completely exhausted and discouraged at the moment, I am not quite ready to give up. Hopefully my moment of clarity is right around the corner, and the camera will start doing what I expect it to again soon.
May 14, 2009