Happy New Year from Winokur Photography

I love my clients, most are friends all are creative collaborators. Each year I pick something that I can brand and give to them. This year I chose the Sharan SQ35 pinhole camera which happens to be sold by my friend Doug’s company Noted. The Sharan camera is a cardboard kit with a pinhole lens that makes square images on 35mm film. Since the kits take about an hour to build I figured none of my clients would build them – so I assembled all 25 cameras, packaged them with film and decorated them with custom “Winokur Photography” stickers. In previous years I’ve given “private label” wine. Since this year’s gift was so much more labor intensive then the wine I had to keep the list quite tight. The cameras went to my current clients and some very special dream clients.

I figured no one would have film hanging around anymore, so each camera was given with a roll of film to get started. In a week or so I'll be emailing everyone who got the cameras and asking them to submit their pinhole camera photos for display on this blog. Of course there will be a top-secret, super special prize for the person who sends the best pinhole image.

The instruction on the SQ35 make Ikea's instructions seem stratight forward. Assembling the cameras got easier after the first few but the design has some quirks and I ended up going over every one of them a second time to make sure all their little parts were properly stuck together. If the Sharan folks read this, I have some free advice for improving the kit.

Twenty-five note cards and 25 sets of promo cards.

Recycling: I used the original Sharan box as part of my home-made packaging.

Say twenty-ten. New Year's note cards, with Kurt Herr's logo design.

The labels for the cameras were printed at Community Printers where our friend Ross helped me get everything tuned up. We didn’t want to spring for a die cut so I thought I’d be hand cutting each sticker. The Xacto cuts just weren’t pretty enough to satisfy my QC team so I went to Techshop and used their Helix laser etcher engraver for a high-tech, low volume die-cutting substitute.

The Winokur Photography labels on the cameras were printed in six flavors.Those hi-tech black rubber bands are a key to the workings of the SQ35 - they hold the back shut.

My assembly plant all cleaned up after the build, everything counted out and ready pack.

The post office took 16 days to send the boxes I ordered, last minute purchase from U-Line and one-day shipping saves the day. Of course, the day after the cameras shipped USPS shows up with 25 boxes. Notice the Burberryesque ribbon, that's how you know we're styling here at WP.

All present and accounted for, ready for the post office.

Collaboration

Several years ago my friend Nancy Dobbs Owen and I conspired to do a shoot with her jewelry. Nancy brought along make up artist Jackie Yost. Jackie and I have been working together ever since.
Just over a year ago I got a call out of the blue from Chrysta Giffen who wanted to talk about the photography business in San Francisco. She has been doing digital post, printing and compositing work for me ever since.
In a business where most people work alone, where projects range from requiring one or two people to scores of talented contributors - having a team is critical. Knowing who to call when there is a client is one part of the equation, having relationships with people who share your vision is also key to the constant effort of making new work. So, when I have an idea I know who to call; it works both ways.
At one point while we were working on some portraits for a pharmaceutical client Jackie told us about her interest in a creating beauty images with funky eyelashes. I put her and Chrysta together and we all started looking for talent. Chrysta found Laurie and Allison on the website Model Mayhem.

This is Laurie.

This is Allison.

My work is focused on a real authentic look, so these images a outside of what I would call my style. However I am a portrait photographer and I think there is plenty of space for the "beauty portrait" in the work I'm interested in. Plus my health clients are interested in skin care so I'm happy to have samples of work that are all about beautiful skin. Images that showcase the team it takes to make an image with the look of beyond perfect skin.

Family Portraits

My parents were here in SF visiting over Thanksgiving so I used some of my precious and aging supply of Type 55 to make some portraits of them. Being that they are my parents they are willing but not necessarily agreeable portrait subjects.
This was a happy Gowlandflex accident. My finger slipped while cocking the shutter. I was going to dump this but instead made a second exposure and processed it out. I caught my dad smiling and looking tough on one piece of film. He always wants to look super serious in photos.
I don't think my dad will like this picture but hopefully he won't be too mad that I posted it. I love shooting this close with the Gowlandflex. It's a challenge because the parallax adjustment on the camera can't compensate at this distance, so the composition is always a guess. Seeing how well the Rodenstock 150mm lens performs this close you know it's worth fussing a bit with the camera to make it work.
While I'm talking about my parents I should give them a little blog shout out. They are fantastic artists you can see their work here and here.
This last photo is also with the Gowlandflex but it's on Fuji 160s not Type 55. You can see why so many people loved the Type 55. It's just as sharp as you can imagine but with an incredible soft tonality and the Polaroid x-factor that is hard to match.

Let's get personal.

Erik Almas' grand prize winning picture from 2008.

If you're not already on it you should be dreaming-up, shooting, editing or retouching your best personal images for the APA SF Something Personal show. That's APA's annual 100 print exhibit and blockbuster party; fourteen-hundred people came to the show last year. If that's still not enough incentive for you to get your work ready for the contest, then the incredible panel of judges we have lined up should seriously motivate you.

I've got to save some surprises but I'll give you a taste. Some of this year's judges include: One of the most talented and influential creative directors in the magazine world Scott Dadich, Creative Director at Wired. Margaret Johnson, GCD at Goodby the top creative agency in America according to Archive. Jennifer Jerde, Owner of Elixir Design, her beautiful work is in the permanent collection at SFMOMA and Fabio Costa, Creative Director at Cutwater where he works on Ubisoft, Nvidia, Ray-Ban and Persol.

Your odds of winning are good. Last year we had about 600 entries so the chances of winning were about 1:6. Just to put that in perspective, your odds of being struck by lightning are 1:280000 so you have a much better chance of getting in this show then being struck by lightning. Last year the 100 images in the show came from 62 individual photographers. So the average winner had 1.58 images represented in the show. We know of one photographer who tracks a national advertising campaign back to having his images in the show, and another who got a solo gallery show out of her winning images.

Are you ready to enter? I thought so. Entries are due October 20 (click here for the entry for). Seriously there will be no extensions.

Dan Winters in San Francisco September 23 with APA and AAU

We're all getting pretty excited about this week's APA lecture featuring Dan Winters at AAU's Morgan Augitorium. Dan's talk will be interesting for photographers as well as anybody in the design or editorial world. Here are the details:

September 23
7:30 to 9:30 PM
Doors open at 6:30
AAU Morgan Auditorium, 491 Post, San Francisco

Checks and Cash only. APA Members: $10, General Admission: $15, Academy of Art Students free with AAU ID.

I've been a huge fan of Dan's work for years now. I think the line he walks between commercial, editorial and fine art is an example of the space today's photographer hopes to occupy. He clearly brings a style and vibe to the table that clients seek out.

The NPR Blog has a short interview with Dan here:

Winters knows his predecessors well, photographers and painters alike, and fully acknowledges their influence. Edward Hopper, Irving Penn, Alfred Stieglitz -- all the midcentury greats. "You're either a Stieglitz guy or a Steichen guy," he asserts, "like you're a Rolling Stones guy or [a fan of] The Who. They're two different kinds of people." Interestingly enough, Steichen was the more commercial photographer. But Winters still associates himself, and his work, with a school of early documentary photography.

I hope we'll see you out on Wednesday night.

September Photography Openings

First Thursday, San Francisco's defacto night for art openings, slightly delayed by Labor Day and Burning Man, turned into a fantastic Second Thursday with several great photography shows at 49 Geary and Gallery 291 last night. For sure the star of the evening was Hiroshi Sugimoto, the mad scientist of the fine art photo world, his newest body of work called Lightning Fields is a set of stunning black and white images Sugimoto creates by applying 400,000 volts of electricity directly to the film with a Van De Graffe generator. I found a couple of great videos of Sugimoto talking about his work. They are here and here. Listening to him one understands he is an intellectual, educated in architecture, history and science, and his work draws on broad and deep concepts about the natural and man-made environment.

With gallery and museum shows around his work and the cover art of the current U2 album "No Line on the Horizon" Sugiomoto's work demands a high price. The print of the above picture is $80,000 at Frankel. If I were in the market for a Mercedes I think Sugiomoto's print would be a better use of the money. Until the lottery winnings come in I have this Fujiroid from his show with an extra bit of lightening from on-camera flash. Richard Prince can only hope to re-photograph an image this well.

Next we went upstairs to Haines Gallery. I was blown away for the second time of the night, this time by Adou Samalada's work. His images of his native Sichuan Province in China are beautiful and timeless. Adou works with old expired film to create portraits which are poetic and heroic. They seem to come from some remote past but they are current documents of his life.

"There is no difference between taking a picture of others and myself. The camera may be pointed outward, but whether you like it or not, it always reveals you."

At Haines I met Zara from Fifty Crowes I'm hoping she will sit for me so I can make a portrait of her with all those amazing freckles. Zara is busy working on an opening 50 Crows is doing with Ed Kashi on October 1. More on Ed on Fifty Crows blog here.

After Adou we went to Brian Ullrich's show at Robert Koch. Brian is the receipient of a Gugenheim for his work on the malls and other remnants and detritus of our shopping culture. He writes:

Over the past 7 years I have been engaged with a long-term photographic examination of the peculiarities and complexities of the consumer-dominated culture in which we live. This project titled Copia, explores not only the everyday activities of shopping, but the economic, cultural, social, and political implications of commercialism and the roles we play in self-destruction, over-consumption, and as targets of marketing and advertising.

Living in San Francisco where we feel the effects of the economy but don't see the wreckage in the obvious way that it has been wrought in other parts of the country. It's kind of jarring to realize that Brian's images document our home not some far off place.

Fujiroid of Miki Johnson from Reslove talking to Brian at his opening.

The last stop of the evening was for one of my personal favorites, Michael Garlington at Gallery 291. His images are beautiful, dark narratives, photographs from Grimm's Tales, beadtime stories to terrify children. Garlington was a master printer as well as a photographer. His personal work is masterful in its own right but with a low-fi, noisy, dirtiness that would be the opposite of the work he did as a printer. His images like Adou's are current but appear to be plucked out of the past.

Here is a Fujiroid of someone iPhoning a Garlington image.

Here is the info for Michael's show at 291. You can also buy his book Portraits from the Belly of the Whale on Amazon or at 291.

Night Fujiroids

I'm still having lots of fun taking the Fuji Instax camera to parties. Of course I could take a digital camera and that would be lots easier but digital is so 2008.


The Louis Vutton windows on Union Square with blogosphere star Miki Johnson.






Grab shot walking down the street on our way to Michael Garlington's opening at Gallery 291.


The Fujiroids burn out when you put to much light through the lens. This photo with the sun in the background looks like a UFO is landing in San Francisco. Of course we all know UFOs landed in S.F. years ago, otherwise how could you explain our Board of Supervisors.

This is guaranteed to ruin your day

Today's San Francisco Chronicle has a story on the very front page of their business section about hobbyists taking work from professional photographers. It's here if you can bare to read it. I guess the chronicle - which is near the top of the death watch list for major metro daily newspapers - got tired or writing about the fall of newspapers and decided to focus on the the economy of free and the future of still photographers.

"It'd be nice to get paid, but I don't really care," said the San Francisco resident. "What are they going to pay me, a hundred dollars? I'd rather get copies and show them to my friends."

The software engineer they interviewed had given his photo to 7x7 Magazine in exchange for a few copies of the magazine. 7x7 has never been a lucrative client but they have been a great display space for San Francisco photographers and they have financed some great portfolio development projects for photographers including Erik Almas.

With an entire issue filled with images they found on Flikr and plans for more such issues one has to wonder what value of the magazine is delivering. I would have to say it's value is about what they are paying for images $0. If they are just republishing work you can find yourself on Flikr then the publication isn't contributing much more then paper and ink. Free certainly has to be an enticing prospect for any publisher but I don't see the payoff f0r readers or advertisers. 7x7 is a style and lifestyle magazine. Their job is to be ahead of the public, finding trends and reporting on them in a beautiful way that also provides gorgeous display space for advertisers. How well can they do this by scouring Flikr for your old photos. It's not that there aren't lots of nice photos on Flikr its that I don't see how this strategy makes the magazine relevant.

Film is dead, long live film:

Our local APA chapter just had a great event on editing. On the panel were Wired contributing photographer Joe Pugliese and Wired Photography Editor Anna Alexander talking about the editorial assignment process and Norman Maslov Agent Internationale and Sue Tallon talking about portfolio editing. In the interest of full disclosure I am on the board of APA-SF.

If you weren't there you missed a great discussion about all things editing. I have one juicy tidbit to share - especially for my Gowlandflex, Type 55 followers. After all, that big, beautiful, beast of a camera was the reason I started this blog. Here goes: Wired, the magazine of the digerati, prefers film. Yep you heard it here. They not only are okay with photographers shooting film on assignment but prefer and encourage it. Joe Pugliese, Todd Hido, Dan Winters - all shoot film for Wired. So dust off your 4x5 holders and unplug yourself for a minute. Film isn't dead.

Meanwhile you can read about and see photos from a Dan Winters shoot with Brad Pitt - on 4x5 - for Wired here on WTJ.

If you are lucky enough to be in San Francisco on September 23 2009, APA is hosting a lecture by Dan Winters about his new book Periodical Photographs, Aperture press 2009 at AAU. Details coming soon on the APAsf.com website.

Transparency and the photo biz

Transparency is one of the theoretical conditions required for a free market be efficient. - Wikipedia

In case you've missed it there is an interesting conversation going on on A Photo Editor. APE posted some advertising and editorial estimates. Read the comments if you want to see ensuing debate about pricing. I want to thank him for posting these and for the debate he started. There were 154 comments as of this morning. In many ways APE is doing for the industry what our professional organizations believe they cannot do - openly discuss the cost and value of photography.

I think there is a very interesting lesson from the level of debate and the tone of surprise these estimates caused on his blog. Photography is not a transparent business. In many cases the professionals in photography can't accurately assess the value of their work to the market.

There are good reasons for this. It's hard to quantify the value of creative thought. Each creator has a different business realities and costs of production to consider in pricing. That said, not honestly and openly discussing pricing has in my opinion been a problem for our market.

Economists, particularly western ones, hate opaque markets. They are inefficient, volatile, and have higher costs then transparent ones. The web in many ways has made the market much more transparent. For example, it's super easy to find out how much everyone else is paying for a car. This protects buyer A from paying more then buyer B. This in turn helps legitimize the value of the vehicle.

Another problem with opaque markets is they allow the more informed player (in our case the client) to control the negotiation. A transparent market is one where all parties have equal access to information. If you knew what Sterling Cooper paid for their last 10 photo shoots you would be in a stronger negotiating position with them and with their competitors. In the current photography market a client can tell you - we never pay for that, every photographer signs this contract, the other guy is bidding 1/2 of what you bid - all you can do is guess what the other guy actually does or did. The more you know about the market the more accurately you can value your goods and services. Let's be clear transparency is not price fixing - which is illegal. In fact the more knowledge everyone has in a free market the fairer it tends to be.

Do give these estimates a careful read. For a definition of transparency here is the Economist's A-Z.

-Michael

Michael Garlington

When I had no money to spend on such things (that's still true) I dropped a whopping $200 on Michael Garlington's book "Portraits from the Belly of the Whale." I'm still thrilled with my purchase which included a beautiful print called "The Fishmonger's Daughter." Seen here.

I knew right away that Garlington was a true artist. For one his images are imaginative and beautiful. Think Christopher Walkin's adventures in Wonderland. What really tipped me off is I met Garlington in San Francisco traffic. He was driving a VW bus which was wallpapered with his work prints. I pulled up next to him thinking what nonsense is this, then I saw that the images were brilliant. Here is Garlington's bio from the Gallery 291 website:

Michael Garlington is an acclaimed Northern California photographer and master printer. He began shooting his own images while working at Spindler Photography, a high-end lab in San Francisco that caters to the finest photographers working today. His work has been purchased by Yale, Dartmouth and countless private collectors.

They should just show a picture of his van - it tells the story more fully.

If you are in SF, see his work at Gallery 291 starting September 10, 2009.

Beijing Street series

A few months ago we had the time and opportunity to visit our cousin Andrey in Beijing. Since I don’t truly understand the concept of a vacation I arranged a ‘fixer’ so I could do a couple days of street portraiture while we were in town. Since my work is all about real people, any pictures I would make there would require a translator, one who understood the culture, languages, photography and production. That’s what a fixer does, more on this later.

It’s hard as an American not to have wildly inaccurate preconceptions about China, most of understand that they make our stuff, own our debt and have some challenges on the human rights front. All I can really report from our brief time in Beijing is, whatever you expect to find there you will be surprised. At this moment progress change in Beijing is, and has been, so fast that even the locals can’t find there way around. Seriously, some of the roads are so new the cabbies don’t know where they go.

The result of all the new building (they’ve had the best architects in the world working overtime) and the rapid cultural and economic development is a duality between new and old that seems present in every aspect of life. This uneasy and very rapid mix of the new into a very old place manifests itself physically in the streets and buildings, culturally in the art, politics and clothes and psychologically in the outlook of young and older generations

Heading to Beijing I knew my ability to make images in China would be limited, I was traveling light I had two days to shoot maybe a half day to scout and no special access. Given those limitations I feel that this shoot was a successful effort for two reasons. I know what I do and we’ve done this kind of street portrait project before. So my scope was narrow. I immediately found one thing about Beijing, the mix of old and new, to be interested in. So that was the assignment I gave myself: Real Beijingers showing elements of new and old China. Does it sound too simple? I think one of the biggest challenges photographers run into with their personal projects is they bite off more then they can shoot. If you assign yourself to photograph “Cultural Change in Neocapitalist China” you best have some time to commit. Finding something you can do well with the resources available is just as important as finding the ideal project.

The other critical element for this shoot was the ‘fixer’ Lin Jing. We really got lucky finding her. She was amazing. Her tireless energy and willingness to approach strangers on our behalf really made the shoot work. I ended up finding her through my old college friend Kay Chin Tay in Singapore who knew a guy named Tobie Openshaw who was in Beijing who knew Noah Weinzweig a Canadian ex-pat and producer extraordinaire who hired Lin Jing for us. If you need a Red camera in China, Noah is the guy to call. Noah also produced for Edward Burtynsky. When he told me this I was honestly a little skeptical. There are lots of people who will tell you about how they assisted for Nat. Geo or whatever. Well I just saw the documentary on Burtynsky, “Manufactured Landscapes” and there’s Noah translating, rallying people and loading 4x5 – he is the real deal.

Well the work is finally online here: winokurphotography.com I hope you will take a look. One last step for us, sending prints to everyone we photographed. As always a BIG big up to my crew on this project: Iana Simeonov, Lin Jing and Chrysta Geffin.

-Michael