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

Paris Rendezvous and American Jesus take prizes from he IPA Lucie Awards

This was my first year entering the IPA Lucie Awards so I'm happy to have received honorable mentions in 2 categories for the portrait project American Jesus and in 2 categories for the digital project Paris Rendezvous. A big up to my team for all their help on these projects especially digital artist Chrysta Geffin.

Polaroid is dead, long live Fujiroid

My new favorite toy is the Fuji Instax 55i. Our fixer had one in China, once I saw it I had to have one myself. So far they are mostly sold in the Asian market. You can read about it on The Photo Village and on Lomography I bought mine on eBay from a seller in Hong Kong. Oddly it arrived faster then most internet orders within the US.

I've been having a great time taking this little instant camera to parties. The only downside is I tend to give people the credit cards sized pictures the camera produces so I have only a few samples to show here.

It's no surprise that Fuji's quality is better, more consistent and the film cheaper then Polaroid was. It's easy to be nostalgic for Polaroid now that they've passed on but it's also easy to forget how bad their quality control could be. For the moment the Fuji Instax is great fun and should be fantastic for a lot the fans of Polaroid pack cameras. The big news on the instant film front is even more exciting.

thirteen-million seconds, that's how long they say we need to wait for the Impossible but the promise is new, better instant film. The last time we talked about this it was an advanced rumor. Now with ownership of a fully kitted out Polaroid factory, a fancy website and some strong buzz I'm getting hopeful they'll pull it off.

Impossible b.v. has been founded with the concrete aim to re-invent and re-start production of analog INTEGRAL FILM for vintage Polaroid cameras.

Therefore Impossible b.v. has acquired the complete film production equipment in Enschede (NL) from Polaroid, has signed a 10-year lease agreement on the factory building; and has engaged the most experienced team of Integral Film experts worldwide.

American Jesus

My specialty is finding the right real people to photograph for my client's campaigns. The preference of working with real people has developed over my career but it comes down to finding people with great character and personality. Since I have just released my newest series of real people portraits titled American Jesus I thought this would be a good time to talk about one of my techniques for finding great people to photograph. We have tried and are willing to try any approach. We street-cast, post ads online, search for specific looks, recruit our friends...

The method that has worked the best over the years is taking the studio on the street and photographing people as I meet them. This eliminates all the vagaries of scheduling. The drawback is the loss of the control we get in the studio. The big upside is we often get to borrow characters, energy and emotion from an event going on around us. American Jesus was photographed during a wild Easter event in Dolores Park. We heard about a Jesus look-a-like contest that was going on and went to see how people would dress up.

Here is San Francisco it's often windy - backgrounds, light stands, soft-boxes and flags don't do well in the wind. I've been refining my tools over the years and I've been learning what works along the way. The recent shoot went really well thanks to a cube we built out of steel pipe and Kee-safety corners. With Matthews silks to diffuse the natural light.

Here is the cube:


My assistants might not love this idea as much as I do, all that pipe is heavy but we have been hauling around hundreds of pounds of sandbags so its kind of a wash. The cube is just as heavy as all that sand but it has structural strength that light stands don't offer. The other great thing about the cube is we can clamp strobe heads right to it reducing the number of stands for people to trip on.

Setting up:


Photographing a Jesus impersonator:


As with all of my projects the tools are just a bunch of gear, it's the team I work with that makes the pictures happen. I couldn't have done American Jesus without my Iana Simeonov producing, my brother Stephan helping with logistics, my assistant Michael Blumenfeld and Chrysta Geffin who loved up the photos in post.



-Michael