Good Looking

Making interesting pictures takes some good looking

Welcome to Really Abstract where I post abstract street photography recorded while wandering aimlessly but aimfully, as a full-time flaneur.

In my First Post Ever I mentioned that I got the idea of abstract street photography when struck by sudden inspiration in Paris way back in 2011. It wasn’t until 2018 that I was able to take the idea far enough to conceive of a project and develop the intent to produce an album. When I looked through my archive of the intervening years, I had to disagree with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous quotation that your first ten thousand photographs are your worst. A couple of lucky shots notwithstanding, I made far more than ten thousand pieces of shit before I produced that first album and at least another ten thousand more since.

Part of the difference can be chalked up to analog versus digital and the real cost associated with releasing the shutter to expose film rather than a sensor. While I’m old enough to have learned photography with an analog camera, I’ve never used one. My project is digital and likely wouldn’t exist if I had learned to shoot film.

Which assertion I’ll use to segue to the other part of the difference. I think you need to have more competence with a camera to shoot film, if only because the darkroom is not as forgiving as Lightroom. For me, it comes down to not being all that interested in the mechanics of photography or even becoming a better photographer. I use a camera because it is the only way I know how to render the pictures I want to see.

Good photographers see through their camera, framing compositions within their plane of vision before releasing the shutter. I bet great photographers don’t even need the camera to compose. They are probably composing all the time, with or without a camera in hand. Cartier-Bresson’s first ten thousand wasn’t much of a milestone for me because I never learned to see through a camera, and I suspect I’d keep shooting the shit, no matter how hard I tried.

I did snap away earnestly at those first ten-thousand-plus. I couched it as if I believed that Paris were teaching me, but I expected with practice to learn to be a proper photographer and see through the camera. That I never figured it out might be due to my own lack of skill or will, but I’m going to stick with my story. Paris as my muse taught me something more personal and therefore more important. Rather than how to see, what I learned in Paris was how to look.

I’ll admit to enjoying the word play of saying that I learned how to look in a capital of fashion, but there is more to it than misdirection or semantics. The misdirection comes from the interchange of the noun and the verb, but semantically, in the intransitive sense, there are two distinct verbs for a reason. For purposes of this post, I consider ‘to see’ to mean using the full plane of vision (i.e. to apprehend by sight); and ‘to look’ to mean focusing on a particular aspect within that plane of vision (i.e. to direct one’s attention).

Before understanding that this distinction made a difference, it made sense to me to consider photography, and especially street photography, as an art of the hunt. Compared to other ways of producing pictures, this is indubitably true enough to be a truism, and I considered it such, even as it related to my project. For example, in contrast to characterizing photography as an art of chance, I identified with the metaphorical hunter.

However, I recently saw this art of the hunt being described as finding a likely spot and waiting for the action to unfold. Setting up behind a duck blind and waiting for the birds makes total sense as a metaphor, but has nothing to do with the way that I do photography. I can’t just wait around as if something interesting is going to happen. If I’m going to see anything interesting, I have to look for it because nothing interesting happens when everything interesting just waits around to be found.

Hunting is not the right metaphor because I’m literally a gatherer. If the hunter’s vision is about how to see, then the gatherer’s vision is about how to look. Looking comes before seeing in my order of operations.

This conceptual transition from hunter to gatherer is a function of becoming a full-time flaneur with nothing better to do but walk around with a camera. My methodology in terms of seeing and looking hasn’t really changed, but the application in terms of seeking and finding has changed greatly. As an amateur flaneur capturing images in the streets of Paris or Toronto for a few days to feed my hunger for a few months, it seemed a lot more like hunting. Taking a few months to glean images from the streets of Tours seems a lot more like gathering a bountiful harvest.

It is possible to see without looking and to look without seeing, especially when we lack focus. Focusing on looking better, I see more, and more interesting things are just waiting to be found. What I’ve found in Tours is that making interesting pictures takes some good looking.

Good Looking

In my previous posts about making albums, I used pictures in a double-wide format as covers and described them as old-fashioned gate-folds. What I was really describing was a front and back cover. A true gate-fold requires at least two pictures so it can actually be unfolded. The two pictures below represent the outside and inside of the gate fold cover for Good Looking.

One of the great things about my first few months living in Tours was discovering the paintings of Olivier Debré (1920-1999). He was a honorary Tourangeau and his legacy is everywhere, including the Centre de Création Contemporaine Olivier Debré (CCC OD). He’s so closely associated with Lyrical Abstraction, I’m almost embarrassed that I wasn’t aware of his work before, but it’s nice to be a little less ignorant. He is known for large-format colour fields and abstracts. This picture doesn’t look so much like one of his paintings, but his influence can be seen in the touches of colour along the bottom edge.

I don’t know what to say about this picture other than that I love the way it looks. It seems simple at first glance, until the stripes separate themselves into a broken emulsion of greys, and beiges and taupes. If it needs a title, I’ll call it Fifty Shades of Greige.

A truly bountiful harvest from my first summer in Tours. I recorded plenty of images, but these ones here struck me a the best of the bunch, at least when it came time to put together the album.

Click on the images below to enlarge or go to my portfolio site Lyrical Realism to get an even better look at them.