The Content Problem

iPhone: my battery in the 5D had drained . . .

In his book about b&w mastery, George DeWolfe talks about the ‘content problem.’ What I interpret him to mean is that we need to look past what is happening in the image per se and see other elements (the light, the composition, the negative space, the use of color) and worry about the content only as a secondary element. He talks about an example of a student whose work only became better when they stopped looking for the content. That, indeed, when we reverse that priority, and emphasize content too much, we end of with mundane images that act simply as a record of something and fall short of ‘art.’ When this happens, as I understand it, the simple fact that we have seen and capturing the thing in the photograph is what makes the photograph what it is and this overshadows everything else. When I read this part of George’s book, I hear the voice of my original photography teacher at Montclair State in my head. His name is Klaus Schnitzer, and he would deride mundane images brought to his class by students such as myself  (in his German accent, of course) as simply ‘schnapshots.’

Jay Maisel has talked at length in the past (and does so eloquently in that podcast I mentioned yesterday) about the use of ‘gesture’ in his work. He implies that, indeed, the capturing of gesture is perhaps the primary element that separates the great photograph from the ordinary photograph. To my knowledge, Jay is the only mentor/teacher I have encountered who speaks about gesture in this way. I am admittedly not totally clear what he means by gesture. I have listened to a couple interviews with Jay, and even he has some trouble defining it, and I will not do better here. But I think that by gesture he means ‘attitude.’ On his website he has this image, which I think speaks much more eloquently about this topic than I might:

copyright Jay Maisel, all right reserved

Again, this is Jay’s work, not mine, and I use this image here simply as a way to try and explain what he means by ‘gesture.’ Jay goes on in the interview I mentioned to emphasize how important this concept is to him. He said he walks around with his Nikon set at ISO 1600, even in daylight on the street (he shoots a lot in NYC and is primarily a street shooter in color) so as to maximize his DOF and to hell with the noise. He is all about being ready for that moment and maximizing his chances of capturing that fleeting moment. He gently derides those who prioritize quality of image over capturing the ‘moment’ because while you might have, at ISO 100, a high-quality image, you probably missed the shot (the moment, the gesture).

When I read DeWolfe’s paragraph about the ‘content problem,’ I thought, “wow, that’s me!” When I look at my work, the images I like are the ones where I’ve simply been standing in the right place in front of the right thing at the right moment. I’m simply a stenographer of places (I know I’m being too hard on myself here). I thought that one of the things I needed to work on in 2010 was honing the vision to see beyond the ‘content.’

Then I listened to Maisel and thought about my street work, where searching for the gesture is everything. I had just scanned in images from a street session I did in NYC with Kevin Allen and they were, to my eye tangibly better images than the ones I had captured in Tempe last April. Partly this was due to the simple fact that I had gotten closer, partly because it was NYC and there was more of an attitude on the part of the subjects, but also because the images had more of what I think Jay means by gesture. But I don’t think I truly know what Jay means but I think I know it when I see it.

What I love about Gary Winogrand’s work, for instance, is his ability to capture exactly that (mind you, I have no idea whether Maisel would agree with me about Winogrand’s work). So, after listening to the podcast, I began is ask myself a ton of questions which I have yet to answer, and pose now to my readers:

• Is content the same thing as gesture?
• Are these two points of view divergent or simply semantics?
• Is this difference simply the diverging points of view of a landscape photographer (DeWolfe) and a street shooter (Maisel) or something else?
• Is the merging of the two elements what makes Cartier-Bresson’s work genius?
• Can you approach your work from both directions simultaneously?

I have some thoughts, but I’d like to hear yours. Yesterday’s image of mine with the big 737 in the foreground and the small jetliner in the air was a conscious attempt on my part to deliver on both fronts at once, btw.