MeMag - Me Magazine

Spotted in: Valparaíso
Message: unknown

Spotted in: Valparaíso
Message: probably: “You are what you watch”

Spotted in: Valparaíso
Message: “.En E$te Invierno Frio, E$tamos Todos Contra Todos !!!” (We’re all against each other in this cold winter)

Ok… since all of my 4 or 5 readers seems to insist on it, I will try to make an effort to do a few new posts.

I stopped writing mostly because I have said more or less all I have to say about everything, and every sentence I’m able to think of now is of the nature “nice weather we’re having”. That is of course just an example. I have never actually said anything positive about any weather. I’m sure the weather has nothing positive to say about me either.

Also I find that the art of being unemployed demands my full attention. I simply cannot find the time to produce photos or write long self-indulgent rants. There are movies that need to be watched. And hobbies that needs pursuing. In two weeks it will be a year since I last used my camera. Frankly I have lost interest in the work and in photography altogether. I don’t even look at other people’s photo blogs and pages anymore. There are too many images out there. More than enough.

I have to say that I have honestly never been happier than since I gave up on the entire art/creativity thing. I really enjoy my life now and my many fixed daily rituals such as reading Spanish grammar and practicing sleight of hand card magic.

A big thank you to Mokka, Anita, Bagherah, Victoria and other friends and strangers for their inexplicable willingness to read my verbal trite and even comment on some of it!

This weblog has now been upgraded to the WordPress 2.x platform which means that a lot of things may not work properly. Please drop me a line or a comment if everything looks jumbled.

I finally uploaded my new photography portfolio or gallery or whatever you may call it, almost a year after I made it. It has been sitting on my hard drive waiting. During this year I have once again applied for grants and for the possibility to have an exhibition sponsored. I didn’t want to put the new photos up in case I were to have a debut exhibition. Would be a bit silly then to have had everything online months earlier. But… after a year, nothing has happened. So I might as well put the portfolio online while it has some shelf life left in it.

This new batch of photos is more representative to what I do these days, as opposed to street photography which was the main focus of the old portfolio. The new one replaces the old one, at least for the time being.

I hope someone will tell me about bugs they find this time. The usual arrangement is for people to someday say “oh… and by the way… that website you put up three years ago… it never did work”. It would be very helpful to learn of these things a little sooner.

Today I added a comment thread subscription to this weblog. Of course… as long as I’m not posting much of anything, there is very little to comment on. Nevertheless this is a very useful feature which I often use myself whenever available on other peoples’ sites.

Lately I have done a great many invisible updates which should hopefully make MeMag a faster loading, less buggy experience. Who knows… I might actually come up with something to post about one of these days and a nicely tuned, perfectly streamlined weblog would make a great canvas for it.

I don’t really know how any of this works, but there are tons of plugins available, written by people with bigger brains than me.

The hidden improvements include MySQL database backup directly from within my browser admin interface, better comment spam protection, truncation of long links in comments, meta keyword tags in posts for search engines and a more accurate search function. I’m sure you are happy for me.

Visible features include live comment preview that lets you see your comment, xhtml tags and all as you type them, and RSS 2.0 , Atom and comment feeds.

Some of these features may require a decent browser.

If any of these features bug everything up for you, then please let me know. Also if you know of any features that all the other really hip bloggers have, that you cannot live without finding here as well, let me know.

(more…)

Chasing the unicorn that is the perfect photographic moment…

In 1952 Henri Cartier-Bresson published a book called The Decisive Moment showing the world a seemingly new form of camera magic; energetic impulsive and absolutely brilliant journalistic street photography, wrapped in a bit of conceptualist new age philosophy. The myth of the decisive moment was born. And it has frustrated many a photographer since.

The book-title and philosophical concept of “The Decisive Moment” refers to the precise moment when both composition and subject come into place and it is time to release the camera shutter. As Cartier-Bresson himself put it: “It is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as a precise organisation of forms, which give that event its proper expression”.

The decisive moment is often likened to zen archery where the archer strives to become one with the target. The problem is that you cannot become one with your target. It only happens in your imagination. You can be very concentrated, yes. You can take your time aiming or you can use a hell of a lot of arrows until one finally finds it way. But you cannot become one with it. Nor should you. Objective distance is what makes photography possible. After a photo is shot it can take years for the photographer to decide what he likes or dislikes about it. If he didn’t have some distance to his subject, he might never decide.

yes, everyone wants to take a photo at the exact right moment, but that choice is no more profound than someone making a small effort to select the best looking apple at the supermarket. In time, after buying apples for a while, you can draw from your experience and hopefully improve your selection skills. The same way a photographer may learn to look for a portrait subjects blinking-pattern to avoid getting too many photos of people with their eyes shut. Experience is useful. But there is nothing zen-like about it. Everyone tries to click the shutter at the right moment. It’s the natural thing to do. We don’t all elevate this simple fact into a philosophy however.

Over the years the idea of the decisive moment has grown into a mythical beast. For many years I was disappointed because I didn’t seem to have the ability to just shoot one frame of something and have it come out as a masterpiece. Then I saw Cartier-Bressons contacts…

Anyone who have seen his contact sheets may find himself bewildered by the fact that they aren’t a string of completely different single shots from completely different locations. They are like anyone elses contact sheets, full of short and long strings of unfolding events, captured in as many similar shots required to get a good one. And then often a few more for good measure. Knowing there and then which decisive moment is the best can be difficult.

The problem with perfect moments is that they don’t tell you what will happen next. You may see something amazing through your camera viewfinder and manage to release the shutter at the correct moment, yet you have no way of knowing that things won’t get even better a few seconds into the future. A perfect moment is often followed by an even better moment. Which is followed by an even better one still. You just don’t know until it happens. Somewhere in the middle of this, an outsider may walk into your frame, ruining the perfect composition or you may run out of film because you spent your last frame getting what was at that point in time the best moment of an event.

You can there and then attempt to anticipate how events will unfold during the next upcoming seconds and wait for the even better moment. But there is no way of knowing for sure. A person who is walking down the street in your direction is likely to fill out more of the frame as he is moving closer. That you can anticipate. But you cannot anticipate that he suddenly remembers that he has forgotten something and turns back, or that he suddenly sees you and quickly ducks across to the other side of the street to avoid being photographed.

I have on several occasions stood for the longest time waiting for the person I have envisioned to appear. And they do appear if you wait long enough. The same principle of ‘the more you put in the more you get’ is at work here only with time as the factor and not frames of film. More often than not, the person you have waited for will appear just as you have given up waiting and has started to pack up your gear and walk away. The fact that these mythical people actually manifest themselves seem to suggest that there is some sort of magic at work. But it is impossible to tap into it and control it. Again it comes down to good or bad luck.

When trying to capture a perfect moment, luck is always an important factor. But luck is something many photographers are reluctant to recognize. After all… they are the creators of their photos. If luck suddenly becomes a factor, then their genius is diminished… cheapened even by by things outside of their control. Luck is something we may refer to when it comes to finding money on the street. When it comes to finding the ingredients for a photograph on the same street, then the concept of luck is often dismissed.

Virtually every famous press-photo published during the last couple of decades have been one frame selected after shooting an enormous string of almost identical shots. Journalists know that coverage is everything. From a pure mathematical viewpoint, quantity is quality. The more you shoot, the more you have to select from later. Yet this method of photography is generally seen as being less impressive than a single perfect negative that embodies everything. Shooting a number of automatic shots-a-second seems less impressive because the act of choosing the right moment, or rather, to attempt to choose, becomes random. The camera does the selection for you. And on the other hand… no one would dismiss a video photographer shooting the same event even though his camera takes even more frames-per-second. Everything is subjective.

A sniper once told me that there are two general methods to choose from in order to hit a moving target: The first one is to pan along with the subject, following his movements and then at some point during this movement, squeeze the trigger. The second option would be to aim at some blank spot where the subject is destined to be in a few seconds time. Somewhere with a clear view, and then wait until the exact moment when he enters the crosshair. “That’s what we do as well”, I said. Panning along with someone gives you greater freedom in choosing a good facial and bodily expression, but the overall composition may be imprecise. Standing somewhere ahead waiting, lets you carefully compose a nice frame for him to walk into, but you have no way of knowing what his expression will look like when he eventually arrives.

Photographers are lucky in that they have even more options: They can shot the same person dozens of times on various occasions as he walks on down the street, and he isn’t likely to tip over in a pool of blood after the first shot. We can also revisit the same scene another day and wait for the same person to do everything all over again, or perhaps more likely, someone else to do something similar along the same stretch of pavement.

But do any of these options have more zen-like elegance than the other? Is there any difference between shooting 10 frames during one minute of a day and shooting one almost identical frame each day for ten days? To many photographers it is. We want to see ourselves as the perfectly tuned instrument. The zen archer at one with his target. Not just as someone with a nice camera and a lot of spare time to wait. But in reality, waiting is a necessity. One can either arrange something to appear the way one wants it to, or one can wait for something real to happen and then frame it into something subjective.

Cartier-Bresson waited when he needed to. You can see it in many of his photos. The bicycle rushing down the narrow street seen from a staircase above… He carefully composed that and then waited. The man jumping over the puddle… He knew anyone walking across there would have to jump. He waited. Perhaps he got the idea from seing one person jump and then waited for another one to do the same. The idea is to see the possibilities in a scene and then wait for it to unfold. If the apples don’t look good, you wait until next week.

The way to get the perfect moment on film is to put in as much as possible. More waiting when that is required… more film when someone is already there. Myself, I can’t afford to spend a fortune on film. And I absolutely hate the tedious routine of developing film, so shooting more than strictly necessary is not an option. At least this way I can take false pride in my archery even though for every decent photo I shoot, there were at least ten better ones that got away. Luckily, as Morten Krogvold puts it in the preface of his book entitled… yes, that’s right… The Decisive Moment:

“There are many decisive moments”. It’s as simple as that. And if there hadn’t been, there would be no point in continuing.

I was walking down a deserted street. There was something attractive about the place and I was wondering if I should spend a frame of film on it or not. A little boring perhaps… nothing was happening. As I started to walk on, some boys suddenly appeared, playing soccer in
the middle of the street. There was no time. After a few seconds, they ran off. Again I was standing still wondering if i should photograph the empty street. It seemed even more pointless now. Nothing like that would ever happen again. As I was contemplating this, a perfect formation of geese flew down the middle of the street. Very low, just above the rooftops. A perfect arrow filling the strip of sky between the buildings on each side. Too late again. I gave up.

The next day I went back to photograph the empty street as a memento of the most action-packed deserted street in history. As I stood there, the scene suddenly filled with people coming from all directions. They were everywhere like in rush-hour. It felt really bizarre. Then suddenly nothing. I shot the empty street (above).

Seconds later a cat ran across the street in front of me (below). I wasn’t ready for that. Still after what seemed like forever, I finally reacted and shot another frame. So now I have 2 different version. Decisions decisions. It will take me years to select which one to use now. The eternal dilemma of the indecisive moment.

This excellent article by Christopher Hawkins identifies the different types of abusive clients that anyone trying to run a small business will encounter. A very good read since it helps to eliminate the feeling you sometimes get that you yourself is the one to blame when things break down.

What the article doesn’t say is how one is supposed to make a living if every single client is impossible and needs to be fired.

“Some folks really do want something for nothing, it seems, and they will use passive-aggressive tactics to try to get you to lower your bill. Some will even go so far as to refuse to pay, even though the invoice is less than the estimate. Don’t fall for it.”

More group therapy can be found in the form of stupid client quotes over at Clientcopia.

Article found through Accordion Guy

Have you ever been to Japan? Of course you haven’t. Japan doesn’t exist. It is a mythical fictional country like Shangri-La or Disneyland. It has to be. Any other explanation would be too absurd.

And still… still there are contradictory clues to this theory, like the groups of small, identically dressed people with cameras who walk around in european museums towards the end of the summer. Their behavior is obviously too strange to be probable, and yet they are there. Everywhere. They seem like real people. They move around almost like human beings do. Sometimes they even talk among themselves in what appears to be some bizarre made-up language. They never talk to anyone outside of the group. Never ask for directions even though they seem constantly lost. Yes, they look human, but until I see one of them eat or sleep or in a state of vomiting drunken stupor on a friday night, like regular folk here in Norway, I’m not convinced.

But if they are real, then then who are they? Where do they come from? My theory is that they are aliens. Japan is a planet, or possibly a large spaceship that travels the galaxy, studying intelligent life and spreading consumer electronics.

You can spot something japanese right away because of the design. Anything coming out of Japan has a unique Japanese look. At my local grocer, they have a crate of Japanese apples in this week. You can tell right away that they are. They just look Japanese somehow. If you watch Japanese movies, you will notice that everything has a distinct Japanese design. Even trees and straw and other vegitation look Japanese. Insects. Domestic animals. Birds. Everything. Movies, of course, are not real. But the apples are. Somewhere in the universe there is a factory that produces them.

Some day I want to go to the planet of Japan. Life there will be good. I will live in a one-room apartment with my polite japanese wife who works twelve hour shifts in a department store. And there will be children with green and red hair who wear school uniforms and spend their life in front of some gaming system that hasn’t arrived in Europe yet. I will be a salariman and work in a cubicle and spend a lot of my life sleeping on bullet trains on the way to and from work. I will amuse myself with groping. I will die of karoshi at the age of fourtythree. But I will be content because I shall have a useful place in society. Which is something I don’t have now.

Five Japanese must-see movies:

Dangan Ranna by Hiroyuki “Sabu” Tanaka

Onibaba by Kaneto Shindô

Woman of The Dunes by Hiroshi Teshigahara

Shall We Dansu? by Masayuki Suo

Yojimbo by Akira Kurosawa

You also need to see every movie made by or starring Takeshi Kitano (except Getting Any?)

Useful links on Japan:

Nandakke: Whatchamacallits
Japanics: Mass hysteria in Japan
(Both links are sub-pages of the qUirKY jaPan HomEPage)
Hentai dictionary: Japanese perversions, fetishes and AV slang
www.engrish.com: Japanese English-mistakes in Japanese advertising
Japanese product design: Toys & candy
Japanese see-thru skirts: The current rage in Japan
Godzilla: King of the monsters
Hiroshi Watanabe: Japanese photographer
Toni Ok: Rockabilly is alive and well in Japan
The Japanese Fashion Experience: Morbid Outlook’s review of Japanese goth trends
Japanzine: Online magazine on Japan

And finally… the west seems as fascinating to the Japanese as Japan seems to westerners. Hollywood celebs are offered huge ammounts of money to make an ass of themselves in Japanese commercials, secure in the knowledge that their fans in the west will never see these films. (Click logo to enter. Reccomended viewing: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s energy drink commercials and Sean Connery’s ham commercial).

Toni Ok-link found through Randy’s Bamboo Room. Chinami Nakajima and Yock River discovered through Cipango

Recently my mother came across an old cigar box full of old glass plate negatives of family photos. They are just over a hundred years old. So I have been scanning them and preparing them for her so that she may print them out and make albums and calendars and things like that. And she tells me who they all are and what they did and where they lived and so on. I find my attention drifting off somewhere else. Other people seem to have a keen interest in photos of friends and relatives. Me, I love to look at the photos but I really don’t care who they are. It’s just not important to me. In some ways I prefer to look at photos of people I don’t know because the mystery of who they might be is so much greater. Yes, I am moved by other peoples lives but somehow it doesn’t matter much to me if I’m related to them or not.

I have been photographing people myself ever since I was a child, but it occurs to me that I have taken very few photos of my own family. They’re just so static, -always sitting in the same chairs in the same house. We don’t move around much in my family. With friends I often have the opportunity to capture them in situations; drunk, kissing, talking to other people. But I don’t photograph them because they are my friends as much as because being my friends they are less likely to attack me for taking their picture. With all of my photos over the years of friends and acquaintances, I still only ever look at the shots that I think are good photos in themselves. I never look at them because the photos represent memories. Maybe that is unusual.

If you are interested in other peoples lives, you may find these links useful:

Photos of an unknown family that probably owned a liquer store (warning: annoying loud background sounds)
Snapatorium
Photobooth Photos c/o The Boat Lullabies
Bighappyfunhouse

There are also a lot of sites that collect letters and street posters and similar random discoveries. I can highly recommend the book Found, published by Found Magazine which offers unique glimpses into other peoples moving, sad and often extremely disturbing lives.

I hereby announce the opening of this weblog. I was planning to write a long poetic intro speach about beginnings, but given the fact that I started this entry by misspelling the word “Beginnings” in the headline twice, I think that a bit of rest would be a more productive use of my time at the moment than speechwriting.

Setting this thing up over the past few weeks, I have given more thought to structure and form than actual content. I have no great journalistic ambition that will drive me through hours of daily blogging. Nor do I have great illusions of masses of regular readers. There won’t be mny. What I do have is a need to occationally dump the contents of my brain onto a canvas of some sort in order to retrieve some mental storage space that may be put to better use. I can see this as becoming such a canvas. As I build new portfolios of work I often have the urge to show sketches and rejected ideas to others. Here I will be able to do just that.

Anonymity… I was reading today about the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and how they have set up a guide entitled How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else). “Anyone can eventually find your blog if your real identity is tied to it in some way. And there may be consequences. Family members may be shocked or upset when they read your uncensored thoughts. A potential boss may think twice about hiring you,” the guide warns. I have given some thought to my own online anonymity. Knowing myself, I will probably spend a lot of my blogging time complaining about various people and things that piss me off. After all… I don’t really get along that well with most people. It may be a good idea to have links from this weblog to my regular web pages, but not the other way around. It doesn’t really bother me that a potential client might stumble upon some prosaic diary-snipplet that contemplates the most efficient use of toilet paper. I never put up much of a facade when I have to meet a new client anyway. But I am already a bit paranoid by nature. Perhaps I shouldn’t give myself further reason to look over my shoulder. There really isn’t any sense in talking about people behind their backs if they are actually listening. It may lead to conflict. And in real life, as opposed to screenwriting, conflict is best avoided.