Know Your Art

Last night was the first class of my Portrait Photography course at Langara College.  The instructor, Andrew Tripp seems whip smart, funny, irreverent and a passionate devotee of portrait photography.  He named a long list of photographers who had inspired him to shoot as a young photographer -- who indeed had fired him to pick up a camera in the first place --  and whose work he both referenced and which had influenced his own work.  Some well know names, some names for me to look up. Juicy stuff!  It was, in a word, fabulous.  And a wonderful introduction to a teacher and potential mentor.  


It was a classic example of an artist paying tribute to the artists who had come before him, whose work had educated him, nourished and enlightened him, and ultimately emboldened him enough to set him on his own photographic path and artistic journey.  Tripp then asked the students to introduce themselves in turn, say where they were at with their photography, state their expectations for the class and share with the rest of us some of their favourite portrait photographers.


Now, in order to take the Portrait Photography class at Langara, it's important to understand that every one of the sixteen students (myself included) was required to take two semesters of Studio Lighting as a prerequisite, so none of my fellow scholars could really be called neophytes or newbies.  They are not just "interested" in photography, but are actively considering it as a possible career, and spending, in most cases, thousands of dollars of real money on tuition.  They are, in theory at least, real students of the art and craft of photography.  Not dabblers or dilettantes but future professional photographers.  And for many professional photographers, portraiture, whether it's commercial (weddings and family portraits), editorial, fashion, or fine art, or some combination of all of the above, is the bread and butter of a successful business.


I'll be honest, one of my favourite parts of any photography class or seminar is the image review, as it is always fascinating to see how other artists have interpreted an assignment or how they have captured an image of a subject which in many cases you yourself have shot.  But have captured something that looks completely different.  It's both amazing and revelatory. So I was really interested to see which photographers my fellow students would cite as sources of influence and  inspiration.  Me?  Off the top of my head I'm pretty sure I named Irving Penn, Arnold Newman, Albert Watson, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, Bill Brandt, and David Bailey.  Over the years, these are the portrait photographers whose books I have collected.


I have to say I was left stunned by the end of my class.  One other photographer named more than one photographer.  And I'm not sure Ellen von Unwerth would really be categorized as a portrait photographer, given her elaborate settings and set pieces.  Nor Steve McCurry, the extraordinary photographer famed for his National Geographic work, in spite of the fact that his Phaidon tome is actually titled, "Portraits".  But hey, I'll bite.  Annie Leibowitz got mentioned three or four times.  Celebrity at work, or a truly memorable photographer?  Vanity Fair or Rolling Stone as an influence?  Who's to say for sure.  Most of the class even fessed up that they had never even heard of any of the photographers I mentioned; well, in the interests of accuracy, their names, "didn't ring a bell".


I couldn't help but think to myself, "Which photographer's work ARE they conversant with?"


How is it possible to fully appreciate an art form unless you have a working knowledge and understanding of the artists who preceded you?  


Next week, I interpret the work of George Hurrell.  I'm pretty sure I have a book on him tucked away on a book shelf somewhere...

Some Things Never Change

It's true.  Some things never seem to change.  Or perhaps it's human nature that is resists evolution, at least at a pace that I can observe.  It was the second long run in the latest marathon clinic, a distance that should have been an easy 13K, but then I've learned to be somewhat suspicious of all that is allegedly easy in life.  One of the great things about this latest marathon clinic is that there is a large number of first time marathoners.  But new marathoners do need to be told repeatedly about pace.  If real estate is about location, location, location, the marathons are all about pace, pace and pace.


Somewhat surprisingly for a Sunday long run, there was also a significant long grade for over a mile smack in the middle of the run.  For those in the know, it was a simple task to back off the pace and keep one's heart rate down below the 65% threshold.  But for the new marathoners, lacking the knowledge base that long experience teaches, they merrily charged up the hill.  There was a lot of huffing and puffing and blowing at the top.  Can't help but think that most of the people in the clinic squandered an opportunity to build an endurance base that they'll be calling on (and desperately at that!) in the marathon come May 1st!


Never one to deny myself an opportunity to repeat myself, here goes:


http://vanishingtattoo.blogspot.com/2008/01/vinces-top-ten-running-mistakes-redux.html


Portrait Photography class at Langara tonight.  Looking forward to it with great anticipation.

Cleaning House

Perhaps there's something in the air, or maybe it's the zeitgeist, but whatever it is, there is no denying that the start of a new year prompts me to do a little house cleaning, both literal and metaphorical, perhaps even metaphysical.  I've been wading through the clutter in my abode -- and yes, I could be featured on any show about Collectors and I'm a borderline hoarder, albeit I like to think with good taste -- and have actually assigned things to storage and the Salvation Army, and even the dust bin.  I cleaned out a kitchen cupboard and the hole under my bathroom sink.  I reordered the piles and the layers in my office.  Other house keeping chores are more centred on my "self".


I started another marathon clinic and my ass and guads are stilling complaining after the first three runs.  I'm flirting with 190 pounds on the scale and this bodes well for my speed work in the future..  It's funny, but when you look in the mirror every morning, you don't really notice any change.  But when I bump into people I haven't seen since before my trip to Asia, I guess it's quite a difference.


All the running I've been doing, and going to the gym, made me rethink the fact that I haven't had a hair cut in two years.  Long hair can be a real pain in the ass. So yesterday, more out of frustration than anything else, I cut all my hair off just to make it easier and quicker to get on with my day after exercising and running.  The result has been many more double-takes when I bump into people.  


In four days I'll be back at Langara for another semester in the Commercial Photography Certificate Program. I downloaded my Adobe Photoshop upgrade to CS5, so that I'll be able to take full advantage of the Digital Workflow class I'm taking and maybe in 2011 I'll actually "manage" my digital workflow.  I still have weeks of potential wading to get through with the 100,000 frames I shot last year.  In the past two weeks I went through dozens and dozens of shoots and brutally edited my images and assigned over twenty thousand to the trash bin in an attempt to clear up the clutter and free some space on my hard drive


The other courses I'm taking, Composition and Design, the Photographic Concept and the Photographic Portrait, have inspired me to dig out some old reference material such as Susan Sontag's, On Photography, Jeremy Webb's, Design Principles and Terry Barrett's, Criticizing Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images.  I must confess to a weakness for asking, "What's the purpose behind the photograph?", and, "What was the attraction?"  So, perhaps I'm re-organizing my thoughts about taking pictures as well...

Self-Image in Middle-Aged Men

Sounds perilously like a rather dry paper in a dusty psychology journal about vanity, narcissism and insecurity in men of a certain vintage, doesn't it?  The topic comes to mind for two reasons; the first being that the title of my Blog was a source of some conjecture among the friends of mine who glimpsed the first post in my new Blog, as in, what exactly IS a man of a certain vintage, and, since being poisoned in Cambodia, I have lost more than fifteen pounds in the last month.


I first began using the phrase, "man of a certain vintage", as a counterpoint in many conversations over the past decade when referencing my marathon running.  Race times that don't seem all that impressive in and of themselves take on an entirely different context when you tack on, "for a man of a certain vintage".  A three hour and thirty minute marathon time is a different kettle of fish when you factor in things like age and gender.  It is in fact a world record if you live and run long enough!  "For a man of a certain vintage", also comes in useful when addressing the effects of the passage of time on the human body.  I have more aches and pains,  it takes longer to get out of bed in the morning, and I actually make noises when I attempt to sit or stand.  


And once you're fifty, there is no getting around the math or the vocabulary, you are indeed, half a century, either young or old depending on your outlook.  I always used to say that, "age is an attitude", but I suspect that that was mostly in conversations with younger women that I longed to date.  Or more accurately, with whom I wished to acquire carnal knowledge.  But I do like the term vintage in part because for me it conjures up images of wine good enough to be cellared, timeless clothes and great sports cars.  Vintage hints at certain characteristics; qualities of excellence, a certain rarity, an enduring appeal, that which over time acquires the status of being a classic.  Time and age are essential to being vintage, indeed you can't be vintage unless you have aged and aged well.  And aged well wears much more comfortably than, "old".


And when I weighed myself the other morning I actually saw 195 pounds on the scale.  I haven't weighted this little since I was training to qualify for Boston, which is some three years ago.  And as much as I would like to credit discipline, training and diet to my physical transformation, I must instead give credit where credit is due, to the house-cleaning staff at the Golden Temple Hotel in Siem Reap for leaving cleaning fluid behind in my room - in a water bottle of all things.  An accident to be sure, but an entirely preventable one. So on December 12 I got the Michelin tour of hospitals in Siem Reap, Cambodia and Bangkok, Thailand.  Starting with the stomach pumping, nose tube and intravenous feeding, the pounds just began to peel off.  When alcohol, caffeine, spicy and fatty foods, among other items, were stripped from my diet, the pounds began to peel off even faster!


But all things being equal, I actually look physically better at the moment than I have in some time.  So there was a silver lining in being poisoned and in having my trip to Asia turned upside down.  I'd still like the deductible back on my health and travel insurance, but I suspect that my self-image is just as happy to settle for losing nearly twenty pounds and looking fabulous in the mirror. Excuse me while I preen for a moment...


The changes to my diet are in place until after I run Vancouver Marathon in May, so I can tell myself that it is more of a training regimen than the result of an accident and a treatment plan imposed by medical professionals.  Makes me think I'm sort of in control.  Which is important to a man of a certain vintage.  

A Man of a Certain Vintage

It's always good to start at the beginning. As 2011 dawned, I couldn't seem to shake the feeling that something was missing in my life.  And no, it wasn't God, the love of a good woman or a superlative bordeaux, although my long-term prospects would probably greatly benefit from a generous infusion of all three.  It was something that I couldn't quite put my finger on and it was niggling away at me.  I needed to scratch, but couldn't identify the itch. And after throwing myself into a truly intense period of both photography and filmmaking for the past year and a half, I didn't suspect for a moment that what might be missing from my life would be a creative outlet of all things.  I realized moments after penning a long note to a dear friend living and working in London, that that something was writing.  I missed writing.  Specifically, writing for myself.

I've been blogging for a while now, starting with Boston or Bust, on January 14, 2005. The Blog was an online journal of my attempts to qualify as a middle-aged fat man for the Boston Marathon.  B or B was mostly a running Blog, the pages occasionally littered with my musings about life.  After I successfully qualified for Boston and ran it twice, the express purpose for the Blog seemed, well, lost.  And after 654 posts, I seemed to be talking a lot more about a newfound passion, photography, than I did about marathoning.  So, I decided to change gears, and I switched from Boston or Bust, to a new Blog, Fifty in Photos.  The fifty having significance in the title because I was fast approaching the half century mark.

Like its predecessor, Fifty in Photos was launched at the start of 2010.  I suspect I have a weakness for resolutions, goal setting and clean slates, all of which seem pertinent and fresh early in a new year.  The new Blog was going to focus (pun intended) on photography and was meant to chronicle my attempt at a 365 photography project in the year I turned -- you guessed it -- 50.  A picture a day for an entire year. The Blog was meant to not only post a new image every day, but to talk about it. The attempt failed. In retrospect, it was a far larger undertaking in terms of time than I had expected, but the biggest wrench in the works was a complete failure of my computer system several months into 2010.  In the midst of shooting a film, an extended trip, and other work (never mind life), it was the final straw.  And it took me six weeks to get my new system up and running.

So Fifty in Photos died an ignominious death after a mere 128 posts (granted, the average Blog dies an ignoble death after six posts, but I digress).  It's a truism that no good craftsman ever blames his failures on his tools, but then again, no one ever won a Grand Prix race after the wheels fell off their car.  Regardless, despite the fact that I fell behind in my blogging, I actually DID take at least one photograph a day from January 1 until late September.  And this was after I had spent much of August and September on a photo safari in Africa where I took some twenty thousand images.  And on the trip I suffered another series of technical malfunctions, the most significant being when my lap top died when the logic board fried itself, and I drowned three lenses and I left my iPhone 4 somewhere in a canola field in South Africa.  Africa was glorious and troubled.  It was the best of times and the worst of times.

And how did my 365 project end?  One rainy day in late September, while stopping over in Paris on my way back from Africa, just as I was about to leave the house, I paused when automatically reaching for my camera, and I thought about it, and I just decided, "to Hell with it". And my 365 project ended just like that.  I had one or two twinges, but no real regrets.  It's not like I was a twenty-something slacker drifting through 2010 with no real purpose. 

In 2010 I was at enrolled in the Commercial Photography Certificate Program at Langara College.  I did more than a dozen photography workshops and seminars during the course of the year.  I took over a hundred thousand frames. I won the Rock 101 Olympic Photography Contest.  One of my photographs was picked for a book on East Vancouver.  One of my iPhone images won a prize from an online Adorama photography contest.  I shot The Tattoo Project as both a documentary film and as a photography project, and we had a rather spectacular Gallery Exhibit and Calendar.  I ran two marathons. And I traveled to Mexico, Cuba, Panama, the Queen Charlotte Islands, South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, England, France, Japan, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos.  And I met a girl.  A rather riveting woman, actually.

What do I want to write about now?  I'm not sure.  I just know that I want to write and I suspect that on a much deeper level, I need to write.  Behold, the birth of, "A Man of a Certain Vintage".

What is on the horizon for a man of a certain vintage?  Hopefully in 2011 I'll end the year having completed the certificate program in photography at Langara College.  With fingers crossed, I hope and trust that, The Tattoo Project will air as a documentary film.  In May I hope to run my eleventh straight Vancouver Marathon and the thirtieth marathon in my little running career.  The rest?  Who knows what the future holds...