Ugly photographs of nothing

[John Brownlow]

Sorry for the defensive title but I have a feeling the following might offend the aesthetic sensibilities of some here. Or in other words some of ya are going to flat out hate this stuff. Hey ho. Others, I hope, might get a kick.

These are some 4x5s from my ongoing Wild Things project... Linhof + 90mm on Portra NC 160 converted to BW in most cases.

johnbrownlow.com/wildthings/XIIa/ (http://johnbrownlow.com/wildthings/XIIa/)

The 4x5s are really a sideline, most of the traction is coming from the Noblex... you can see that stuff here:

johnbrownlow.com/wildthings/XII/ (http://johnbrownlow.com/wildthings/XII/)

The Noblex stuff is Ilford Pan F, wish I could get it in 4x5. Hmph.

Hopefully Ansel is spinning in his grave. But I read all his books.

[Marv Thompson]

Definately a kick. They are some beautiful images of a tough subject.

[Jim collum]

don't think they're ugly at all.. i think it's a great series.. love to see more in the future

[Frank Petronio]

Makes you appreciate how hard the settlers worked to clear the land. And why villagers were afraid of the forest.

Well done, thanks

[Gregory Gomez]

I don't know why you think they are ugly? Give yourself a break man! You have potential and your subject matter is interesting to me on several levels.

[paulr]

they're my favorite kind of ugly of my favorite kind of nothing.

[Brian Ellis]

Like others have said, this is really good work. There's a lot to be said for photographing the kind of landscape that most of us can actually see on a routine basis as opposed to the mountains, rivers, aspen groves, etc. all photographed at sunrise or sunset and with a warming filter added to make it really "pop" that seems to make up so much of commercial landscape photography today. I don't know that Ansel would be spinning in his grave, he wasn't a particularly dogmatic guy and I think he might very well have appreciated your efforts. FWIW I thought the black and white images worked better than the color for this subject matter.

[chris jordan]

My favorites are the B&W 4x5's, especially the ones on page 2 of the website. There's a wonderful wild chaotic un-composed look to them, but they are somehow aesthetically satisfying at the same time--but just barely! I think they're killer, John. It won't be long before you have a cohesive series of images (or maybe you do already) that will be fun and rewarding to put out into the world. I think Ansel wouldn't be spinning in his grave at all-- he'd be phoning up his favorite galleries to give you an introduction.

~cj

www.chrisjordan.com

[John Brownlow]

chris -- thank you. I am trying to put together a portfolio at the moment but I really want to shoot this series for a whole year and see where it goes.

Dan -- that is a great question. The answer is that I am shooting two different projects at the moment, and I like to keep my 7(!) Grafmatic backs locked and loaded with film, in the back of the truck so I can leap out when the light is right. I am quite capable of shooting all 7 backs in an afternoon if I get excited.

One of the projects is color and the other, this one, is mostly BW. I have been caught with the wrong film loaded so many times that I resolved to stick to a color neg so I could be ready for anything. I actually like the look of Portra NC converted to BW because it allows me to add fiilters in post-processing -- these were converted with a virtual yellow filter (ie Channel Mixer with 50%R 50%G 0%B) for example which brought down the values of the sky.

[adrian tyler]

i'm with the rest of the guys, great work, keep at it. viva ugly! viva nothing!

[William Mortensen]

Better than pretty pictures of nothing...

Fine work!

[Struan Gray]

I too think the wild things are great, and have a sense of formal composition that belies John's self deprecation. These are not snaps.

I like the colour more than the B+W. I have always loved that coming-out-of-winter mix of browns and earthy tones which gets lost in B+W. I don't like the blue skies though, which is an argument for shooting on overcast days if possible.

I do wonder how and how much you edit John? Have any weeding criteria emerged as the series have built up, or is it just an unexamined gut feeling that drives your selection process?

[Walt Calahan]

Beautiful. Especially the color and B&W comparison views of the same scene.

[John Brownlow]

come on, somebody must hate it. Van Camper, are you out there?

@Struan: the editing is hard. Because the photographs have no obvious subject it's really hard to find any particularly useful criteria for success. Worse, as soon as they have a conventional subject they stop being interesting and become familiar photographs of trees. So the pictures that work are the ones that walk a tightrope. So basically it is a gut feeling, but I do also look very hard at the formal elements such as resonance of shapes, depth, balance and how the frame is filled. One ideal for me is that your eye should have no easy resting places so they are generally bereft of large negative spaces... in order to do this I expose for the shadows and print them as open as I can. As soon as you print the shadows down and create some areas of black, the photos start to be much less interesting somehow.

The main editing is of course when you are making the exposures. I generally shoot about 24-36 frames over a two or three hour period. Then I edit again when I scan, but err on the side of scanning anything that looks vaguely interesting, then I edit again before making up one of these galleries. Usually I'll put up somewhere between 1/2 and 1/3 of the exposures I make as kind of digital workprints for my friends (people like you and the folks on Flickr (http://flickr.com/photos/pinkheadedbug/), Streetphoto (http://streetphoto.info) and the Contemporary Landscape (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/contemporarylandscape/) forum (and the semi-associated Flickr pool (http://flickr.com/groups/contemporary-landscape/pool/)).

So basically these are a pile of workprints, and then I just live with them for as long as I can. Usually the strong ones float to the top in my head and I can then pick out the final selections in a few minutes.

I feel that it's good to keep the editing light because sometimes unexpected pictures turn out to have staying power or -- more importantly -- have a germ of an idea in them which you can return to in later shoots. That's really how this whole project started... from this single picture (http://flickr.com/photos/pinkheadedbug/61701602/) which suddenly gave me a new way of looking at the trees.

Thanks for looking and commenting, everyone.

[John Brownlow]

PS. A further thought on editing: it is always easy to pick out the 'lollipops', ie the really strong single pictures that make people go 'oooh'. It is much harder to pick out the strong pictures that speak quietly. Robert Adams is the master at this. The strong, quiet pictures are the really important ones. You discover this whenever you try to edit down to a portfolio (like I'm doing now). You end up with a dozen lollipops, all yelling at the top of their voice 'look at me! look at me!'. It's like sitting in a room with a dozen cable news talk show hosts.

That's when you realize how important the quiet ones are.

[Dan Jolicoeur]

I also think you need to load some B&W film. In my opinion you are loosing a lot in the conversion. The B&W pictures look like they where taken in harsh light and washed out. Although I do like the color pictures, and 99% of my photo's are B&W. For example the 1st one was in very low light. The secound was about the same as your photo's, but I used B&W fuji acros film. The prints are scanned so some detail is lost.

http://img393.imageshack.us/img393/745/screwaugerfalls0013fe.th.jpg (http://img393.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screwaugerfalls0013fe.jpg)

http://img181.imageshack.us/img181/3481/cribworkskatadin0011xb.th.jpg (http://img181.imageshack.us/my.php?image=cribworkskatadin0011xb.jpg)

[Gary J. McCutcheon]

Wonderful visual feast! I'll have more after dinner.

Photo on

Gary

[Paul Metcalf]

As an engineer by training and practice with a passion for photography, this posting really goes a long way in portraying the struggle I have with truly being satisfied with my photo work, that being the issue of why can't anything (or nothing as suggested herein) be a valid subject for a photograph? If "the formal elements such as resonance of shapes, depth, balance " are adequately "filled in the frame" a good photograph should be, well, good, shouldn't it? Maybe that's an uneducated (in art) viewpoint. I'm curious, would this pass the grade at art school's for those that have been educated in such? If it wouldn't, well too bad for the art world, there's a lot of nothing out there to be photographed.

Thanks, John, I now have a lot more "better" photographs (of nothing!).

[Don Miller]

Oh come on......

Is this some kind of group think experiment?

[Chad Jarvis]

Looks like Robert Adams' Cottonwoods. He made a career of photographing "nothing".

[Greg Miller]

"Why shoot 4x5 in color and convert to B&W rather than shooting B&W from the start? "

When converting from color to B&W in Photoshop, you have the advantage of having all 3 color channels avaiable (each channel displayed in grayscale) and you can easily combine/change the proportions of each (i.e. 30% red, 50% green, 20% blue). This gives you tremendous control over all tonalities and contrast. You can even stack layers and use different RGB proportions to do things like optimize local contrast or tonalities.

After that's done it then very easy to tone the image if you like.

[Struan Gray]

Thanks for the quick peek inside your head. The siren song of the lollipops is something I find hard to resist, no matter how much parsley I stuff into my ears. It's one reason I like to wait a while before doing any weeding on my own negs: images I thought were nothings have a way of wedging themselves into quiet corners of my mind for the long term, but make so little fuss about it that I need to have forgotton the lollipops before I can hear their quiet voices.

I wish I could find a way of short-circuiting the process. My tinfoil hat doesn't seem to help much, but it, and the parsley, do ensure that nobody bothers me when I'm out scouting the local wastegrounds for inspiration.

Sorry I can't be negative. This work screams "Friedlander", but I don't see that as a criticism.

[Ralph Barker]

Struan - do you have a grounding strap attached to your foil hat? Mine worked much better after adding that option, although I have to be careful not to trip on it when backing up. ;-)

[Struan Gray]

I got rid of mine: I kept stubbing my toes on the copper spike.

[Jim collum]

i find the copper stake doubles as a way to hold the camera/tripod to the ground during those very windy days

[looker]

i really like the snowy cedar bog one...

the rest don't quite get there,

tlt

p.s. engineers tend to have this problem. the compositional side of the brain has atrophied from neglect.

[Mike H.]

OK. I really hate them. They remind me of several weeks ago when I was climbing down a cliff on one side of Date Creek northwest of Wickenberg and trying to climb through 20 foot high stacks of flood debri and climb up the cliffs on the other side. Came home bloodied, scratched, bruised and tired. I HATE them. :-)