Category: Op-Ed

Opinion and Editorial

NYCLU threatens to sue city over new photo policy

Nicolai Grossman 4 Comments

"A public Troy New York ice skating rink has decided that photography should not be allowed unless approved by their Executive Director. At least one parent says she’s being arbitrarily discriminated against and not being allowed to film her own kid at the public rink."

James V. Franco writes in the Troy Record:

Jean Hetman, who has a 13-year-old daughter who practices figure skating at the arena, said she has been video taping and photographing her daughter’s routines for about six years, but now she is being told she cannot, and even had the police called on her twice.

"I am more than willing to show my ID and go through whatever mechanism they want to use to determine who is a pedophile and who is not," she said "When it gets right down to it, I can take a photo of whoever I feel like taking a picture of. When you are in a public place you have no right of privacy."

The city maintains the new policy is to protect children from pedophiles.
Melanie Trimble, NYCLU [New York Civil Liberties Union] executive director, said the rink is a public place and Hetman is within her rights to photograph children skating. Furthermore, she said the policy, although unnecessary and probably illegal, is not being applied fairly because Recreation Director George Rogers twice denied Hetman permission while granting other parents permission to do the same thing…

Again: WTF??!? I’m no lawyer, but in the US, public place = right to photograph. As Ms. Hetman said, "When it gets right down to it, I can take a photo of whoever I feel like taking a picture of. When you are in a public place you have no right of privacy." End of story. Hetman is bending over backwards to meet on middle ground as it is: she’s willing to show identification to exercise a legal right! This bogus policy needs to end and Rogers needs to be fired immediately.

This is outrageous, whether you care about photography or not. You don’t get to go around just making up laws because you feel like it. As far as I’m concerned, this is actually worse than somebody arbitrarily declaring wearing-jeans-is-a-felony-Mondays because the courts have explicitly and repeatedly upheld the right to photograph in public places, whereas they haven’t, as far as I know, the right to wear jeans.

I’m curious about what happend when the police were called. Some random clown trying to legislate from the rink is bad enough, but it’s far worse if the police are actually enforcing it.

If you take photos in the US—yes, even you with the camera phone—have a look at attorney Bert P. Krages‘ downloadable flyer, The Photographer’s Right – Your Rights When You Are Stopped or Confronted for Photography. And don’t believe the hype: there’s nothing at all about photography in the original (HR3162, 2001) or reauthorized (HR3199, 2005) versions of the Patriot Act.

For the UK, get the downloadable UK Photographers Rights Guide; for Oz, grab NSW Photographer’s Rights. (If anyone knows of similar sheets for other countries, please let me know!)

Coverage:
Read article at troyrecord.com
Video of local WNYT news coverage (WMV)
Thomas Hawk’s commentary
Bill Pytlovany’s commentary

Via Digg

Photographer Jay Parkinson interviewed by Jörg Colberg

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Jörg Colberg interviews photographer Jay Parskinson about his Aspiring Models project:

But the project is also interesting from the purely photographic perspective. Doing photographic portraits is very tough – if you don’t believe it try it; and I somehow thought that shooting portraits of people who want to earn money from getting their portrait taken but who have not much actual experience adds another complication to the whole project, since both the photographer and the model have to worry about the photo.

I talked with Jay about these and other aspects of his work…

Read interview at Conscientious

Paul Butzi on silver vs inkjet BW printing

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Paul Butzi writes in The Online Photographer:

Different isn’t synonymous with bad. Instead of viewing every difference between silver-based photography and digital photography as weaknesses in the new technology, it’s far more productive as artists to pick up the new technology and ask ourselves, “Where can I go with this that I couldn’t go before?” The best path forward isn’t to refuse to pick up digital cameras until the results are exactly like those we get with film, and it isn’t to mindlessly adopt the new technology and forget the lessons of the past, either. The best path forward is to pick up the new technology, embrace its different strengths and weaknesses, and extend our hard won knowledge rather than discard it…

Someone talking sanely about silver vs. digital? Am I dreaming?

The sanity continues at The Online Photographer

Combi-Plan 4×5 daylight tank still sucks donkeys

Nicolai Grossman 4 Comments

It turns out that when I reviewed the HP Combi-Plan T 4×5 daylight sheet film developing tank and called it a "dodgy, leaky piece of shit", I may have vastly under-stated my case.

It was nice today: the trees in a local apple orchard were flowering, it was warm but not hot, and the light was good. I loaded up some Velvia and FP4, grabbed my field camera, and spent half an hour waiting for a cloud to move out of the way of the sun.

It’s been a while since I shot B&W 4×5 and I forgot that I never actually ordered the rotary tube I was looking at to replace the Combi-Plan. Oh well. You know how sometimes you have a bad experience with something, time passes, and you start to think that it couldn’t really be as bad as you remember? The Combi-Plan can’t be that bad, can it?

It can. Now that I’ve given the tank another go, I think it’s still dodgy, it’s still leaky, and still a piece of shit, but that doesn’t really begin to cover it. This time, most of the sheets escaped their carrier channels and were floating around loose inside. One sheet had a few chunks of emulsion scratched out, which could be my sometimes questionable film holder loading skills, but my money’s on it floating around and scraping against sharp film carrier parts.

I’m frankly amazed that this thing is actually sold. If I hacked something this bad together, I wouldn’t even lend it to a friend, let alone attempt to charge money for it. Either the company who make this have never used it or they’ve got balls the size of the moon. This product needs to be melted, dunked in piss, and stabbed in the face with a fucking schoolbus.

UPDATE: The scratches are my fault. I forgot to affix the thing that holds the film in place to the top of the film carrier.

Toy camera article in Photoblogs magazine

Nicolai Grossman 1 Comment

Badass photographer Tread has written a piece on toy camera photography for the May 2006 issue of Photoblogs magazine, and it go a little something like this:

So why now, when it is easier than ever to get a nice photograph and cheaper and simpler to print your own, have I became a near-Luddite photographically speaking? It’s an easy answer: I like the work I make with toy cameras more than anything I’ve done in the past 23 years of photohobbying. With toycameras, I am forced to think more about the shot, less about the camera’s controls, more about what I want the photo to "say," less about the technical fluffery of so-called "good" photography. Any respected photographer will sing the same song, "It’s not the camera or the equipment that makes a good photo, it’s the person behind the camera…"

Read article at photoblogsmagazine.org

When you’re done with the article, do yourself a favor and check out Tread’s portfolio site and blog.

Why are we still shooting slide film? answered by Ken Wronkiewicz

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Ken Wronkiewicz posted a rebuttal to my recent article, Why are we still shooting slide film?, bringing up something I completely failed to consider: slide film has a greater Drange (density range) than print film does. This means that while you give up dynamic range, you get a significantly better contrast range in what you do capture.

In light of this excellent point, I’ll keep shooting slides in low-contrast lighting such as overcast days. You can always get rid of unwanted contrast after the fact, but you can’t add it if you didn’t capture it in the first place.

Check out Ken’s complete explanation at wireheadarts.com.

Why must we explain art?

Nicolai Grossman 4 Comments

Grayson Perry has written a great piece in the Times about explaining art. Quoting only the really good stuff would require including almost the entire article, but here are a few nuggets:

I am asked to talk about my art sometimes. I sense that hunger for understanding within the audience. I used to feel pressurised to come up with answers to satisfy that hunger. I have learned that it can lead to me coming up with hurried and spurious interpretations of my own work.

…

Nowadays I employ a more open strategy and talk about the things I was looking at and thinking about when I was making a particular piece and leave it up to the audience to make their own direct connections. This feels more satisfying and true than any nailed-down explanation.

I couldn’t possibly agree more. Art isn’t something that can always be put into an intellectual box and tidily wrapped up with a bow. I understand the urge: ambiguity is scary. Looking at what your own interpretations tell you about yourself can be uncomfortable—most growth is. I think there’s an impulse to want to keep your eyes shut tight when standing in front of that sort of mirror. But art is human, messy, and asks more questions that in answers (at least the stuff I get the most out of does). I think when artists or the art world hand down or viewers ask for pat interpretations, everyone is robbed of their own genuine experience, and that’s a damn shame.

I’ve been working on a more direct version of my artist [non-]statement that reflects this better than my current one does. It’s not finished, but here’s a relevant excerpt:

Nobody feeds me easy answers, and the whole exercise would be pointless if they did. Anything I could come up with would be bullshit anyway as the ones I do are only valid for my personal experience at a particular point in spacetime. They’re fleeting, incomplete, unsatisfying, and may completely contradict any previous or future experiences without invalidating any of them or itself. What can you do? Life is like that.

I don’t have any easy answers for you. My father used to say that you’ve got to make sure you’re talking to the right end of the horse, and I’m not it. You are, as only you can tell yourself about your experience of anything, art included.

It’s a little light on heady abstractions and touchy-feelies, but I feel like it’s at least approaching honesty. As the Perl programmers say, TMTOWTDI: There’s More Than One Way To Do It. Suitable as a philosophy for both computer programming and life in general.

Read article at timesonline.co.uk

Via ArtsJournal (my headline lifted from theirs)

Related post: Jörg Colberg on artist statements

Why are we still shooting slide film?

Nicolai Grossman 2 Comments

Given that I get my color film developed at a lab and scan it myself (and that I never project slides), I’ve got to wonder why I shoot chromes anymore. The film and processing are both more expensive, and with my workflow, all I get for the money is less dynamic range and no exposure tolerance.

The ~5 stops that most slide film can capture is simply not enough for many non-studio lighting situations. It’s quite common to be faced with the choice of having to severely blow out a bright area or severely block up shadows. Landscape photographers who shoot with view cameras or SLRs can sometimes get around this with split ND filters, but not everybody can take 20 minutes to set up a shot, not every subject has a brightness boundary that falls in a conveniently straight line, and there are plently of cameras that don’t let you look through the lens to see what you’re doing (rangefingers, TLRs, pinholes, toys, etc.), so it’s not a solution for everybody…

Continue reading on Photon Detector

Hilarious “dos and don’ts of photography” list

Nicolai Grossman 4 Comments

Don’t: Cyanotypes and Cross-processing Both of these are Alternative Processes, which is a required course in most college photo programs. It’s like forcing a painting class to forage for their pigments amid nuts and flowers. “Alternative” means experimenting with the flexibility of the print-film process or something. Cyanotypes are all blue and splotchy. Cross-processing is where the colors are supersaturated, like that movie 21 Grams. Like using filters in Photoshop, it always looks bad.

Don’ts: Cell-phone Cameras, Cindy Sherman, Closeups, Crooked framing, saying “Cheese”

Dos: Color, Cinematographers, Collages, Cartes de visite (small portraits, about the size of a business card, popular during the 1860s)

If the author is serious, [s]he is a complete wanker, but ironic or not, the whole list is funny as hell. Read it at Viceland.com. ([S]/He is also wrong. Cross processing can yield muted pastel or black and white as well as saturated palettes, and cyanotypes are usually blue but can be toned to a variety of non-blue colors and are only splotchy if you make them that way.)

My dos and don’ts are: do shoot however you want to and don’t let anybody tell you different.