The Art of Photography: A Conversation with Gary Isaac and Exploring Pictorialism

His images tend to have a lot of the loaf by quality of certain mediums um and generally I think the medium is part of the work or at least has a voice in what the image looks like in the end. If you try to research what he does or what his techniques are, he doesn't like to talk about them very much which I completely understand because his feeling I'm sure is that he doesn't want to get bogged down in the process and the technique, he's trying to tell a story with him and he uses those mediums as such. You can tell he probably does a lot with maybe some alternative process a lot with film a lot of stuff with which you'll notice in this picture here of you know this this photo that looks like it's probably been enlarged at some level whether this was scanned off a contact sheet or a piece of dirty film or something of that nature because if you look at the Globs that are on here they're rather large and so I don't think this is a large photograph, I think this is a small and that's been blown up.

These are all guesses um but you know what you see here the name of this picture is called cesal and you know it's a portrait of a woman um in kind of a landscape setting and this image really does bring back um you know some of the ideas of the pictorialist photographers from the 19th century um some of the early guys that were working even in the early 1900s that were kind of trying to get photography accepted as an art form and so you saw a lot of alternative process and a lot of altercations to the image to make it more like drawing or painter little quality. And I think that Gary Isaac's is for me any way bringing a lot of this back with this photograph in you know that retro sense but it's clearly a modern photograph, it does not feel like he's trying to recreate a civil war enactment or something of that nature.

So anyway but I think again much like the Saul leader photo what makes this work is the fact that it's out of focus um that you really don't have a real sense of focus that's going on here and it's very disorienting image, but at the same time it provides this kind of elusiveness to this woman that is actually quite attractive I think when you're looking at this photo and it's just it starts to tell a story and and it distan you and maybe there's a sense of memory or Nostalgia that's there too because of this abstraction, there's almost a surrealistic quality to it. I know I'm using a lot of colorful adjectives to describe things today and I'm not saying that if you take a camera and go knock it out of focus or go shoot on Old film that it's going to make a great picture, I'm not saying that at all what I'm saying is is that in the hands of the right photographer and when you have three photographers who have a really wonderful sense um of composition and how to make a photograph and you know set a scene and tell a story and then you take some of these techniques using a technique that's pretty sloppy like blurring if you have the right photograph it can say something and take it to another level.

Um and I like to see is when photographers come around and it's okay to be sloppy sometimes because we're telling a story, it it's not getting in the way or we don't feel like everything has to be a certain tightness or a certain quality of clean to make it work. So anyway whether you agree with this or not, this is been another episode of photo 3es and these are three photographs that I particularly enjoy, I'm going to put links to all these guys in the show notes particularly Gary Isaac's because like I said he is a photographer who I think is absolutely amazing, he does not have the recognition that I believe he deserves um, and go look at his work, go check out his website buy a print support the guy he's amazing.

Anyway once again guys this has been another episode of photo 3es we will see you next week every week we do an episode of photo 3es on Fridays we do photo q&as and then on Sundays we do our regularly scheduled full length episodes, so hope you found this interesting once again subscribe to the channel if you want all the latest and greatest updates and I'll see you guys next week this been The Art of Photography thanks for watching

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody my name is Ted Forbes from the artart of Photography and welcome back to another episode of photo 3es photo 3es is a show that I do weekly where I do groupings of things in threes that relate to the world of Photography that hopefully you will find motivating and inspiring in your own work and today I want to talk about three photographs that are blurry but they still work and this is a subject that's particularly interesting to me because part of my the part of the taste that I have and what drives me and what excites me about images is when you see people do things that are a little bit messy as far as techniques go but they really work as part of the composition and they really work in terms of um the way that the work communicates to the viewer as you know we're looking at the work and anyway I just think it's a really interesting topic and I want to look at three photos that I think really exemplified that the first one I want to look at is by a gentleman named Tom Burell now Tom Burell was um came to be known probably in the 90s and 2000s as kind of one of these photographers who was using retro processes he was shooting a lot of codeon a lot of pinhole and that kind of became his thing and what I always loved about Tom is he was not doing it um in a retro style he was simply shooting modern photography using these historic techniques and I think he really does this well photo I want to look at today is a Cloudscape that he did and I believe this version of this photograph is hand colored um I've seen the same photo as black and white and um knowing Tom it's probably a historic process and it's actually a hand tint and this I find absolutely beautiful because it's a pretty standard conventional landscape photo of looking out over the ocean probably shot from the beach this was shot with a pinhole lens and because of the tiny little aperture of a pinhole lens and the low Tech nature of the camera in general you're going to capture some motion if the exposure is long enough which is he's done with these clouds moving and this is what gives this shot I believe a little bit of breadth I believe it gives it life and I believe it keeps it from being just an average standard landscape that we've seen over and over hundreds of times compositionally the photo is very conventional it divides the the um the ground of the photo up um it's a Cloudscape over an ocean there's nothing particularly interesting about that but what brings it together is that motion within the clouds and I think that that is really um one of Tom's strong points is Burell is able to go in and create an element in that photograph which really takes it to another level and this would not be the same photograph if those clouds were in focus it gives it the the the life and the motion and the Vibrance that there is in the photo secondly today I want to talk about a photo by a gentleman named Saul leader and we've talked about Saul on this show before and Saul had a career mainly shooting a lot of black and white commercially and was rediscovered oh late ' 90s or so as this huge this guy who has this huge body of color work and in more recent years we think of him in that way where you notice his color work and this is actually a black and white photo and what's also interesting about this photograph is a portrait um and you don't see Saul doing head-on face portraits like this very much I think in Saul's personal work and his artistic work we see a lot of abstraction a lot of street photography using Vibrance of color uh reflection and you don't see any of that here this is a head-on portrait even when you see figures within Saul's um images a lot of times you'll see know just a part of a person like just their legs or their arm or you see them walking or or if you do see a head it's usually turned to the side or backwards or wearing sunglasses or obscured somehow and this is an unusually intimate picture that we have from Saul with you know between you the viewer and the subject that he's photographing and I think what makes it amazingly interesting is Saul could not leave it alone without blurring it up and this is what makes it amazing and if you look at Saul's work uh in general like I said there is a layer of abstraction that's there he usually does this using Reflections um using glass to shoot through um foggy windows things of that nature and what we see here is a blurred out photo of a woman's face now what's interesting is it creates kind of a double-edged sword here because I think on the one hand there is almost this sense of loneliness and you know this isolation that you feel is you know there's obviously a lot of emotion in this picture this high contrast photograph of a headshot and but at the same time I think there's a layer of intimacy that I get out of this Photograph because of the Distortion of the blur in here that makes me feel like maybe you know this person and it extends Beyond just their their uh General Visage or their general you know what their face looks like I think you really start to see this person's soul now I know that's really corny sounding and uh but that's what I get out of this Photograph and I think that's why it works and and I think if this is kind of your bag as far as your taste and photography that's the kind of thing that makes it speak to you the last gentleman I want to talk about today is probably somebody you probably haven't heard of um he does have a flicker account he's fairly popular on the internet but if you haven't heard of him he's a wonderful photographer this is a gentleman from Denver Colorado named Gary Isaacs and Gary I've watched his work for years and he is one of the my favorites I don't think he's ever gotten the recognition that he deserves um he does some wonderful work and what's interesting is it's very uh tempting to want to know what the technique is because his images tend to have he Embraces a lot of the loaf by quality of certain mediums um and generally I think the medium is part of the work or at least has a voice in what the image looks like in the end and if you try to research what he does or what his techniques are he doesn't like to talk about them very much which I completely understand because his feeling I'm sure is is that he doesn't want to get bogged down in the process and the technique he's trying to tell a story with him and he uses those mediums as such you can tell he probably does a lot with maybe some alternative process a lot with film a lot of stuff with which you'll notice in this picture here of you know this this photo that looks like it's probably been enlarged at some level whether this was scanned off a contact sheet or a piece of dirty film or something of that nature because if you look at the Globs that are on here they're rather large and so I don't think this is a large photograph I think this is a small and that's been blown up these are all guesses um and but you know what you see here the name of this picture is called cesal and you know it's a portrait of a woman um in kind of a landscape setting and this image really does bring back um you know some of the ideas of the pictorialist photographers from the the 19th century um some of the early guys that were working even in the early 1900s that were kind of trying to get photography accepted as an art form and so you saw a lot of alternative process and a lot of altercations to the image to make it more like drawing or painter little quality and I think that Gary Isaac's is for me any way bringing a lot of this back with this photograph in you know that retro sense but it's clearly a modern photograph it it does not feel like he's trying to recreate a civil war enactment or something of that nature so anyway but I think again much like the Saul leader photo what makes this work is the fact that it's out of focus um that you really don't have a real sense of focus that's going on here and it's very disorienting image but at the same time it provides this kind of elusiveness to this woman that is actually quite attractive I think when you're looking at this photo and it's just it starts to tell a story and and it distan you and maybe there's a sense of memory or Nostalgia that's there too because of this abstraction there's almost a surrealistic quality to it I know I'm using a lot of you know colorful adjectives to describe things today and I'm not saying that if you take a camera and go knock it out of focus or go shoot on Old film that it's going to make a great picture I'm not saying that at all what I'm saying is is that in the hands of the right photographer and when you have three photographers who have a really wonderful sense um of composition and how to make a photograph and you know set a scene and tell a story and then you take some of these techniques using a technique that's pretty sloppy like blurring if you have the right photograph it can say something and take it to another level um and you know I think it's such a contrast of where we go now with you know with modern cameras where everything is such a high resolution um you know everything has autofocus on it and you know it's all part of this process of having this ultimate clean neat image and this emphasis that we have on the quality of image and I like to see is when photographers come around and it's okay to be sloppy sometimes because we're telling a story it it's not getting in the way or we don't feel like everything has to be a certain tightness or a certain quality of clean to make it work so anyway whether you agree with this or not this is been another episode of photo 3es and these are three photographs that I particularly enjoy I'm going to put links to all these guys in the show notes particularly Gary Isaac's because like I said he is a photographer who I think is absolutely amazing he does not have the recognition that I believe he deserves um and go look at his work go check out his website buy a print support the guy he's amazing anyway once again guys this has been another episode of photo 3s we will see you next week every week we do an episode of photo 3es on Fridays we do photo q&as and then on Sundays we do our regularly scheduled full length episodes so hope you found this interesting once again subscribe to the channel if you want all the latest and greatest updates and I'll see you guys next week this been The Art of Photography thanks for watching see youhey everybody my name is Ted Forbes from the artart of Photography and welcome back to another episode of photo 3es photo 3es is a show that I do weekly where I do groupings of things in threes that relate to the world of Photography that hopefully you will find motivating and inspiring in your own work and today I want to talk about three photographs that are blurry but they still work and this is a subject that's particularly interesting to me because part of my the part of the taste that I have and what drives me and what excites me about images is when you see people do things that are a little bit messy as far as techniques go but they really work as part of the composition and they really work in terms of um the way that the work communicates to the viewer as you know we're looking at the work and anyway I just think it's a really interesting topic and I want to look at three photos that I think really exemplified that the first one I want to look at is by a gentleman named Tom Burell now Tom Burell was um came to be known probably in the 90s and 2000s as kind of one of these photographers who was using retro processes he was shooting a lot of codeon a lot of pinhole and that kind of became his thing and what I always loved about Tom is he was not doing it um in a retro style he was simply shooting modern photography using these historic techniques and I think he really does this well photo I want to look at today is a Cloudscape that he did and I believe this version of this photograph is hand colored um I've seen the same photo as black and white and um knowing Tom it's probably a historic process and it's actually a hand tint and this I find absolutely beautiful because it's a pretty standard conventional landscape photo of looking out over the ocean probably shot from the beach this was shot with a pinhole lens and because of the tiny little aperture of a pinhole lens and the low Tech nature of the camera in general you're going to capture some motion if the exposure is long enough which is he's done with these clouds moving and this is what gives this shot I believe a little bit of breadth I believe it gives it life and I believe it keeps it from being just an average standard landscape that we've seen over and over hundreds of times compositionally the photo is very conventional it divides the the um the ground of the photo up um it's a Cloudscape over an ocean there's nothing particularly interesting about that but what brings it together is that motion within the clouds and I think that that is really um one of Tom's strong points is Burell is able to go in and create an element in that photograph which really takes it to another level and this would not be the same photograph if those clouds were in focus it gives it the the the life and the motion and the Vibrance that there is in the photo secondly today I want to talk about a photo by a gentleman named Saul leader and we've talked about Saul on this show before and Saul had a career mainly shooting a lot of black and white commercially and was rediscovered oh late ' 90s or so as this huge this guy who has this huge body of color work and in more recent years we think of him in that way where you notice his color work and this is actually a black and white photo and what's also interesting about this photograph is a portrait um and you don't see Saul doing head-on face portraits like this very much I think in Saul's personal work and his artistic work we see a lot of abstraction a lot of street photography using Vibrance of color uh reflection and you don't see any of that here this is a head-on portrait even when you see figures within Saul's um images a lot of times you'll see know just a part of a person like just their legs or their arm or you see them walking or or if you do see a head it's usually turned to the side or backwards or wearing sunglasses or obscured somehow and this is an unusually intimate picture that we have from Saul with you know between you the viewer and the subject that he's photographing and I think what makes it amazingly interesting is Saul could not leave it alone without blurring it up and this is what makes it amazing and if you look at Saul's work uh in general like I said there is a layer of abstraction that's there he usually does this using Reflections um using glass to shoot through um foggy windows things of that nature and what we see here is a blurred out photo of a woman's face now what's interesting is it creates kind of a double-edged sword here because I think on the one hand there is almost this sense of loneliness and you know this isolation that you feel is you know there's obviously a lot of emotion in this picture this high contrast photograph of a headshot and but at the same time I think there's a layer of intimacy that I get out of this Photograph because of the Distortion of the blur in here that makes me feel like maybe you know this person and it extends Beyond just their their uh General Visage or their general you know what their face looks like I think you really start to see this person's soul now I know that's really corny sounding and uh but that's what I get out of this Photograph and I think that's why it works and and I think if this is kind of your bag as far as your taste and photography that's the kind of thing that makes it speak to you the last gentleman I want to talk about today is probably somebody you probably haven't heard of um he does have a flicker account he's fairly popular on the internet but if you haven't heard of him he's a wonderful photographer this is a gentleman from Denver Colorado named Gary Isaacs and Gary I've watched his work for years and he is one of the my favorites I don't think he's ever gotten the recognition that he deserves um he does some wonderful work and what's interesting is it's very uh tempting to want to know what the technique is because his images tend to have he Embraces a lot of the loaf by quality of certain mediums um and generally I think the medium is part of the work or at least has a voice in what the image looks like in the end and if you try to research what he does or what his techniques are he doesn't like to talk about them very much which I completely understand because his feeling I'm sure is is that he doesn't want to get bogged down in the process and the technique he's trying to tell a story with him and he uses those mediums as such you can tell he probably does a lot with maybe some alternative process a lot with film a lot of stuff with which you'll notice in this picture here of you know this this photo that looks like it's probably been enlarged at some level whether this was scanned off a contact sheet or a piece of dirty film or something of that nature because if you look at the Globs that are on here they're rather large and so I don't think this is a large photograph I think this is a small and that's been blown up these are all guesses um and but you know what you see here the name of this picture is called cesal and you know it's a portrait of a woman um in kind of a landscape setting and this image really does bring back um you know some of the ideas of the pictorialist photographers from the the 19th century um some of the early guys that were working even in the early 1900s that were kind of trying to get photography accepted as an art form and so you saw a lot of alternative process and a lot of altercations to the image to make it more like drawing or painter little quality and I think that Gary Isaac's is for me any way bringing a lot of this back with this photograph in you know that retro sense but it's clearly a modern photograph it it does not feel like he's trying to recreate a civil war enactment or something of that nature so anyway but I think again much like the Saul leader photo what makes this work is the fact that it's out of focus um that you really don't have a real sense of focus that's going on here and it's very disorienting image but at the same time it provides this kind of elusiveness to this woman that is actually quite attractive I think when you're looking at this photo and it's just it starts to tell a story and and it distan you and maybe there's a sense of memory or Nostalgia that's there too because of this abstraction there's almost a surrealistic quality to it I know I'm using a lot of you know colorful adjectives to describe things today and I'm not saying that if you take a camera and go knock it out of focus or go shoot on Old film that it's going to make a great picture I'm not saying that at all what I'm saying is is that in the hands of the right photographer and when you have three photographers who have a really wonderful sense um of composition and how to make a photograph and you know set a scene and tell a story and then you take some of these techniques using a technique that's pretty sloppy like blurring if you have the right photograph it can say something and take it to another level um and you know I think it's such a contrast of where we go now with you know with modern cameras where everything is such a high resolution um you know everything has autofocus on it and you know it's all part of this process of having this ultimate clean neat image and this emphasis that we have on the quality of image and I like to see is when photographers come around and it's okay to be sloppy sometimes because we're telling a story it it's not getting in the way or we don't feel like everything has to be a certain tightness or a certain quality of clean to make it work so anyway whether you agree with this or not this is been another episode of photo 3es and these are three photographs that I particularly enjoy I'm going to put links to all these guys in the show notes particularly Gary Isaac's because like I said he is a photographer who I think is absolutely amazing he does not have the recognition that I believe he deserves um and go look at his work go check out his website buy a print support the guy he's amazing anyway once again guys this has been another episode of photo 3s we will see you next week every week we do an episode of photo 3es on Fridays we do photo q&as and then on Sundays we do our regularly scheduled full length episodes so hope you found this interesting once again subscribe to the channel if you want all the latest and greatest updates and I'll see you guys next week this been The Art of Photography thanks for watching see you\n"