The Art of Photography: A Hands-On Experience

I recently had the opportunity to visit an art gallery that offered a unique and intimate experience with some stunning photographs. The gallery was filled with beautiful works, each with its own distinct texture and character. One of the photographers whose work I admired was Sarah Moon, who is known for her grungy 4x5 prints. Her use of chemical splotches on the paper added an extra layer of depth and mystery to her images.

One particular photograph caught my eye - it was almost 100 years old and had been printed on beautiful Japanese tissue paper using a gum by chromate process. The texture of the paper added a level of tactility to the image, making it feel more like a tactile experience than just a digital print. The photographer's use of this technique created a sense of history and tradition that was fascinating to behold.

What struck me most about this gallery was the variety of techniques and processes on display. Some photographers were using traditional methods such as gum by chromate, while others were experimenting with more modern techniques like gels and toners. The result was a diverse range of images that showcased the artist's skill and creativity.

The diversity of photography is one of its greatest strengths. As a photographer, it's easy to get caught up in our own styles and preferences, but sometimes stepping outside of our comfort zones can lead to some amazing discoveries. I found myself drawn to works by Richard Avon, whose style is known for its gritty realism. However, when his work was curated alongside more traditional and formal images, it felt out of place.

The curator's intention was likely to shock the viewer into seeing the world in a different way, but ultimately it felt like an attempt to shock rather than engage. This experience made me realize that sometimes less is more - instead of overwhelming the viewer with too many styles and techniques, it's often better to focus on one or two ideas and execute them with clarity and precision.

My visit to this gallery was a reminder that photography is not just about taking pictures, but also about the process and technique involved in creating those images. By exploring different processes and techniques, photographers can push themselves creatively and produce work that is truly unique and beautiful.

The experience of visiting an art gallery like this one is essential for anyone who wants to become a better photographer. It encourages us to step outside of our comfort zones, try new things, and experiment with different techniques and styles. By doing so, we open ourselves up to new ideas and perspectives that can inform and inspire our own work.

In addition to the art gallery visit, I also recommend taking time to explore other photography resources. Online tutorials, blogs, and social media platforms like Twitter offer a wealth of information and inspiration for photographers. The Art of Photography TV, for example, has a wide range of podcasts, written tutorials, blog posts, and live Master Class sessions that can help you improve your skills.

As I left the gallery, I felt invigorated and inspired to explore new ideas and techniques in my own photography practice. By embracing diversity and experimentation, photographers can create work that is truly innovative and captivating. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting out, there's always room for growth and improvement - and that's what makes photography such a rewarding and fulfilling art form.

References:

- Sarah Moon's work

- Richard Avon's style

- Gum by chromate process

- Japanese tissue paper

- The Art of Photography TV

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eneverybody welcome back to another episode of The Art of Photography my name is Ted Forbes today I want to talk to you a little bit about art galleries this is an odd topic and I hope that maybe that's a little bit foreign to you and I hope that I can Enlighten you with a few things here um the idea for this topic uh came from Recently I took a trip to New York and there was no reason for my trip I just wanted to get out of here a little bit I had some vacation time and some airline miles from some other traveling I had done and I thought you know I haven't been to Manhattan in long time and it's time to go revisit probably about 8 years and I used to go to New York fairly frequently and it's a great City uh that's an understatement it's a magnificent place and one of the things I've always loved about it is that I get my batteries recharged a little bit I get inspired I see stuff that that you know I come back ready to work and ready to get going on stuff and this last trip I kind of there was a little bit of a deal with it because you know I was I had some stuff stacked up to make the trip possible but also I really didn't want to spend a whole bunch of money which when you go to New York it's really easy to start doing uh things are a little more expensive sometimes than they are in other cities and typically when I do a trip like that to a major city I always go to Art Museums that's one of the things I like to do and art museums in New York can start costing money and time and they're not really near one another and so this last time I decided that what I was going to do is I was actually going to just go to I was going to spend in I spent two days I was going to spend one but I spent two days doing nothing but art galleries and there's a couple reasons for for this one art galleries are a little bit different than museums one they're all free uh two they tend to deal with subject matter a little bit different than an institution like a museum would in that they're going to have stuff that's more current uh people who are living now maybe people who aren't established in their careers and so it's a little bit more of a mixed bag of what you're going to get to see and if you get a chance to do something like this I mean there there are galleries outside of New York you can do this in any City uh whatever you live in find just go online and make a list and find out all the art galleries you possibly can find uh make them photography based obviously it's photography podcast we're all photographers that's what we're interested in and you'll be surprised at what you'll find now typically uh especially in a place like New York where it's great where you can go to some place like Chelsea or lower east side or something like that and they're all kind of grouped in there together and so if you're lucky enough to be in a situation like that what I would do is look them up online and find maybe five exhibitions that you definitely want to see write them down take them away with you and while you're traveling between those five bump into the gallery next door the gallery next door to that they kind of tend to be uh clustered like that and surprise yourself and find some stuff that that I mean I certainly found things that I didn't plan on seeing that were mind-blowing there was a lot of stuff that was awful you know that that comes with the territory uh and then there was the things that I wanted to see which also varied as well and some of them were great some of them were not so great I'll share some of this with you the reason I'm telling you you should do this and how does this come into a photography tutorial why am I talking about this if you watch this podcast fairly regularly or my videos on YouTube uh you'll know that I tend to deal I don't like to talk about equipment and photography there's plenty of other shows and podcasts that do that that's fine uh I like to get into the philosophy behind it uh how we start to think is photographers and how we try to get better as photographers and the reason that I'm bringing this whole thing with photo galleries up is this uh typically we all kind of live in this online world and there's nothing wrong with this uh and but most of our world is reduced to a computer screen so much of the time I love Flickr I love 500px I love all the photo sharing websites I like to look at blogs that are friends of mine I like to look up other photographers online and see their websites and their portfolios I like to look up famous classic photographers and go through their work and and find as much on that online as I can but uh I actually had a conversation with a friend the other day and we were talking about the difference between seeing your images on a computer screen versus in real life uh if you watched this show before you know that I do a lot of book reviews and why do I collect books well photos look different artwork in general looks different when it's being displayed or presented either in a book format or preferably in an actual Gallery set setting where the artist generally or some curator has gone through and actually picked out the show put it in a certain order and done their job and good curators and good artists who do this with their own work present that in a different way not that you couldn't present your work well online but for me I mean one thing is I I really lose a scale a sense of scale online cuz everything's on the same screen all the time and so for instance uh there have been like some famous photos that when I've seen the prints in person I've been surprised at how small they were and in a really good way because that really spoke to me um in a certain way rather than being extra large like I may have expected them to be or something like that uh so that's one reason uh two I think just in general the light source on a computer screen is behind the image I mean it's projecting it out uh whereas if you're in a gallery or looking at a book the light is dependent on reflecting from a light source like the light in your ceiling or the Sun or something like that so it's just a different way of looking at work uh you can really get in there particularly with a gallery show that's really good or a museum show and see the detail in work and see what's really happening and it's really important I think for everybody and I think it has to do with getting better as an artist to get out and really look at work this way photography is not just grabbing a camera and machine gunning it and going and I think we all do that to a small degree some of us more than others and sometimes I do it more than than I should uh photography is not the ACT just sitting around snapping photos all the time photography is about creating a product and I know I've talked about that on the podcast before and what is that in product well your product is a picture it's an image you're creating that image and there should be a finality to that uh there should be kind of a direction and a way that you're looking at projecting that and a vision that you have and then I also think that you know it should be a physical product and this should be something that's framed nicely and presented on on a on a well-cut mat and hung on a wall and grouped with other pictures that tell you a story or or give you some insight or make you think that is the power of Photography when you can all of a sudden engage that conversation with a viewer that's the important thing and it's really important to be able to do and I think it's really important for you to go out and experience how other photographers are doing that um Museum shows are great and I don't mean to knock them at all um I love museums and I just didn't do it on this one particular trip I just think that art Gall or excuse me yeah galleries are such a gold mine uh in the sense that one they're free and two they're usually grouped and there's a lot of them particularly in a place like New York there's a couple galleries in particular that I started with that I always try to hit when I'm in New York because they're a little more on the H toyy in they're they're Midtown uh but they carry really famous stuff that's usually very high price but it's it's such a rarity to get to see some of these things all put together in that way uh there's the Bonnie Ben Ruby Gallery which is uh you know near Central Park but on the east side and then in the same building uh floor up is the Greenberg gallery and both of them are amazing um when I was there there was a wonderful uh hinr exhibition uh he was a contemporary a friend of stets and uh what I'm going to share with you about this and I don't have any books to support this and and I'll have to change that but I don't think I could represent It Anyway even in a video uh but anyway I was going through and I was looking at these prints and a lot of them are really old process so some of them are photogra uh some of them are got by chromate and then there was the some that had this beautiful there was a lot of loss in the details and they were highly textured uh and so they almost looked like impressionist paintings in a way even though they were they were definitely still photographs but one had this beautiful texture to the paper and I asked the woman that was working there I said you know can you tell me a little bit about the printing process on some of these and she said well she looked at up and she said this one's gum by chromate on Japanese tissue paper and I mean Sketchbook write that down I mean they were just completely mesmerizing you do not see work like this anymore I think a lot of modern photographers like to get their work done at some place like Adam or B B&H and and it all has a sameness in the way it's printed and my gosh what what a beautiful way of presenting work all of a sudden and this this this Photograph was almost 100 years old it was a cool $39,000 to buy but uh which was actually probably a pretty good deal considering the Rarity of it but anyway it was it was beautiful and I got this great idea from something was actually pretty old um and like I said these things are free to go into uh you know uh some other interesting stuff I saw is some wonderful Sarah Moon pictures um I haven't talked about Sarah much on this podcast but go look her up Google her I'll put some links in the show notes she's she's simply fantastic and the work that she's done more recently uh it's kind of this grungy 4x5 but you see chemical splotches on and she just has a way of bringing that process in and making that part of the beauty of and the Mystery of the photo in some ways I mean you could call that kind of a trendy technique but she just does it in such a wonderful way um you know I think on the other side there there were some shots that I or some galleries that I really didn't like as much um there was a Richard avidon exhibition that was going on at the Gan gallery and I love Richard Avon's work he's one of my all-time favorites uh I prefer his earlier work and these were shots and I think what bothered me is the way the show was kind of curated it was just kind of uh you know kind of this Andy Warhol um uh gay pride New York thing and they're wonderful shots but it was mixed in with you know Vietnam Napal victims which was just and maybe that was the intent that the curator had with this is is kind of trying to shock you with this with this weird balance of stuff that was going on probably in a similar time frame but anyway but all this stuff it makes you think and it makes you get out there and it definitely even the stuff I don't like I bring that back and it affects my work in a way where maybe I'm avoiding something or maybe there was a small correction in what I didn't like about it or maybe it just made me think and then sometimes I found that you know you go years down the road and you revisit an idea or something and you thought well I didn't like that at the time but my opinion is changing on that now and that fluidity and that kind of awareness and that sense of what you want to do as a photographer I think is really important to anybody whether you're a professional an amateur a fine art photographer or a full-on commercial photographer or a wedding photographer or a senior portrait photographer I think those are the kinds of things that make us better artists that make us more complete and they make our work better so anyway all this to say is get out um try to get off the computer a little bit when you are picking aside time to look at photos and photography and try to get out and experience some of that live whether that's a bookstore even or whether you have an art gallery in your city that you'd like to go to or you have a whole cluster of them like you do in a place like New York so anyway uh once again visit us online the website is the art of photography. TV we have more podcasts like this and we actually have a lot of other content as well well we started doing some written tutorials uh some blog posting kinds of things um and there's also things like Master Class live and hogga projects and all kinds of wonderful things that you can check out so that is at theart of photography. TV and follow me on Twitter if you want updates on shows and other links that I might run across during the day to try to help you become a better photographer uh my handle is at Ted Forbes so if you go to twitter.com Forbes sign up for an account if you're not on Twitter and follow me anyway once again this has been the Art of Photography and thank you for watchingeverybody welcome back to another episode of The Art of Photography my name is Ted Forbes today I want to talk to you a little bit about art galleries this is an odd topic and I hope that maybe that's a little bit foreign to you and I hope that I can Enlighten you with a few things here um the idea for this topic uh came from Recently I took a trip to New York and there was no reason for my trip I just wanted to get out of here a little bit I had some vacation time and some airline miles from some other traveling I had done and I thought you know I haven't been to Manhattan in long time and it's time to go revisit probably about 8 years and I used to go to New York fairly frequently and it's a great City uh that's an understatement it's a magnificent place and one of the things I've always loved about it is that I get my batteries recharged a little bit I get inspired I see stuff that that you know I come back ready to work and ready to get going on stuff and this last trip I kind of there was a little bit of a deal with it because you know I was I had some stuff stacked up to make the trip possible but also I really didn't want to spend a whole bunch of money which when you go to New York it's really easy to start doing uh things are a little more expensive sometimes than they are in other cities and typically when I do a trip like that to a major city I always go to Art Museums that's one of the things I like to do and art museums in New York can start costing money and time and they're not really near one another and so this last time I decided that what I was going to do is I was actually going to just go to I was going to spend in I spent two days I was going to spend one but I spent two days doing nothing but art galleries and there's a couple reasons for for this one art galleries are a little bit different than museums one they're all free uh two they tend to deal with subject matter a little bit different than an institution like a museum would in that they're going to have stuff that's more current uh people who are living now maybe people who aren't established in their careers and so it's a little bit more of a mixed bag of what you're going to get to see and if you get a chance to do something like this I mean there there are galleries outside of New York you can do this in any City uh whatever you live in find just go online and make a list and find out all the art galleries you possibly can find uh make them photography based obviously it's photography podcast we're all photographers that's what we're interested in and you'll be surprised at what you'll find now typically uh especially in a place like New York where it's great where you can go to some place like Chelsea or lower east side or something like that and they're all kind of grouped in there together and so if you're lucky enough to be in a situation like that what I would do is look them up online and find maybe five exhibitions that you definitely want to see write them down take them away with you and while you're traveling between those five bump into the gallery next door the gallery next door to that they kind of tend to be uh clustered like that and surprise yourself and find some stuff that that I mean I certainly found things that I didn't plan on seeing that were mind-blowing there was a lot of stuff that was awful you know that that comes with the territory uh and then there was the things that I wanted to see which also varied as well and some of them were great some of them were not so great I'll share some of this with you the reason I'm telling you you should do this and how does this come into a photography tutorial why am I talking about this if you watch this podcast fairly regularly or my videos on YouTube uh you'll know that I tend to deal I don't like to talk about equipment and photography there's plenty of other shows and podcasts that do that that's fine uh I like to get into the philosophy behind it uh how we start to think is photographers and how we try to get better as photographers and the reason that I'm bringing this whole thing with photo galleries up is this uh typically we all kind of live in this online world and there's nothing wrong with this uh and but most of our world is reduced to a computer screen so much of the time I love Flickr I love 500px I love all the photo sharing websites I like to look at blogs that are friends of mine I like to look up other photographers online and see their websites and their portfolios I like to look up famous classic photographers and go through their work and and find as much on that online as I can but uh I actually had a conversation with a friend the other day and we were talking about the difference between seeing your images on a computer screen versus in real life uh if you watched this show before you know that I do a lot of book reviews and why do I collect books well photos look different artwork in general looks different when it's being displayed or presented either in a book format or preferably in an actual Gallery set setting where the artist generally or some curator has gone through and actually picked out the show put it in a certain order and done their job and good curators and good artists who do this with their own work present that in a different way not that you couldn't present your work well online but for me I mean one thing is I I really lose a scale a sense of scale online cuz everything's on the same screen all the time and so for instance uh there have been like some famous photos that when I've seen the prints in person I've been surprised at how small they were and in a really good way because that really spoke to me um in a certain way rather than being extra large like I may have expected them to be or something like that uh so that's one reason uh two I think just in general the light source on a computer screen is behind the image I mean it's projecting it out uh whereas if you're in a gallery or looking at a book the light is dependent on reflecting from a light source like the light in your ceiling or the Sun or something like that so it's just a different way of looking at work uh you can really get in there particularly with a gallery show that's really good or a museum show and see the detail in work and see what's really happening and it's really important I think for everybody and I think it has to do with getting better as an artist to get out and really look at work this way photography is not just grabbing a camera and machine gunning it and going and I think we all do that to a small degree some of us more than others and sometimes I do it more than than I should uh photography is not the ACT just sitting around snapping photos all the time photography is about creating a product and I know I've talked about that on the podcast before and what is that in product well your product is a picture it's an image you're creating that image and there should be a finality to that uh there should be kind of a direction and a way that you're looking at projecting that and a vision that you have and then I also think that you know it should be a physical product and this should be something that's framed nicely and presented on on a on a well-cut mat and hung on a wall and grouped with other pictures that tell you a story or or give you some insight or make you think that is the power of Photography when you can all of a sudden engage that conversation with a viewer that's the important thing and it's really important to be able to do and I think it's really important for you to go out and experience how other photographers are doing that um Museum shows are great and I don't mean to knock them at all um I love museums and I just didn't do it on this one particular trip I just think that art Gall or excuse me yeah galleries are such a gold mine uh in the sense that one they're free and two they're usually grouped and there's a lot of them particularly in a place like New York there's a couple galleries in particular that I started with that I always try to hit when I'm in New York because they're a little more on the H toyy in they're they're Midtown uh but they carry really famous stuff that's usually very high price but it's it's such a rarity to get to see some of these things all put together in that way uh there's the Bonnie Ben Ruby Gallery which is uh you know near Central Park but on the east side and then in the same building uh floor up is the Greenberg gallery and both of them are amazing um when I was there there was a wonderful uh hinr exhibition uh he was a contemporary a friend of stets and uh what I'm going to share with you about this and I don't have any books to support this and and I'll have to change that but I don't think I could represent It Anyway even in a video uh but anyway I was going through and I was looking at these prints and a lot of them are really old process so some of them are photogra uh some of them are got by chromate and then there was the some that had this beautiful there was a lot of loss in the details and they were highly textured uh and so they almost looked like impressionist paintings in a way even though they were they were definitely still photographs but one had this beautiful texture to the paper and I asked the woman that was working there I said you know can you tell me a little bit about the printing process on some of these and she said well she looked at up and she said this one's gum by chromate on Japanese tissue paper and I mean Sketchbook write that down I mean they were just completely mesmerizing you do not see work like this anymore I think a lot of modern photographers like to get their work done at some place like Adam or B B&H and and it all has a sameness in the way it's printed and my gosh what what a beautiful way of presenting work all of a sudden and this this this Photograph was almost 100 years old it was a cool $39,000 to buy but uh which was actually probably a pretty good deal considering the Rarity of it but anyway it was it was beautiful and I got this great idea from something was actually pretty old um and like I said these things are free to go into uh you know uh some other interesting stuff I saw is some wonderful Sarah Moon pictures um I haven't talked about Sarah much on this podcast but go look her up Google her I'll put some links in the show notes she's she's simply fantastic and the work that she's done more recently uh it's kind of this grungy 4x5 but you see chemical splotches on and she just has a way of bringing that process in and making that part of the beauty of and the Mystery of the photo in some ways I mean you could call that kind of a trendy technique but she just does it in such a wonderful way um you know I think on the other side there there were some shots that I or some galleries that I really didn't like as much um there was a Richard avidon exhibition that was going on at the Gan gallery and I love Richard Avon's work he's one of my all-time favorites uh I prefer his earlier work and these were shots and I think what bothered me is the way the show was kind of curated it was just kind of uh you know kind of this Andy Warhol um uh gay pride New York thing and they're wonderful shots but it was mixed in with you know Vietnam Napal victims which was just and maybe that was the intent that the curator had with this is is kind of trying to shock you with this with this weird balance of stuff that was going on probably in a similar time frame but anyway but all this stuff it makes you think and it makes you get out there and it definitely even the stuff I don't like I bring that back and it affects my work in a way where maybe I'm avoiding something or maybe there was a small correction in what I didn't like about it or maybe it just made me think and then sometimes I found that you know you go years down the road and you revisit an idea or something and you thought well I didn't like that at the time but my opinion is changing on that now and that fluidity and that kind of awareness and that sense of what you want to do as a photographer I think is really important to anybody whether you're a professional an amateur a fine art photographer or a full-on commercial photographer or a wedding photographer or a senior portrait photographer I think those are the kinds of things that make us better artists that make us more complete and they make our work better so anyway all this to say is get out um try to get off the computer a little bit when you are picking aside time to look at photos and photography and try to get out and experience some of that live whether that's a bookstore even or whether you have an art gallery in your city that you'd like to go to or you have a whole cluster of them like you do in a place like New York so anyway uh once again visit us online the website is the art of photography. TV we have more podcasts like this and we actually have a lot of other content as well well we started doing some written tutorials uh some blog posting kinds of things um and there's also things like Master Class live and hogga projects and all kinds of wonderful things that you can check out so that is at theart of photography. TV and follow me on Twitter if you want updates on shows and other links that I might run across during the day to try to help you become a better photographer uh my handle is at Ted Forbes so if you go to twitter.com Forbes sign up for an account if you're not on Twitter and follow me anyway once again this has been the Art of Photography and thank you for watching\n"