"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody it's time once again for another episode of The Art of Photography my name is Ted Forbes every Thursday we will bringing be bringing you new photography related videos and this week is no different 42 was the original working title for this episode and I'm not sure if I'm going to call it that or not because it's a little obscure but let me explain uh this episode I've been pretty excited about putting together this week and I would argue that it's probably one of the most important episodes of all the episodes we've done today because I think it's going to tie some things together metaphorically of what I believe about photography and what can hopefully make you a better photographer make you think a little bit differently and that's one thing I love to do so let's get right into it um 42 uh is a number it follows 41 and it comes before 43 uh the reference I'm making today is going to be metaphorical in nature we're going to use this as a metaphor and the metaphor I'm using I brought up actually a couple episodes ago um there's a book called Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and I made a reference in that show and I got a lot of uh very funny comments back of inside jokes of people who read the book uh very popular Douglas Adams book and in this book which is U very trippy to say the least um the number 42 is presented as the answer to the ultimate question of life the universe and everything and supposedly in this fictitional book it was calculated by a enormous supercomputer that took 7 and A2 million years to calculate and here is the answer to the meaning of life basically that is presented and the problem is is nobody knows the question so of course another supercomputer is built uh that's the size of planet Earth and uh it's going to take a while longer to come up with the actual question but one thing that's intriguing to me about 42 in relationship to hitchhiker sky to the Galaxy is this I think as photographers uh or as I think you could say is anybody who does visual art whether you're a painter a sculptor whatever that is in our case it's photography and I've got four examples of photographers that I'm going to show you today that are going to hopefully back up what I'm saying and what I think is interesting and what I think separates people who are really good from people who are okay is this and it doesn't matter whether you're a professional photographer you do this for a living or you're just a serious amateur or it's just something fun you do it doesn't matter you're stri if you're watching this podcast and you've watched the last couple of them you're striving to get better and this is something you're interested in something I'm very interested in and the whole reason I bring up the 4 to thing metaphor is this I don't believe that it's the answer so much in photography as it is the questions that are important and those are the hard part okay let me explain what I'm talking about here let's say that I take a picture of that table over there okay it's a picture of a table that's the answer it is a picture of a table um look at this in context of what somebody other than you um somebody who may see this at a gallery show somebody a family member somebody who may see it on the internet whatever that is there they're going to see this image and they get the answer off the bat what is the question behind that and that's what separates if you had 10 different photographers come in at 10 different times and shoot that table you'd have 10 completely different looking photographs the better the photographers you would have I think even The Wider difference that would be in how a table was photographed and I know that's a very um U very plain example of what I'm talking about but I think that's the important part it's not the answer so much but it is the questions that you're posing I think sometimes there can be mult mulle questions that come tied in with a photograph too and let me explain what I'm talking about here a lot of times if you think um well think of it this way if you've ever gone most of us who watch this podcast you're kneed deep into photography you're into it it's your passion it's something you love it's something you've got to do it's something that means a lot is very special to you and so for instance you might go to a photography show with a friend or a relative or somebody who may not be nearly as into it as you are maybe the way they look at photographs is a lot more casual and they're going to see a photograph and I think the most obvious question that comes up with any viewer is an aesthetically related question do I like it or not does it speak to me is it beautiful uh sometimes as we all know there can be very ugly photographs that are shocking to look at but if you understand and dig deeper into that there are further questions that might impact whether that's a photograph you're interested in or not or whether it's speaking to you and so anyway I've got some examples of some stuff I'm going to hold up uh some books here and I'll probably go in and get some typ shots on these so you can see what I'm talking about because I want to back up what I'm talking about with this whole thing of 42 we know what the answer is we know what the subject is we know what we're shooting but what is the question that goes around that and I think this is a really interesting thing to look at first up I want to talk about a wonderful photographer I've never discussed on this show before he's one of my favorite I think he's probably one of uh I know I love to say this with my favorite photographers but I I really do think this guy is one of the top 10 um photographers producing work today um if not higher than that he is incredibly good his name is Abelardo Morel he is a Cuban born American photographer now who is based out of Massachusetts and I don't think this guy can take a bad picture uh everything he does makes you think it makes you see something differently it raises really good questions and I think that's what's important about all this so let's look at his work um the book that I've got uh right here and I will have links in the show notes um to all this stuff so if you are watching on um on iTunes you can go to the YouTube channel you can go to the art of photograph .tv I will have the show notes all there and I will have links to all these things in the books excuse me in the show notes um this is a book of his called camera obscura and one of the things he's kind of not everything he does but developed quite a bit around is this whole concept um which was actually if I think it was the very first podcast I ever did which was called the camera obscur and I want to show you this image first this is an image that abarda did and abelard is a teacher as well and what's interesting about this image is it's very simple but it is is showing a very deep concept about photography and I believe this is an image he did for his own teaching materials and it's a box with a lens attached to it and a light bulb you see the light bulb reflected inside this box and upside down and this basically illustrates what a camera obscure is this is how your camera works it is a dark box that light is projected in and it makes a image onto the back of that box and then you can use either a digital sensor or you can use film or whatever that is to capture that image and um there you have it you know that's that's how we capture images as photographers now the image that I want to show you is he's developed this whole concept of turning rooms into literally camera obscures so for instance uh you can you can do this in your house you can do it in a hotel room if you have a way to make the room completely pitch black usually this involves putting trash bags over the windows and cutting a small pen hole so literally what you're doing is making a pinhole camera out of the room that you're in this is what Morel does and then he photographs the way the scene outside is being pictured inside the room and this is really incredible so the image I want to show you here is this image right here which is in taken in New York City from a hotel room across the street from the Chrysler Building and you can see that there is a very interesting way he's depicted this camera obscura image of the Chrysler Building inside the room this is taken with a pinhole with dark windows in a dark room and you can see how the needle of the Chrysler Building lays across the bed this is really interesting and it asks questions you have the answer which is yes it's an image of the Chrysler Building but it's not taken from the street level it's not a tourist image it's not just a snapshot there's something that's going deeper here and what's interesting about morel's book um or about morel's work in general is that he doesn't stop at that there is the questions that he asks concern everything from photographic history to the history of Imaging with this whole idea of a camera obscure to how this works on a wall there's a whole set of technical demands that come across when you're trying to shoot in very low light like that these images are are generally made with 4X fives and I think he just does an absolutely brilliant job of rephrasing questions sometimes to answers and this book uh camera obscura actually has tons and tons of images that are all sorry I'm trying to get these on the video that are all related and I like I said I'm not going to try and do too much on the video because I have bad lighting right now Etc but anyway Abal Arda Morel I think he's asking the questions and he's doing an incredible job at that moving right along a photographer that I have mentioned on this show before is Hoshi sugimoto who is a Japanese photographer again uh alive today doing incredible incredible work the project I want to show you today are these images that he did and this is in a retrospective book again Link in the show notes these are images of theaters that he did and they're very similar in nature but the whole concept and I have talked about this on the show before is that he photographs the theater with a film playing on the screen the exposure is calculated to last the duration of the film that's being projected so what you end up seeing is a compl completely blown highlight uh as far as the stage and where the area where the film is being shown goes the lights come out from there and then the ambient lighting of the theater based on that so what sugamoto is doing here is he's asking a different kind of question it would be really easy to go in well or maybe slightly more challenging to go in and light it correctly and get a really beautiful shot of a movie theater but to go in and do these black and white shots let the the movie run its full duration and then come back in and and that's where you're making your photograph you've timed it out and you're actually capturing a third element in the photograph and I've talked about this before he's got um elements of you know contrast uh you know they're obviously black and white images uh they're largely in Focus but you have a time element that's associated with this and so yes it's a it's a picture of a three-dimensional space but you have this fourth dimension really of time that's passing within that and that's the only way this picture can exist that creates a lot of interest and it asks a very important interesting question I know that perhaps um sugamoto and Morel are both very highly conceptual examples and we're going to run the gamut today I'm going to show you the other two photographers here who I think are doing this in a more conventional way okay so next up is a wonderful photographer uh who's based I believe up near Pennsylvania um been into his work for years this was a guy who early on inspired me to start seeing things in a different way and really made me want to shoot I found Tom Burell is his name and Tom's work is so inspirational to me and I don't know what it is probably largely aesthetic um the fact that Tom also has an enormous respect for the tradition and the history of photography in his work which does push the boundaries and so there's this this really interesting balance between those two things that I think I'm really drawn to his work I'm going to use this image as an example this is an image it's a still life and oh gosh in the '90s uh Burell was doing a lot of work with still lives that were shot with pinhole cameras and there's just something about this the answer here is it's an image of peirs this one is very easy image to go get anybody can line up a bunch of pairs and shoot them but how many people can do it like this with this kind of aesthetic quality and the fact that they pinhole still life tabletop shots um the way they're toned the um I believe Burell uses tea like IC tea to tone and they have this almost interesting gold-like quality mixed with this soft focus of the pinhole effect that it really adds another dimension plus his composition is very unconventional uh these pairs are sitting up almost like you know Quail or you know something like that it's not how you expect to see this subject presented there's nothing really highly conceptual about this it's just a really great image and the reason is is because it still has those questions that are tied to it the answer is very clear it's a shot of some pairs but what is the question behind that how are they shot how are they communic unated to you how are they displayed how is the composition sit you have these pairs they're just below the the halfway point um so you do kind of have a rule of thirds associated with this you have two stems that come off the pairs that are very prominent that spells out the composition and I think Burell is so good at this at coming up with these compositions that work push the boundaries a little bit remain aesthetically very pleasing and he just does an incredible job at it that's Tom Bell's work and again his his books um they go in and out of print I will link as best I can to his work uh but he just does some simply amazing stuff um he has the tendency I will admit at times to imitate Carl blossfeld very heavily but I don't ever think it's a direct ripoff um again I think he rephrases some of the questions that baselt answered with his work again very interesting the final photographer we're going to look at today it's another person I haven't talked about on this show before we're going to talk about Salgado and this is uh fairly easy book to find called workers uh Salgado was a uh a magnum photographer uh extremely good street style photography but applied mostly to editorial type work that would appear in magazines uh stuff like that um what draws me to sado's work is that a lot of times he's a Trix shooter or was at one point at least and his work tends to be kind of grainy and kind of dirty and I'm sure he's pushing film and doing all those cool things um and so that has a vibe to the photos but there is compositionally with Salgado and especially with subject matter there is a sense of complexity that he has in his work um some of the photographers I've talked about on this show before if you go look at the old podcasts we talked about guys like Michael Kenna you know a lot of guys that I like even sugamoto for instance uh tend to be very minimalist photographers in their subject matter and what they're trying to convey um I think sagato works on the opposite end of that Spectrum he's a he's a maximalist you know there's always a lot going on as images um the first image I want to look at we'll look at two here it's a shipyard and I don't really need to tell you much about this image what's interesting is you really don't make out what is a boat in this image necessarily you can tell it is a shipyard and there's a lot of complexity in patterns uh sagato is very interested in symmetry he's very interested in kind of these migratory patterns of how things fall together he shoots people in a very similar fashion too um but there's a lot that's going on with the light here with the ambient nature of this um it's almost got a kind of a misted look to it and the way these big cables or ropes are lying over the edge of these two boats that are sitting next to each other it's just it's amazing um and his work tends to fall into this range a lot there's a lot going on but there's kind of like this overlaying minimalist quality because it's not just complete chaos it's very organized you're going to see patterns you're going to see um uh you know some very interesting things the ship image is one I wanted to use because purposely because we're asking theoretically ourselves these question questions as photographers of what are the questions to the answer um I purposely didn't want to pick things that were so obscure that the average person going to shoot them but I cannot close talking about sagato without showing this image these are gold diggers in or the gold miners excuse me in in Brazil uh this is a mining site and these are probably his most famous images and I'm going to zoom in on this too um again I think you can see exactly what I'm talking about with the the the max imum quality to this they're grainy images they're dirty um they're very dark and it's just interesting to me because you see tons of stuff going on in this image but at the same time you're able to pull back and make out some very basic patterns in this yes they are abstract a little bit but your eye can follow simple shapes and patterns in these and then on a closer look you realize that there's so much more going on in these images um here's another one um that I it's it's just mindboggling how interesting these are and you know like I said Sado to keep this Fair uh you know Sado generally working for Magnum street style of Photography but editorial nature and he literally travels the world to get these things it's not something that you and I are going to go for a walk on Saturday and happen upon uh unless you happen to work near a Gold Mining facility um in uh Brazil but anyway uh at any rate that's I'm going to leave it today and like I said these are I've tried to show you four examples of what I'm talking about here and all these are pretty extreme let me close by saying this too photography is not something you can learn in 20 minutes it's not something you you can sit down and learn in 3 hours it's not something that you can learn in a week uh photography is something like any other art that takes an enormous amount of time it takes an enormous amount of dedication and it takes you know paying dues it takes not being very good sometimes I'm very guilty of that uh in fact you have to come to grips with the fact that even on a personal level we generally View our work uh the number of good shots I get to bad ones it's extremely high ratio to bad ones in my case I just it's hard for me to look at my work sometimes and because I have something I'm striving for sometimes it's really hard to attain that but you're never going to get any better unless you start doing these things unless you push yourself further let me give you a very basic example of this a lot of times well a lot of times one of the most common questions that I get via email flicker forms Etc is people ask if I could do a show where basically I'm going to go out on like a photo walk type situation and show people what I'm looking for what I'm interested in shooting and that's a really hard request for me to do because generally I do not let me put this way I do not like shooting photos on Photo walks with people and the reason is is because that's not the right way of looking at this um maybe I can explain a little better but with a hypothetical a lot of us will go out and look for something to shoot it's part of being a photographer you want to get out of the house get out of the studio Studio you want to get out in the world and find something new you know I think we all feel that way from time to time when you go out and you find something that is interesting to you and you feel like you're going to make a picture of ask yourself are you getting the right shot Okay so we've already determined what the answer is it's whatever you've decided to shoot let's say it's an interesting building you're going to do an architectural shot nothing wrong with that let's make it as good as we can you happen to set your camera up right here probably where you first viewed it you're going to try to get the light right and Jack the metering and the focus and all that stuff which is all very important and you're going to take a picture now what you need to ask yourself is is that the right question for that answer so if the answer is that building are you asking the right question about it is there a different view you could shoot that from is there a different angle you could shoot from should you come back at a different time of the day when the light is going to be doing something that may be more interesting is there something conceptual you can do with this um like for instance we looked at uh abarda morel's work Morel does camera obscura so he actually shooting a picture of a picture of that building inside a different environment okay that's one way of approaching it you don't have to go that extreme that's a very highly conceptual extreme example and it's going to be hard to copy without looking like Morel in a lot of cases but the point is is that Morel asked that question and I think that's important uh there's another image I didn't show and I'll probably overdub it in here somehow but it's very similar in nature uh Tom Burell shot the Empire State Building um and he shot it from an empty office building in New York City you know not the most obvious shot to get but it's something that gives you compositionally a little more interest to it uh the light is doing some interesting things and it probably was a pain in the rear end for Burell to go get that shot and to set that up it could have taken several days several weeks but it's that kind of time dedication sometimes that comes up with the right question for the answer you're trying to get yeah it's really easy to go shoot the Empire State Building if you're in New York City it's right there but how are you going to do it in a different way there's millions of pictures out there of the Empire State Building how are you going to do that where it's different and it stands unique and it asks the right question as far as I'm concerned I'm really not interested in shooting the Empire State Building exactly as it's been photographed 100 times I'm only interested in shooting it and that sounds really tacky and really snoody to say and I don't mean for it to sound arrogant at all but what I'm saying is is if you're going to do good work and you're going to strive for that kind of thing you need to start working on the questions not the answers anyway I know this may be a little goofy and a little weird and the whole 42 thing and I'm sure I'll get some good comments back uh for other people who've read hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy uh if you haven't wonderful book I will put that in those Show links uh as well show notes and uh anyway that's about all I have we ran I'm sure very long today because uh I I had a good time kind of thinking about this this week and like I said I think this may be one of the more important shows we've done um because it's a little bit shorter but we've made a really interesting point of what it is you're looking for with your own work you're not always going to succeed it's okay you're not going to succeed unless you fail and so it's a matter of pushing forward and trying harder and like I said coming up with questions to the answers not answers to the questions so anyway I hope that made sense uh email me comments questions Etc once again this has been the Art of Photography thank you for watching see you next timehey everybody it's time once again for another episode of The Art of Photography my name is Ted Forbes every Thursday we will bringing be bringing you new photography related videos and this week is no different 42 was the original working title for this episode and I'm not sure if I'm going to call it that or not because it's a little obscure but let me explain uh this episode I've been pretty excited about putting together this week and I would argue that it's probably one of the most important episodes of all the episodes we've done today because I think it's going to tie some things together metaphorically of what I believe about photography and what can hopefully make you a better photographer make you think a little bit differently and that's one thing I love to do so let's get right into it um 42 uh is a number it follows 41 and it comes before 43 uh the reference I'm making today is going to be metaphorical in nature we're going to use this as a metaphor and the metaphor I'm using I brought up actually a couple episodes ago um there's a book called Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and I made a reference in that show and I got a lot of uh very funny comments back of inside jokes of people who read the book uh very popular Douglas Adams book and in this book which is U very trippy to say the least um the number 42 is presented as the answer to the ultimate question of life the universe and everything and supposedly in this fictitional book it was calculated by a enormous supercomputer that took 7 and A2 million years to calculate and here is the answer to the meaning of life basically that is presented and the problem is is nobody knows the question so of course another supercomputer is built uh that's the size of planet Earth and uh it's going to take a while longer to come up with the actual question but one thing that's intriguing to me about 42 in relationship to hitchhiker sky to the Galaxy is this I think as photographers uh or as I think you could say is anybody who does visual art whether you're a painter a sculptor whatever that is in our case it's photography and I've got four examples of photographers that I'm going to show you today that are going to hopefully back up what I'm saying and what I think is interesting and what I think separates people who are really good from people who are okay is this and it doesn't matter whether you're a professional photographer you do this for a living or you're just a serious amateur or it's just something fun you do it doesn't matter you're stri if you're watching this podcast and you've watched the last couple of them you're striving to get better and this is something you're interested in something I'm very interested in and the whole reason I bring up the 4 to thing metaphor is this I don't believe that it's the answer so much in photography as it is the questions that are important and those are the hard part okay let me explain what I'm talking about here let's say that I take a picture of that table over there okay it's a picture of a table that's the answer it is a picture of a table um look at this in context of what somebody other than you um somebody who may see this at a gallery show somebody a family member somebody who may see it on the internet whatever that is there they're going to see this image and they get the answer off the bat what is the question behind that and that's what separates if you had 10 different photographers come in at 10 different times and shoot that table you'd have 10 completely different looking photographs the better the photographers you would have I think even The Wider difference that would be in how a table was photographed and I know that's a very um U very plain example of what I'm talking about but I think that's the important part it's not the answer so much but it is the questions that you're posing I think sometimes there can be mult mulle questions that come tied in with a photograph too and let me explain what I'm talking about here a lot of times if you think um well think of it this way if you've ever gone most of us who watch this podcast you're kneed deep into photography you're into it it's your passion it's something you love it's something you've got to do it's something that means a lot is very special to you and so for instance you might go to a photography show with a friend or a relative or somebody who may not be nearly as into it as you are maybe the way they look at photographs is a lot more casual and they're going to see a photograph and I think the most obvious question that comes up with any viewer is an aesthetically related question do I like it or not does it speak to me is it beautiful uh sometimes as we all know there can be very ugly photographs that are shocking to look at but if you understand and dig deeper into that there are further questions that might impact whether that's a photograph you're interested in or not or whether it's speaking to you and so anyway I've got some examples of some stuff I'm going to hold up uh some books here and I'll probably go in and get some typ shots on these so you can see what I'm talking about because I want to back up what I'm talking about with this whole thing of 42 we know what the answer is we know what the subject is we know what we're shooting but what is the question that goes around that and I think this is a really interesting thing to look at first up I want to talk about a wonderful photographer I've never discussed on this show before he's one of my favorite I think he's probably one of uh I know I love to say this with my favorite photographers but I I really do think this guy is one of the top 10 um photographers producing work today um if not higher than that he is incredibly good his name is Abelardo Morel he is a Cuban born American photographer now who is based out of Massachusetts and I don't think this guy can take a bad picture uh everything he does makes you think it makes you see something differently it raises really good questions and I think that's what's important about all this so let's look at his work um the book that I've got uh right here and I will have links in the show notes um to all this stuff so if you are watching on um on iTunes you can go to the YouTube channel you can go to the art of photograph .tv I will have the show notes all there and I will have links to all these things in the books excuse me in the show notes um this is a book of his called camera obscura and one of the things he's kind of not everything he does but developed quite a bit around is this whole concept um which was actually if I think it was the very first podcast I ever did which was called the camera obscur and I want to show you this image first this is an image that abarda did and abelard is a teacher as well and what's interesting about this image is it's very simple but it is is showing a very deep concept about photography and I believe this is an image he did for his own teaching materials and it's a box with a lens attached to it and a light bulb you see the light bulb reflected inside this box and upside down and this basically illustrates what a camera obscure is this is how your camera works it is a dark box that light is projected in and it makes a image onto the back of that box and then you can use either a digital sensor or you can use film or whatever that is to capture that image and um there you have it you know that's that's how we capture images as photographers now the image that I want to show you is he's developed this whole concept of turning rooms into literally camera obscures so for instance uh you can you can do this in your house you can do it in a hotel room if you have a way to make the room completely pitch black usually this involves putting trash bags over the windows and cutting a small pen hole so literally what you're doing is making a pinhole camera out of the room that you're in this is what Morel does and then he photographs the way the scene outside is being pictured inside the room and this is really incredible so the image I want to show you here is this image right here which is in taken in New York City from a hotel room across the street from the Chrysler Building and you can see that there is a very interesting way he's depicted this camera obscura image of the Chrysler Building inside the room this is taken with a pinhole with dark windows in a dark room and you can see how the needle of the Chrysler Building lays across the bed this is really interesting and it asks questions you have the answer which is yes it's an image of the Chrysler Building but it's not taken from the street level it's not a tourist image it's not just a snapshot there's something that's going deeper here and what's interesting about morel's book um or about morel's work in general is that he doesn't stop at that there is the questions that he asks concern everything from photographic history to the history of Imaging with this whole idea of a camera obscure to how this works on a wall there's a whole set of technical demands that come across when you're trying to shoot in very low light like that these images are are generally made with 4X fives and I think he just does an absolutely brilliant job of rephrasing questions sometimes to answers and this book uh camera obscura actually has tons and tons of images that are all sorry I'm trying to get these on the video that are all related and I like I said I'm not going to try and do too much on the video because I have bad lighting right now Etc but anyway Abal Arda Morel I think he's asking the questions and he's doing an incredible job at that moving right along a photographer that I have mentioned on this show before is Hoshi sugimoto who is a Japanese photographer again uh alive today doing incredible incredible work the project I want to show you today are these images that he did and this is in a retrospective book again Link in the show notes these are images of theaters that he did and they're very similar in nature but the whole concept and I have talked about this on the show before is that he photographs the theater with a film playing on the screen the exposure is calculated to last the duration of the film that's being projected so what you end up seeing is a compl completely blown highlight uh as far as the stage and where the area where the film is being shown goes the lights come out from there and then the ambient lighting of the theater based on that so what sugamoto is doing here is he's asking a different kind of question it would be really easy to go in well or maybe slightly more challenging to go in and light it correctly and get a really beautiful shot of a movie theater but to go in and do these black and white shots let the the movie run its full duration and then come back in and and that's where you're making your photograph you've timed it out and you're actually capturing a third element in the photograph and I've talked about this before he's got um elements of you know contrast uh you know they're obviously black and white images uh they're largely in Focus but you have a time element that's associated with this and so yes it's a it's a picture of a three-dimensional space but you have this fourth dimension really of time that's passing within that and that's the only way this picture can exist that creates a lot of interest and it asks a very important interesting question I know that perhaps um sugamoto and Morel are both very highly conceptual examples and we're going to run the gamut today I'm going to show you the other two photographers here who I think are doing this in a more conventional way okay so next up is a wonderful photographer uh who's based I believe up near Pennsylvania um been into his work for years this was a guy who early on inspired me to start seeing things in a different way and really made me want to shoot I found Tom Burell is his name and Tom's work is so inspirational to me and I don't know what it is probably largely aesthetic um the fact that Tom also has an enormous respect for the tradition and the history of photography in his work which does push the boundaries and so there's this this really interesting balance between those two things that I think I'm really drawn to his work I'm going to use this image as an example this is an image it's a still life and oh gosh in the '90s uh Burell was doing a lot of work with still lives that were shot with pinhole cameras and there's just something about this the answer here is it's an image of peirs this one is very easy image to go get anybody can line up a bunch of pairs and shoot them but how many people can do it like this with this kind of aesthetic quality and the fact that they pinhole still life tabletop shots um the way they're toned the um I believe Burell uses tea like IC tea to tone and they have this almost interesting gold-like quality mixed with this soft focus of the pinhole effect that it really adds another dimension plus his composition is very unconventional uh these pairs are sitting up almost like you know Quail or you know something like that it's not how you expect to see this subject presented there's nothing really highly conceptual about this it's just a really great image and the reason is is because it still has those questions that are tied to it the answer is very clear it's a shot of some pairs but what is the question behind that how are they shot how are they communic unated to you how are they displayed how is the composition sit you have these pairs they're just below the the halfway point um so you do kind of have a rule of thirds associated with this you have two stems that come off the pairs that are very prominent that spells out the composition and I think Burell is so good at this at coming up with these compositions that work push the boundaries a little bit remain aesthetically very pleasing and he just does an incredible job at it that's Tom Bell's work and again his his books um they go in and out of print I will link as best I can to his work uh but he just does some simply amazing stuff um he has the tendency I will admit at times to imitate Carl blossfeld very heavily but I don't ever think it's a direct ripoff um again I think he rephrases some of the questions that baselt answered with his work again very interesting the final photographer we're going to look at today it's another person I haven't talked about on this show before we're going to talk about Salgado and this is uh fairly easy book to find called workers uh Salgado was a uh a magnum photographer uh extremely good street style photography but applied mostly to editorial type work that would appear in magazines uh stuff like that um what draws me to sado's work is that a lot of times he's a Trix shooter or was at one point at least and his work tends to be kind of grainy and kind of dirty and I'm sure he's pushing film and doing all those cool things um and so that has a vibe to the photos but there is compositionally with Salgado and especially with subject matter there is a sense of complexity that he has in his work um some of the photographers I've talked about on this show before if you go look at the old podcasts we talked about guys like Michael Kenna you know a lot of guys that I like even sugamoto for instance uh tend to be very minimalist photographers in their subject matter and what they're trying to convey um I think sagato works on the opposite end of that Spectrum he's a he's a maximalist you know there's always a lot going on as images um the first image I want to look at we'll look at two here it's a shipyard and I don't really need to tell you much about this image what's interesting is you really don't make out what is a boat in this image necessarily you can tell it is a shipyard and there's a lot of complexity in patterns uh sagato is very interested in symmetry he's very interested in kind of these migratory patterns of how things fall together he shoots people in a very similar fashion too um but there's a lot that's going on with the light here with the ambient nature of this um it's almost got a kind of a misted look to it and the way these big cables or ropes are lying over the edge of these two boats that are sitting next to each other it's just it's amazing um and his work tends to fall into this range a lot there's a lot going on but there's kind of like this overlaying minimalist quality because it's not just complete chaos it's very organized you're going to see patterns you're going to see um uh you know some very interesting things the ship image is one I wanted to use because purposely because we're asking theoretically ourselves these question questions as photographers of what are the questions to the answer um I purposely didn't want to pick things that were so obscure that the average person going to shoot them but I cannot close talking about sagato without showing this image these are gold diggers in or the gold miners excuse me in in Brazil uh this is a mining site and these are probably his most famous images and I'm going to zoom in on this too um again I think you can see exactly what I'm talking about with the the the max imum quality to this they're grainy images they're dirty um they're very dark and it's just interesting to me because you see tons of stuff going on in this image but at the same time you're able to pull back and make out some very basic patterns in this yes they are abstract a little bit but your eye can follow simple shapes and patterns in these and then on a closer look you realize that there's so much more going on in these images um here's another one um that I it's it's just mindboggling how interesting these are and you know like I said Sado to keep this Fair uh you know Sado generally working for Magnum street style of Photography but editorial nature and he literally travels the world to get these things it's not something that you and I are going to go for a walk on Saturday and happen upon uh unless you happen to work near a Gold Mining facility um in uh Brazil but anyway uh at any rate that's I'm going to leave it today and like I said these are I've tried to show you four examples of what I'm talking about here and all these are pretty extreme let me close by saying this too photography is not something you can learn in 20 minutes it's not something you you can sit down and learn in 3 hours it's not something that you can learn in a week uh photography is something like any other art that takes an enormous amount of time it takes an enormous amount of dedication and it takes you know paying dues it takes not being very good sometimes I'm very guilty of that uh in fact you have to come to grips with the fact that even on a personal level we generally View our work uh the number of good shots I get to bad ones it's extremely high ratio to bad ones in my case I just it's hard for me to look at my work sometimes and because I have something I'm striving for sometimes it's really hard to attain that but you're never going to get any better unless you start doing these things unless you push yourself further let me give you a very basic example of this a lot of times well a lot of times one of the most common questions that I get via email flicker forms Etc is people ask if I could do a show where basically I'm going to go out on like a photo walk type situation and show people what I'm looking for what I'm interested in shooting and that's a really hard request for me to do because generally I do not let me put this way I do not like shooting photos on Photo walks with people and the reason is is because that's not the right way of looking at this um maybe I can explain a little better but with a hypothetical a lot of us will go out and look for something to shoot it's part of being a photographer you want to get out of the house get out of the studio Studio you want to get out in the world and find something new you know I think we all feel that way from time to time when you go out and you find something that is interesting to you and you feel like you're going to make a picture of ask yourself are you getting the right shot Okay so we've already determined what the answer is it's whatever you've decided to shoot let's say it's an interesting building you're going to do an architectural shot nothing wrong with that let's make it as good as we can you happen to set your camera up right here probably where you first viewed it you're going to try to get the light right and Jack the metering and the focus and all that stuff which is all very important and you're going to take a picture now what you need to ask yourself is is that the right question for that answer so if the answer is that building are you asking the right question about it is there a different view you could shoot that from is there a different angle you could shoot from should you come back at a different time of the day when the light is going to be doing something that may be more interesting is there something conceptual you can do with this um like for instance we looked at uh abarda morel's work Morel does camera obscura so he actually shooting a picture of a picture of that building inside a different environment okay that's one way of approaching it you don't have to go that extreme that's a very highly conceptual extreme example and it's going to be hard to copy without looking like Morel in a lot of cases but the point is is that Morel asked that question and I think that's important uh there's another image I didn't show and I'll probably overdub it in here somehow but it's very similar in nature uh Tom Burell shot the Empire State Building um and he shot it from an empty office building in New York City you know not the most obvious shot to get but it's something that gives you compositionally a little more interest to it uh the light is doing some interesting things and it probably was a pain in the rear end for Burell to go get that shot and to set that up it could have taken several days several weeks but it's that kind of time dedication sometimes that comes up with the right question for the answer you're trying to get yeah it's really easy to go shoot the Empire State Building if you're in New York City it's right there but how are you going to do it in a different way there's millions of pictures out there of the Empire State Building how are you going to do that where it's different and it stands unique and it asks the right question as far as I'm concerned I'm really not interested in shooting the Empire State Building exactly as it's been photographed 100 times I'm only interested in shooting it and that sounds really tacky and really snoody to say and I don't mean for it to sound arrogant at all but what I'm saying is is if you're going to do good work and you're going to strive for that kind of thing you need to start working on the questions not the answers anyway I know this may be a little goofy and a little weird and the whole 42 thing and I'm sure I'll get some good comments back uh for other people who've read hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy uh if you haven't wonderful book I will put that in those Show links uh as well show notes and uh anyway that's about all I have we ran I'm sure very long today because uh I I had a good time kind of thinking about this this week and like I said I think this may be one of the more important shows we've done um because it's a little bit shorter but we've made a really interesting point of what it is you're looking for with your own work you're not always going to succeed it's okay you're not going to succeed unless you fail and so it's a matter of pushing forward and trying harder and like I said coming up with questions to the answers not answers to the questions so anyway I hope that made sense uh email me comments questions Etc once again this has been the Art of Photography thank you for watching see you next time\n"