Burning Wonga Man

Well yesterday's post was fun. I'll have more on that in the new year. Some people have pointed out, "but what about art photography? What about documentary? What about conceptual?"

Good point. A few years ago I did an extended spew of sarcasm that touched on some of these subjects and the generic nature of bad photography. It was called How Not to Photograph. It lasted about six months. This was the first post, here's another one, and here's another.  Yesterday's post lasted one day. So there is much more time to go before a balance is reached.

And in terms of visibility, the balance will never be reached. Photographic muzak (with a z, yes) is everywhere. I was in town again today and I saw thousands of pictures (I don't remember any) but not one of them was art or documentary or social. So there is a balance to be reached there. I'm not sure how writing how photographic muzak and featuring on this blog will do that. It might even tip the balance a tiny bit the other way. Oh dear!

I think there is much more critical writing on documentary than there is on the muzak I was talking about yesterday. Isn't that what Susie Linfield wrote about so eloquently in her essay that questioned why so many critics hated photography, hated looking even.



Anyway, enough of all that for now. Yesterday was bonfire night in the UK and we had a bonfire. You make effigies on Bonfire Night and burn them. The effigies are called guys after Guy Fawkes, a Catholic who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament.

For a few obvious reasons (it's sectarian and isn't that a good thing and he's a symbol of opposition to all things corporate), not so many people burn Guy Fawkes. Sometimes this isn't a good thing and they find something even dafter to burn. This is what happens in Lewes where they were going to burn Alex Salmond, the Scottish Nationalist leader who didn't quite get independence for Scotland a couple of months back - he would now. But because of complaints, they didn't burn him in the end beca burnt Putin sitting on top of Malaysian Airlines jet MH17.

We did nothing so ambitious at our little allotment and instead burned effigies of a Slum Landlord, a Wonga Loan Shark and a Homicidal Misogynist Nutbag (and I'm thinking more of religious homicidal misogynist nutbagshere - all the major religions are accounted for, so if you are a religious homicidal misogynist nutbag, don't worry you weren't left out. You're in there somewhere whatever your religion.) If you are just a religious nutbag, don't worry, it wasn't you I burned. Unless you're one of those who thinks that all non-believers are going to burn in hell, then what the heck, you're in as well. Why not? What goes around comes around. And it's not for real anyway. Nobody should be killed for their beliefs, not even Wonga Man and Slum Landlord.

How not to Photograph: The Last Post

picture: Colin Pantall - The Photographer and the Subconscious Portfolio Review

There are so many more posts in the How Not to Photograph series; Night Timezzzzzz, Long Exposures, Double Exposures, Multiple Exposures, Self Exposures, Look at the Quality, Don't Look at the Quality There Isn't Any, Functional Family Values, Me-Myself-I, My Addiction and Me, My Body and Me, It's Not About You it's About Me, My Beautiful Pictures, I Really Should Get Out More Parts 8-22 and my own personal favourite If Velasquez Had a Camera He Would Be Me.

But I'm feeling kind of lazy and I've got a bonfire to burn so you'll all have to fill in the gaps.

Happy Snapping and thanks for all your visits, comments and encouragement.

How not to Photograph: I've got a scanner and I'm going to use it

picture - Colin Pantall: I scanned my arse but it was too nasty so here are some dandelion seeds instead

If you work in an office, you may have attended an office party. At the office party, you may have drunk excessively and acted inappropriately. You may have photocopied your body parts, and displayed the photocopies around the room. The next day, there is good chance you felt embarrassed, ashamed and humiliated.

What you didn't do is put all the photocopies of your body parts together into a portfolio turn it into an end of office year exhibition. You didn't make a book of your photocopies or enlarge them and frame them. This is because you, like all right-thinking people, know that a picture of an arse is a picture of an arse is a picture of an arse.

Now imagine that you don't work in an office and you don't have a photocopier. Instead you are a photography student and the proud owner of a flatbed scanner. You don't have to get drunk to photocopy your arse. You do it with a sober face etched with the knowledge that the scan you will make of your arse is no longer just a picture of your arse. It is something more; a project, a series, Art. So you do make a portfolio of your pictures, you do put them in the end of year exhibition, you do make a book of them and enlarge them and frame them. It's your photographic education etched in scanner stone.

But goddamit, they are still just pictures of your arse!

It used to be that photograms were the thing - ferns, dresses, children's clothes, swimming babies, the debris of war or rubbish dredged up from a canal. The best photograms are magical pieces, shadowlands that have been touched by the thing they represent.

Then a few years ago came scanners. There is fabulous scanner work out there, and the best scannograms are also objects of beauty (look at Elaine Duigenan's Nylons and Nets), the result of craft and collecting made apparent on a glass plate.

The worst are lazy scans of random body parts accompanied by mumblings about Jenny Saville or John Coplans. God help us if they are flowers (and I can never really get past flowers) or bugs or anything two-dimensional because then you are just talking photograms done on the cheap. And things done on the cheap have a nasty habit of looking like things done on the cheap. They're cheap.

Scanning your sandwiches can be good fun, in fact scanning anything can be good fun (including random body parts) and that is the main point about scanners. They are quick, they are easy and they are fun. You can make little things look big, and big things look little. Mess with the scale, then mess with the colour, curves, saturation and the hue because what are scanners for except experimentation in photoshop gone wrong.

What scanners almost never do (unless there is some massive back story as with Duigenan's work) is present anything profound. They are two-dimensional in every way, the artificial flavouring of the photography world. The apparent speed, ease and fun results in something cheap. And the best word to go with cheap. Nasty!

So there you have it, scannograms, the photographic equivalent of photocopying your arse, with all the class, dignity and beauty that this implies. Cheap, nasty and thoroughly pointless. But somehow marvellous as well.

How not to Photograph: Street Credibility

picture: Colin Pantall - Does my bum look big 0n this?

First of all, I love street photography. The history of photography is powered and invigorated by the street. If it weren't for the street, photography would collapse under the weight of its essential vanity and self-regard. Walker Evans, Robert Frank, William Klein, Henri Cartier Bresson, Garry Winogrand, Daido Moriyama, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Trent Parke, Paul Graham believe-it-or-not, Bruce Gilden, Mark Cohen (and I could go on ) are all fantastic examples of the broad spectrum of photographers who have used the street as their location.

At its best, street photography has an energy and vitality of its own, the photographer fuelled up on adrenaline and fags flits around the city capturing the nervous edge of the people and spacial politics of the city. The photographer becomes one with the street, personal, private and public merging into the amorphous mass that is the urban zeitgeist of a particular space.

The street photographer maps the psycho-geography of the built-up environment in other words. That's the idea anyway.

But it doesn't always happen like that. The street photographer has the street as his location for a reason; the street is anonymous, amorphous and impersonal. And sure, you can pursue your obsession with the amorphous for years and years, and if you are obsessive and hard-working enough you might end up producing something as great as the photographers mentioned above.

But most of the time, having the street as a location is an abdication of responsibility and choice. We forget the hard-work bit and use the street because we couldn't be arsed to do anything better. We don't have to choose, we don't have to focus, we don't have to relate to anything beyond a second. We photograph whatever comes into our rangefinder and rationalise it away with some mumblings about...? About...? About what exactly? I'm not sure really. Most of the time street photography is a cop out, a simple expression of our dysfunction as human beings, our failure to relate to each other, our limited attention span.

We can be in-your-face like Gilden and Cohen (and I love the work of Gilden and Cohen, but one of each is enough), but what is that apart from a photographic invitation to be at the end of a slapping. We can do the blurry Daido-thing (and I love the blurry Daido-thing), but then doesn't everywhere end up looking alike.

If we live in a really big city where lots goes on (aka New York or Tokyo) we can search out those random locations where shop displays, loading bays and wealthy women of a certain age collide to provide us with Winogrand-lite visions ofa lovable, huggable but essentially crappy Whimsy City. It's low rent slapstick, the photograph equivalence of the film scene where someone walks across the street holding a giant pane of glass.

Or we photograph the light, we try to do what Trent Parke did so brilliantly in his black and white work of Australia. We lurk on street corners waiting for the sun to come round and shine on the faces and bodies of those coming towards us. We can borrow some ideas from Philip-Lorca diCorcia's Heads and mutter something about "the individual" and "isolation" and "the loneliness of the long distance commuter".

But our pictures will be pictures of patches of light - because that's what all pictures are. Unless you tie them together with a visual web where environment, history, people and place combine to make a beautiful and cohesive whole (as Parke did with his Australian work or di Corcia with his heads).

And I haven't even mentioned typography, signs, or advertising hoardings. Or flags. Or dogs. And I'm not going to because that would be to go into such a dark place that I would never emerge into the daylight again.

Street photography is the ultimate cop-out. It's for people who are too lazy to engage with the real world, for people who are scared of the intimacy of meaningful photography so seek out the sequential one-one-hundred-and-twenty-fifth-second-stand of the street, for people who just want to hang around on street corners snapping strangers, smoking fags and drinking coffee with fond imaginings that they will be the next Cartier-Bresson/Winogrand/Parke.

I know this because I am lazy and think this every day. I forget the foot-slogging, brow-beating unrewarded drudgery of it, the endless rolls of film wasted hanging around waiting for something to happen even if it's nothing much at all.

I forget all that and think how I'd love to be a street photographer!

How not to Photograph: The random backdrop

picture: Colin Pantall - Isabel standing against memorial mural of Ben Foster, murdered behind Grosvenor Place in the dumbest drug deal ever (except I thought it was James Dean until Robin told me it wasn't)


Who you photograph is problematic, so is where you photograph. We choose the location we photograph in; the forest, the street, the home, the urban landscape, the empty lot or the industrial wasteland.

Or it could be none of these. It could be whatever catches one's eye on a particular day. This is the random location, the location that often serves as the backdrop to the picture that's going to happen in front of it.

At one extreme, there is the spectacular random. You know the kind of thing, the picture where someone is walking along and there in the background rises Ayers Rock or The London Eye. If it's in a foreign land, the random background picture will be some poor sod harvesting wheat or rice while just by chance the Taj Mahal, Borobodur or a volcano rises in the background.

Then you get industrial or urban random where the backdrop is something out of the Bechers reject pile. Pylons might be involved, chimneys are good, and if you have a full-on smelting tower, you're on your way to photo-nerd nirvana. We all have our favourite locations, those little places where everything looks good and a little bit more real than our normal surroundings. Sometimes these locations look ugly-good, sometimes pretty-good, but in our heart of hearts we know they are always random-good.

And random-good=bad, because if the backdrop is random, then how is it going to join up with all the other pictures in our series. We can pretend there is some geographical, political, psychological or temporal connection between our random images - what after all is the roadtrip for? But if there is no intertwining and overlapping of visual themes, then all our pictures will stay self-enclosed items of randomness. Perhaps some captioning/artist statement sleight of hand will transform our set of dislocated landscapes into a cohesive commentary on the whatever-it-is we are cohesively commentating on? Perhaps, but probably not.

That counts double if we have a figure in there. Our opportunist glee at finding this wondrous backdrop to photograph against will need some mercurial alchemy to tie in figure and ground, to transform the random location into something where subject and location exist in a manner that ripples with layers of meaning and emotion.

If we don't succeed in this, we don't just end up with a random location, but with a random subject too. Random location, random subject, random picture, Flickr here we come! I'm going to have to just throw away the cameras and die!

How not to Photograph: Dr Frankenstein's Make Yourself a Monster Workshop Clean-Up Shoot

picture: Colin Pantall - I'd lose my head if it wasn't attached


The town of Wilkes-Barre in Pennsylvannia will always have a place in my heart. Partly because the Bechers made some of their loveliest industrial landscapes there. But mostly because Mark Cohen made his Grim Street pictures there.

By day, Mark Cohen is a gentleman, a gentle gentleman. By night, he transforms into a photo-psycho, flashing his rangefinder into people's faces in true shoot-and-run style. This isn't big city in-your-faceness, Cohen does this in a moderately sized town where there is little anonymity and no camouflage from the big crowds (see him at work here).

The results are marvellous disjointed affairs where limbs, torsos and heads are lopped off in the name of Cohen's art.

I love it because Cohen's decapitations and dismemberments are a pyschological depiction of both Cohen's own neuroses and fears as well as a portrayal of industrial America as a fractured, dysfunctional society. The pictures are part of a package in other words - a package where the photographer, the location and the subjects and their body parts all fit together in a coherent, if somewhat mysterious and bleak, discourse. It's Frankenstein photography, with Cohen as the body-snatcher, cutting off bits of people with his camera, only to unite them in his Dr Frankenstein moment, when that little spark of Cohen psychosis is enough to bring the monster of the parts to terrifying life.

For the rest of us, those of us who aren't photographing in this manner as a way of life, dismembering your subjects so you end up with a series of pieces of arms and legs, bodies and heads is an exercise in Frankenstein photography - but the kind where there is no lightning spark, where all we end up with is a bin full of rotting body parts - random fingers, eyes and legs that have all been cut off for no reason discernible to man or beast.

So we should all do ourselves ( and each other) a favour and stop with the photo-mutilation. Enough already! No more cut off hands and legs. Except when they have rings on them, or they belong to babies. Because that's different!

How not to Photograph: Hasn't She Grown Part 2

pictures: Colin Pantall (from Seven Stages of an Idealized Childhood)


Forget that last post. What a load of twaddle!

Photographing children, especially if they are your own children, is great. It cannot be recommended enough. Instead of gallivanting all over the place photographing bridges, tribesmen and dead pigeons at great personal and financial expense, you get to spend time with your family and kids.

You can see how they grow up, how they change. You can photograph the tears, the fears, the trauma and the joy. You can make series of them doing different things and relate this to different theories of child care and development, capturing them as they climb up from squawling newborn to egocentric toddler and burgeoning self-awareness. While you do this you get closer to your child and learn something about yourself and the footsteps of your life.

You can give your series a title - "The Seven Stages of an Idealized Childhood" is the one for me - and then you can edit your work right down to the 40 images that will be the perfect portrayal of what it is to be a child - because that's the thing we are all trying to capture.

Childhood is tender, beautiful, brutal and traumatic - so there is an emotional gamut you can capture. The environment you photograph in may be domestic, but what you photograph can be extraordinary, the glances, postures and poses that show the physical and emotional side of becoming a child, an adult, a human. At it's best, photographing children is honest, raw, physical, emotional, psychological, cultural and incredibly political.

What could be better, more worthwhile or more valuable than that?

How not to Photograph: Hasn't She Grown Part 1

picture: Colin Pantall - Isn't she Gorgeous #1 (from a very, very long and ongoing series of ooh, I've lost count)

Kids next! Because obviously there is only one thing worse than the Vacation Slide Show - and that is the kiddie slide show.

Those of us who are parents are fascinated by our children, by their language, their art, their actions, their vendettas, all those little politics of childhood that stir in us memories of how we used to be. We are so fascinated, we decide we will photograph our children for posterity, to strip back and reveal the psychology of growing up. Yes, we decide, ours will be the first real look into what it is to be a child because there is no on-the-nail documentary or photography of childhood, just the odd glimmer here or there.

The first obvious problem is who cares? If you don't have children or you have little memory of your own childhood, you almost certainly do not care. There are grown up things like drink and drugs and going out and having fun that are much more interesting than children. And if you don't have children you can do worthwhile things like travel to foreign lands, get out of Somerset or wherever it is you inhabit and live life to the full. That will expand your horizons much more than the navel gazing claustrophobic world of people who photograph children and don't get out enough.

Next up. The problem with people who photograph children is when you become a parent, and you spend a lot of time with your children, your inner lizard brain kicks in and you resort to type; mothers become cave-mothers, fathers become cave-fathers. We grunt alot, eat for two (women because they are feeding the baby or feeding themself, men because we don't like to miss out) and begin to mimic our child's behaviour. When children are young they are called babies. Babies are little ASBO people who shit and spit and vomit where they like. They wail and scream and are wake up at unreasonable hours of the night. They can't speak so scream when they want something. They can't see or use their hands. They can't even walk.

And this is what we copy. We move to their level in the dustballs (sorry, is that just me?), in our snot-stained top and vomit streaked jeans and begin to see the world from their perspective. To the new father or mother, this is a miracle of life and indeed it is. And because we have a camera handy we start to photograph this miracle of life from the little miracle's perspective; so down and dirty we get with the dustballs, the textures, the little things that exist at toddler-eye level.

Great, except there's just one problem. Dustballs and the texture of smear stains on the window (my own personal favourites!) are of no interest to anyone except babies and OCD clean-freaks. Babies grow out of this way of seeing and they do so for a reason - because as they grow older they find there are more interesting things to look at. There are more things to see than the dust beneath our feet. They know it, so why don't we?

The next level of tedium comes as the child grows up and starts to explore. This is where they become cute and lovely. They are Innocent Children ( little Noble Savages if you like), unspoilt and unsullied by civilisation, tabula rasa that need to be captured on film for all the world to see.

Except they are not innocent and they are not unsullied. Small children are feral creatures, wild and untamed and completely selfish. The first words they learn are "more" and "again" and they do things like have tantrums in supermarkets when they don't get what they want. If they were adults they'd be Father Jack (the priest from Father Ted whose discourse mostly consists of "Drink! Feck! Girls! Arse!").

But you have to be pretty hard-hearted to focus on that. Photography is so much about making things look good and that counts double when it's your own children. Who photographs their children crying or screaming or sick? The father in Peeping Tom, that's who, and see what a sicko his son turned out to be!

And if you take the naturist interpretation to the feral child and photograph your child in their natural state, then God help you because you will be damned by the Neo-Taliban that inhabit all shores and regard a child's bottom as something out of Sodom and Gomorrah - Cover Up, Cover Up, they scream. And well they might, because on the other side lies the attention of those disgusting people who find an uninteded love interest in our pictures. We can pretend it isn't so, but it is. There's no escaping it.

So we ignore that side of things and we focus on the Innocent Child - an 18th century vanity, Lord Preserve Us. Look at film or literature and there are plenty of children who live in savage worlds filled with vengeance, guilt and shame, worlds filled with evil, bile-spitting nazis-in-boy form (The White King, a wonderful novel by Gyorgy Dragoman is my favourite, current example of this) . But in photography, it's dignity, beauty and grace all the way.

And that's what we end up with - the beautiful child, the innocent child, the child untainted by adult life and the adult world, living in isolation from society and the outside world, deadpan fakery scrawled across their face, their daily lives a simulacrum of tasteful disorder.

The photographer of children produces a glorified baby slide show, genres mixed, shaken and stirred. The photographer of children can't be bargained with, can't be reasoned with. He doesn't feel reason, or pity, or shame. And he absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead from the boredom of seeing all his goddamn pictures of his little darling.

And the only way around the dilemma - see How not to Photograph: Hasn't She Grown Part 2. That's what I do. Easy!

How not to Photograph: Make Like a Native and Weave

picture: Colin Pantall - Lijiang: Death by Tourism


There's one photographic tendency to portray other people as victims already noted in the Do Mind That post. The general idea is that these other people live in faraway lands of which we know little. The little that we do know about them tells us that these people are primitive people living lives that, in true Hobbesian form, are nasty, brutish and short. We know this because we have seen the pictures of skeletal men and screaming babies. They are helpless infants leading terrible lives only we, the people of the developed and civilized world, can provide a solution to. If only they would do as we said, then everything would be alright.

The flip side of this version of events is the Noble Savage, the Never Mind That version of events. One of the most memorable things I ever overheard whilst travelling was in Sapa, Vietnam. An Australian tourist educated to postgraduate level bemoaned the fact that the young Hmong girls would go to school and learn to read and write, thus taking away the oral tradition inherent in learning to weave, dye and embroider the Hmong clothes. The clothes are great and there are many thing wrong with Vietnamese education, especially with regard to minorities but that took the biscuit/cake; a classic example of Noble Savage relativism.

The Noble Savage is uncorrupted by civilisation, consumption and materialism. He is naturally happy and lives his life in the forests and jungles and mountains of faraway lands of which we also know little.

The Noble Savage wears colourful clothes and fancy hats. He uses feathers for decoration, plays ancient atonal music of the forests/woods/mountains. He has a good sense of rhythm and can run through the jungle like a deer or climb a mountain like a billy goat.

If he lives in the jungle, he doesn't wear many clothes at all, but if he lives in the mountains, his womenfolk weave and embroider colourful clothes that they wear on market days.

Because the Noble Savage lives outside the world of consumption, he has a simple and happy life and knows little of the evil worlds of which we are part until the loggers, miners and tourists come to visit, destroy and corrupt.

The Noble Savage looks great in a photograph and often takes part in the Vacation Slide Show. That's why it is important to photograph him, because then natural nobility shines through and it raises awareness of the threat that consumption, materialism and deforestation, mining and cheap T-shirts pose to their world.

And then they can carry on with their weaving and their foraging and water-hauling because there is nothing they like doing better. Except for posing for our pictures. They love that.

And so on...

In the 19th century people used to photographic "natives" in this manner, enthusing about their unspoilt childlike manner, so making it easier to rationalise away the abuse, enslavement and humiliation of colonialism. But that was over 100 years; people are more than the sum of their cultural token parts just as people are more than the sufferings they are forced to endure. That the truth is more complex than either both the Hobbesian and the Noble Savage ends of the spectrum portray.There are few newspaper, magazine or TV editors who are happy to show this complexity so for the time being it seems we're stuck with being shown a simplistic state of affairs in the world.

But there are lots of photographers who have cottoned on to the fact that the world is not such a simple place and try to portray a different front to the world. Perhaps the rest of us should follow suit, wherever we are, whoever we are and whatever we do. And then the world would be a better place. Perhaps.

How not to Photograph: All White People look Alike

picture: Colin Pantall - All white people look alike

Another popular choice in choosing subjects is the one where everybody looks the same. In Ryan McGinley's case, this means everyone is young, skinny and white and up for a fun time gallivanting around picturesque parts of the USA in their holiday Scooby Vans.

Everybody looks the same, everybody is the same, nobody is memorable but the things they get up to make up for it. McGinley's world is Norman Rockwell sorted for Es and whizz. McGinley's endless summers stick with you in a way that indicates that something else is going on beyond the all-white-people-look-alike schemata he's working with.

Imagine if McGinley's models didn't have quite such a fun time. Imagine if they stayed at home, hanging aimlessly around their oversized and tastefully decorated homes. We can pose them how we like, pretend they have indigestion or mild depression which the pills can't quite cover up. We can ask them to look vacant, scatter them around the oversized room like chess pieces and try to set up some kind of dynamic of glances that will convey an air of mystery about our subjects.

But at the end of the day, after we've gone to bed and have nothing better to do than think about the pictures we have taken, we will realise that the significant glances aren't so significant after all, that there is less dynamism in our pictures than there is in the bag of old socks that we photographed for our typological metaphor of our feelings of inadequacy and loss.

It doesn't really matter who our group of people are. If they are portrayed with one common, overriding feature that defines them above all else (and especially if the photographer shares that common feature), whether that feature is class, age, gender or income level, then we end up with a series of images that are no better than waxworks of stereotypes trying to look good for the camera.

Which is no good at all because the photography then becomes an exercise in self-congratulation. We show these people as we like to be seen, they become an extension of us, a glorified self-portrait even if we try to show the little cracks behind the facade of civilisated decency they portray. We're telling photographic fibs in other words. Nothing wrong with that, if they were no photographic fibs, every photographic industry would collapse overnight. But if we're going to make the effortto tell a lie at least we should do it convincingly and show the real cracks beneath the surface, the real neuroses, the real psychosis and not just our pretend anguish and fake irritation. Just because fake rhymes with cake doesn't mean it's a good thing.

How not to Photograph: Character of Average Height

picture: Colin Pantall - Mr and Mrs Average Get Dressed

So who gets photographed. Pretending that photography is democratic, that everyone has a voice and a right to be photographed is a mistake. It's a lie. It shouldn't be, but it is. Those who sit the extremes of a variety of scales get photographed much, much more, especially if they lie at the skinny-pretty end of things.

The same goes for income - they will photograph just fine if they are stinking minted and even better if they are stinking skinted. God help us if they fall in the middle income section because only the ghosts of Bill Owens and Martin Parr will dare to look you in the eye.

And if you consider appearance. Photographs of people of average height and appearance (to borrow from Howard and Mittelmark), photographs of people with no outstanding features, people who have with blank eyes and expressions are one of the great pointlessnesses of photography. They are nondescript and nondescription doesn't really do it for anyone. When was the last time you saw a magazine called Whatwasyournameagain Weekly or the Nondescript Times?

Our conceit when we show our ordinary pictures of ordinary looking people is that ordinariness is everywhere and deserves to be portrayed, examined and reflected on in great detail. Which is true but doesn't mean that our pictures should be ordinary, banal or boring.

Many of us have tedious, humdrum lives. We work too much, we don't get out enough, we interact with gadgets and machines rather than people. But just because we have humdrum lives doesn't mean we are average or have nothing interesting to say, show or share. Most everyone can transcend the averageness of their lives with a look or a glance, a dropping of the mask that people use to hide their hopes, delights and terrors from the camera. Parr and Owens photographed this beautifully in their different ways. They photographed the ordinary and made it extraordinary.

In other words, nobody is average, you just have to look close enough. If we choose to show people as simply average, that is really a reflection of our failure of imagination or our failure to understand the world we live in, it is a part of our pursuit of tedium and the average, not that of the outside world.

How not to Photograph: The Olivetti Hour

picture: Colin Pantall -From the Series, What People Don't Understand about Komodo: Over 3,ooo people live in Kampung Komodo, an increase of 2,000 on 1992 levels. Immigration due and reduced rainfall has produced pressure on Komodo's natural resources. Poaching of the island's deer by hunters from mainland Sumbawa together with unsustainable fishing practices and corruption amongst local officials has led to environmental degradation and a fall in the deer population of 37%. This together with encroachment on their natural habitat has caused a fall in the local Komodo dragon (Varanus Komodoensis population of 26% over the last 7 years, resulting in increased attacks on villagers including last months death of a foraging villager. It's all in the picture, look, kids' feet and everything.

In How not to Write a Novel (the book which, er, inspired this series), Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark mention The Kodak Moment where the writer describes a character through a photograph.

As he passed the mirror, Joe noticed the blond hair and square-jawed features that had always won him attention from the girls. Then he saw, wedged in the mirror's corner, a photo of Melinda. Her pretty face was lusciously framed by long straight cinnamon hair and medium-sized by perfectly shaped breasts.

The description is second-hand, devalued and unrealistic according to Newman and Mittelmark. We don't need to see a picture to describe a person and if we do, it's rare that the description will be that evocative.

In photography, the equivalent is the Kodak Moment's flipside, The Olivetti Hour. This is where the picture doesn't really do the work it is supposed to do so the photographer gets tip-tip-tapping away on the typewriter and hey-presto, the picture is transformed from an image of a sombre middle-aged man with a case of indigestion to an expose of the use of empty bed typologies in the torture of innocent terror suspects in North Africa.

Many of us do this kind of captioning, but few of us get away with it, our captions taking on an extravagance and length that enables us to make the leap of faith that is necessary tol persuade us that, yes, these are important pictures and they say everything that the words say underneath. And no, it's not just about the caption, it's about the picture which really does show what it says underneath and if it doesn't, then it doesn't matter because there has always been a strong relationship between writing and photography and this is an example of that.

But there is a massive difference between photographers (Bill Owens for example) whose captions nail the photographs and those who use words to fill in the gaps where the picture doesn't go, quoting facts, figures and factoids to make the point that is hopelessly missing from the picture. We can make all kinds of justifications for doing this (time, budgets, relationship between words, pictures etcetera etcetera) but we all know the real reason we do this - because we didn't get the pictures in the first place.

The solution to the Olivetti Hour?: Get the pictures in the first place.

How not to Photograph: Genre Switching

pictures: Colin Pantall - Kiss, Patsy and Fantasy from the series Empty Beds and Flyovers

Roger Ballen, the American photographer of South African weirdness says that he shoots square. because you don't have to choose between landscape or portrait and that's one less choice to make.

The idea being the less choices the better because photography is infected with choices; who, what, where, when, why, how. Large format, medium format, 35mm, digital or analogue, colour or black and white, deadpan or daidopan, art, fashion, editorial, commercial. And who are your pictures for, or are they just for your family, or yourself? And if they are just for yourself or your family does that make them any worse than if they are for your gallerist, editor, art director or your assessor? Why are you making the pictures you make? Why am I making the pictures I make? And are we doing it for love or money, or love and hoping a bit of money will eventually follow, or money and hoping the love will follow, or are we just complete whores and doing it for money and no other reason; one of the lucky ones who is rolling around in photographic lucre from a photographic day job while the rest of labour teaching/writing/serving/cleaning all week, with the project on the side we do in the evenings and on the weekends in the hope it will get us somewhere?

Choice is important because photography is a promiscuous art. We don't have to make choices if we don't want to, we can just point our camera and shoot away, have a drink, swap cameras shoot some more then drink some more, find another camera and imagine that we can make the choices later and a messianiacal coherence will shine through.

Sometimes we shoot with a Rollei and then with a Ricoh and a Holga. We make a little bit of black and white and then a little bit of colour. Some people make something for our commercial portfolio but then they are artists too, goddamit, so they need the project on the side. And we imagine that we can make the choices later.

And then we start making those choices but it is so difficult because either

a) We haven't got enough that's really good/really fits

b) We've got too much that we think is really good/really fits

c) We don't really know what's really good/really fits

d) An unholy combination of all of the above

So we edit a bit and then edit some more, and break it down until only our darlings are left but we still have a problem because we just love these pictures and they're colour but there's this black and white one and it's so great and it adds a special something. So we slip that one in, and then we slip in something experimental because we like that one and we want to show that we can do that, and then we have a few from of the family album, the vacation slide show, the empty bed typology and that time we tried doing cupcake photograms on the flatbed scanner and before we know it, we have a big, fat mess that doesn't make sense and just plain hurts the eyes.

There are places for this sort of chaos. Blogs are a good place because they are semi-written and random places full of semi-written and random thoughts, and so are scrapbooks which are essentially higgledy-piggledy artist's books where a little bit of typography and design can go a long, long way - and where the more rules you ignore, the better. Even if you don't get the scrapbook right, you still have a book that speaks to yourself. That might be a case of photographer's solipsism but so what, it's a good thing.

But there are also places where this genre switching doesn't work, where the message is confusing and disorienting, where our train of visual thought is flung hither and thither on a slew of mixed-up pictures, themes and messages. And those places are everywhere else.

The only thing worse than genre switching? Genre monogamy!

How not to Photograph: Oh, and also - Reminiscing

picture: Colin Pantall - New Year's Day, 1956
Larkhall Map
Campsite Map

Larry Sultan's Pictures from Home is a wondrous mix of snapshots from the family album and stills from old home movies and Sultan's own portraits of his mum and dad. Larry Sultan gets away with using all these images because he's using them for a reason - to connect the social, economic and personal histories apparent in his family's move to California. Everything looks great in Pictures From Home, especially Sultan's large format portraits of his parents. These could stand alone and Pictures From Home would still be a great book. They are lovely and full of insight and the snapshots fade into the background to create a foundation for the Sultan family's varied perspectives.

For the rest of us, it's the other way round. We have our portraits and pictures of contemporary life and then stumble upon a snapshot from an old family album. And snapshots from old family albums have a habit of looking good because they are more than snapshots: people took more time making them than they do now, people wore better clothes than they do now, people didn't necessarily know what was expected of them in front of the camera and if they did, they performed their task with more dignity, conviction and self-belief than they do now.

It's old, it's black and white if possible, it's connected to whatever you are doing in a vague way, because everything is connected really isn't it and a bit of creative captioning and a creative artist's statement can work miracles for sneaking an outsider into your project? Just mumble something about archives, family albums, vernacular and in it goes. Then say it out loud, and again, and louder and soon you'll believe the transformative powers of your own alchemy. Ooh, and there's another one, and another one, and another one. The problem is if all the informing from the past overwhelms the informing from the present, if we end up looking too much at the pictures of our parents and grandparents' lives instead of our own, then the snaps from the olden days become decorative addenda that overwhelm the tedium of our own pictures.

We can rationalise the importance of the pictures and their inclusion in our book/project/series/whatever, but deep down we know the only reason we are including them is because they are more interesting and evocative than the work we produce ourselves.

Reminiscing with the odd found photograph is great, reminiscing with too many turns the project into some kind of weird scrapbook - great if we're making a scrapbook, not so great if we're not unless you approach the thing with the brashness, chaos and rigour of Peter Beard or Ed Templeton for example.

The real problem comes when our solipsism becomes so great that we don't just include the pictures from our past, we include the debris of our lives, the stuff we find at the bottom of pockets, bags and in small piles gathered by the side of our desks. Old receipts, bus tickets, notes and doodles that we once thought was so insignificant that we couldn't even be bothered to throw it away.

Sometimes these insignificances can add up to more ( as in Keith Arnatt's Notes From My Wife), but most of the time we are trying to flesh out a project with something banal and humdrum, something that doesn't illuminate anything except the tedium of our lives both past and present.

The only exception to this rule is maps. They tell us where things are, what happened where and if they're drawn by hand, it's even better. Maps are always good.

How Not to Photograph; The Playing Possum Portrait

picture: Colin Pantall - Playing Possum #1 (from a series of 1)


These posts have an order, so after dawn of the dead and deadpan comes death. There is a great tradition of portraying death in photography from Victorian vernacular memento mori to the great work of Wisconsin Death Trip, Jeffrey Silverthorne or Walter Schels and many, many more.

Death features large in war, disaster and famine photography and for all the complaints (including the ones in this series of posts) made about its use in photography, the best portrayals of death punch through our fatigued retina to find their way into that tiny, tiny part of our lizard brains that tells us something that really matters is being shown to us.

That's why people come up with all kinds of reasons not to allow death to be shown in pictures, to censor images of death; because we don't like death, we know it's a bad thing and there's nothing like seeing it in pictures to tell us it is happening and showing us directly that it's a bad thing. And if we see it happening we can't pretend that it's not happening, especially when it happens to people who are close to us or people we have sympathy for. Surprisingly, most of us have sympathy for most everyone if we are allowed to - sympathy for people of all nationalities, religions, ages and all backgrounds. So when we see these people suffering, or dead, we feel sympathy for them and want to stop their suffering and death in some way. Which you think would be a good thing.

Mmm. That's one kind of death. The other kind of death is the staged death, the playing possum death. This also has a long, long tradition going back to 1840 when Hippolyte Bayard portrayed his own suicide by drowning. People were playing dead in photography before they photographed the pyramids, empty beds or shipbreaker's in Bangladesh. It is the oldest cliche in the book in other words.

Bayard's suicide by drowning is a classy picture, but he made it 169 years ago, with a 12 minute exposure, to express his grievance at not having his photographic process recognised as the bee's knees. Nowadays, it seems, playing dead has become a theme in photography designed to show.. to show... to show, I'm thinking hard here, but nothing's coming.

To show what?

Ok, the photographer's decided to have people in the picture, that's an advance at least on pictures of empty beds. Perhaps they've even tried a few poses where they tell the subject "to think of nothing" (see previous post). Maybe that doesn't quite work, or the subject is still a bit too unempty, so what comes next. Make them sick a little, tell them to imagine they have a sore belly, that they've had a donut too many. That's a strategy that seems to work for some photographers - making pictures where the subject stares into the very near distance with a pained expression that seems to mourn the fact that they had that extra donut, golonka, or tub of Ben and Jerry's for breakfast that morning - it's called the indigestion portrait and you see it everywhere.

But perhaps this isn't enough, perhaps a little gas pain doesn't satisfy the photographer's cravings to strip their subject of their last whisp of humanity. Then what happens? What happens then is the playing possum portrait. William Eggleston's woman on the grass picture is the supreme example of this, but this being Eggleston (deadpan in every way) you're never quite sure if she's not really dead after all.

Aside from stripping the subject of their humanity, what does the possum playing portrait achieve? It keeps the subject still, making them inanimate and so easier to photograph, especially if they close their eyes because everybody knows that the best corpses have closed eyes, unless it's Cindy Sherman playing dead. The dead person becomes an inanimate empty bed in other words. Photograph them in a real-life empty bed and it's like two empty beds in one. Emptiness abounds!

At the same time, playing dead is great fun, especially if you have kids because there's nothing kids like better than playing dead and it's one of the great ways of getting a bit of peace and quiet for a while. The game, Trappist Monk, does this as well (the winner is whoever stays quiet the longest), but you never get good pictures out of Trappist Monk.

You can extend the play acting if you stick a knife or blunt object near the body and pretend that your subject has been killed. Splash a bit of ketchup around and it adds to the effect.The danger if you do this too much is to find the right line between making something light and amusing and just becoming deranged and psychopathic. A whole line up of beautifully clad female victims, lying with their legs at right angles might seem a good idea as you like awake in the middle of the night thinking of your next big thing, but in the cold light of day when it's been photographed and titled (Ripper Victim #1, Son of Sam #2, and so on) you do just end up looking like a bit odd and we've all seen Peeping Tom and know where this kind of thing leads.

So there is a time and place for play dead pictures and that time and place is here - play dead pictures.

Send them there and save us all the trouble.

How not to Photograph: The Indigestion Portrait

picture: Colin Pantall - A bhaji too far!

How not to Photograph: Deadpan

picture: Colin Pantall - I said be serious!


From Dawn of the Dead to Deadpan, the apparently neutral style used to describe particular kinds of landscape and, less commonly, portrait photography.

I don't know who first used the term for photography, but it certainly appears in Charlotte Cotton's handy book, The Photograph as Contemporary Art. I don't really like the word in the photographic field. It brings to mind stone-faced comedians like Buster Keaton and, er, well I'll stick with Buster Keaton. But the term does serve a purpose; you see a deadpan picture and you know it's a deadpan picture.

In photography, the great deadpan portraitists are August Sander and Rineke Dijkstra, though the emotional undercurrents in the work of both these artists is so immensely political and emotional that deadpan doesn't even begin to cover what they show.

The way they work is what matters though and that's where the choice kicks in. Dijkstra employed a look-this-way, click-and-that's-it strategy for her Beach Portraits, the power of the images coming from the subject herself and the situation she finds herself in.

That's the look-at-the-camera, I'm-not-doing-too-much-even-though-I'm-doing-a-great-deal work dealt with. And she is doing a great deal, especially when finding subjects who have a non-generic way of responding to the camera. Dijkstra's models are interesting in other words, they perform for the camera, and the way Dijkstra photographs makes them even more interesting. We want to know about these people.

The problem arises when the deadpan artist wants to impose his vision on the world, where control in all areas is paramount, especially the question of where the subject should look and how they should look and how to get the subject to look in this particular way.

And that's when you get the weird looks you find only in photography. The did-I-just-have-an-accident-in-my-pants look, the has-someone-farted look, the what's-that-coming-over-the-hill-is-it-a-monster look, the why-am-I-looking-over-your-shoulder look, the hurry-up-and-take-the-picture look and of course the this-is-not-a-look look.

All these looks are a simple combination of bad direction from the photographer and bad performing from the subjects. We all know when we see somebody acting badly in a film, but the same thing can happen in a photograph. We also know when this happens, but somehow people never mention it. Probably because it's not polite.

We all know these looks, we see them all the time in our own pictures and in other people's. We take pictures of these looks, wonder if we can get away with it and cut the pictures into pieces and throw them away when we discover we can't. Except for the ones that we don't cut up, because let's face it, a good have-I-had-an-accident-in-my-pants look is a rare and glorious thing and should be shared amongst the world.

Worst of all is the last look, the this-is-not-a-look look, the one where the photographer says something like "Be expressionless"or "Empty your mind" or "Think about nothing?" This is not the same as thoughtfulness or introspection or attendance-elsewhere, this is an attempt by the photographer to portray the subject/victim as an empty vessel upon which the photographer can project their own thoughts, ideas or desires.

To what end I'm not sure. There's not much happening up top for most of us at the best of times. This doesn't make us interesting people, quite the opposite. Emptying our minds of everything makes us even less interesting, even if we do it convincingly.

It makes us less interesting in real life and it makes us double-less interesting in a picture. Unfortunately, few photographers ever capture this look convincingly. It is difficult to empty one's mind, it takes years of training and fasting and pilgrimages to the Himalaya to be halfway believeable. But again and again and again we see this attempt at emptiness photographed, as though a feigned vacancy of feeling, thought and personality will reveal some inner truth about humanity, how we're all empty and vacant.

The only person in this scheme of things who is vacant is the photographer. Asking one's subjects to be empty reveals a failure of the imagination that can only come from somebody completely bereft of ideas who is trying to copy somebody else because that's always a good thing, right.

The only solution to this state of affairs is the removal of these people from polite society. A Thomas Ruff Memorial Retirement Home should be established. There, the photographer can stay with his/her fellow guests, deadpanning themselves to death by photographing each other and anything else that is empty - empty beds, empty houses, empty spaces, empty anything. And at the end of every year, they can have an exhibition of their pictures of emptiness, with massive prints and a cabaret and guest lectures by some of the giants of emptiness, and they can have print sales and slide show nights and portfolio reviews where people with earnest hair and serious faces can talk meaningfully about nothingness and nothing. And they can make a magazine with high production values and it will be called Emptiness and when can I book myself in because it sounds just perfect!

How Not to Photograph: Dawn of the Dead

picture: Colin Pantall - Where have all the Golfers Gone?


The Fifth Flyover was about how empty beds, empty buildings, barren flyovers and sparsely vegetated fields can be overused. This is especially true when all the empties come together in one body. Everything is empty; the streets, the parks, the shops, the houses, as if nobody lived there, as if the whole town or village or country had been denuded of people in some kind of Dawn of the Dead zombie flick.

Where have all the people gone? They can't all be in the Mall, because if there are pictures of the Mall, that'll be empty too, and they're not under the electricity pylons because there's never anyone there. Either the photographer has a nasty smell about him or the absence of people is very deliberate. Most of the time it's the latter. Unpopulated landscapes become a synonym for a visual fascism, a way of seeing that makes people invisible and removes them from the interplay of the environmental, social and economic equations that make a place what it is.

Why is this? It used to be that people would pick up a camera to overcome their shyness, to give them an excuse to talk to girls or boys, to engage with the outside world. Marc Riboud used to be shy and but he started snapping people and was transformed into a maker of iconic images. Alec Soth used to be a nervous wreck who could barely look anybody in the eye, but give him a large format about and he had everybody getting their kit off in no time - himself included.

Now it seems that picking up a camera is an excuse, not to engage with, but to retreat from the world. We show the lived in environment but without the living, we show the built environment without the builders, the houses without the inhabitants, the roads without the cars and so on all the way down the line; we show a world in which life has been exterminated, as though it's been hit by a photographic neutron bomb.

What is the source of this anthrophobia? Why are so many photographers so scared of photographing people? Are we such a bunch of shrinking violets that we flinch whenever a human enters the viewfinder? Do we find the notion of digital or chemical interaction with human form so repellent that we would rather photograph a world of interiors and peeling paint? Has our lack of social skills and general dysfunction reached the nadir where we would rather lock ourselves in the cellar than be mocked and abused by the outside world.

Or could there be another reaon? Could it be that photographing empty things is easy, and photographing people is hard. Houses don't move, empty beds stay still, they don't jump up and down, pout or smile inappropriately. Flyovers don't tell people where to go, suburban houses don't stare menacingly however many pictures you take. You don't even have to talk to them, they stay in the same pose, unchanging, unmoving wonders of emptiness.

So it's laziness that makes us do this, a collective case of boneheaded idleness reinforced by corner-cutting professors and copycat curators. We can rationalise it away however we like, but we all know it's true - we should try and get out more and meet some people.


The sarcasm of these How not to posts is killing me. So is the cynicism. I'm on a rollercoaster of doom with this series. There is no hope! But alas, I was daft enough to get on and now I can't get off, so the sarcasm and cynicism will have to continue for a few more months before I can return to my rightful place and lighter things like Origami Cats.

How not to Photograph: The Fifth Flyover

picture: Colin Pantall - Empty Estuary and The Fifth Flyover


The Fifth Flyover is different to the typological approach but similar. It's about repetition within a wider theme, where the photographer feels the need to show us the same thing over and over again, but they think they are showing us something different each time. Robert Frank had juke boxes running through The Americans, Alec Soth had empty beds running through Sleeping in the Mississippi, but they were always different and always served the purpose of helping to illustrate the much more interesting aspects of human life which these photographers explored with their pictures.

Too often we find ourselves photographing an empty bed simply because we are attracted to empty beds, we know it'll make a nice picture and we think we can slot it into a wider body of work. Why not, everyone loves an empty bed, especially if it's stained and unmade, but nicely composed! If we are really attracted to them we might try an empty bed typology (which has been dealt with already in this series) which is always a bad idea because that will remind the viewer where they are heading after flicking through a few empty bed images.

Most times, the empty bed, empty building, barren flyover or sparsely vegetated field becomes a visual trope that resonates throughout a photographer's work. By the time we have seen the eighth one, we've got the picture. Empty buildings are really empty, barren flyovers are really barren, and sparsely vegetated fields are, er, sparsely vegetated and there are a lot of them about if you care to look for them. Critical mass is reached at an early point (scientific research shows us critical mass is reached at 8 pictures) and if we see any more than this number it is like having one, two or three drinks past the point where you are absolutely legless. Nausea kicks in and vomitus follows soon after.

The illusion is that the similarities of the emptiness/sparseness ( or whatever other lack or absence you choose to mention) will neutralise each other and illuminate the differences so that, if we look, really, really hard our visual understanding will transcend the tedium of what we are seeing. Maybe so, but who could be bothered. It's just not that interesting. Most of us would rather boil our ankles rather than look at work of such unremitting emptiness.

The only exception is when it's my (or your) own work - and then this kind of emptiness takes on a miracle transformation. It becomes endlessly fascinating and engaging. But only to me, which is no good at all, because I have an audience of one and I'm back in the solipsist nightmare of talking to myself, alone again in the darkroom of my soul .

How not to Photograph: Mr Sandman, on second thoughts bring me a gun

picture by Colin Pantall - Does the Fish have Chips?

We all dream but most of the time we forget our dreams; they fade away back into the seething pot of unconscious desires and random detritus where they belong. This is a good thing. I dream about fish, vampires and North Korea with an alarming frequency. I would love to be able to combine these dreams in a surreal photographic form. It would be a revelation to me, my inner soul revealed through my passion for art and photography. Unfortunately I don't have the time or energy to set up the lighting, buy the fish, paint the papier mache or cast the Kim Jong-il lookalikes.

Thank goodness for that! It would be a revelation to me, but an exercise in eyeball-churning tedium for everyone else, solipsist self-indulgence that would turn every right-thinking person's stomach to milk shake. We should endeavour to keep out dreams to ourselves, our neuroses under control, to lock it in, not let it all hang out.

Of course, there are people that are good at getting under the skin of the human condition. They have an irresistible momentum that comes from being older, wiser and more crackerjack than the average photographer, with more time, money and talent to hand. There is a place for this kind of thing in other words, and for me that place belongs to Gilbert Garcin ( and Teun Hocks, but if we were all Everyman, who would be left to inhabit the real world?). The rest of us should make like the English, keep the upper lip stiff and hide it all away.