Waterfalls, Vivian Maier, and Bruce Gilden
I know, the title. For some of you who may be old enough to remember, the title comes across like one of those old Johnny Carson skits with Carnac the Magnificent. Like, here’s the answer, but what in the world could the question be.
So last week on my vacation I decided to schedule a visit to my dentist for a root canal. Brilliant!
While I’m sitting there in the chair, you know these days they have that TV up there and they play ambient music and nature scenes. Previously, they used to play some game show or home improvement show and I’d be worried about the attention span of my attendants. So I feel better about the nature scenes and the bland ambient music. No more watching the wheel to see what it’s going to land on.
But while sitting there, this scene came on with a waterfall, like a really huge waterfall, and I don’t know which waterfall in the world, but a big one, straight down a cliffside somewhere. And it occurred to me that the magnificence of that waterfall was really all about the scale of it. Is it any different than water pouring out of my tap? What would water pouring out of my tap look like to say, a small chipmunk? Depending on the angle it came out at, it might look like a roaring river or a huge smooth waterfall to them. The relative scale was important.
Before scheduling the dentist, Rachel and I took a short trip to New York City, and visited some places we’d not been to. One of them was the Fotografiska Museum, which was showing an exhibit from Vivian Maier. Since watching the documentary Vivian Maier, I had a keen appreciation for her street photography. On that note, while she’s known for her creative self portraits, I’ve always felt her best work was her candid photography of people she encountered. What I particularly like about it is the impact she has on these people. There is often a reaction to her imposing presence that helps to inform the photograph.
One of the images shown was of a woman walking in the city with a cat on her shoulder. The woman is rather glamorous, the cat seems a bit anxious, but comfortably gripped to the woman’s shoulder. There were 2 exhibits of the image. One was oh, maybe a 24 x 24, somewhere around that size, and the other was a wall size print, perhaps 7-8 feet tall. A good photograph is a good photograph, no matter the size. But with some photographs, something changes when the scale of the photograph changes. A 24 inch print is not a small print, and yet, perhaps due to the evocativeness of the image, the wall size print produced a very different emotion, it enhanced the degree of evocativeness. I thought that was interesting, because I don’t naturally think of scale being an important factor with portraiture.
https://newyork.fotografiska.com/en/exhibitions/vivian-maier
A few floors below, Bruce Gilden also had an exhibit. And if you don’t know Bruce Gilden, he is most renowned for his street photography, and for sticking the camera with a hand held flash about 2 feet away from the face of people and whammo! I’m sure there are many varied feelings about that which you, the reader might be considering. The exhibit featured some less confrontational candid environmental portraiture as well, and this work was compelling, but the real hero shots were those whammo shots. They would have been interesting prints at 20” size or so, but all the whammo shots were a good 6’ tall. And most were just the face, maybe a bit of shoulder. And the resolution in these prints was impressive.
I believe Bruce shoots mostly with a Leica for this type of work, it goes to show how important a high resolving lens can be to the final result. Because he shoots with flash and the flash is very close to the subject, there is a lot of light (relatively), so even though he is close to the subject with the lens, there is a substantial depth of field, because he can shoot at a smaller aperture, due to the amount of light hitting the subject. Nose to back of ears are typically in focus.
https://newyork.fotografiska.com/en/exhibitions/bruce-gilden
This collection of 6 foot faces clearly showed those who have been through a lot in life, and the wear is highly evident in their faces. Their expressions, the details and scaled up scars, blemishes, scuffs of life, blood vessels, bruising, stressed pigmentations, all this evidence of a life spent fighting for life, are extremely emphasized due to the quality of his photographic execution, and the resulting scale that it can then be presented at.
What was especially interesting was that this type of photography was very different from the landscape photography of a Rodney Lough or the industrial photography of an Edward Burtynsky, which naturally lend themselves to scale with the level of detail. In the case of Bruce Gilden, the face becomes a landscape, the details become storytellers of the life, that a smaller print might not tell. But in the case of Vivian Maier’s (childless?!?!) cat woman, the scale doesn’t create a different experience because of the level of detail, it creates a more emotional reaction, simply due to the scale itself, the emotional response is less easily detached.
I thought all of this was interesting as a lessen against absolutes, in this case, the idea that a photograph doesn’t have to be printed large to be the fulfilling image it deserves to be. Scale really can substantially change a photograph. So all those megapixels and those high resolving lenses can really come to bear as important tools, as much as some may dismiss them. Shoot something today that will benefit from scale, have it printed extra large, and be rewarded.
Thanks for reading! If you have any questions feel free to reach out!
steve@captureintegration.com – 404.543.8475
