Darkroomist Art by the orange glow.

So many ups and downs

Being engaged in a creative endeavor sometimes seems like a decent into an extremely bipolar world. All the ups are extremely up and all the downs are really down. You can always look back and see all the hills you've climbed and feel great. You accomplished those feats! Then you look ahead and see people standing on top of hills that look so difficult to climb, you've never tackled anything like that before. At your sides are people offering encouragement believing you can climb those hills. Also at your sides though are other climbers that look more dedicated and better equipped. Oh well, if selling art were easy it'd probably be a Girl Scout fund raiser.

Another such paradox is booking shoots. On the one hand I've worked with a few great models recently and local interest in my work is increasing in my town's talent pool. Yay! That is really awesome and I'm looking forward to being rather busy on that front. On the down side I usually attend DEAC shoots. Despite being a rather established photographer with a decent portfolio and some good shoot ideas, booking time slots to work with models has been like pulling teeth with far more rejection than success. I guess I just have to put my nose to the grindstone and keep at it.

Speaking of noses to grid stones and their always being a new hill to climb, a while back I was organizing my work, looked at a *pile* of framed prints and thought I was pretty awesome. That was until I saw this blog post and thought "Damn!!!! I want to be there someday!" Then I started looking through Ed Templeton's blog and though it was so awesome it deserves a link of its own:
http://toymachine.com/ed/

There's some fantastic work there (film work at that!). Lately I've noticed that my admiration of other artists has shifted from "Wow, I wish I made that!" to "Wow, I'd like to accomplish that!"

I often find myself torn between quality and quantity. These days, especially since digital, there seems to be the expectation that photographers should turn out *tons* of work every year. This is harder to accomplish shooting film than in the digital world. Right now my darkroom workflow is geared towards quantity, but after screaming through 500 sheets of Kodak Polycontrast IV 8x10 glossy paper, I still feel like I have accomplished anything awesome. I guess that's what the next 500 sheets are for.

Why I dislike the term “Ruin Porn”

My apologies that this went a little long, but there are pictures and (shameless plug) they're all available as prints from me

First off, in full disclosure, I'm a Ruin "Pornographer". I love shooting abandoned buildings and do so whenever I get the chance. Lately the term "Ruin Porn" is picking up steam and that bothers me. For a second, I'd like to acknowledge the people who are offended in some sense by this work. I get it, I understand you. I know it must be hard to look at places in varying states of decay where you used to shop, visit an ailing grandparent, had a birthday party, even got married. That's not how *you* want to remember them. But then again you're not the intended audience, you're too close to the issue. To work within the metaphor I'm displeased with: you wouldn't go to a strip club where your sister worked.

Also it's very much worth stating that there is a LOT going on in all of the communities where modern ruins exist. Detroit, Gary, Flint, and to a certain extent Saginaw (we're pretty small potatoes as far as ruins go), all have positive things going on, they're all trying. Modern ruins shouldn't be the sole defining emblem of any community; they're just buildings.

One of the reasons I very much enjoy Urbex photography is precisely because I'm not from here. I grew up in Pennsylvania, in an area in transition between rural and suburban that was and still is growing. Abandoned structures of any kind were extremely rare. A couple of years ago I did some searches for abandoned structures in my home town in preparation for a visit. I found two, one had been torn down and the other was already in the final stages of restoration.

Now that the pleasantries are out of the way lets dig into some of the meat. Why do we still have a problem with porn? Why is it still a negative? A scientific study on the effects of porn had to be scuttled because they couldn't find a control group of men that *didn't* use porn. So right off the bat half the population already "likes" porn. Other's studies point to porn providing a social good. Namely that increased access to porn reduces sexual violence.

Obviously, the term "Ruin Porn" tries to tie the idea of exploitation from porn to the photography of abandoned buildings. This is a false analogy. I think much of the "exploitation" in porn is a hold over from the past. It's one of the few (only?) industries where the women are paid more than double their male counter parts. Not to mention the latest trend of "cam girls" puts ALL the control in the hands of the performer herself. Add in that Wikipediea's exploitation page doesn't mention porn (or Urban Decay photography). Regardless of how much exploitation is in porn if any at all, it's a major mental stretch to tie that to photographing modern ruins. What's being exploited? No people are generally depicted. Is it the community? I've heard it mentioned that it discourages potential employers from locating there. I can't confirm or deny it, but it seems quite a stretch. If a potential employer does their due diligence "ruin porn" won't be what sways their opinion. Conversely Detroit's gaining the reputation of being the city of possibility where you can start anything.

A more subtle part of why I feel the term "Ruin Porn" is pejorative is the generalization that all the talent in porn is in front of the camera and no talent is required on the part of the photographer. This is just as true in porn as in any photography. It's easy to find homemade snapshot porn, but for decades mainstream porn has required some serious talent behind the camera. Arny Freytag has ben known to use more than 20 lights calibrated to 1/3rd of a stop to shoot one Playboy Centerfold with an 8x10 large format camera on slide film! That being said, I've seen people run around an abandoned structure with a point-and-shot just snapping away. I've also seen someone setup a 4x5 view camera on a tripod, precisely measure the light in different areas, adjust the rise, swings, etc, and take a photograph.

Ok, enough about the porn, let's get to the ruins. One of the reasons why Ruin Porn is so popular is because of the ruins being depicted. Most, if not all of the popular images are of large scale, pre-WWII, public or manufacturing spaces. The places Urbex photographers want to shoot are train stations, schools, hospitals, city halls, prisons, churches, theaters. They're not really interested in you're normal, run of the mill, single family house. Pre-WWII buildings tend to have spectacular craftsmanship and materials. It's buildings like these that have a beauty that shines through "nature's wrecking ball", graffiti, and vandalism.

Detroit specifically is special in that it has a LOT of these types of buildings. Detroit had a big boom with the auto industry prior to WWII and because of it's resources, MI had a lot of manufacturing in general. Go to New York City, Baltimore, Orlando, LA, Denver, Chicago, any other US city and you'll be lucky to find a handful of derelict buildings that meet this criteria that Detroit has by the scores. Detroit is the Mecca of the Urbex world. This beauty might be hard for the inhabitants to see. It's like when you live on the beach, ocean/lake sunsets aren't very special. No place in the world has modern ruins of the size, scale, and beauty that Detroit does.

While on the topic of aesthetics, there is something beautiful about way in which the confluence of time, natural forces, and vandals dismantle a building. Marble crumbles revealing the rusting rebar beneath. Holes poke in the ceiling allowing water in that turns books into compost from which saplings spring. Paint peels, metal rusts, floors boards warp, it's a surreal infusion of texture that changes a structure. There is something *worth* photographing there.

Abstractly, modern ruins represent the impermanence of mankind's creations and of our own mortality. Ancient ruins just don't back the same psychological punch that modern ruins do. Modern ruins are more recognizable as something "of us". It's startling to see just how quickly nature's wrecking ball can work. It's not how we like to see ourselves. I think it might hit Americans a little harder because we're a newer country, we believe we're "exceptional" and yet nature reclaims our creations faster than it did many of Europe's. I also heard it said that "American happiness is based on denying death." Which, if that's the case, there's something very countercultural to depicting these structures.

Urbex photography is also a race against time. Eventually, in most cases, time or people pull a building down. Just documenting a magnificent building's existence becomes important to the photographer. Here's a sampling of building's I've had the privilege to shoot that are no longer with us:

Linked to the need to provide a record of these buildings is a need to record this time period for future generation. Make no mistake, for these communities it's been a rough half century. The decline has been slow and wrought with pain. But does that mean we pretend it doesn't exist? Do we ignore it? It's not my intention to profit from pouring salt on a wound, though it may seem so to some. Rather I'm trying, with varying degrees of success to provoke thought about a society that allows this to happen to treasured structures, about entropy, about man's relation to nature, and about a culture so greedy it allows cities to crumble and communities to evaporate (and that knife cuts both ways). I'd like to briefly mention that one of the unseen forces condemning these structures are national, state, and local regulations. Every old building will have lead paint, asbestos, and probably mold. The regulations for restoring these structures lump on huge expenses that favor demo and rebuilding over preservation.

Finally, there's an element of adventure in all this. "Ruin Porn" was born out of Urban Exploration (Urbex for short). Urban exploration is the quasi-illegal activity of seeing what's you should be looking at. It's going in abandoned buildings, factories, and the like just to see what's there. "Ruin Porn" is just a natural extension of that. There is a (manageable) amount of risk. Photographers have been held up for their equipment or arrested for trespass. For a mid-thirties, happily married, father of two it's a welcome change of pace.

In closing, I hope I've provoked some thought about the term "ruin porn" as being sensationalist and misleading because there is historical, aesthetic, artistic, and experiential value in the imagery.

All this technology doesn’t take a better picture.

Sigh, it's really kind of sad. We have all of this wonderful technology surrounding image making and quite often it just gets in the way. Apparently it's a US Navy tradition for one lucky sailor to have "The first kiss" when returning from deployment. For the first time ever,it was a homosexual couple kissing on December 22nd, now that "don't ask - don't tell" has been lifted. This Kodak Moment could have been reminiscent of Alfred Eisenstaedt's icon ticker tape kiss:

It should have been iconic, a tribute to long over due equality being extended to new generations of soldiers and to all the gay service men and women that so bravely sacrificed for our country. Instead, the image that Brian J. Clark/AP delivered is a classic example of what not to do:

If having a great subject is 95% of the battle, the other 5% was lost here. For starters, it breaks the "rule" of not putting heads in the "Bull's Eye" of the frame. Eyes should be in the top third of the image. Nothing about the framing is good. A lower angel would move that yellow crap away from the subject's heads, while also adding a larger-than-life feel plus getting less pavement and more boat in the image. Also why is this framed in landscape, was it a video frame capture? That makes no sense. The frame is noticeably tilted and limbs are oddly cropped off. All of these "rules" can be broken for effect, but this combination of infractions just makes it seem like an amateur snapshot. This isn't an echo of history, it's a muddled reverberation. My apologies to Brian Clark, maybe this was just an off frame, day, or perhaps conditions were more difficult than they seem or something. But the quality of the image doesn't match the weight of the moment. I somewhat blame technology. It's the best explanation for the sort-of-video framing (video/still camera in one). Using the center AF point and not focusing then recomposing explains the "bull's eye". But more over is the idea that a good camera takes good pictures. It just didn't happen here. I wish the subject matter was better captured. Over half a century later, and having multiple processors assisting, about the only things better now is color rendition and turn around time. It's that a worthwhile tradeoff?

Interesting stocking stuffer for the film lover

If you're looking for an interesting yet inexpensive photography book for the film lover in your life, let recommend Hotel Seventeen by Jörg Fokuhl. Channeling Stefon from SNL's Weekend Update: it has hipsters, cyberpunks, fighting rooster tattoos, rockers, push buttons, and transvestites in leopard print. It's mostly ring lit providing a very start, almost T-Dawg-esque rendering of its subjects. It was published in 2000 meaning it was shot in the 90's and pretty much had to be film. Judging by the complete lack of grain I'd guess medium format at that. There's a uniformity of style that really brings together the diverse subjects. I pick it up when I'm in the mood for something interesting to look at. Also, Hotel 17's interior has been completely remodeled, so I feel a historical connection with the book. With used prices starting at $1.55, it's a bargain.

Ups and Downs

Film photography is different from any other art form in one way. We're all afraid it's going to die. It reminds me of a comedian who talked about how hard core surfers are. In no other sport do athletes face the real possibility of being consumed by a wild predator. No other art form is threatened in quite the same way. If film, paper, and chemicals are all things that need to be done in large volumes to be profitable. If the prices go up too much, demand drops off, volumes drop off, products cease production. A severe enough downward cycle could put an end to film photography as we know it in a relatively short period of time. Perhaps a year or so. The hope is that if only a few players exit the field at a time so that the others can pick up the business.

This situation also has film photographers gazing at industry news like it's some sort of tea leaves. Some of the stuff that's got me down includes this article about how the Library of Congress no longer offers traditional silver gelatin prints. While it's sad that they've stopped offering the service, what's truly depressing is the how the contracted printer feels. He's been printing for 30 years, has recently picked up digital and now feels like silver gelatin is "out of step" with today's industry. GRrrrrr! Rare, yes, different, yes, niche, YES! But somehow nebulously wrong, no, no , NO. He needs to go to a Photostock and see how alive the film community is!

On the up side is the email I just got an email that Lomography.com is now selling 120 versions of their B&W film. Yay! Except for one thing, we know who all the film mfrs are which means Lomography.com is rebadging someone's film. Dunno whose though. At least this points to their finding some more demand.

On the downside is Kodak's financial woes. It looks like they're headed for bankruptcy. On the plus side, their film and chemical divisions, though shadows of their former selves are profitable.

On the down side my local Rite Aid pharmacy now sends out their film for processing and printing. Meanwhile Walgreen's just changed their processing policy so that you MUST order two sets of prints to have your film processed. O_o Also Walmart's E6 and C-41 send out services just jumped to $7/roll. This has me thinking I perhaps over-hoarded Astia and Kodak EPP slide films.

Another interesting positive development is the release of the Lomokino. Essentially a hand crank film/movie camera that uses regular 35mm film to put 144 24mmx8.5mm frames on a roll. Neat, film hungry, stuff!

Also Keh, the largest reseller of film cameras, just did a brief guide to film types supposedly in response to an influx of new-to-film photographers. Hopefully this is a trend that continues or levels off but doesn't recede. I'm hoping there's been an actual over correction in the exodus to digital and that this isn't just a dead cat bounce.