This is what happens…

…when APE links to you. 

Girl on the Magazine Cover, The (1940)

This is how “behind the scenes” was done ‘back in the day…

Learn about Jam Handy here.  I have always liked the Diane Keaton book Mr. Salesman, which is a collection of sales training photographs from the 40’s and 50’s, which I believe were made by Handy, but I am not sure. 

Not far from NSEW.

Reproduce-able

Went to see Stefan Ruiz last night at Aperture and he talked about his book “Portraits”.

He signed the book for me, although the “R” in Ruiz got wiped off. I have the only book signed by “Stefan uiz” in existance. Actually, I don’t have it, since I had him sign the wrapper as a lark. I have since discarded the wrapper meaning this is the only photograph of a Stefan Ruiz book signed “Stefan uiz”.

I like this work a lot. There is a lot of space in the pictures and a straightforwardness that I seek in my own work sometimes. And the lighting style provoked some thought.

For the past couple of weeks I have been mulling over an idea that I have had for a while, that there is a style of photography that I might label “reproducible”. It has to do with what I see on the newsstands over the past few years, and conversations I have had with editors about the quality of their paper stock. Time and time again I have heard “that won’t reproduce on our paper” with regards to some dark melancholy photograph I have made, or just recently when I wanted to run a story in black and white in the New York Times I was told the same thing, “black and white does not look good on our paper.”

Huh?

This is the “Grey Lady” we are talking about right? But it is not unique to them.

I think some of the best feedback I ever received from an editorial board was after a job I shot for Fortune too many years back to admit to. In a fit of desperation or you might say after exhausting all my ideas of “good” lighting I decided to arbitrarily put lights up in a kind of north-south-east-west fashion. In other words I was not going to let the subject dictate the lighting. It was just going to be “light.”

Technically this isn’t NSEW, this is more copy-stand like Stefan Ruiz. I was still trying to be nice. Depending on the room configuration I could usually get two or three lights going. But soon this was not enough, and I decided to break the “fourth wall” as it were, and put the remaining light in:

For one of the last issues of George Magazine, see, I am dating myself…

W:

To me, things were getting better. You could see less despite having more lights. Compounding the issue was that I decided to print the negs on Ilford Multigrade Fibre Matt. Yeah, some kinda wonderful…

A party for W magazine-this has flash on camera triggering strobes in the room.

More for Fortune, on risking retirement funds on the stock market. Love that flash glare in the patio door:

And the nadir, same story, but the editor asked, do you have any lighter frames?

I think a lot of this has to do with colour vs. black and white. Magazines Hate Black and White. I think it says, “you couldn’t spend the money for colour?” or “this is olde.” But I think most of it has to do with reproducibility. The paper is so bad that you cannot print anything with any depth. And printing is a significant cost of making a magazine. So do you think there is a style evolved out of the necessities of printing on bad paper that could be called “reproduceable?”