Two extraordinary-looking 17-year-old girls, one dark, the other blonde, just rode past me on a little motor scooter. I was carrying my dSLR and I didn’t take a shot. Is it because it’s Sunday and I’m hung over? Maybe it’s because I’m still a bumbling amateur? And, come to think of it, do I really want to be the kind of person who’s always looking for photographs?
I’m just back from a therapeutic Sunday afternoon stroll down to the fishing boats and back, the glorious Greek light playing on every crumbling, shiny, epidermic surface. I could get used to wandering the streets with a camera all day and every day. Take away your eye and your technical capabilities and what you’re left with is time. The subject keeps cropping up. I want more time.
Last night hordes of us drove down the coast to see a couple of friends murder several Irish tunes in a beachside taverna. Sat at our large table were a young dark-eyed girl and her identical mother. In her early 20s Dimitra is paralysed from the waist down and is, in a nutshell, stunning. My friend Anita, the retired American Jew who converted to the Greek Orthodox faith before I was born and who I’ve mentioned before is teetotal, and as the meal to accompany the food came off a set menu including wine, I had her half litre as well as mine. Pleasantly giggly I took the opportunity of somebody’s need for the toilet to steal their chair and get to know Dimitra. I’ve got her phone number and I want to photograph her.
Back to today, I realised that one of the things I enjoy most in life is talking to strangers. This is a prerequisite of my day job, and is something I automatically do when I’m taking photographs in the street. It’s not that I want to take the kind of pictures of people that involves asking them for their permission, it’s more the other way round. I take the portraits I take when I’m out because it means getting to meet people. I’m going to have to look into this closer at a later date. Right now I need to lie down for a bit before heading off to Anita’s apartment in the hope that the light will be kind enough to allow me to take a group portrait of the international women’s group here in Volos. They're an interesting bunch and I realise I don’t take enough pictures of females.
Oh, and about Sebastião Salgado. I’d never seen anything of his taken before his Kuwait pictures, and was struck by Paul’s comments about his early work having dreamy, mystical overtones. This is pretty much (in my opinion anyway) a Latino trademark, seen in Latino art from the Cuban theatre of Teatro Buendía to the films of Luis Buñuel to the novels of Fidel Castro’s buddy Gabriel García Márquez. Personally I’m not a fan, but it’s good that it’s out there. Salgado’s business model is more interesting than his work, and I was glad more for being told about that than being shown his actual work. The other thing about him is that he’s not from the USA. Amazing that documentary photography’s one and only superstar hails from a Third World country.
2 comments:
you are more of a fan of salgado's business plan than his work?
Absolutely. His work leaves me cold. Just because something's technically brilliant doesn't mean it has to be admired. I feel unbelievably uncomfortable about photographer-superstars, it doesn't feel right to me. And what I really meant about the business model was that this is really the nuts and bolts of the thing. I'm on this course because I want to make a living with photography. I particularly enjoyed hearing about Mary Ellen Mark using her more conventional work to feed her other stuff. Have you ever read Charles Ives? He believed that artists who sat in their ivory towers all day had nothing to say about the world. And of course he put his money where his mouth was, running a successful insurance business and composing on the train to and from work.
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