Post-Panevėžys post

I like what Henri Cartier-Bresson once said, something along the lines of ‘If you want to make a little bit of cheese you have to milk a lot of goats’. Put that together with his musings of Zen archery (Google it) and you’ve pretty much got good street photography in a nutshell. An idea that keeps going around in my head that sounds more like an excuse than anything else when I stop to think about it is that, as those brilliant old films of Edwardian street scenes show, the streets just aren’t as busy as they used to be. Not that I’m advocate of shooting fish in a barrel, but it can get a bit depressing sometimes. This weekend I took the bus 150km north to the Lithuanian city of Panevėžys, first mentioned 500 years ago and now boasting a population of around 115,000 people. It all sounds rather promising until you go out with a camera and try to find anybody. Some days Lithuania feels like and collection of ghost towns, making my job exasperating to say the least. The way things are going, I feel pretty pleased with myself if I come home from such a trip with one decent photograph. Heading back to my hotel yesterday at around 6pm after a dismal day of seeing almost nobody I was suddenly struck by the amusing situation of trying to cross the road and having to wait what seemed like forever to get across thanks to an endless procession of cars in both directions. It’s been mentioned a million times before, but it’s still amazing to think how people have become so completely addicted to their cars. Still, I like a challenge, and if ever there was a challenge, trying to produce quality street photography with a two-megapixel Nokia in an empty country is a challenge to be sure. Anyway, I got home this afternoon and sat on the sofa with my new Antanas Sutkus book in order to read what was written inside. Not only was it uninformed arty claptrap but the quality of the English was some of the worst I’ve seen in a long time. If there’s a reason why Sutkus doesn’t get the recognition he deserves in the West, this is surely a large part of the reason. Reading between the painful lines it’s clear that Antanas Sutkus has had an extraordinary life, one that deserves a better telling than it gets now. At least that’s one contribution I can make when I finally get to meet and interview him. An intelligent book on Sutkus by the right publisher would do a lot to help promote arguably the most influential and unique photographers of the post-war Soviet Union. More of this later. I did a little more printing today, still working on the small 10cm x 15cm prints, and today actually dodging and burning parts of the images, something that is much more necessary when working with prints that if just posting photographs online. I’ve got a nice fat wad of Nokia pictures now, and will soon need to make the decision as to whether my final project will stay with the Lithuanian theme or will embrace more publishing and turn out to be a sort of retrospective, or Portable Portfolio. I still haven’t found the time to get some pictures printed at the Kodak Pro shop, neither have I made any advances towards doing some test colour separation prints. I keep getting distracted and worrying that my pictures aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, but then remember that the most important thing is to follow my own instincts and to produce a body of work that represents who I really am, not who I sometimes think I should be. When I get a minute I’ll do some rough scans of everything I’ve printed so far and put everything on line so that what I keep going on about hopefully makes more sense than it does just in words. I also want to try and find some more time to develop my snapshot projects, especially the Snapshot Citizens project I really badly want to do. I don’t think I’ve written about that yet. Will have to do that another time.