Maybe I'm too close to it, but I don't agree with your assessment.
Yes a lot of work, mine included and especially for commerce can be over produced, but that is just the nature of commerce and what happens when the room swells from 5 people to 2 dozen.
It's not that the photographer doesn't have a vision, or just wants to see the room and the expenses grow, but the resulting size of production is just a reflection of what is involved, usually a committee driven concept and once again, there is nothing "wrong" with this as it has proven over time to work.
Then again I don't think things are much different today than they were in the past.
For small editorial such as this
http://russellrutherford.com/paris_editorial/The production is small, and the lighting on this was limited to either what was available and I used one tungsten Fresnel for fill. (The two black and white images were shot with the leica, BTW).
Also when we do a personal project like this, the production is even smaller, down to two assistants, makeup, hair, stylist and models. I may shoot just 5 frames a session.
You may have a rose colored remembrance of the past and believe simplicity produced a pure look, but I think the past is just that, the past and of the pure photographs I see from those days, few really grabbed my attention or will last past their own publication dates.
I think what works is just what works. Sometimes it takes a huge crew and cast to produce even a simple retail shoot, where left to our own devices, a smaller crew will produce equal or even superior imagery, but then again that's because we start with a more simple agenda.
Commerce, especially when the money increases, will always have a more complicated agenda but I can promise you in this industry the past is just that . . . the past.
To move forward you do what works today, but it's not always that complicated and just because it's digital doesn't make it any less or more pure than before with film and wet darkrooms.
I don't believe in being nostalgic for anything. It just slows me up and will keep me from going forward and the photographers I know that miss the good old days, usually aren't working that much, if at all.
JR
James
I was slightly amused by your post regarding photographic quality because it takes me right back to where I was some months ago when I voiced a sadness about the way in which fashion photography has evolved.
At the time of writing, I was admitting a nostalgia for my own era - 60s to mid 80s - and noting how different everything is today. In particular, I referred to the fact that once upon a time we would just pick up the model, take along the clients´ clothes in the back of the car and go shoot something off the cuff or in accordance with some location arrangement made earlier in the week. And that was it: from humble little me to Horvat, Sieff and probably anyone else outwith New York, it was just photography. Then came the make-up people, the hair people and on and on and up went the total costs. I remember Helmut Newton saying on Fashion TV (the show with Jeannie Becker - Toronto) that in his "good old days" they just went out on the streets of Paris like wild dogs and shot and shot; today (his last few years) "everything is such a big deal..."
And that sort of sums it up.
Closer to your point about photographic quality, I can only take your own stuff as example. Yes, it is very impressive, but for ME, and possibly only me, it is exactly the same as all the other work that appears in the mags: skin is not skin, everybody looks too plastic-perfect; nothing much seems natural. The same quality is to be found in the portfolio of the Australian chap that posts here - Elitesometing? - which, as with yours work, is most impressive on a technical level but, to me, at the cost of the emotional. And if fashion is not about emotion then it´s about nothing.
I understand only too well that you have to go with the market, so no criticism is given, what I do say is that I believe it is all linked to the over-complication of everything in life today, from digital cameras and their compulsory computers to the fact that photographers have to be other than photographers, Jacks of all trades, if you will, and you know how seldom Jack does it all well.
The reference to the lady in France (another, but relevant thread) who gets somebody else to do the actual shooting is not as absurd as it seems at first glance. Is she not just doing a level above what art directors do, the ones who don´t trust the photographer?
So, if you tie up the basic truth of what you remarked about the Leica pictures you saw on show and marry it to the ethic of the commercial world, do you see a conflict between too much technical "perfection" and emotional expression? I don´t think I see much work anywhere that combines the two qualities with a lot of success.
Ciao - Rob C
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