Warm spot and cold beer

[Ivo_B]

I learned something today! (really, no hidden agenda)

[RSL]

Ivo, I don't really want to get in an argument over this, but what I see is some guy at a table, with a beer in front of him, picking his nose. Is there some emotional content here I'm missing? Some deep meaning?

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

Oh, no! What have I done!? We are now going into "why is my warm spot and cold beer worse than other guy's warm spot and cold beer?"

Actually, I like Ivo's shot. I won't go into better or worse than the other one, just leave it at "like."

The "deep meaning" is in the absence of deep meaning. It just an illustration of one of many banalities of our everyday existence. We've all been there (in life, not that particular spot). It isn't a glamorous area, a bunch of cars and standardized housing instead. The sun is warm and the beer is cold (it ain't England, after all), the reading material is there too (phone, of course) and yet... none of that seems to make the guy happy. Instead, he is deep into whatever is troubling him (or not). Or simply absorbing the meaninglessness of it all. As I said, we've all been there.

[RSL]

Instead, he is deep into whatever is troubling him (or not). Or simply absorbing the meaninglessness of it all.

Or just picking his nose.

[Rob C]

It's what happens when you piss off the waiter: he pours out the starter from such a hight as to create a mountain of foam that goes right up the nose. I dislike beer, and even more I dislike seeing women drinking beer, which is somehow so enfeminine it turns me right off. Ladies should do dainty, not trucker.

I do appreciate that the nose picker is probably not a lady - doing it in public, hardly even a gentleman. The ambiguity, of course, lies in what did he do with it next?

Now you know girls; a beer in your hand and folks like me will remain on the dark side of the street.

There really must be a poem or a song in there, could I but see it.

[Ivo_B]

Ivo, I don't really want to get in an argument over this, but what I see is some guy at a table, with a beer in front of him, picking his nose. Is there some emotional content here I'm missing? Some deep meaning?

Fair question, Russ

Don’t you see the ambiguous empty chair at the other side of the table? The empty spot reserved for his date, not showing up?
The silent cellphone on the table, fruitless waiting for a call, reflecting the man his beer, the beer he will drink to soothe his love sickness.
The woman in the window on the opposite of the street, transcendental laughing with the poor man.

Don’t you recognize the dated Vichy shirt? In West Belgium a sign of desperate bachelors.
And the badly chosen location for a romantic date, aside a boisterous road.

 

[faberryman]

Every picture tells a story aka you can make up a story about any picture.

[Rob C]

Every picture tells a story aka you can make up a story about any picture.

And I frequently do, even before I shoot one. Several have been born of a title that flashed across my consciousness, but even though I have a surfeit of those, they are still not often motivation enough to make me bother... you know, photography really does not bring its own reward: it takes a lot of hard graft to convince oneself otherwise and do it.

Rob

[RSL]

Fair question, Russ

Don’t you see the ambiguous empty chair at the other side of the table? The empty spot reserved for his date, not showing up?
The silent cellphone on the table, fruitless waiting for a call, reflecting the man his beer, the beer he will drink to soothe his love sickness.
The woman in the window on the opposite of the street, transcendental laughing with the poor man.

Don’t you recognize the dated Vichy shirt? In West Belgium a sign of desperate bachelors.
And the badly chosen location for a romantic date, aside a boisterous road.

 

Actually, Ivo, what I see is a guy sitting in the sun with a beer on his table, picking his nose. I think Fab has it right: ". . .you can make up a story about any picture." Unfortunately, the picture is what's supposed to tell you a story, not the other way around.

[Ivo_B]

Actually, Ivo, what I see is a guy sitting in the sun with a beer on his table, picking his nose. I think Fab has it right: ". . .you can make up a story about any picture." Unfortunately, the picture is what's supposed to tell you a story, not the other way around.

Then tell me Russ, what makes one more willing to fantasize a story under ones picture and unwilling under another.

Burtynsky’s comment on the Scotiabank award winners photo is considered as an ‘us know us’ thing. What about the comments here on Lula?

It seems there is a lot good will to project and do a cerebral effort to make a picture better than it is for the one, not for the other.

It’s normal human behavior, nothing wrong with it. But it doesn’t harm to do some kind of self sanitizing and clean out our belly button we are gazing at.

[Rob C]

Then tell me Russ, what makes one more willing to fantasize a story under ones picture and unwilling under another.

Burtynsky’s comment on the Scotiabank award winners photo is considered as an ‘us know us’ thing. What about the comments here on Lula?

It seems there is a lot good will to project and do a cerebral effort to make a picture better than it is for the one, not for the other.

It’s normal human behavior, nothing wrong with it. But it doesn’t harm to do some kind of self sanitizing and clean out our belly button we are gazing at.

During the hedonistic 60s you could actually buy a belly button cleaning tool. The brush for the man who has to have eveything. And there still are many of those about. Not sure if the button cleaners were designed to last, though - probably not. But neither was Ektachrome.

A harsh reality of life onlne, Ivo, as you are sure to have sussed out for yourself, is that 99.99% of all the pictuires posted on it are shit. The difficulty is, of course, telling what's what, because people have a different sense of smell to one another. For instance, my vanilla is another man's shoe polish.

Rob

[stamper]

For me the cluttered background spoils a potentially good image.

[Rob C]

For me the cluttered background spoils a potentially good image.

It's what the Leica Noctilux was invented to cure!

;-)

[Ivo_B]

For me the cluttered background spoils a potentially good image.

I understand your objection and I had the same idea in the past (I don't want to say that my insights today are improved, theye are different) Actually, I think the environment as such is an essential element of a todays scene.
Imagine an image like this without the cluttered street in 50 years, nobody is going to care, apart from the interest in the dated phone and Vichy shirt. But in 50 years, People are going to love the 2019 cars and environment.
Thats my take on street, see?

[D Fuller]

I like this, because I can feel the day, feel the street. I can imagine someone walking past and, in my head, hear what that sounds like. It’s not an idealized anything, and as such, I believe it.

[32BT]

For me the cluttered background spoils a potentially good image.

For me that cluttered background would exactly be the point of the picture. There is good tonal contrast between that background and the subject, so they are nicely separated. There is a sense of beauty by design at the seating, attempting to be a nice place to enjoy a cold beer, and that is contrasted by the banal view killing any successful attempt at creating an atmosphere. By the owner of the establishment, I mean, not the atmosphere created by the photographer which exactly manages to capture that contrast.

Like I said, I am beginning to think all good photography is about contrasts. Tonal and color contrasts, and more importantly contrast in content and narrative. So, yes, the picture works, but if you insist: no, it's not street in the narrow sense of our definition, and personally I would prefer not to see it was shot through a window.

[Rob C]

I like this, because I can feel the day, feel the street. I can imagine someone walking past and, in my head, hear what that sounds like. It’s not an idealized anything, and as such, I believe it.

Anyone who is fit enough to step outside home can experience all of what you describe without recourse to a photograph.

I want to divorce my opinions here from this specific photograph because I well know that Ivo can shoot all sorts of images well; it's not about specifics but genres and ultimate intentions. I just want to say I don't feel that image captures anything at all that's remarkable, and I hardly think Ivo is doing anything here but having fun on this thread, as do I sometimes.

If you want to leave images for posterity, to reveal fashions and ways of life, then there are far better ways of doing that, and don't forget something most important: we, today, look at snaps from the past with interest, deriving the clues from magazines and assorted collections of work that appeared in books etc. on the Internet. The Internet has changed everything, and the idea that one of us is going to leave a legacy of meaningful images that in a hundred years will make us famous, is nuts. We are already drowned out in the tsunami of images - think what killed stock as a generally good income source! Unless a disaster of international proportions occurs, such as all electricity being wiped out for months, those files will always be around and probably readable in some form or another.

All the fashion mags have online histories complete with pictures, so the individual is fooling himself if he imagines he has anything fresh to contribute to history. Movies, tv shows, it's all documented with style and vigour better than our own. And those companies understand the value of back catalogue far better today that the innocents of the forties and fifties ever did.

I believe that in order to get any buzz from your own work, you are obliged to surprise yourself first of all, and then be ruthessly cruel with those new children and disown them at their first offence. Tough call; mainly, I just pat 'em on the head and stick 'em on the website regardless. It's not a business - I am not looking for anything but self-satisfaction and personal viewing/researching convenience through my website. And some turn out to have bit-player status in my plays somewhere else. Nice.

Trouble is, to shine in this kind of reportage work takes a particular kind of mindset and exposure that younger folks are unlikely to get because their interest rests within their own age group, and it appears patently clear to me that this is not a generation of great street artists! They could be, if only they understood what it was about instead of aping their contemporaries who, by and large, know no more than they do.

If the past can be a key to the future, then perhaps a study of Robert Frank et al. would help. It's informative to know that after his book, The Americans, he pretty much abandoned stills photography, reportedly because he felt he'd already said all there was to say about the genre in which he was interested. He was probably right, and not many who followed him contrbuted anything as touching, poignant and pointed. He was apparently little interested in the commercial world of work, thinking of it disparagingly, and he and Louis Faurer used to refer to those who wallowed in it and it's fleshpots as "Sammys", after the character in the novel What Makes Sammy Run. It did Faurer no harm at all; it fed him well.

And with Faurer, you find an instance of where the Internet fails him: there are very few of his fashion pics around because his work was left with friends for a long time, and he repeatedly failed to heed their requests to pick it up and take care of it himself. They dumped it. Maybe he really didn't give a damn, and he believed in the supposed damage of the ethos of Sammy.

I guess Frank did two clever things: he made a body of work telling an overall story - reportage - as well as doing so in the manner of street, giving us the very best of both within the single body of work.

Rob

[Ivo_B]

Anyone who is fit enough to step outside home can experience all of what you describe without recourse to a photograph.

I want to divorce my opinions here from this specific photograph because I well know that Ivo can shoot all sorts of images well; it's not about specifics but genres and ultimate intentions. I just want to say I don't feel that image captures anything at all that's remarkable, and I hardly think Ivo is doing anything here but having fun on this thread, as do I sometimes.

If you want to leave images for posterity, to reveal fashions and ways of life, then there are far better ways of doing that, and don't forget something most important: we, today, look at snaps from the past with interest, deriving the clues from magazines and assorted collections of work that appeared in books etc. on the Internet. The Internet has changed everything, and the idea that one of us is going to leave a legacy of meaningful images that in a hundred years will make us famous, is nuts. We are already drowned out in the tsunami of images - think what killed stock as a generally good income source! Unless a disaster of international proportions occurs, such as all electricity being wiped out for months, those files will always be around and probably readable in some form or another.

All the fashion mags have online histories complete with pictures, so the individual is fooling himself if he imagines he has anything fresh to contribute to history. Movies, tv shows, it's all documented with style and vigour better than our own. And those companies understand the value of back catalogue far better today that the innocents of the forties and fifties ever did.

I believe that in order to get any buzz from your own work, you are obliged to surprise yourself first of all, and then be ruthessly cruel with those new children and disown them at their first offence. Tough call; mainly, I just pat 'em on the head and stick 'em on the website regardless. It's not a business - I am not looking for anything but self-satisfaction and personal viewing/researching convenience through my website. And some turn out to have bit-player status in my plays somewhere else. Nice.

Trouble is, to shine in this kind of reportage work takes a particular kind of mindset and exposure that younger folks are unlikely to get because their interest rests within their own age group, and it appears patently clear to me that this is not a generation of great street artists! They could be, if only they understood what it was about instead of aping their contemporaries who, by and large, know no more than they do.

If the past can be a key to the future, then perhaps a study of Robert Frank et al. would help. It's informative to know that after his book, The Americans, he pretty much abandoned stills photography, reportedly because he felt he'd already said all there was to say about the genre in which he was interested. He was probably right, and not many who followed him contrbuted anything as touching, poignant and pointed. He was apparently little interested in the commercial world of work, thinking of it disparagingly, and he and Louis Faurer used to refer to those who wallowed in it and it's fleshpots as "Sammys", after the character in the novel What Makes Sammy Run. It did Faurer no harm at all; it fed him well.

And with Faurer, you find an instance of where the Internet fails him: there are very few of his fashion pics around because his work was left with friends for a long time, and he repeatedly failed to heed their requests to pick it up and take care of it himself. They dumped it. Maybe he really didn't give a damn, and he believed in the supposed damage of the ethos of Sammy.

I guess Frank did two clever things: he made a body of work telling an overall story - reportage - as well as doing so in the manner of street, giving us the very best of both within a the single body of work.

Rob

It is true, this post is more a little but not evil provocation. I think the discussions (not the rant) under such a provocation are more interesting than the +1's, 'As Usual' and 'Good Grab' comments.

All tough, it's not a provocation for the provocation, I do believe in photography as pure registration with no attempt to conceal a boisterous or disturbing environment. I strongly believe in William Eggleston's statements:
 
“You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.” –
“It quickly came to be that I grew interested in photographing whatever was there wherever I happened to be. For any reason.” – William Eggelston


I like to search the boundaries of my work, stretching my photographic comfort zone.
Alas, I can only dream of a consistent body of work, it's not me, I'm not enough concentrated on one thing, when I understand one thing, I move to the next.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

Or just picking his nose.

Doesn't look like it. I often touch my nose in the similar fashion when I am contemplating something.

[32BT]

Alas, I can only dream of a consistent body of work, ...

Well, within the context of LuLa I can immediately identify even this image as a real Ivo_B, if that helps any...  =:-/