In Sun and Shadow, Ricardo Reyes, a man in a Mexican village, wages war against a fashion photographer who, in Ricardo’s view, is engaged in unforgivable photographic appropriation.

The story’s opening paragraph is intended to align the reader’s allegiance. In it, Bradbury describes a clicking camera held in the “tenderly exploiting hands” of a photographer. We may not know it yet, but by these words the reader should suspect Bradbury’s position; that the photographer exploits not just the camera, but much more besides.

From the window of his village home, Ricardo watches in annoyance as the photographer uses Ricardo’s alleyway as a backdrop. The photographer positions his fashion model subject against the cracked plaster of the building opposite Ricardo’s. He places her delicately against Ricardo’s own banister, with the weathered paint so artfully peeling. He positions Ricardo’s own son, Tomás, in the alleyway, within view of the camera’s lens. This is the final straw.

Ricardo shouts out the window to the photographer and model. “You there!”

Ricardo’s wife, Maria, embarassed, urges him to stop. “They’re not hurting anything.”

Storming out the door, Ricardo replies to his wife with Bradbury’s exaggerated sense of humor.

“I’ll cut off their heads!”

When he reaches confrontation range, Ricardo tells the photographer to get away from his house. The photographer assures Ricardo that it’s okay, that they’re only making fashion photos. The photographer is sure that this argument will work. He will tell Ricardo that they’re taking photos and Ricardo, like hundreds of others before him, will understand and let them get on with their work.

Ricardo won’t allow it, and he makes his point:

“You are employed; I am employed. We are all employed people. We must understand each other. But when you come to my house with your camera that looks like the complex eye of a black horsefly, then the understanding is over. I will not have my alley used because of its pretty shadows, or my sky used because of its sun, or my house used because there is an interesting crack in the wall, here! You see! Ah, how beautiful! Lean here! Stand there! Sit here! […] Oh, I heard you. Do you think I am stupid?”

Ricardo eventually berates the photographer until, exasperated, the photographer flees the alley. The battle has been won but the war is not ended. Ricardo wants the man gone not just from his alley, but from his entire village.

When the photographer tries unsuccessfully to pay Ricardo to leave him alone, and then announces loudly to his model that they’ll go take pictures on the next street over where earlier he’d noticed “a nice cracked wall there[…]”, Ricardo announces (louder still) that he’ll follow them.

Keeping pace with the fleeing photographer and his model, Ricardo once more makes his point.

And this paragraph, I think, is the heart of the argument. Ricardo wants his family and his friends and his village, his life and his place in the world, to be seen not as props, but as people. He demands no less.

“Do you see what I mean? My alley is my alley, my life is my life, my son is my son. My son is not cardboard! I saw you putting my son against the wall, so, and thus, in the background. What do you call it – for the correct air? To make the whole attractive, and the lovely lady in front of him?”

“We are poor people,” said Ricardo. “Our doors peel paint, our walls are chipped and cracked, our gutters fume in the street, the alleys are all cobbles. But it fills me with terrible rage when I see you make over these things as if I had planned it this way, as if I years ago induced the wall to crack. Did you think I knew you were coming and aged the paint? Or that I knew you were coming and put my boy in his dirtiest clothes? We are not a studio! We are people and must be given attention as people. Have I made it clear?”

Here, Bradbury has broached the subject of class and economics. Ricardo is poor. By contrast, the photographer and his model, with the hat boxes and makeup cases and assistants and expensive gear, must be rich. Bradbury shines a light on the power dynamic at play here, and the cultural looting done by traveling photographers who spare no expense for the perfect background or the artfully weathered wall, or the beautifully devastated face. The cracked hands of the sweatshop worker in Sri Lanka, or the blood-rimmed eyes in the blackened face of the coal-miner. The blistered feet of the man pounding pans in the streets of Kolkata for less money per day than an American would accept for a minute’s work. The photographers go out to hunt for the underpaid of the world, before returning to “civilization” to collect their pay.

But the photographer in the story isn’t listening. He’s moving his production along to the next alley. Once there, he comes across some colleagues shooting their own fashion shots. Here, Bradbury sprinkles his sense of humor, as the photographer greets his irreverent colleague and apprises him of the situation.

“How you doing, Joe?”

“We got some beautiful shots near the Church of the Virgin, some statuary without any noses, lovely stuff,” said Joe. “What’s the commotion?”

“Pancho here got in an uproar. Seems we leaned against his house and knocked it down.”

“My name is Ricardo. My house is completely intact.”

To this point in the story, it’s not perfectly obvious whether Ricardo is a fanatic lunatic or a reasonable man simply taking a stand against what he sees as an injustice. Bradbury presents the counterpoint to Ricardo through a number of characters within the story. These assert that the photographers aren’t doing anything wrong, that they’re simply making a living.

Ricardo’s own son laughs happily with the photographer. Ricardo’s wife tells him to leave them alone, saying in no uncertain terms that “they aren’t hurting anything.”  When the photographer positions his model in front of a local shop, one which possess a “nice antique wall[…]”, Ricardo is stunned to find the shop owner watching the photo shoot with mild amusement.

“Jorge! What are you doing?” […] “isn’t that your archway? Are you going to let them use it?”

“I’m not bothered,” said Jorge.

Ricardo shook his arm. “They’re treating your property like a movie actor’s place. Aren’t you insulted?”

“I haven’t thought about it,” Jorge picked his nose.

“Jesus upon earth, man, think!”

“I can’t see any harm,” said Jorge.

But seeing that no one is going to stop the injustice, Ricardo takes action. As the photoshoot continues, he surreptitiously positions himself for the next salvo.

The photographer directs the model to pose this way and that, delicately composing his shot for the maximum effect, and just as he’s about to fire the shot, Ricardo bounds into frame and drops his pants.

“Oh, my God!” said the photographer.

Some of the models squealed. The crowd laughed and pummeled each other a bit. Ricardo quietly raised his pants and leaned against the wall.

“Was that quaint enough?” he said.

The plot of the story continues in this way for another page or two (the entire story is only eight pages long). Ricardo thwarts the cameraman by dropping his pants whenever a photo is attempted, all while a growing crowd of his fellow villagers look on bemusedly.

The photographer soon sends his assistant for a policeman. When the unhurried policeman arrives, he assesses the situation and sees no fault. Ricardo is simply standing there, naked. And in the policeman’s estimation, there’s nothing wrong with a man of the village standing there with his pants down.

They argue the point, but Ricardo has found allies in the villagers and policeman. When the photographer finally gives up, he tells his models “Come on, girls, we’ll go somewhere else.”

Ricardo is ready with a victorious reply.

“France,” said Ricardo.

“What!” The photographer whirled.

“I said France, or Spain,” suggested Ricardo. “Or Sweden. I have seen some nice pictures of walls in Sweden. But not many cracks in them. Forgive my suggestion.”

As the story ends, the photographer and his models retreat down the street toward the docks and Ricardo watches in satisfaction. He relives the moments before and plans his evening ahead. Here, Bradbury uses gorgeous lyrical writing to remind us of his position. That the world is not made for just some of us, it is here for all of us, and we are all equally deserving of it.

Now, Ricardo thought, I will walk up the street to my house, which has paint peeling from the door where I have brushed it a thousand times in passing, and I shall walk over the stones I have worn down in forty-six years of walking, and I shall run my hand over the crack in the wall of my own house, which is the crack made by the earthquake in 1930. I remember well the night, us all in bed, Tomás as yet unborn, and Maria and I much in love, and thinking it was our love which moved the house, warm and great in the night; but it was the earth trembling, and in the morning, that crack in the wall. And I shall climb the steps to the lacework-grille balcony of my father’s house, which grillwork he made with his own hands, and I shall eat the food my wife serves me on the balcony, with the books near at hand. And my son Tomás, whom I created out of whole cloth, yes, bed sheets, let us admit it, with my good wife. And we shall sit eating and talking, not photographs, not backdrops, not paintings, not stage furniture, any of us. But actors, all of us, very fine actors indeed.

By the end of the story, Ricardo is confirmed as a quiet hero. As the photographers flee and Ricardo pulls up his pants, the villagers literally applaud him.

Bradbury wrote this story in 1953. At that time, photography as a mainstream middle-class pursuit was relatively new. The Leica M3 didn’t exist yet. Most people didn’t know what an SLR was. Kodak hadn’t yet begun monetizing our living memories as “Kodak Moments.” And yet Bradbury was already writing about cultural photographic larceny.

I shudder to think what he’d write about the era of smartphone cameras, and Instagram and TikTok. An era in which travelers (often wealthy ones) seek out the “authentic” places (often code for “poor”), stand in line with dozens of other “photographers” and slice away their little piece of someone else’s world for display on social media. All without ever really interacting or experiencing the true cultures of the people whose land they’re shooting.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s no crime in photographers of a majority culture photographing people of a minority culture, or the other way around (though this happens far less often). That’s called cultural exchange, and it’s good.

But I think the critical judgment of whether something is cultural exchange or cultural appropriation should be held in the hands of the minority. It’s the duty of the majority to listen to the minority. And if any one member of a minority takes exception to the actions of anyone of the majority, that should be enough. Just one voice calling out for justice should be enough for the majority to listen, as happened in Sun and Shadow.

If, in the story, Ricardo had not existed, there would have been no conflict. The photographers would have absorbed the Mexican village into their photographs and carelessly jetted away. No one in the story, besides Ricardo, thought that the photographers were doing any harm.

Ricardo was the one voice. The one protesting minority voice amongst his indifferent fellows.

“Am I the only one in the world with a tongue in my mouth?” said Ricardo to his empty hands. “And taste on my tongue? Is this a town of backdrops and picture sets? Won’t anyone do something about this except me?”

No one in the story does, in fact, do anything about it. Ricardo is, in his own words, the “one man like me in a town of ten thousand,” who allows the world to go on as it should. “Without me,” he opines, “all would be chaos.”

Sun and Shadow currently appears in Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories

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Shooting Film : Everything You Need to Know About Analogue Photography, in keeping with the subtitle, contains all of the information that a new film photographer would need to know to get into this hobby, craft, profession, whatever you want to call it.

The book begins with an argument for shooting film in the digital era. Ben Hawkins, the book’s author, launches into it. “Film Photography is Back!” shouts the first line of the first page. The fact that I’ve been evangelizing film cameras professionally for the past eight years showed itself as I snarkily quipped to the author, “Film photography never went away, BEN.” My eyes traced down to the first paragraph’s text. “Not that it ever went away…” continued the author. “Oh, I’ve found a comrade. My apologies, Ben.”

The introduction provides us with a starting point. Here’s why film is great. We read the intro and want to shoot film. Let’s find out how. The book then quickly launches into the craft in a perfectly logical way – camera types and formats first, buying advice for finding a film camera, and then into the most popular examples of each type. From there it outlines film formats, film types, and when and why we’d want to use one or the others. Accessories are profiled and on we go.

After the nuts and bolts of gear acquisition, we dive into basic techniques, focusing clearly on the specifics of shooting film. We then jump into more advanced techniques, genre studies, retro flaws, and then crawl deeper and deeper into the nerd hole that is film photography – developing at home, pushing and pulling, printing at home, building a darkroom, and on, and on.

The book also spends a decent amount of page space on less-often explored aspects of the medium, such as slide projectors, best practices for archiving negatives, and best ways to store prints. Have I mentioned the book is thorough?

There’s a section of the book which also offers case studies on modern day film photographers, offering insight into their craft and inspiration to the reader.

A film photography jargon buster, comprehensive index, and lists of current film camera shops and websites finishes off the book. Was I depressed that my site and my shop weren’t included on these lists? Absolutely. Did it color my review? Absolutely not. And we can thank my old journalism professor for that.

Can we find all of the information contained within Shooting Film on the internet? Of course. We’ve covered a lot of these things on this very website. But the book is really well done; excellent writing and beautiful photography, and it’s nice holding something in the hand. This should be a familiar concept to anyone shooting film, right?

For me, Shooting Film strikes a perfect balance between deep dive explorations of the medium and succinctness. It tells you what you need to know but stops short of inundating the reader with information overload. There’s plenty within these pages to keep even experienced photographers entertained and intrigued; the section on DIY cameras has me wondering why I’ve not yet built my own camera, and the beautiful product photography (something I pride myself on here at Casual Photophile) is eye candy enough to just sit and browse in a comfortable chair without feeling I’m wasting my time.

Before I opened this book I was a little bit apprehensive. I’d never heard of Ben Hawkins or Lisa Kanaeva-Hunsicker, the author and photographer who have put together Shooting Film, and I worried that it might be written by a couple of kids who had shot their first roll of film six months ago. To be clear, I love kids who have just learned about film. They’re great, and their enthusiasm is infectious and their talent is bright and fresh, and they are the people who are keeping this hobby growing. But I also see a lot of bad information on the internet and YouTube published by really unqualified people, and I get a little frustrated. Shooting Film, the book, is not made by unqualified people. Ben and Lisa have approached this thing with experience and seriousness, and they’ve produced a book that is not only a useful resource for new film shooters, but an inspiring collection of everything that makes the medium so great.

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“I don’t do landscapes” and Other Misguided Notions

My main limitation, I believe, was a narrow understanding of what landscape photography is or what it can be. I mostly thought of it as… well, Mark Knopfler said it better than I can: “The drawing room tea-set / Wants horses, sunsets / Sweet nothings – the seaside with yachts.”

I don’t claim any kind of moral high ground; I’ve taken my fair share of “sweet nothings” – pleasant but unoriginal photos of horses, sunsets and the rest. Sometimes the sky turns a certain shade of pink, a flock of birds takes flight and you gotta do what you gotta do. But I’m not just talking about landscape photography by dilettantes such as myself.

In 2012, I went to see an Ansel Adams exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. I was blown away by his compositions, dramatic timing and mastery over light and shade. But the exhibition did not move me, or make me think, as much as some others have – World Press Photo exhibitions, for example. Now clearly, this is just about my own preferences, and not a general slant against photographs that celebrate picturesque or sublime vistas. But it took me a while to discover the other forms of landscape photography are out there. Wanting to broaden my vistas (literally) was one reason for purchasing Perspectives on Place.

Perspectives on Place Overview

Perspectives on Place is written by JAP Alexander, a freelance photographer and writer. It features images by a number of photographers who have engaged with the landscape in diverse ways – from stalwarts of the past like Ansel Adams and Fay Godwin, to contemporary and postmodern work by artists such as Noémie Goudal and Tonk. Even Spirit, the NASA Mars rover, gets an entry.

The cover image – Hong Kong, Back Door 02 by Michael Wolf – sets the tone for what is to come. I’ve seen many photos of the Hong Kong skyline taken from the surrounding hills; in fact, I took one such photo myself when I was there in 2011. In Wolf’s place, many of us would have instinctively framed to exclude the plastic chair, but its inclusion makes it so much more surprising and thought-provoking. Who was sitting there, and why? What went through their mind? How much of the landscape – and philosophically speaking, how much of life – do we miss, when we fixate on the grand vista in the distance and ignore the seemingly mundane details closer at hand?

The binding, paper quality, print and layout are all excellent. I photographed some of the pages for this review, but they don’t really do it justice.

The images featured in the book include remote landscapes like glaciers (Jose Navarro) and national parks (Ansel Adams), but also shopping malls (Dan Holdsworth), unassuming Welsh villages (Keith Arnatt) and even computer-generated terrain (Joan Fontcuberta). Indeed, one of the key messages of the book – as Paul Hill says in the foreword – is that “you don’t have to go to remote or exotic places … to make landscape photographs. The land is … everywhere – in your backyard and garden, in retail parks and industrial estates, as well as in picturesque dingles and glens” (p6).

The book is designed as a “primer” (p13) – not just for “makers of landscape pictures” but for anyone who is interested in contemporary landscape photography. It has five chapters addressing broad conceptual themes such as Defining Nature (chapter 2) and Landscape and Power (chapter 4). At the end of each chapter, there are end notes indicating sources and further readings, ideas for projects and questions for research and discussion. As a casual reader I didn’t do the assignments myself, but I can see how they would add value, especially if the book is used as part of a (formal or informal) photography curriculum.

Technical Aspects

The book covers both technical topics – such as composition, lenses, filters, color temperature and the Zone System – as well as theoretical and philosophical aspects. The former, I found, is a bit general, and not detailed enough to be truly useful. But I can overlook that because there are many other “how-to books” for landscape photography on the market, which cover such topics more thoroughly.

In any case, I think such books can only take us so far. As someone with no formal education in photography, I found that after the first couple of years, once I’d got my head around basic technique  of exposure triangle, focal lengths, and so on, my learning curve hit a plateau. It took me a while to figure out what I needed to make further progress: engaging with the work of other photographers, learning more about history and critical theory, and reflecting on the “why” rather than the “how.” For me, Perspectives on Place delivers most solidly in these areas.

Even in the technical sections, it offers at least three things which most “how-to books” don’t. First, it avoids the trap of being too prescriptive – a refreshing change from books which try to brainwash beginners into following certain “rules.” For instance, after briefly introducing the rule of thirds, Alexander warns us that ‘adhering to such a formulaic approach for one’s own picture making is not conducive to a progressive approach’ (p27).

Second, the technical sections are illustrated not with generic images as in many other books, but with work by outstanding past and contemporary practitioners. Cartier-Bresson’s The Hauts-de-Seine ‘department’ illustrates the section on composition, and Fay Godwin’s Fence, Parkend Woods features in the section on formats and aspect ratios (unusually for a landscape photographer, Godwin used a 6×6 camera for much of her work).

Third, discussions of technique are interwoven with critical theory and aesthetics. Alexander says in the introduction that technique and theory are not really separable, and that this book “is designed to deliberately blur those false boundaries” (p13). The section on view-camera movements and tilt-shift lenses, for example, analyses Richard Page’s use of a skewed focal plane to suggest misinformation and uncertainty.

Landscape Theory and Philosophy

The theoretical discussions, illustrated with some excellent photographs and insightful captions, are truly eye-opening. Take for example Robert Adams’ assertion that landscape pictures can offer us “three varieties – geography, autobiography, and metaphor”. The quote, as it stands, is rather abstract, but Alexander brings it to life through an illuminating discussion and a series of examples, one of which is Dewald Botha’s Ring Road project. At a basic level, Botha’s photographs are a geographical record of a transport system in the city of Suzhou. But the ring road can also be seen a metaphor for an enclosure or defensive wall. Finally, for Botha, the metaphor also carries autobiographical connotations – linguistic and cultural barriers that can isolate the outsider.

The book also covers movements and trends in landscape photography including pictorialism, Group f/64 and the New Topographics school, as well as aesthetic issues such as “picturesque” and “sublime” depictions of landscape in painting and photography.

Among others, I enjoyed the discussion on WJT Mitchell’s theory that landscape is more usefully understood not as a noun but as a verb (as in, “to landscape”) – for example through cultivation, industrial development and other human interventions. More subtly, as Alexander says, framing and composing a photograph is also an act of “landscaping” – creating, reinforcing and sometimes subverting expectations of how the land should look.

Chapter 4 (Landscape and Power) is particularly concerned with such big questions. Some sections focus more on aesthetics, such as the “industrial sublime,” deadpan aesthetics, urban exploration and the allure of decay. Others address political issues like land ownership and access, environment and conservation, gender, national identity and minority perspectives.

Final thoughts

I won’t attempt to summarize or even list all the themes covered in this extraordinarily wide-ranging and thought-provoking book. Suffice to say, Perspectives on Place is ambitious in its scope, but strikes a really good balance between breadth and depth. Likewise, the theoretical discussions are comprehensive, but I did not find them difficult or dry. The photographs are well-chosen, and the captions really added to my understanding and appreciation. If I have a criticism, it is that the roster of photographers – mostly male, nearly all from Western Europe and North America – is unfortunately not as diverse as the range of landscapes and approaches represented in the book.

If you’re interested in the theoretical aspects of landscape photography, I believe Landscape: Theory (1980) edited by Carol Di Grappa is another excellent book. Unfortunately, I haven’t read it myself; it’s out of print and quite expensive (anyone want to lend me a copy?) Bloomsbury, publishers of Perspectives on Place, also have a sister volume on portraits: Train Your Gaze: A Practical and Theoretical Introduction to Portrait Photography by Roswell Angier. I’m currently reading this book, but so far (only a couple of chapters in), I find it less engaging than Perspectives on Place.

This is my first book review for Casual Photophile; my contributions so far have mostly consisted of gear reviews. And when reviewing gear, one of the best things I can say about it is that it makes me want to go out and take pictures. Perspectives on Place is the equivalent in book form. Turns out, I am into landscapes after all.

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The thing about photography is that it is impossible to tell which aspects of life today will be interesting to our future selves. Never has this been more apparent than friends and family sharing images of their pre-Covid lifestyles on social media during the ongoing pandemic; a world of hugs and concert crowds and restaurant plates, scenes of close embrace and bustling streets, trips abroad and foreign friends. Throwaway snapshots have taken on a new importance after a global shift which has brought varying degrees of isolation to every one of us for over a year. This incredible ability of photography to elevate the ordinary to something more keeps us invested, keeps us clicking away at that shutter button even on days when it seems like there isn’t much worth photographing at all. For many reasons, photography for the sake of photography is often a good enough reason to take pictures.

This very site’s founder and editor, James Tocchio, was recently asked during an Instagram Q&A to show his favorite photograph of all time. I wasn’t surprised when I saw that his answer was a photo showing his children. I think most people, even the most die-hard of art-nerds, would give a similar answer. There are certainly cooler answers to give, but giving the boring answer – my family, my loved one, a photo that represents happiness rather than cool-ness – is so vital when posed with these questions because we must never forget that photography at its absolute core fundamentals is simply a tool to represent a world inside an image.

In an interview with Lynne Tillman in 2004, American photographer Stephen Shore spoke of his seminal work American Surfaces with a simple line; “I was simply recording my life.” Nothing particularly interesting happens in this book, and that’s kind of the point. Shore captured the ordinary, and every type of ordinary he could find. It was the ordinary of his own life. It was sign posts and shopfronts, airplane meals and fine dining, scruffy party-goers and well-dressed elders. It was in this very variety, this lack of clear subject, in which the ordinariness of everyday life in America at that time shines through today.

For 22 months beginning in March 1972, Shore traveled across the continental United States with a simple Rollei 35 – a camera so diminutive in stature that it earned the title of smallest 35mm camera in production at the time [more on the Rollei 35 can be seen here in our review]. It was this tiny camera which allowed him to blend in, to never give the air of a serious photographer, and which granted him accessibility to people and places without question or query. It was the normality, the civilian nature of a compact 35mm loaded with color film which let him make important work right under the noses of people looking for Leica-clad members of Magnum.

Shore cites Walker Evans’ 1938 book American Photographs as having a strong influence on how he would begin to view the world through the eye of photography. Evans’ book championed the idea that the photographer and the photograph cannot be separated from one another, and this idea of the eternal battle between objectivity and subjectivity is something which Shore leaned into heavily in his early years.

A Rollei 35 SE, similar to the model used by Shore.

But there was a much stronger, and perhaps more culturally famous influence for the young artist. As a teen, Shore grew and formed a working relationship with Andy Warhol after meeting him at a movie showing at the Filmmakers Cinematech in New York. A short film of Shore’s was playing before Warhol’s piece The Life of Juanita Castro (1965). Shore asked could he visit The Factory in the hope of photographing the people who inhabit the space. Uncharacteristically, Warhol obliged and Shore created several environmental portraits of key figures of the era such as Edie Sedgwick and Lou Reed. One particular photograph shows Warhol and company in a Chinatown restaurant in the early hours of the morning. Warhol appears not even as the focal point of the dream like picture, instead sitting off to one side, oblivious to his own grandeur within the everyday setting. Shore’s wide angle of the restaurant depicts kitchen staff and other patrons going about their business with Warhol perched in the bottom right half of the frame casually raising a glass to his mouth and acknowledging the camera.

Shore learned a lot of his art sensibilities from his time at The Factory. At just seventeen, it would be difficult not to have had such an experience play a part in shaping the future of Stephen Shore: The Artist. What was gained from this time was an understanding of the importance of ephemera and how it relates to experiential art forms but more importantly, it focused Shore’s attention on the everyday. Warhol was an esteemed artist who was noted as championing the everyday as core subject matter for his art. The Pop Art movement was in fact, art for the people, art that utilized a language the common man could understand. We see this in perhaps his most famous work, Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962). This exploration of the ordinariness of food packaging was an obvious commentary on the banality and beauty of living.

From here, it’s going to feel like I’m skipping forward for a moment. The American Surfaces series was shot between 1972 and 1973, but it wasn’t published as a proper book until 1999 – nearly three decades later! Before this, it existed merely as a gallery exhibition. Shore was just 24 years old at the time he took these images, yet served another full lifetime in this respect when the book was eventually published at age 51. At the time that this series became a book, his life – and his career for that matter – were very different.

In 1982 – nearly a decade after American Surfaces – Shore published his breakthrough series Uncommon Places. To many, this was the work which put Shore on the map. To many, this was his first major work. The structure was much the same as before; Shore set off on a road-trip across America with a camera. Only this time, the pocket-sized Rollei 35 was replaced with large-format view cameras. The effect on his workflow was immediate.

The compositions became sordid affairs, full of strict attention to detail and precise calibration. The resulting pictures were stark and true, with an emphasis on the hyper-real beauty of interesting scenes in otherwise normal locations. These images are cinematic in nature, bearing uncanny resemblance to even recent films such as The Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men. But it is only when contrasted against this later work does Shore’s early American Surfaces begin to make sense from an intentional and artistic perspective.

“There was a time though that something else changed. When you put an 8×10 camera on a tripod, the decisions a photographer makes become very clear and conscious. There is a period of awareness, of self-consciousness, of decisions […] I felt like I could take a picture that really felt “natural,” or that you were less aware of the mediation, that was harder to achieve when I started using the view camera because of the self-consciousness of the decisions. Over time, I very slowly examined each of the decisions involved in putting a picture together, and played with it, and tried to learn how to do it so that I could eventually get to the point of very consciously taking a picture that had much of the same quality that American Surfaces had, except doing it with this great big camera.”

That was Shore speaking to Gil Blank in 2007. And this is him speaking to his publisher, Phaidon, in a promotional interview five years later:

“I felt that the decisions I was making as a photographer were so influenced by my conditioning that if I removed myself in certain ways from the decision-making process I would arrive at a less mediated experience. And I think to some extent it’s true. […] I felt that I ought to be able to understand an image in a certain way, understand the visual, artistic conditioning that I’m imposing on the image and eliminate it as much as possible from the picture. […] I’m taking a screenshot of my field of vision at various moments, not necessarily when I was taking pictures, and see what it’s like to look, to stand back from seeing and really observe what I’m looking at and how I’m looking at it.”

As much as Shore wanted to continue his methodology and process from American Surfaces to Uncommon Places, somewhere not too long into the second Great American Road-trip, he discovered it wasn’t possible. The more involved that the photographic process became, the less it became about capturing everyday life. An idea could pass before it could be photographed. Instead of representing the original moment of interest, the photograph would now show the moment after a photographer had noticed something of interest, unpacked their camera, set-up their tripod, framed and composed the shot, and then took the photo. Those are two different moments.

In both respects, American Surfaces and Uncommon Places are as much about the practice of photography than any subject that appears within their frames. In fact, to many who view the books in isolation of a wider knowledge of Shore’s work, they may even describe the images as boring or mundane (such is everyday life).

From American Surfaces

In American Surfaces, there is a sense of immediacy. Shots are often not framed well – a screenshot of his field of vision as Shore would say – and they also contain fragments of the presence of the camera itself. The Rollei 35 had a maximum aperture of f/3.5 which meant it could not shoot very well in low light. Coupled with the usage of low-ISO Kodak slide film, this meant that Shore needed a flash for the majority of his exposures. However, because the Rollei 35 was a compact camera optimized for pocket-ability above all else, it meant that the flash mount had to be located on the camera’s bottom rather than the top. The presence of flash in any form can alert a viewer to the camera’s effect on an image, but anything below the camera creates unusually large shadows which loom over people and objects in many frames. The pictures are sharp. They are undeniably vibrant. But they are undoubtedly photographs. At no point, do these images ever feel like screenshots of Shore’s field of vision. When viewing this series, I am always aware that what I am looking at are photographs produced with a camera. It imposes its presence on the scene as much as the photographer himself.

From American Surfaces

From Uncommon Places

And so flipping to Uncommon Places whose images are so lucid that it feels as though I could step inside and walk around, I am hardly aware of the camera at all. But for this to be possible, it meant that there was a trade-off and that barrier to realism posed by the ever-present flash in American Surfaces was replaced with Shore’s own sacrifice of a moment for our own enjoyment of its image.

Again, from the interview with Blank in 2007:

“I couldn’t do some of the pictures I was doing for American Surfaces as easily, like pictures of food. I did my pancake picture the next year, the first year with the 4×5. But to do it, I had to be standing on a chair, looking into the camera, and by the time I did it, the food was cold because it’s a big production, and I have to get permission from the restaurant, because if I had this camera and this tripod and I’m standing on one of their chairs, it’s not as simple as just looking down at the plate in front of me and snapping a picture of it.”

From American Surfaces

From Uncommon Places

With Shore’s work, I don’t find answers to how we can represent the everyday, but rather questions as to what we must give up in order to do so. Photographs that look like photographs will distract from the scene which they aim to represent, and to me, that’s a totally acceptable trade-off. After all, I like photographs. But to others, mainly those whose attraction to photography is its ability to capture reality, the compromise of life by the artist in order to achieve pictures of sublime realism may detract from that very realism which they aimed to preserve – much like a documentary film where the presence of a film crew causes the subjects to act differently.

I believe Uncommon Places to be about photography showing the beauty of everyday life, while American Surfaces displays the beauty of photography itself by reflecting itself within banal scenes of normality. There is place for both frames of mind, and I actually believe an understanding of the trade-offs between these two reference points is vital for any photographer today.

Over the years, far more photographers have been drawn to the Uncommon Places pictures than any other made by Shore. This is, after all, the series which cemented his place as an early pioneer of color work in the critical art space. It is a large book filled with crisp images of immense detail. It is the kind of work every photographer vies to make in their lifetime. But American Surfaces is the book I revisit more than any other. It’s the book I wrote my college thesis about nearly a decade ago. To me, American Surfaces is a collection of images taken by a man living out his life. The more meditative Uncommon Places is too pre-occupied with composition to eat the damn pancake.

Of course, I am not naïve. I understand that the goal of all photography is not to simply capture moments of reality. There are a wide variety of disciplines which can contain image-making that go in every direction imaginable. But as a person who enjoys the pursuit of realism with aesthetic flair, I have always had a penchant for Shore’s work. I simply wonder if when looking back upon his life, Shore ponders what his favorite photograph may be. I wonder if, like our editor James, his choice favors an imperfect representation of a great moment, or a perfect depiction of something missed.

Shop for American Surfaces and Uncommon Places

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By all measures and in the right hands, both mediums are capable of broaching the other’s specialty. Fast-paced street shooters who ignore the need for perfect exposure and absolute focus can achieve a film look with any pixel-producing black box, and on the flip side, the methodical approach of large-format analogue work has the capability to resolve details that digital technology is still perhaps decades away from improving upon.

But as a general truth, this simple distinction of digital and film as truth and memory respectively is how I simplify a very difficult question about aesthetics into something problematically binary. However, to quote the great patron saint of early 2000s teenagers, Donnie Darko, “You can’t just lump things into two categories. Things aren’t that simple.”

I fully agree! So if I am to extrapolate just one layer deeper (and I know you’re all just begging for more aesthetic mathematics for the insane), I would add this; If digital photography is truth, and film photography is memory, then black-and-white photography is the embodiment of dreams.

Again, we’re painting with extremely broad strokes here. I know generalizations can be bad, but for the purposes of the specific book I am about to discuss, the generalized point is relevant. I believe this particular artist is one of the few people with the ability to give vision to this idea.

In 2020, Ogawa Yasuhiro released The Dreaming. A book spanning 27 years and nine different countries, it is impressive in both scope and travel, but it is perhaps its restraint that stands out the most. Unlike what many would expect of a book of this description, it is small at just 108 pages. It extends less than 25cm in either direction. Rather than attempt to encapsulate all that a vast region such as Asia could contain – the specificity of cultural difference, the nuance of identity, the architectural diversity – Ogawa pushes the boundaries in the opposite direction.

Somehow, a lifetime of work appears as one, the areas blend together to form a singular view, a distillation of memories appear on the page much as I imagine they appear in his own mind – a series of foggy and general imagery, specific flashpoints of pure clarity, a collection of truths that have come into question over time.

Ogawa has defined and refined a singular aesthetic of work over a huge period of his life, and with the benefit of distance and hindsight set out to make a book which does not interrogate but rather blur. Ogawa stated that the impetus for this book was that he turned fifty years old last year, and like any man of a certain age, was keen to revisit his youth.

As life progresses, memories are called into question. They shatter and fragment. They refract through both the emotions of the time in question, and the wisdom acquired through experience. With photographs, we aim to grab on to individual moments so that they may never be forgotten. But Ogawa’s contrast-heavy images embrace the haze of time as much as they do the cloudy landscapes themselves. A couple stand on a train platform. A television is reflected in a hotel room window. Razor-sharp portraits appear against muddied, unclear landscapes.

This book is as much about the failures of photography to represent memory as it is a travelogue of a young man’s decades-long journey through a continent. Much in the same way that photography freed painting from its commercial dependency on representing truth and reality, Ogawa attempts to free his own past work from accurate memory and instead pushes it towards the ocean of dreams. It is ambitious in its attempt to oppose other collections of work which attempt to define a location or people or idea, and instead nuzzles down between the cracks of definition, into the little grey areas of uncertainty. This is not Steve McCurry’s India or Bruno Barbey’s Morrocco, and it is all the better for it.

Ogawa is no stranger to working within the space of memory either. His latest book, Cascade, tackles the subject of his mother’s death a few years ago, his memories of her, and the 8mm films he found among her belongings. His first book, Slowly Down The River is more documentary, and perhaps better fits into that classic photojournalist style associated with Magnum’s finest, but according to Ogawa in an interview with Tokyo Arts it was not something he wanted to pursue further.

Yet, a lot of the images that appear in The Dreaming are from this same period in his life, so you get this awareness of style and documentary technique, yet a sage aftertaste of a person trying to distance himself from it as well. There is a reluctant acceptance that the images within this book have a non-uniform style (and as they were shot over nearly three-decades, how could one expect uniformity?), but an attempt at editing, processing, sequencing grants them a central idea and a foundation of structure – even if that structure attempts to conceal more than it puts on display.

I believe a lack of context is Ogawa’s sharpest tool, and it is with this that he brings you into a painterly world of familiar yet difficult to recall scenes. A list of captions occupies the back of the book, but only after you have completed the journey are you rewarded with this seemingly critical information. For most books, this decision to leave captions until the end would hardly be considered a decision at all. Most books tackle singular topics, or are abundantly obvious that the images are unconnected, or simply they can stand alone. For most books, the back is simply where the captions go. But for The Dreaming – an unusually small collection of many years spent traveling many countries – it adds a layer of mystery that further pulls the images from reality, adds an extra question, an extra moment to pause and think “What am I looking at? Where is this?”

The final frame in the book, a Fukushima train passing between two mountains, is my personal favourite. The artist’s viewpoint is high, unusually so as the top of a tree occupies the foreground, and the artist is also seemingly exposed to weather as white dashes of snow streak across parts of the frame. It is detached. It’s as if you’re floating above the scene like an out of body experience. It haunts me in much the same way a barely remembered dream does after I wake. There is a realization that I was asleep, but that doesn’t make the dream seem any less real.

Where to buy The Dreaming by Yasuhiro Ogawa

Shashasha.co ($38 plus shipping from Japan)

Photobookstore.co.uk – ($61 plus shipping from UK)

InbetweenGallery.com ($49 plus shipping from France)

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The post Book Club – Seeing Clearly Through the Haze of Time – Yasuhiro Ogawa’s The Dreaming appeared first on Casual Photophile.

Written by Andrew Bellamy and with a forward by Impossible Project founder Florian Kaps, Analogue Photography Reference Manual for Shooting Film examines the technical side of cameras and photography with a definite focus on the mechanisms and fundamental functionality of film cameras. Designed with an eye toward the often wonderfully illustrated manuals that came with cameras in days past, the new book seeks to teach the reader everything necessary to use the amazing machines we film shooters love.

The basic components of a camera, depth-of-field, how a pentaprism works, scale focusing methodology – over its 192 pages, Analogue Photography dives into all of these concepts and much more. Sure, you could get a lot of this information from any camera manual made in the 1970s, but this book is more than that. It’s a love letter to the cameras we shoot and a beautifully made reminder of just how intricate and incredible these machines are.

The price, around $24, is surprisingly much lower than what we’re used to paying for specialty photo books.

Analogue Photography is being issued in a limited run of just 200 books, and can be ordered directly from the Vetro Editions website. Our contact at Vetro says orders are being filled as we speak, so it’s safe to assume that those 200 copies are now less than 200. If this book looks like something you’d enjoy browsing over a cappuccino, I’d suggest you get going.

Want the book? Get it from Vetro

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The post This Technical Reference Manual on Film Cameras is Beautiful – CP Book Club appeared first on Casual Photophile.