robert used to play in a rock band. he said that editorial work is like going on the road. often you are playing in an empty bar in a nowhere town and wonder ‘why am I doing this?’ all of those gigs make you stronger – more ready for the big gigs, the arenas and the studio sessions.

alec soth

so i was excited when i saw, that blake andrews had an explanation on how the picture came to be on his blog. here’s a short extract:

According to Clark, a developer had bought the property planning to build a subdivision but before he could proceed he needed to raze the existing structure. He offered the house up to the MVFD to burn in a controlled way. The MVFD would get some practical training and the developer would be rid of the structure. A win-win situation.

cool!

update: i just realized that andrews is doing a whole series of revisited posts where he’s looking closer at a lot of the pictures from the book, attaching old newspaper articles relating to the event and such. sweet!

One of the things I say to young photographers now is that what you react against is far more powerful than what you are influenced by. I loved Irving Penn and Anton Corbijn at the time and it’s one thing for me to be influenced by them and say I want to make cool pictures like them but it’s something completely different to see the mid 80’s sunset lighting with blue sky behind (that was the prominent look at the time) and think “how lame.” For me there’s no mystery to it and it’s very heroic which is also something I didn’t like, so I find my reaction against that stuff to be far more exciting

here’s another interesting bit:

I do a lot of research before a portrait shoot, because I don’t want to go into a shoot scratching my head thinking what am I going to do here and I don’t really have time during the shoot to come up with ideas.

Here’s a typical shoot: I’m given an assignment, I research the person a bit, read some interview’s, then talk to the magazine and finally go away and write up 7 different ideas for shots. I’ll go somewhere quiet and sit and think of ideas. I also have a list of ideas that I’ve been building over the last 10 years or so.

read on about how he keeps a long list of ideas and on advise not to work as an assistant. Part one here and an even more interesting part two here.

picture lifted from www.chrisbuck.com

and here’s a clip from youtube. i especially enjoyed the part where he explains how he tried to convince David Hasselhoff to wear lederhosen in a shoot.

would all three of you out there please post a comment with a link to people who inspire you in terms of portraiture? i want to print some small pictures of inspirational material, tape it to the pages of a notebook and bring it along in my bag. call it an emergency manual. or whatever.

here’s a few people i already look to for ideas: alec soth, avedon, platon, leibovitz.

feel free to add links to specific images.

thanks!

i’ll start out with a guy i started getting interested in back when i studied at fatamorgana in copenhagen. in 2003, alec soth made a book called sleeping by the mississippi. it consisted of images taken with his large format camera while driving along the mississippi river. a combination of portraits and still life, he manages to capture the spirit of the river and the people who live and work along it in a very elegant way.

his next book, niagara, was centered on the town near the waterfalls, where people go to celebrate their honeymoon. it’s slightly darker and more moody, which i really like. i read somewhere, that he intended to dedicate the book to his wife, but it became so dark and depressing, that he decided that he better not.

looking closer at soth’s work made me realize that there’s a point to me made about working slowly. he has to, due to his large and complicated camera, but it works to his advantage. the whole process is so slow, that people will start to relax or at least put down their guards.

it was inspiration from alec soth that made me shoot my first year assignment on my grand dad’s old rolleiflex. i still consider these images some of the best i’ve produced.

when i sometimes think about how to combine storytelling based in “the real world” with a more artsy touch, soth always comes to mind. especially, i like how he includes notes in his books. notes that will bring some context to the picture. something, that in my opinion adds a who new layer to work.

© alec soth – lifted from his website

the note to this image reads as follows:
Peter’s houseboat, Winona, Minnesota
During the slow process of setting up the 8×10 camera, I would sometimes ask people I photographed to write down their dreams. “My dream is running water,” wrote Peter, who has lived on a Mississippi River houseboat for over twenty years.

that, to me, is the perfect example of how the process and the result works together.

here’s a clip from youtube where he talks about how he works…

and this one is a presentation of his niagra work from magnum in motion: