 | One of the great pleasures of photography for me is the editing process. I don't mean the tweaking in Photoshop but the process of selecting, ordering and arranging a sequence of images so that they add up to more than the sum of their parts. Once I have a set of images in front of me (either physically or arranged in a digital folder somewhere) I begin moving them around, arranging them in piles and considering my options. Depending on the nature of the imagery, this can achieved using various strategies. For example:
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Having recently visited the USA for a family holiday, and having decided to shoot pictures on film with my Yashica rangefinder, I have been enjoying editing the resulting images. They are mostly street pictures influenced by a combination of my favourite American photographers - William Eggleston, Garry Winogrand, Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore, Henry Wessel etc. They don't all include people. I took them over a period of 3 weeks in various locations from New Hampshire to New York City. Some are obviously urban, some very rural. Some are taken close to the subject, others from a distance. It would be hard to define an overall mood to the pictures - I was excited when I took them, mostly because I was thrilled to be using film again with all the attendant risks and uncertainty - but some of the images could be interpreted as ironic or quizzical interpretations of American culture. I have sequences of hats, umbrellas, empty and abandoned chairs, signs and other sets of objects. Simply throwing all the photographs together in a random order has produced some intriguing results. However, I have also enjoyed using more coherent strategies like those listed above.
Here, for example is a sequence of images connected by colour - in this case, red. When I used to shoot exclusively with Kodachrome 64 transparency film (now sadly unavailable) it was always the reds that seemed most vivid in the resulting slides. Perhaps I'm still subconsciously drawn to red when I make photographs, although it could also be argued that so are advertisers and shop window display artists and sign designers and others who create our visual landscape, precisely because red is so seductive, leaping out at you and grabbing your attention. Perhaps one of the most famous red photographs ever made is William Eggleston's fly's eye view of his friend's ceiling. As Eggleston himself observed:
Here, for example is a sequence of images connected by colour - in this case, red. When I used to shoot exclusively with Kodachrome 64 transparency film (now sadly unavailable) it was always the reds that seemed most vivid in the resulting slides. Perhaps I'm still subconsciously drawn to red when I make photographs, although it could also be argued that so are advertisers and shop window display artists and sign designers and others who create our visual landscape, precisely because red is so seductive, leaping out at you and grabbing your attention. Perhaps one of the most famous red photographs ever made is William Eggleston's fly's eye view of his friend's ceiling. As Eggleston himself observed:
The photograph was like a Bach exercise for me because I knew that red was the most difficult colour to work with. A little red is usually enough, but to work with an entire surface was a challenge. It was hard to do. I don't know of any totally red pictures, except in advertising.
Anyway, here are my red photographs, which I've decided to title 'Songs everybody knows':
This isn't the definitive set of images, just one of many potential edits. I love photography precisely because it offers this ongoing experience of meaning making long after the images themselves have been created. I hope it's one of the things I try to communicate to my students. Taking the photograph is just the start of a creative journey. It's definitely a feature of my Photopedagogy.
-- Jon Nicholls
-- Jon Nicholls
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