Photoni.st

I wasn’t aware of Sabine Weiss until she appeared in one of my deep dives about humanist photographers. One of her most known photographs was taken it in 1952, Porte de Vanves. To be honest, I don’t recognise the area, even though I went to engineering school not too far, the area changed a lot. The horse is out in the snow, kicking up its heels. There’s no drama in the frame, just an animal having a moment on a patch of waste ground. It became the most reproduced of the pictures she took, and…

Photographers often pride themselves on knowing who they are and what they do. In fact, a lot of us believe that it is a requirement to do good stuff. But this leads to a kind of self-deception that is hard to catch because it doesn’t feel like lying: we all have a story about the story we carry around, what attracts us, and what our work is about. That story is misleading us. Abandoned shoes Most photographers mistake it for self-awareness. In reality, it is a filter that stands between them…

The image the world calls the first photograph is nearly invisible, undecipherable. Looking at it, most people can’t see anything clearly identifiable. And it hasn’t been in France for over a century. The photo is a pewter plate, about sixteen by twenty centimetres, coated with bitumen of Judea. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (which can only be pronounced “Nièpce”, BTW) coated it, then put it in a camera obscura at an upstairs window of his family house in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes in Burgundy, and…

I used to believe my photography time was precious, which meant every outing had to count. If I couldn’t imagine the shot I wanted before leaving the house, I’d stay home, because why bother. Better to do nothing than to waste time making nothing good. But I eventually realised that this was killing the fun and wasting my photography. It was pointless pressure to perform disguised as efficiency. No mooring ropes on light, eh? Here was my logic: limited time plus uncertain outcome equals wasted…

Capa was on Omaha Beach under fire on the morning of D-Day, the 6th June 1944, putting himself in danger to make images that he thought were important. He pushed the shutter on his Contax II rangefinder ten times, maybe eleven. Those frames became the iconic photographic record of D-Day through which we imagine the landing. The story of how they got there, and the story that’s been told about them ever since, is more complicated than you think. To be clear, none of what follows in this post…

There is nothing that separates a password mugshot from a photography master piece: you can use the same camera for both, the same lens, the same location. The physical objects (file or print) are identical. So what is the difference? Industrial The vast majority of images taken are not art: surveillance cameras, medical imaging, scientific imagine, and accidental snaps of the photographer’s ear (yes, that used to happen a lot) are clearly not art. Nobody would think they are, and in that it…

I first came across Gerda Taro’s work years ago as I was investigating claims that Capa didn’t actually land on Omaha Beach with the first waves (come back next week for a whole post on that subject) as a side story to that old post, and I’ve been thinking about her lately as I was writing this series. She was one of the most important war photographers of the 1930s, and then she was forgotten. This is the story of how it happened, and how she was finally found again. Gerda Taro, anonymous…

There are things that are the most visible when they’re no longer there. Gone Lately, our oldest pet, MiniBeastie (of her real name IV as in Ivy and cat number 4) has not been well. She started coughing and not breathing well in the winter. At first we attributed it to some passing illness or hairballs. And it was coming and going, so it seemed a sensible diagnosis. Things were mostly fine. But by early May she started doing it more. So we decided to take her to the vet. There, he wasn’t sure…

I suspect every photographer has a piece of equipment that changed everything for them. Not always expected, rarely expensive. But the one that unlocked something for them. Sigma 10-20mm Mine was the Sigma 10-20mm. I bought two decades ago out of curiosity not really knowing what to expect of it, but I had seen on forums that a lot of landscapes photographers were using ultra-wide lenses (and I couldn’t afford the Canon 12-22mm). My go-to Tamron 28-300mm at the time had been getting in my way…

As I was writing this series that is unintentionally turning into a “women photographing war” series, I’ve been thinking about Catherine Leroy. She’s a French photographer I heard about a very long time ago when I was a kid, and I was vaguely aware of her career. Mainly because she worked for Paris Match, a weekly news magazine that can be seen as a more trivial French Life Magazine. She arrived in Saigon in 1966. she was twenty-one years old. She had bought a one-way ticket from Paris, with no…

Tracy Friedlander’s post on the three Substack creator type appeared on my Substack timeline one Sunday morning. I found it interesting and it got me thinking about what these types were. But thinking about them made me realise that they were simplistic and I wondered how I could reduce them to something more flexible. Creator map The post is called “The 3 Substack Creator Types On Substack…”, and it proposes three types: Authority, Pathfinder, Magnetizer. Authority builds from what you know,…

Street photography is something that bothers me, so I want to understand it. And to understand things, I need to classify them and understand how they relate. Call it professional bias. With street photography, I quickly hit a wall: the term clearly covers many disparate activities and everybody has a point of view on what it really is about. So when I tried to classify it, I realised that I couldn’t create a neat and orderly way of breaking things down using the clear known categories. Street…

The number of women war photographers is incredible. I wasn’t expecting to fins so many. I’m only going to cover some of them in this series. This April 7, 2005 photo shows AP photographer Anja Niedringhaus in Rome. Niedringhaus, 48, an internationally acclaimed German photographer, was killed and an AP reporter was wounded on Friday, April 4, 2014 when an Afghan policeman opened fire while they were sitting in their car in eastern Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong, File) I’ve never been to a…

I’ve seen a number of people creating curated lists of Substack photography newsletters lately. Some are just blunt lists that are hard to use, others have categories, but all are missing some of the newsletters I subscribe to. Also a plain list is not very digest: how do you find what you’re interested in? There is no way you’re going to look at more than a few links before you give up. I know I have. So, Sunday morning activity: build my own (620+ newsletters) with search function and…

Years of landscape photography eventually crystallised into something I could trust. The experimentation settled, the instincts took hold, and I started recognising my own hand in a frame before I could explain why. A composition either felt like mine or it didn’t. Then I started shooting street, and shortly after that, documentary work around people I knew. Both felt like arriving somewhere new with instincts calibrated for somewhere else, the technical knowledge and compositional logic…

I hadn’t planned to make a series on women war photographers. When I started looking into Lee Miller, I found references to a few other women of the same era and in the present and I got really interested in them. With the war in Ukraine, the risk of global war is the highest since I was a kid in the 70s and 80s when Wargames felt more like a prediction than fiction, and with politicians that now treat war as a way to win elections at home and score political points, war and reporting is more…

Photography is in essence a conversation between you and the world, not you and an audience. There is a reason why it’s not a public activity, even if you take into account photo walks. The moment you photograph for likes on social media instead of for personal motivation, your photography become predictable, safe, bland. Path of fire The likes, the approval system of social media, applies pressure to your photography and whatever the platform, it changes how you photograph, and even why you do…

She opens her TEDx talk talking about a blue vest. It’s a flak jacket. Twelve pounds of Kevlar, in the specific shade of blue the UN adopted in 1947 for its flag. The colour that says: neutral press, not a combatant. When it’s 120 degrees in the shade and you’re running from mortar fire, she says, those twelve pounds carry all of your history and hopes and dreams. She kept it after leaving Iraq. It sits in her office at Columbia College Chicago now. She lets her students try it on every January…

I travel roughly 2,000 kilometres a week for work. Sometimes, on the train, I put my phone away and sit with nothing. No book, no podcast, just the landscape moving past and strangers shifting through the carriage. On one of these journeys, my mind drifted to a photograph I’d never quite got right, a recreation of a shot from the opening credits of a TV series called Felicity, the main character standing beside an incoming metro train. From there it wandered to a conversation I’d had about…

I’m into deep dives at the moment and I think I’ll make this a regular feature. I first came across Dickey Chapelle by accident. I was reading about war photographers, having arrived on the subject via Lee Miller. Someone mentioned a woman who wore pearl earrings into combat and whose last photo was recovered from her camera after she was killed. I had to find out who she was. Dickey Chapelle The image people usually show is her standing next to some Marines in Vietnam, wearing her signature…

I stopped photographing for many years. Nothing dramatic happened; it was a slow fade. I’d go out with a camera, walk around, come back without a single frame worth keeping. Eventually I stopped going out at all. The problem wasn’t burnout or crisis. It was worse: complete indifference. Danger de mort I tried the usual remedies. Looked at photobooks, scrolled through exhibitions online, forced myself to shoot anyway. None of it worked. The books were impressive but kept their distance. Forced…

Juliette wrote last week about Deadpan photography. I was intrigued because it’s a term I had seen start appearing all over the place lately and I wasn’t sure what it was. So I did a deep dive to understand for myself (unpublished on Substack as it’s not an opinion piece). But in turn it got me thinking about what Deadpan was doing and how. Andreas Gursky, 99 Cent (1999), image found on Flikr Look at Andreas Gursky’s 99 Cent. Let your eye travel along those shelves. Notice the grid, the…

The photography education industry runs on a specific kind of desperation. Browse Instagram or scroll through YouTube and you’ll find an unending parade of people promising to unlock your potential, offering preset packs, weekend workshops, and masterclasses. The transformation you’re looking for is always just beyond your credit card details, and the entire industry is built on a misunderstanding about how photographic competence actually develops. The building blocks Beginners spend hundreds…

I first encountered the phrase deadpan photography around Youtube, of all places. I was watching one of Tatiana Hopper’s videos I think (I don’t remember which one). I didn’t think much of it at the time but I was intrigued by the term (file for later examination). Then I started seeing the term more and more, as if it was a new thing that was quickly getting traction online. The latest was Juliette’s post at the weekend on the subject. I had to find out more. And as usual, I went too far, so I…

My view of Japan is cartoonish. It’s built almost entirely from exports and a European vantage point. When I watch how other countries portray France through their own exports, the caricature is cringeworthy, so it stands to reason mine works the same way in reverse. I’ve never had a Japanese friend. Growing up in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, most of my childhood friends were North African, Caribbean, Vietnamese or Cambodian, and rarely Laotian. Later, through work, I met and collaborated…

For a while I assumed the relationship was simply doomed. Photography requires patience: you develop a project over months without knowing whether it’s working, improvement arrives slowly, the feedback loop runs on timescales that platform culture has trained people to experience as failure. For a generation whose entire media experience has been structured around instant response, this looks like a fatal incompatibility. I think that’s the wrong framing, and I’ve been slow to see why. Urban…

The standard advice for lens selection follows a simple formula: match the focal length to the genre. Portraits need 85mm or longer. Landscapes want 20mm or shorter. Street photography lives at 50mm. This reasoning isn’t entirely wrong, but it misses the more important variable: you. Oslo by night I don’t normally talk about specific gear because it’s a pointless discussion that is more suited to YouTube resellers than photographers. But there is one aspect that is often missed in gear…

There is no shortage of people eager to tech you photography online these days. There are probably many tens of thousands of videos on YT. Maybe millions of tutorials about everything touching photography. But the vast majority will be useless to you and won’t better your photography. A tiny rock The algorithm keeps suggesting photography tutorials. Ten tips for better composition. Five mistakes beginners make. The secret to sharp images every time. All presented by someone with immaculate…

The justification photographers reach for when defending raw files is technical: more latitude, recoverable highlights, adjustable white balance. Sound in principle, largely irrelevant in practice for photographers making personal work rather than delivering to clients with exacting technical requirements. Paris lovers Shooting raw is really about refusing to commit to decisions you make at the moment of capture. I shot raw+JPEG for over twenty years, and looking back honestly at what I was…

After mentioning this idea of somehow being able to authenticate the source of a photo, I’ve implemented and tested the idea. Here is an update on the project. I added the ability to federate the system using only a DNS dependency. The point is that for those who are very privacy conscious, they can handle their own data and their own server. They can even change the algorithms used to sign the images, as long as they stick to the format and API standard. The system currently relies on local…