Since taking my photography up a notch over the past years, i keep coming across new things that blow my mind. There seems to be this list of things that some people have known about for years, but others haven’t at all. Things like HDR (High Dynamic Range) - those hyper-real images where there’s detail in the shadows and the highlights. There’s IR film (or filters) - infra-red where greens become ghostly white and your regular scenery becomes an ethereal world. You have people using 50mm lenses backwards as a “poor mans macro”, and for the people who love film, using a myriad of techniques , using old cameras long forgotten, expired film, rubbing material on polaroids as they develop, the list goes on and on.
All of this still assumes something - you find or buy a camera, and you work forward from there. Miroslav Tichý, now hovering around 82 years old, is a true old-school artist. Growing up in Soviet Czech (now Republic), he shunned society and dressed in rags. Interestingly he made his own cameras made out of whatever he could find - metal plates, thread, rubber bands, cardboard tubes.. all of this lending itself to a truly mesmerizing feeling in his photographs which one could recreate in photoshop - and lose all the soul in the process of doing so.
He’s a great quote, which i nabbed from Kottke.org, on the apparently quality of his photography:
Photography is painting with light! The blurs, the spots, those are errors! But the errors are part of it, they give it poetry and turn it into painting. And for that you need as bad a camera as possible! If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you’re doing worse than anyone else in the whole world.
He developed his photos in a bucket, due to a lack of darkroom and it’s the quality and journey of the image to it’s final product that make it interesting - it’s less about the composition. It’s something i’ve noticed with the film shooters - the feeling of a scene is so overpowering, one doesn’t even register they’re looking at something quite mundane. It’s the goal of film - go for the emotions. And for that, using a high-powered top-of-the-line digital camera will probably hinder you more than help you, as Tichý says above.
Imperfection is human, something Tichý understood well.
There’s more images and some galleries here.
