What Camera Should I Buy?

tl;dr — This is a long post, so here’s the gist: Cameras don’t really matter, because they all work basically the same way. What, how, and why you make photographs are more meaningful questions to ask when you’re getting serious about photography.

Grab something, anything—even your smartphone—and make photographs deliberately. A deliberative, contemplative, and reflective approach toward the images you make and share is much more important than the camera. This applies to visual researchers, but I’m pretty sure it applies to most image-making scenarios.

---

Every so often I get an email or message from someone who writes to ask: “What camera should I buy?”

This is a tricky question to answer, and I usually respond with questions of my own: What are you going to photograph? What do you want your camera to do for you? How much can you reasonably spend? Do you care about having multiple lenses? Do you care about how your camera looks, as an object, in addition to how it sees?

I’ve answered the question of “what camera to buy” enough times that it occurred to me to write a post about it. It’s weird that I even get this question, though; I’m nowhere near a professional photographer, nor do I keep up with gear. If you say “I’m thinking about buying X Camera,” it’s quite likely I’ve zero experience with that camera.

I use cameras to make photographs in the processes of conducting research, and in the processes of living everyday life. That said, I have learned a lot about what I want from photography (and cameras are pretty important to photography), so if reading about what I’ve learned is useful to others, then please to enjoy…

Leveling Up as a Photographer

The folks at DigitalRev recently posted a video that pretty well mirrors my own journey as an amateur photographer. It’s very tongue-in-cheek, and well worth five minutes of your time:

Thankfully, I skipped Level 1; I’ve experienced several of the remaining levels to varying extents, though. For example, I did completely geek out on gear (Level 2) before I became a student of photography (Level 3) and embraced the philosophy that a camera should go with one everywhere (Level 4). I dabbled in the hobbyist phase (Level 5), but became bored by message board arguments and the gear pedants and zealots that thrive there as an invasive species (see Level 1).

I’m nowhere near an “Online Legend,” Level 6, though I have had a couple of photos make Flickr’s “Explore” page, including this one, which picked up 300 faves and over 20,000 views in a 24 hour period. That was a trip, since I’m lucky to get 1,000 views and 20 faves on any given Flickr photo. Flickr and Instagram mystify me. Images that I think are well-composed and interesting, such as this one, rarely receive much love. DigitalRev’s take on this is spot on, but I digress…

Obviously, I don’t earn my living as a photographer, so I kind of sidestepped Level 7; like many photographers, amateur and professional, I strive to reach Level 8, in my own way. But it takes a while to figure out what you want from photography. It has taken me the better part of the last 3 or 4 years, shooting and editing almost daily, to kind of be happy with what I’m doing and to get what I want from cameras—to get them to see what I see with my eyes and brain. Your mileage will vary, of course.

So, What Is a Camera, Anyway?

It’s a box with a hole in it. Seriously, that’s it. Every camera, ever, is a box with a hole in it. Despite the dizzying array of dials, buttons, and menu options on contemporary digital cameras, the damn things are just boxes with holes in them. I wish someone explained this to me many years ago.

“Wait a second,” you’re thinking. “Surely it’s more complicated than that.” Well, yes, I need to add one other element: material that’s sensitive to light. The predominant light-sensitive material used in photography for 100 or so years was film. Now, our predominant light-sensitive material is a digital sensor.

So, a camera = box (that shuts out light) + hole + light-sensitive material (film or digital sensor). Really and truly, that’s it. Have you ever heard of a pinhole camera? Box, itty-bitty hole, film.

“Wait a second,” you’re thinking once again. “Surely it’s more complicated than this.” It is more complicated, but not much. The things we add to cameras are simply variations on the theme of box, hole, light-sensitive material.

For example, a lens helps us focus the light that comes through the hole and hits the film or sensor. Blades inside the lens help us control the size of the hole, known as aperture. Controlling the size of the hole lets us adjust to different light sources and intensities, and lets us control what’s in focus and what’s out of focus (known as “depth of field”). A shutter gives us control over how long we allow light to shoot through the hole and reach the light-sensitive material. And something called ISO allows us to choose the sensitivity of the light-sensitive material.

Are these things—lens, aperture, shutter, ISO—very complicated? Not really. The first three are all simply improvements upon characteristics of the hole; ISO is an improvement upon the material where light is written. [1]

In sum, the composition of any given photograph involves light passing through a hole into a light-proof box (that is, the light can’t spill out the sides or back) onto film or a digital sensor. You can make a camera with a roll of film and an Altoids can.

If you already knew all this, then I apologize for making you read the last few paragraphs. I write this because I didn’t know this stuff with this kind of clarity until a couple years ago, even though I’d been making photographs since the early 1980s. In fact, it wasn’t until I started seriously shooting film again, in the spring of 2014, that the simplicity of the technical aspects of photography clicked into place for me.

Aperture, Shutter Speed, ISO

This is the stuff to learn, no matter what camera you shoot. What’s the definition of a “user friendly” camera for most people? One that doesn’t make you think about these three things.

But you want to think about these things, because they’re the only things that matter when it comes to the technical side of photography. And once you learn them, they work on any camera. Any camera. Because all cameras work the same way, remember?

Aperture. The aperture is the size of the hole, period. Bigger hole, lower f-stop number; smaller hole, higher f-stop number. F2 means the hole is wide open, while F22 means the hole is really small. Big hole = small focus area. Small hole = everything in focus.

Shutter Speed. Fast shutter speeds freeze movement. Slow shutter speeds blur movement. Want to take a picture of a waterfall? You don’t want to shoot it on automatic mode, with a 1/2000sec shutter speed. Why? Because you’ll get a crappy picture of water frozen in time. Instead, put your camera on the ground or some other stable surface, switch over to “shutter priority mode” and shoot it at 1/2sec or 1 second. Your rocks and trees will be perfectly sharp, but the water will be a smooth, pleasing blur.

ISO. It used to be that you could only control ISO within a very limited range of film sensitivity—between about 50 and 1600 ISO. You selected your ISO when you bought your film, and once that film was in your camera, you were stuck with it. With today’s digital sensors, we can adjust the sensitivity to light (ISO) on the fly, shooting one picture in broad daylight at 100 ISO and the next indoors, in very low light, at 3200 ISO. Because digital cameras are so good with this, you basically almost never need to worry about ISO. It helps to know how it affects your images, though.

Here’s a great little infographic with everything you need to know about how aperture, shutter speed, and ISO affect your shots. This is the stuff to learn.

Shooting Modes

Pretty much any digital camera you can buy nowadays comes with these basic shooting modes:

• Automatic: camera controls aperture, shutter speed, and ISO
• Aperture Priority: you control the aperture (e.g., “I want my background to be blurry, so I’m shooting this at f2”), the camera controls shutter speed and ISO
• Shutter Priority: you control the shutter speed (e.g., “I want the water in this waterfall to be a silky-smooth blur so I’m shooting this with a 1 second exposure”), the camera controls aperture and ISO
• Program Mode: basically a fully automatic mode, but with a little more control (e.g., “I don’t want the flash to fire, but I want the camera to figure out everything else”)
• Manual Mode: fully manual—you choose aperture, shutter speed, and ISO

Most professionals and hobbyists shoot in manual mode, right? Wrong. In my experience, most shoot in aperture or shutter priority mode.

When I’m shooting digital, I’m usually in aperture priority mode. I also have my camera in “Auto ISO” mode. This means that I tell the camera: “shoot between 200 and 3200 ISO, depending on the available light.” (I don’t want it shooting over 3200, because the pictures become grainy in my particular camera—yours may shoot fine up to 6400 or even 12800 ISO).

On the technical side, the only thing I’m thinking about for most everyday shots is the aperture and depth of field—what do I want to get in focus in a given shot? I select the aperture and let the camera figure out shutter speed and ISO. Easy. If I’m shooting something where I either want to freeze movement or show movement, then I’m probably switching over to shutter priority mode.

Put simply, aperture priority and shutter priority modes cover roughly 90% of my digital photography.

If I’m shooting with a flash, or if I’m shooting film, that’s when I’m in manual mode. My film cameras are all fully mechanical—there are no batteries, no electronic components, and so everything is set manually for each exposure.

So, What Camera?

The first thing to consider in any digital camera is whether it has all of the shooting modes I detailed in the previous section. If it meets this very, very basic test, you’re good to go.

The next thing to consider is: fixed lens, or lens system?

I’m not going to delve very far into this at all. But here are some basics:

• “Kit” lenses—those that come bundled with cameras such as the Nikon D3300 in an Amazon deal—are serviceable, but not great.
• Zoom lenses, unless very very expensive, tend to be of lower quality than prime lenses.
• Prime lenses have a fixed focal length—e.g., 50mm.
• Prime lenses typically have a greater range of aperture options, which gives you more control over the creative and aesthetic aspects of your images.
• Prime lenses may be extremely expensive, but they are also sometimes super affordable—Canon and Nikon both make stellar 50mm and 35mm lenses for around $200.

That should suffice. Back to the question: fixed lens or lens system?

A fixed lens camera has one lens that cannot be swapped out for another. If you buy such a camera, you’re stuck with that lens. For many digital cameras, that fixed lens is a zoom.

Lens system cameras allow you to purchase the camera body and lenses separately, giving you lots of flexibility and room for growth over time.

I own several fixed lens cameras (one digital and four film), and two lens system cameras (one digital and one film). They’re all great, and all used to make different kinds of images. My fixed lens cameras are much better looking, as objects, than my lens system cameras, which are big, bulky, and kind of awkward.

Right now, I’d say 95% of my photography happens with a fixed lens camera; I pull out the lens system camera for special situations (photographing written artifacts, shooting portraits, etc.). Don’t make anything of this—it’s a personal preference based on the kinds of things I like to shoot and how I like to shoot right now. It will likely change, so this not an evaluation or endorsement of either approach.

What camera should you buy?

At a minimum, one that has the shooting modes above, and one that will serve you in what you want from photographs now and in the near future (2–4 years or so). If an inexpensive digital camera with a good sensor, full shooting modes, and a competent zoom (or prime) lens will serve you well, go for it. If you want to have the option to add lenses and do specialized kinds of shots, go with a lens system camera.

The stuff that follows is more important, though…

What do you want from your photography?

What do you really want to shoot? Landscapes? Slices of everyday life? Your kids? Archival materials? All of the above?

How you answer these questions will in large measure dictate the kind of camera you buy. But really, no one cares about your camera.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve become most interested in street photography. This is not the art of making shots of streets, but of simply capturing everyday life, unposed, unscripted, as it happens. It’s really hard to do well for a variety of reasons, but my best street photos have emotion and heart, and they make me really happy when they turn out well.

I could shoot my street photos with my digital lens system camera, but it would be… not exactly joyless, but less joyful. Instead I use a small, fixed lens rangefinder camera, either film or digital. I recently finished a research project using only one of these cameras, and it was very satisfying, both while shooting and during processing. The camera fit the project so well.

The thing is, I didn’t know what I wanted from photography until I’d spent a few months shooting every day.

My advice then, is simply this: Grab something, anything—even your smartphone—and make photographs deliberately. A deliberative, contemplative, and reflective approach toward the images you make and share is much more important than the camera. This applies to visual researchers, but I’m pretty sure it applies to most image-making scenarios.

---

1. BTW, improvements to the box are responsible for most of the complexity we feel are part and parcel of digital cameras. But the fact that a very complex computer now sits inside the box doesn’t really change anything about how cameras work.  ↩

Picturing Writing with Visual Research Methods

In Academic Writing as a Social Practice, Linda Brodkey (1987) argued that composition studies needed a new cultural conception of composing, one that reimagined the tired trope of the alienated and anguished writer who writes alone. In a chapter titled “Picturing Writing,” Brodkey relies heavily on visual metaphors; she passionately argued that we need new pictures of writers and composing practices in their rich, socially situated complexity. She asked readers to re-see writing, to consider alternative viewpoints, and in the process, to break away from popular perceptions of composing, particularly because such perceptions obviate new, different, or even challenging perspectives about writing (58).

More recently, Jody Shipka (2011) draws on Brodkey to suggest that one charge of contemporary composition research is to foreground and make more visible the circulatory processes of composing and textual distribution (38). In response to these and similar exigencies, I compose with photography as one way in which to see writing anew—a method for re-seeing the complexity of composing processes by literally and systematically picturing writers and writing.

As a qualitative researcher focused on the activities, objects, and environments of composing, I conduct ethnographies and case studies of writers in everyday life—from academe and industry to religious practice and social gaming. In these studies, I use traditional fieldwork methods such as semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and artifact collection and analysis. In my early fieldwork, I often used photography and videography as well, mainly as means of augmenting observational fieldnotes and capturing informal talk, gestures, and spatial and material arrangements.

A few years ago, however, I realized that my use of visual fieldwork methods, while beneficial, was also somewhat facile in its execution. I learned that over the last four decades, social scientists have explored the nuances of visual methods in studies of social life (see, for example, Pink, 2007; Spencer, 2011; and Pinney, 2011), of which writing is, of course, an inescapable mediator. The subfields of visual anthropology and visual sociology have enriched my understanding and use of visual methods in fieldwork. These approaches have developed in parallel to our own field’s explorations of visual rhetorics, resulting in complementary empirical perspectives on visuality and visibility.

Writing in the world: a tiny geocache container and scroll for logging visits.

More recently, therefore, I have adapted approaches from visual anthropology and visual sociology to the study of writers and their composing practices and environments. Doing so has resulted in many trials and errors, but the struggle has been rewarding: I have learned to use visual methods to explore, analyze, and present the rich materiality of everyday composing practices, and in the process, to formulate new pictures of writers and writing that may be generative for participants and composition researchers alike. More important, by using visual methods in field studies I have been able to create new forms of material engagement with participants about the role of composing in their learning, work, and play.

While critics such as Susan Sontag (1977) have suggested that photography results in the distancing of photographic subjects from photographers, I have found opposite to be true: Visual methods of fieldwork result in qualitatively different forms of intersubjective understanding between researchers and participants. Composing with photography throughout fieldwork can help researchers of writing move beyond mere tautological illustration; by using visual methods, researchers may document and engage simultaneously.

More important, participants may see their own composing environments, tools, and practices in new ways, from different perspectives. A technique known as photo-elicitation uses fieldwork photographs as pivots for better understanding participant practice. For example, by photographically demonstrating a writer’s well-maintained mise en place, the researcher may help make the familiar strange for a participant, and through discussion, develop new insights about their composing practices.

In a similar way, visual methods may result in presentations of experience that are more hyaline and evocative than traditional forms of reporting. Qualitative data is notoriously dense, and for readers, the mass of fieldwork supporting ethnographies and case studies is often opaque. In addition, traditional methods of collection and representation are necessarily sequential; observational fieldnotes, for example, may miss crucial details of actual practice—movements, tools, arrangements, or cross-talk that may meaningfully mediate composing.

A software studio’s whiteboard is a collaborative space for composing and ideation.

Photographs offer simultaneous renderings of practice, what Flusser (2002) terms surfaces rather than lines. A traditional ethnographer detailing the complex, collaborative work pictured above must transform the simultaneously visible surface of a software studio’s whiteboard into a linear representation of activity. A visual ethnographer, however, can present that visible surface in its full complexity; when coupled with an analytic narrative that details punctuated development, a more hyaline rendering of complex composing practices emerges.

Qualitative research is characteristically ideographic; indeed, visual methods foreground the situated materiality of composing practices. This is a key strength of visual methods as I practice them in studies of writers and writing: the ability to document and collaboratively explore particular systemic contexts and the ways in which artifact assemblages participate in composing processes.

However, in developing new pictures of writers and writing, visual methods have the potential to be nomothetic in the aggregate. Because visual methods may be more hyaline—presenting richer data than traditional methods alone—they carry the potential for fruitful cross-case comparisons of composing practices. Imagine, for a moment, systematically composed and collected photographs of 20,000 first year writers’ typical composing environments and the resulting wealth of both particular (ideographic) and tendential (nomothetic) pictures of writing that might emerge from careful analysis.

Visual methods in empirical studies of writing carry the potential to further develop and realize Brodkey’s argument for re-seeing our object of study, and more important, the people who write. Barthes (1981) argued that “the camera can be an instrument of deep meaning, connecting the scene to the viewer and the viewer to existence” (131). With visual methods, writing researchers can reframe cultural conceptions of where, how, why, and with whom people write in their everyday lives.

Shanghai Street Food

During the summer, when I told people that I was going to (or recently returned from) Shanghai, I was often immediately asked about food, and sometimes specifically about street food.

If you know much about me, then you know that I’m a food utilitarian. I eat for calories. I simply don’t care much about food beyond sustenance. This does not mean that I don’t enjoy food; I do. I enjoy the things I eat every day so much that I eat almost the same things, every day. But I am no foodie.

I will try almost anything, and Shanghai presented many opportunities for new culinary experiences. About the only thing I had that was challenging was stinky tofu during breakfast. Served cold, this everyday snack actually smelled fine to me—and was quite wonderful when it hit my tastebuds. On it’s way down my esophagus, however, it exploded in a kind of fermented, spicy, heartburny miasma. Despite that, I’d probably try it again…

As it turned out, just outside the West Gate of the Baoshan campus of Shanghai University, about a 1.5 mile walk from where I stayed and taught, is Jufengyuan Road, and area that Shanghaiist calls one of Shanghai’s street food meccas. I came to know this area well, visiting daily.

As the Shanghaiist post notes,

The actual Jufengyuan strip isn’t even the main attraction with its fruit wagons, skewer carts, etc. The real deal begins at the alleyway just right of the bridge connecting Shanghai Uni’s west entrance to Jufengyuan Lu - identifiable by the covered picnic tables, shrouds of steam, and scraping of woks. Here, you’ll find fried noodles and rice galore, shawarma, skewers, Chinese breakfast crepes aka jianbing , fried chicken, and our favorite, big Xinjiang skewers with ribs, chicken legs, and other animal parts spitted on medieval-looking metal swords.

This area is amazing. The smells, the open flames, the masses of people moving about carrying xialongbao and sizzling chicken and steaming soups—it’s essentially what I envisioned when conjuring the phrase “Shanghai street food,” and it was incredible that I was within walking distance for two weeks. And while I came to appreciate one stall’s very spicy noodles, I was much more interested in simply being there than in sampling all of the food on offer—the street food scene along Jufengyuan Lu was atmospheric, enveloping, all-encompassing.

---

At this point, I want to write a few words about my experiences with street photography in Shanghai before I share some photos of the street food scene…

I never felt unsafe during my brief time in Shanghai, even though I stumbled into areas of the city where tourists and laowai are rarely seen. However, there were a couple encounters that I’d describe as “dicey,” and each involved my use of a camera at the time.

I’m fairly conspicuous as a street photographer; I love to shoot in low light and at night, and I’m a stickler for sharpness and legibility. This means that I typically stand out—with a big Manfrotto tripod, a Nikon D7000, a wireless shutter release, and a tendency to shoot low angle, wide frame shots. In other words, people can easily see what I’m doing, and in the process, they may become curious, shy, amused, etc.

This shot, for example, was taken in front of about 25 scooter taxis and their drivers—to the left of frame, and behind the camera—all facing me as I set up, and all watching me with interest. This was photography in front of an audience, and after I made a couple of acceptable shots, I moved along the crowd, showing everyone the resulting images. It was both odd and fun.

But I take few “candid” or furtive street shots. If you see close-up, legible images of people in my street photographs, there’s a very, very strong chance that I asked for permission before shooting. So, in touristy areas like The Bund, nobody cared about my photographic activities. But in a locals area like Jufengyuan Lu, as an obvious laowai with a camera and tripod, I stuck out.

On several occasions in Shanghai, therefore, my conspicuousness was potentially positive or negative (for me, and others). Folks often would set up behind me—squatting down or leaning over my shoulder—as I framed a shot on my tripod, essentially trying to see what I was photographing. When I noticed this, I’d show people my shot, so they could see my results. Then we’d exchange thumbs up or down signs, smiles, shrugs, or frowns depending on what people thought of a given photo.

But on a couple of occasions, people were visibly upset by something I’d done with my camera. The diciest situation occurred just after I’d shot this photo, one of my favorites from the trip:

To the left of the frame, Jufengyuan Road moves out into the distance—a pedestrian, bike, and scooter thoroughfare with major chains (Wal-Mart, KFC), local shops, banks, apartments, etc. Just to the right of the frame is the entrance to the street food mecca.

For me, this fruit stand is visually lovely. I’d purchased cantaloupe skewers here on a couple occasions, and at night, it makes a fantastic photographic subject.

I shot this in the street, about 20–30 feet away from the stand. My tripod was low, the camera perhaps 30 inches above the ground. The woman working the stand moved in and out of frame as I was setting up the shot, and my intention was simply to capture her movement—a blur in the long exposure. In other words, I was shooting the scene—the well-lit stand, the movement of people nearby, the colorful fruit—rather than a portrait.

A man—probably in his 40s or so, shirtless (it was hot and humid), and a bit bigger in stature than I—set up behind me as I framed the shot, clearly skeptical and uneasy. After shooting it, I turned to him, gesturing back toward the camera, indicating as best as I could that I wanted him to look.

Finally, I picked up my camera and held the shot up for him to see. He was pissed. I’m not at all sure why, but he started screaming at me there in the street. He’s yelling in Chinese, I’m offering in English to delete the image, and no one nearby was able to mediate. Finally, he gave me a dismissive wave and I headed off down the street, quickly, hearing a few farewell yells, without taking another shot.

I feel bad, as I clearly did something to cause offense. But I also couldn’t tell if this was the kind of man who often yells at people on Jufengyuan Road. Because of this ambivalence, I kept the photo.

The rest of the photos were shot in the alley, with permission. I returned another night to shoot these, but I was still skittish; I ended up shooting far less here than I would have liked.

This photo is the poorest of the bunch, but it gives a sense of the stalls in the alley. From this view, I am about 2/3 of the way down the alley, so we’re seeing only the final few stalls along the vanishing point. To the right of frame are tables and many, many patrons enjoying their food.

At this stall, a family—a grandmother, son, daughter (or daughter-in-law), and grandchild—were very accommodating, and they really liked the shot after I showed it to them. The huge wok and open flame caught my eye, but I’m really pleased with the little details here—the shovel in the bottom left, the dividing paneling, the electrical sockets and peeling paint. A perfect environment for street food!

This image is intentionally dark; to the left of frame, a line stretched easily twenty people deep. The single bulb illuminating the workspace caught my eye.

Finally, a couple of the few food close-ups I shot, before and after.

Shanghai Graffiti

I have a few more posts from my summer teaching in Shanghai on the horizon, including today’s on graffiti and stencil art.

I spent much of my time on the Baoshan campus of Shanghai University; I learned quickly, thanks to some impressive heat and humidity, that there were areas of campus that remain shaded throughout the day. For example, many of the main instructional buildings had bicycle garages at the ground floor, like this one:

The walk to my classroom was about a mile or so, and I covered most of it by moving through the bicycle garages of a row of instructional buildings. And since I spent a fair amount of time there, I noticed some interesting stencil graffiti, which I couldn’t help but photograph.

Overall, however, there were few examples of graffiti that I saw during my two weeks in Shanghai. It's a big city, though, and I saw only a fraction of it!

Everyday Details

While I was in Shanghai, I spent half a day in and around Jing’an Temple, a key site of contemporary Han Buddhism in China.

This is a fascinating place for many reasons, but what I found most interesting were the everyday details—from the feel of architectural materials and their accompanying visual flourishes to the smell of incense and the sounds of visitors lobbing yuan coins into the central metal tower.

If you regularly read this blog, then you’re possibly aware of my ongoing multisensory ethnography of Eucharistic Adoration practices. Perhaps out of researcherly habit, I found myself zeroing in on Buddhist analogues while I was at Jing’an Temple, taking many photos of the seemingly small, often fleeting and sensory everyday details that help make a sacred space sacred.

What we often overlook, though, are the details that make everyday spaces what they are. We can extrapolate from these exemplary spaces, I think, and look at quotidian spaces in new ways.

Shanghai Selfies

Folks in cultural studies and related fields have been banging this drum for years: we are immersed in images. We have been, sure, but awareness of ambient photography has recently gone mainstream in a big way.

I’m actually glad that I’m not studying a phenomenon like selfies right now; I’m mildly surprised by the amount of work that's already been done.

I’m a reluctant photographic subject. In point of fact, I despise pictures of myself. But sometimes they’re necessary, sometimes being in a photo is polite and tactful, and sometimes they can simply mark a happening or event.

I spent two weeks in Shanghai last month, teaching a short professional communication course at Shanghai University. I’ll have more to say about this experience in subsequent posts; for now, I’ll just say this: I loved Shanghai, I loved my students, and I can’t wait to go back.

On a few occasions during my time in Shanghai I felt compelled to photographically document my experience, mainly for my family, by using this tried and true equation: human + location = experiential documentation.

I realize that these aren’t selfies, per se, but they’re as close as I’m likely to get. [1]

---

1. Photo 1: a door at Jing’An Temple; Photo 2: a little tea garden and spicy peanuts (I was the only laowai there); Photo 3: Yuyuan Garden footpaths, sensibly designed to soothe and massage bare feet.  ↩

Found Photo Fodder

I haven’t commented much on the death of Google Reader, and while this post is marginally about RSS (and, really, about tagging within RSS), I don’t really have much to say about Reader that adds anything meaningful to all of the excellent things that have already been written.

Instead, this post is about found photos, sources for those photos, and the use of such photos in professional presentations.

Over the last few years, I’ve received some minor kudos for developing conference presentations that are visually arresting and compelling. I’ve heard lots of good feedback from folks whose opinions I value about the effectiveness of my presentation style, which is heartening.

During the first couple of years that I worked on developing this ethos, I predominantly used striking images that I found on the web (hence my use of the term “found photos,” which, technically, is different from the actual definition of found photos or vernacular photography, but not unlike that definition either, but that’s for another post…). Indeed, when preparing a presentation, I would often begin with the images, mining Google Reader posts for visuals that evoked or supported ideas I was trying to convey verbally.

After giving a talk, folks would often ask: “Where do you find all those cool images?” In reply, I would usually joke that it was a “trade secret.” But really, it was just simple sifting and winnowing using RSS.

In Reader, I subscribed to several image-intensive feeds, many of which were from Tumblr. These feeds have always made my RSS experience a pleasure, for mixed in with discourse-heavy posts from fellow academics, tech blogs, and news sites were often incongruent and arresting photos. Over the years of using Reader, I probably looked at 100,000 or more photos.[1]

When I stumbled across an image that was striking for whatever reason—and I learned to develop a sense of what would make an interesting and effective slide-ready image—I would simply use Reader’s tagging function to label the post “photos.” That’s it. When it came time to prepare a talk, I’d open my list of posts tagged “photos” in Reader and simply j/k my way through, looking for visuals congruent with the scope of my presentation.

I had thousands of posts tagged “photos” in Reader,[2] which means that I had my own archive of visuals that might evoke the presentation ethos I’d developed over time.

However, over the last two years I’ve moved away from using such found photos in my presentations, preferring instead to use my own images to support my work for two main reasons. First, I’ve been developing approaches to using visual research methods in qualitative studies of writing, and consequently, many of my talks have covered this work. Second, and perhaps more importantly, I’ve been working hard on developing rhetorically engaging visuals of my own, honing a visual phronesis related my academic work alongside the verbal and written craft.

Regardless, when Reader died, so too did thousands of tags. This is but one example; I also used tags to code data in Reader, I used tags to mark items related to research reading, and I used tags for a variety of other things (one of my favorite tags was “holy shit,” reserved for a bevy of truly amazing and awe-inspiring posts).

I moved to Newsblur in mid-June, and I’ve been very happy with the service. No tags, though, and no import for the archive of tagged items from Reader users (there are some other options, I realize, but that’s not the point of this post).

And yet, I still have the desire to single out arresting images. In the old days of Reader, I would sometimes publicly share such images. Since Newsblur doesn’t support tagging but does offer some of the social sharing features that were once part of Reader, I’ve been using the “share” feature to collect interesting found images.

It’s not a workaround, but a totally different way of thinking about the images I find arresting. Since I’m sharing these publicly, I’m thinking more about why I find the images striking, whether others will find them similarly striking, and what my sharing them says about me and my visual ethos.

If you ever wanted to tap into the archive of images I used in presentations a few years ago, or if you simply would like another image-intensive feed in your own RSS reader, feel free to add my Blurblog, a feed of nothing but images that I once would have tagged “photos” in Reader.

---

1. Who knows for sure? I’m basing this on the fact that a couple years ago Google released statistics for individual Reader users. When they did, I learned that I had already surpassed 300,000 total read items, the maximum count they’d render for a given user. Again, that was a couple years ago, at least. My feed list has always included a healthy amount of photoblogs, and “reading” posts from such feeds takes just a second, particularly if the image doesn’t immediately hold my attention. Could be I looked at 50,000 images, could be I looked at 300,000. Regardless, I explored (and continue to explore) a crap-ton of images as part of my everyday routine. I’ve thus honed certain visual sensibilities alongside my daily academic reading and writing.  ↩

2. In actuality, I had more posts tagged “photos” than Reader could actually render, should I want to mine them to the earliest such tagged occurrence. Google’s API limits, even in the good old days, stopped me from seeing more than a few thousand.  ↩

Contextual Ambivalence: Images + Inscriptions

In my last post, I talked a bit about the potentially dizzying contexts of production and use that accompany nearly any photograph.

I argued there for the importance of understanding—to the extent possible—the meaningful contexts of production in subsequent interpretations of photos. And while I argued against the notion of a photograph-as-text—as a self-contained unit of meaning irrespective of its social processes of production and use—I also willingly conceded that photographs are indeed meaningful (in fact, ontologically and epistemologically multiple) without rich contexts of provenance and circulation.

My argument was simply that we should strive, whenever possible, to recover contexts of provenance, circulation, and use as a means of transcending superficial “readings” of photographs as texts.

This refresher serves as preamble to an intriguing book of found photographs that speak to a kind of contextual ambivalence which I hope builds upon my last post.

Ransom Riggs’ (2012) Talking pictures: Images and messages rescued from the past is described by the author as a coffee table book of vintage found photos.

It’s a really neat book, with some startling pictures, but it’s ambivalent in terms of how it treats contexts and photos as stand-alone objects.

One the one hand, Riggs presents these images as meaningful in themselves, as examples of the curious, nostalgic, voyeuristic, and vernacular. He argues for their value through arrangement—by placing these geographically, temporally, and situationally disparate photos in a collection together and then arranging them thematically around notions such as “Clowning Around,” “Life During Wartime,” and “Hide This Please.”

Simply doing so has worth and value. The images are arresting, interesting, full of life and pathos and curiosity. They are “crammed” with meaning, as Barthes (1980) has argued—“The photographic image is full” (p. 89).

And yet Riggs’ ambivalence also argues something of the opposite; all of the images in his book are deemed significant because each couples photography—writing with light—and inscriptions—writing with glyphs and symbols. The images are chosen and arranged because they say something in two modalities simultaneously, because they include writing. Because they aren’t crammed full (enough) and overflowing with meaning (enough) on their own. They are not texts-without-writing.

In his brief but insightful introduction (and in the video above), he notes: “I became a collector, albeit an odd one; my primary interest was in snapshots that had writing on them” (p. xi).

He argues that “A photo might seem absolutely ordinary, but for a few words scribbled on the opposite side” (p. xii). Those few words—that microcontext—transforms the images from something mundane (here, he shows a blurry image of a rock wall, a street, a street sign, and some shrubs—“as banal as snapshots get”; p. xii) into “hidden gems” (p. xii).

Indeed, for Riggs, the smallest bit of written context is transformative (p. xii): “It lent the mutest of snapshots a voice” (p. xiii). “The best inscriptions,” he argues, “make a snapshot feel current, no matter when it was taken” (p. xiii). The inscription which transforms the blurry, banal street photo is this: “Rock wall near Rose Bowl, Pasadena Cal. where Dorothy found a Baby Girl on Jan. 24 1961” (p. xii).

---

These images+inscriptions include something else for Riggs, and for people who interact with them. Pinney (2011), drawing on Barthes (1980), has described the double temporality of photography. Understanding this notion requires a bit of context from Barthes’ Camera Lucida.

In consideration of an 1865 photograph of Lewis Payne, a comely young man in shackles after his attempted assassination of Secretary of State W.H. Seward, Barthes’ interpretation of the image is: “This will be and this has been” (1980, p. 96; emphasis in original).

Barthes’ own caption for the photograph (his own interpellation, his own inscription, his own figuration of image+writing) is “He is dead and he is going to die…” (p. 95; emphasis in original).

Pinney (2011) describes this paradox of photography, how all photographs “bring the ‘there-then’ of the making of the photograph into the ‘here-now’ of our viewing of the photograph” (p. 85).

As Riggs suggests of the photographs he collected, “many of the snapshots I’d handled were of dead people; they were old pictures, after all” (p. x). But this realization occurs within the context of photography’s double temporality, most viscerally in his description of one of the first found photos that had a major impact on him—a portrait of a pretty teenager who reminded him of a summer camp crush.

He kept the image in a cardboard frame for almost a year, his “fantasy girlfriend” (p. x). At some point, however, he decided to transfer the image from the cardboard frame to a photo album, and at that point, for the first time since acquiring the photo, he saw the inscription on the back: “Dorothy … Chicago, age 15 Died of Leukemia” (p. xi).

A tiny inscription with profound and cascading effects on meaning and context: “Now she had a name—Dorothy—and a city, and a fate. I’d been fantasizing about a dead girl” (p. x). This will be and this has been.

Photographs in themselves are meaningful to someone, “crammed” with real and potential ontologies as they travel and circulate in different social contexts.

But photographs with inscriptions at once limit and extend ontologies. Ontological contexts are ambivalent.

Riggs concludes his introduction by suggesting that “Sometimes a word is worth a thousand pictures” (p. xiv).

Contexts, Image Making, and Understanding

“Writing and picture making have, in many significant ways, replaced human memory and become the primary means by which twentieth-century Western humanity remembers.” Ruby, 1995, p. 113.

For the first time in my life, I have grown a beard. When I look in the mirror, I see myself and I see my dad in myself.

For most of my life, my dad wore a beard, shaped not unlike my own at the moment. Before he died, his beard was mostly gray, though his thick, dark head of hair remained.

Growing up, I was most often compared to my maternal grandfather—an active, outdoorsy, stubborn, stocky bull. He was bald save a ring of hair above the ears and around the back of his head. He never wore a beard, so far as I know. He was athletic, strong-willed, even a bit obnoxious at times.

On several occasions during the time between my 6th and 10th birthdays, I remember my granddaddy (that’s we called him, because my mom called him “daddy”) arriving at our suburban Bay Area home unannounced, causing uproar, laughter, shouting, and joy from my mom, my brother, and I. Shortly after the initial commotion, he would head into our kitchen, grab a spoon and a tub of Dreyer’s ice cream from the freezer, and walk out the front door. My brother and I would give chase, and he would speed off—a 60-something man running, with ice cream!—around the block, leaving my older brother and I despondent, unable to keep up.

My granddaddy wrestled with us, and I remember trying to hang on to his legs with all of my strength as he motored through the living room. He taught me how to throw a spiral. I grew up knowing I was like my granddaddy—active, outdoorsy, athletic, strong-willed, and more than a bit obnoxious.

But I didn’t look all that much like my granddaddy. There were physical resemblances—for example, my dad was 6’ 2”, but my granddad was only around 5’ 10”; I take after my granddad.

---

No, it wasn’t until I watched my dad die in 2008, after his last confrontation with cancer, that I realized who in my family I most resembled. It’s not even really close, actually.

This was a significant realization. I had developed a narrative that I’d long told myself: I look more like mom and granddad, and my brother looks like dad (my brother is a couple inches taller than I am). But that narrative wasn’t accurate; I’d been telling myself the wrong story. I look like my dad, more and more as I get older. And my brother looks like my mom as he gets older.

With my new beard, I look in the mirror and I see my dad staring back at me sometimes. This is not an unpleasant feeling, but it is unsettling nonetheless.

I suppose that I would know this whether I had photographs of my dad or not. But I can’t help but think that I know this in large part because of those photographs.

I certainly don’t have any writing from my dad to supplement my memory of him—at least none ready to hand. He didn’t leave me a letter or a journal, no will with special instructions. Not that he would.

I have a few vivid memories that I can recall at almost any time:

• The day that he almost got into a fight with another man after one of my Little League baseball games—I remember the light of that day, the slant of sunbeams across a field of grass, looking up at my dad cradling a portable cooler and fold-up chairs, ready to fire on this man for a reason I didn’t know.
• The time he picked me up from a day hike on Mt. Diablo and took me to Frosty Freeze.
• The first time he held my son and played with him.
• The day that he and I took BART to see Cal play football at Memorial Stadium.

But how much can I not recall? How many everyday moments are lost?

---

We have images. And images, in themselves, are worthy of our attention.

But photos as objects often carry incredibly significant meanings that may only be even marginally understood with the benefit of rich contextual detail—both about the moment and circumstances of image making and the reception and use of said image.

Ruby (1995) argues persuasively that “An interest in the photograph as a text complete in itself” is insufficient without “a focus on the social processes of construction and subsequent use(s)” (p. 5). Take this picture of my dad, for example:

I shot this photo as my dad watched my youngest daughter play soccer on a blue-bird day in early September, 2007. He was making his way across the country with his dog, driving from Atlanta to California and back to see family and to see the country.

He also knew he was going to die.

He didn’t tell us, of course. He didn’t say much of anything about the trip—he just wanted to get out and see us, his sister and her family, his nieces and nephews, and my brother and his family—to make this trip, to camp along the way, before he got too old.

We thought it was a bit odd, though. We worried about him. We sensed something was off.

We did the things you do with visiting family, and we had fun. I took several pictures, but when I composed the photo above, I was grasping for some significance—here’s my dad in the shade, sitting on the ground with his big red doberman laying next to him, looking out at my daughter play a game as he once looked out at me doing the same.

---

Almost immediately after my dad died, just four months later—after a man came to my dad’s house and pushed his dead body on a gurney out the front and into the back of a van as I held the door—I spent some time on my laptop, looking for pictures.

I was in charge of handling his cremation arrangements while my step-mother dealt with so much loss and so much legal minutia simultaneously. I’d mostly done my part by that point.

So many people had helped in small ways during the last months of my dad’s life, and there were many others who couldn’t fly to Atlanta but who wanted to be here to help—these people needed something from us, I felt. Some small measure of thanks, and some recognition of my dad’s life.

I looked at the photo above. A different context and perspective occurred to me.

Perhaps my dad was looking squarely at the now in that moment—the smell of the crab grass, the feel of pebbles and sand beneath him, the smell of the creosote chaparral on the El Paso wind, roving bunches of 4 and 5 year-olds chasing a ball—but perhaps he was looking forward, too. Maybe he was thinking about what he knew he’d miss, what his grandkids might become.

I made a little 3x5 photo card with nothing but this image of my dad and the caption “looking forward…” I ordered a few and sent them to the folks who shared our memory of him.

---

Is this photo meaningful without these contexts of production and use? Surely, for not everyone who received the photo card knew the backstory I’ve just provided—the contexts of production. They had other contexts that they brought to bear, however—an understanding that my dad was gone, a follow-on interpretation of the framing and perspective of the image + caption as received, and a host of their own contextual details remembered and stirred in the moments of reception and use.

Though the contextual details differ from person to person, it is the confluence of images and contexts which amplifies meaning in profound and often indescribable ways.

It’s tempting to skim across the top of these rich contexts in our investigations of images, to believe that such objects can be read without stirring up, surfacing, and carefully examining the incredibly detailed and even mundane phenomenologies of production and use.

But it’s folly to assume that such a reading can even marginally plumb the depths of those contexts; the analytic axes available to us without such cultural and historical contexts are largely superficial—lighting, composition, framing, technologies of production and distribution…

Even the term reading is insufficient, a misnomer.

Don’t get me wrong—these are important and even useful analytic axes for any interrogation of an image. Necessary starting points, to be sure.

But so woefully incomplete.

The ontological chasm between such superficial readings and more complex, nuanced, triangulated understandings of images in/and contexts is massive.