Category: Journal

Every year I print a box of pictures no bigger than a paperback and give it to the people in them. It is the least modern thing I do and the most useful. This is a note on why, and on the strange things a small print teaches you about a photograph you thought you knew.

The screen lies a little

A picture on a screen is lit from behind and it flatters everything: the shadows glow, the blacks are never quite black, and a dull frame looks moody. Paper is honest. A print lit by the window shows you what you actually made, and about a third of the time it is not what you thought.

Why small

A big print is an argument. A small one is a conversation. Held in the hand, a picture the size of a postcard asks to be looked at closely, then passed to someone else, then put in a book and found again in ten years. Nobody has ever found a poster in a book.

What fits in a box

• Forty prints, no more. Choosing is most of the work.
• One size, so nothing shouts.
• No captions. If a picture needs one, it stays out.
• A line on the lid with the year and the place.

What a print teaches

Edges, first. On a screen you look at the middle; on paper the eye goes to the corners, and the corners are where the mistakes live: a pole, a stray hand, a bright patch that pulls the eye off the face. Then tone. A print has less room than a screen, so the picture has to earn its blacks. And finally sequence. Forty prints on a table arrange themselves into an order the screen never suggested.

Print it small and the photograph tells you what it is. Print it big and it tells you what you wanted it to be.

How to start

Pick ten pictures from the last year, order them at postcard size from anywhere decent, and put them on a table by a window. Leave them there for a week. Move them around when you pass. By Friday you will know which three are photographs and which seven were only files.

There is an hour before dinner when the light in a coastal town goes soft and everyone slows down without deciding to. Shutters half closed, a table being laid, a child sent to buy bread. I photograph almost nothing else when I travel, and this is an attempt to say why.

Why not the sunset

The sunset is a performance. Everyone faces the same way, phones up, and the light does the same thing it did yesterday. The hour before it is a rehearsal nobody knows they are giving. A waiter wipes a table twice. A dog decides the warm step is his. The light comes in low and sideways and finds the texture in everything: plaster, hair, the grain of a wooden door.

That sideways light is the whole trick. At noon the sun is a spotlight from above and faces flatten into shapes. Late in the afternoon it becomes a lamp on a table, and people look like themselves.

Where to stand

Not in the square. The square is where the sunset crowd gathers, and you will spend the hour photographing the backs of heads. Walk one street inland, uphill if you can, and find the place where the light has to come round a corner to reach you. Corners are where it is interesting.

The three windows

In most towns there are three windows of about fifteen minutes each. The first is warm and still bright: good for streets, bad for faces. The second is the one the postcards are made from. The third, after the sun has gone behind the hill but before the lamps come on, is the one I care about. Colour drains out, the sky becomes a giant soft light, and nobody is posing any more because they think the show is over.

What to bring

• One camera, one lens, and the discipline not to change it.
• A place to sit. A step, a wall, the edge of a fountain. You will be there a while.
• Nothing to read. The waiting is the work.
• A word or two of the language, enough to say thank you and mean it.

If you can feel the light on the back of your hand, you are standing in it. Turn around.

A note from an old teacher, still true

A note on people

Photographing strangers in the hour before dinner is easier than at any other time, because they are busy. Nobody is being watched; everyone is doing the last small job of the day. Stay long enough to be furniture, keep the camera low, and take fewer pictures than you want to. The one you keep will be the one where nobody noticed you, including you.

Then put the camera away and have dinner. The light will do it again tomorrow.

A studio makes people behave. Put someone under lights with a paper backdrop and they stand the way they think they should stand: chin up, shoulders back, the smile they use for passports. Take them outside, let the wind do something unhelpful to their hair, and within ten minutes they forget the camera. This is the whole argument, but it deserves a few more paragraphs.

The studio problem

A studio is a room designed to remove everything except the person, and that is exactly what makes people nervous. There is nowhere to look and nothing to do with your hands. The light is perfect and the perfection is the problem: it flatters, and flattery is not the same as likeness.

Ten minutes of forgetting

Outdoors there is always something happening that is more interesting than the camera. A gull, a bus, a smell of chips. People react to the world and their faces move, and somewhere in that movement is the expression their friends would recognise. I am not looking for a good expression. I am looking for a true one, and true ones happen between the good ones.

What I actually do

I walk. We talk about anything except the photographs. I keep the camera in my hand rather than at my eye, so it is a thing I am carrying rather than a thing I am pointing. When the light and the face agree, I lift it, and mostly I lift it too late, which is fine. There will be another.

Light, in order of preference

• Open shade on a bright day: the sky is the softbox and it is free.
• The hour before dinner, with the sun behind the person and their face lit by everything else.
• A doorway, half in and half out, for the face that wants a little drama.
• A north-facing window, when it rains, which it does.
• Direct midday sun, never, unless the person asks for it and means it.

What you lose

Control. The background you wanted is behind a van. The cloud you were counting on moves. A portrait made outdoors is a collaboration with the weather, and the weather does not take direction. What you get back is a person who looks like a person, and a picture that could only have been made on that day, in that place, which is the only kind worth keeping.

Nobody remembers the backdrop. They remember the wind.

Mara, who has heard this speech before

Most of photography is waiting: for a cloud to move, a person to stop posing, a street to empty. I used to think the waiting was the price of the picture. Now I think it is the picture, and the frame is only the receipt. Here is how I wait, in the order it happens.

Before you arrive

Decide what you are waiting for. Not the exact picture, which never turns up, but the kind of thing: a face in a doorway, the moment the shadow reaches the step, the boat coming back. If you do not know what you are waiting for, every minute feels like a minute wasted, and you will leave two minutes before it happens.

• Look at the light the day before, at the same hour, if you can.
• Find out when things happen: the ferry, the school gate, the bread.
• Eat first. Hunger is a clock that runs fast.

When you get there

Standing still

Pick a spot and stay in it. The temptation is to drift towards whatever looks promising, and by the time you get there it has stopped being promising. Standing still does two things: it lets the light come to you, and it turns you into part of the street. After a quarter of an hour people stop seeing you, and that is when you can see them.

Watching the edges

The picture rarely arrives in the middle of the frame. It comes in from the side: a bicycle, a hand, someone stepping into the light you have been watching. Keep your eyes on the edges and your camera on the middle, and let them meet.

How long to wait

Longer than feels reasonable. As a rough guide, from a notebook I have kept for years:

What you are waiting for	Usually takes	Give up after
A shadow to reach a mark	10 to 20 minutes	the mark is in shade
A person to stop posing	3 to 5 minutes	never; change the subject
A street to empty	20 to 40 minutes	dusk
A cloud to move	5 minutes to a week	the forecast says so
The boat	it comes when it comes	dinner

The frame is the receipt

When it happens, it happens fast, and you will have time for one or two frames. That is enough. The forty minutes before were not wasted; they were the exposure. The picture only proves you were there and paying attention, which, if you think about it, is the whole job.

If you want to take better photographs, learn to stand still for longer than feels reasonable.