Gaucho shoot is complete

This past week I spend time around Torres del Paine national park visiting six gauchos with my friends Alberto (L) and Sabine (C) in the photo below. One of the gauchos - Daniel is pictured right.

It’s been great to re-connect with Alberto and Sabine. Alberto was my driver for many years running my Torres del Paine Patagonian tour, and Sabine has been my guide around three, maybe four times.

When I wrote to her earlier this year, I simply just said ‘I would like to go photograph some gauchos, and wondered if you are free for three or four days?’. She is a full time mum now, but she kindly put a programme together for me, with Alberto as driver, and lunches, included. She also spent a lot of time phoning around many gauchos to see if they were free. She told me it is very difficult to get a commitment from many because their daily schedules change on a heartbeat. This time of year is particularly busy for all of them.

So I was surprised when she sent me a detailed schedule of the week, listing which gauchos we would visit each day. I liked the pace: we had around two to visit per day, and that worked well for me.

I am rather rusty at taking portraits of strangers, and being invited into someone’s estancia to sit around for several hours and drink plenty of maté (a tea like drink they are all mad about down here), was a good idea. We got round to making shots gradually of each gaucho.

One thing that stood out for me, and became a theme of the photographs was that every gaucho we visited was an avid maté drinker. They all have very old stoves in their homes, and quite elegant teapots.

So I ended up making lots of close ups of them pouring the tea with their elaborate aluminium carved tea pots (as can be seen below).

The stoves they had, all seemed to have been manufactured in the UK last century, or perhaps longer. Some said ‘Bonnybridge’ which is a town in Scotland. Others said ‘Dover’ on them.

At one point, I was gifted one of the teapots by Juan, whom we visited yesterday.

I just love it.

One thing that photography has brought me, is many friendships. I have made friends with folks all over the place. I think for most of us though, photography is all about creating memories of where we were, and what we did. It is all so easy to think that there is another time, that in some way, life is a rehearsal. As we get older, we realise that the most precious commodity we have is our time. Better to spend it with those that we like, and better to spend it doing what we love.

I really enjoyed this past week making gaucho friends, pictures, and having a step back from my landscape work. I hope to come back next year to do some more.

Hosé Paillacar, Gaucho, Patagonia

This is my first day back in Patagonia in more than six years. My last trip here was in 2018. I’m staying in the lovely little town of Puerto Natales, and for the next four days I will be making photographs of gauchos (Chilean cowboys).

Shot with my iPhone, Tuesday April 23rd 2024

I’ve been dreaming about making some portraits now for quite some time, and I remember talking to my good friend Sabine who lives here about doing a special trip as far back as 2016. It has taken this long to get round to doing it. So much got in the way, and the years just flew by.

I have a week off between tours, and so I figured there would not be a better time. My friend Sabine not only lives in the area, but she knows many of the gauchos personally. So it was very easy to set this up. And I like being able to go in as less of a stranger to meet the gauchos I will photograph this week, because I am with someone who knows them well.

The shot above is a quick mock up with my iPhone. Hosé was very kind and posed for me inside his kitchen. I found the three gauchos I visited today to be very funny guys. Lots of humour, and also very hard working. Their homes were very rustic and had a lot of character to them. I so wished I had brought some reflectors with me to help with the light, but we got by, re-arranging things in the houses a little to make use of the available light.

Myself and my friend Sabine, Puerto Natales, Patagonia, April 2024

For those of you whom have travelled with me to Patagonia before, you may recognise Sabine above. She is such a nice person and I’ve been good friends with her for about a decade now. It has been very nice to hang out with her today and go drive around meeting gauchos together.

I hope this won’t be the last trip to make photos of Chilean cowboys, as I feel each new encounter requires a thawing out period, then a sense of familiarity before each of them truly relaxes into who they are. I am sure that if I keep returning, the more familiarity I have with them, can only help.

Perhaps this is the start of a new chapter for me. I certainly hope so.

More on Airports and X-rays

I’m away for just over a month, and will be in Brazil, Chile and Bolivia.

Lagoon shooting, Brazil 2024. Image courtesy of John Motzi.

I’ve managed to get through all the airports so far without having my films scanned and I’ve found the best way to do this is to collect / un-box all the films and put them into sealable bags, so they can be seen easily. I have also chosen to make sure that there are a lot of 800 ISO films in the bags, as this seems to make the decision easier for the x-ray staff as to whether to scan or hand-search the films.

For most of the staff, I found showing an ISO 800 roll was enough for them to decide to hand-search the film. The only airport where I had more of a reluctance to do that was Edinburgh. I have always found London Heathrow to be 100% inflexible with regards to doing hand inspections of film.

I took Portra 160, 400 and 800 ISO films with me this time as I wish to focus on some portraiture shooting while in Patagonia. My Contax 645 system allows me to have different backs attached allowing me to change ISO quickly.

I realise this post is of little interest to digital shooters, but I note that film has gained more popularity in recent years (lowest year for film sales was 2009). We now live in a multi-format society where mp3, CD, vinyl and even cassette co-exist, and the same is true for photography. It has never been such a great time to do photography as there are so many different kinds of chemical processes which lend a very different look and feel to the work. It is not a 100% digital world.

In the landscape

Just left Brazil after a very nice tour with a nice group of people. Thank you to everyone who came on this tour. It is an amazing landscape and I am very much looking forward to going back next year.

Image courtesy of Bruno Vias. Many thanks Bruno !

I’m heading to Patagonia now. I will be based in the town of Puerto Natales for a week. My good friend and ex guide Sabine will be taking me into the national park each day to go and visit some of her Gaucho friends. I am hoping to do some portraiture and I’ve brought my Contax 645 system for this purpose alone.

The Contax 645 system has some of the most beautiful lenses available for portraiture. I am particularly fond of the 80mm lens for close ups, and the 140mm lens as well.

I can’t quite believe it has been many years since I made any photographs of people. I wish I had more time in my schedule each year to do this, and I must make more effort to do this. As much as I love landscape work, everyone needs some respite or time away from their passions. I find rotating from photography to music is a good way of doing that, but also within photography, changing from landscape to portraiture is also a great way of recharging the inspiration.

It has been a long time since I made any portraits and I’m really looking forward to it.

Jaisamler, India, 2009

Are you documenting, or looking for style in your work?

This past week I’ve been reminiscing on my recent trip to Argentina’s Puna region, that I have been photographing now for close on to a decade.

It was interesting hearing the group’s opinion about the landscape. The biggest impression I heard from them was of the variety of different landscapes that they saw. For instance, we visited a really beautiful sand dune complex on one morning which yielded some very nice new images (if my films turn out to be as good as I hope they are).

It was a reminder to me that my portfolios of what I end up showing from my travels are always going to be a subset of what I encountered. No matter how hard I work at trying to capture what I’m seeing, the final results that I publish will always be a skimming of the surface of what I saw.

There is a natural process of reduction: first we filter down our travels by choosing not to photograph certain scenes. Then we go through a further refinement or reduction by reducing down the set of images we shot to the ones we think are decent. In the process of working towards showing others our best work, we omit images because they fall short in some way. Either the compositions are weak or the light is not good. Either way, we inevitably reduce and reduce what we encountered into a very small subset that simply cannot convey what was encountered and experienced.

Then there is sylistic reduction. In an effort to make the work more cohesive, sometimes this may result in collecting images that are more focussed on working together as a set, rather than being a full document of what was there. In fact, when I think about this more, I have a strong feeling that tight portfolios are at odds with documentary photography, as my set of images from my visit to the Puna in 2022 may convey:

In the above set I more or less reduced down a 10-day tour to a few key locations. There were many ‘documentary’ shots that I took, that would have weakened the final set in some way, either by subject dilution, or by throwing too much contrast and the viewers attention in a direction I would not wish to take them. I’m drawn to a stylistic motif in the final set above, but this bears no relation to the variety of scenery that was actually presented with. When I consider my portfolios over the past few years, it is clear to me that I have not been interested in documenting a landscape for a very long time now.

Yes, there is much more to shoot in the Puna. Yes, there is little room for variance in my portfolio above. I know this to be true. I cannot do both so one has to be sacrificed to aid the other. It’s just that one has to weigh up which is most important. Do you focus your final output on documenting what one saw, and risk losing a sense of stylistic sensibility to the work? Or does one focus on conveying a tight style, but do so at the risk of abandoning all the variety one saw of a place?

The choice is ultimately a personal one for each of us, and there is no right or wrong. Just a personal preference for one over the other. But this does assume that you’ve realised at some point that there is conflict at play here. You cannot have both.

So perhaps this is something that you should ask yourself about your photography:

“what is it that I am trying to do?

Are you trying to work towards finding and honing a sense of individualistic style in your work? Or are you more interested in trying to document all that you experienced?

I have a very strong feeling that both cannot exist together in a portfolio. If they do, then I would expect compromise to feature largely in the final work. Which would ultimately weaken the final output.

So which is it for you? I know for me that I am more interested in developing a style in my work, and for that reason, any hope of documenting all that I saw, was abandoned a long time ago.

But that’s just me. What about you?

Eigg Workshop March 2024

I’m just finishing up a workshop I ran this past week on the isle of Eigg here in Scotland. Below is a ‘portfolio’ example created by the participants work during this week’s workshop.

As part of my Scottish workshops, I always take a high quality digital projector along, so we can review and edit participants work throughout the week. My aim in doing this is many:

  1. most photographers tend to undervalue what they shoot, and it is only in editing the work that I can often show that what may have appeared to be an average shot upon first review, is actually an image that holds great promise.

  2. Editing is an undervalued skill, often viewed as nothing more than just a post-exercise in tidying up an image, when in fact it is a life-long skill in bringing an image to it’s full potential.

  3. to instruct on how compositions could have been tighter / simpler.

  4. to instruct on how choice of subject equals choice of luminosity, and how tonal separation play an important part in image composition

  5. localised contrast selection can make a huge difference to simplifying / aiding composition.

  6. Adobe’s advice to punch up the RAW file in the RAW editor, is fundamentally the wrong approach to delivering images that selectively lead the eye through the frame whilst maintaining soft tonalities and conveying ‘punch and depth’ at the same time.

  7. Luminosity can be edited to lead the eye through the frame.

  8. Subjects appear to stand out better if you spend time quietening their surroundings.

  9. Editing informs fieldwork. Not the other way round. You will become a more selective shooter / composer if you work at your editing.

As part of all my Scottish workshops, I aim to bring the images from all participants together at the end of the week into a cohesive set. I think portfolio development is the key to finding one’s own style, and conveying it to your audience. During the week I start off by editing everyone’s images on an individual basis, but as the week progresses, I show how to go from what may appear to be a random collection of images to a cohesive set. This is done through not just selection, but also editing the images together.

It was a good week this week. The images did start off as a rather random set, but as the week progressed I felt I was able to show how just the six above could feel more cohesive, not simply by what was removed to make the final set glue together better, but also in how iterative editing between this final set brought them together.

Many thanks to Caroline, Mike, Paul J, Paul M, Matthias and Peter for coming all the way to Eigg with me.

Airport Scanners and Film

My latest experience of going through airports with my film has made me decide to take ISO800 and above film with me now. Let me explain.

At Edinburgh airport I was informed that all film below 800 ISO had to go through the scanner, and that the scanner was safe for any ISO below that number. I know for a fact that film is not safe below even 400 for regular old fashioned scanners, and for the new CT scanners (which are rapidly being rolled out everywhere) even one single pass is detrimental to the films.

At Paris Charles de Gaulle, they have introduced CT scanners. I managed to get the film hand checked. But it’s not going to work all the time by asking. In Buenos Aires they told me the scanner was film safe (it degrades the film) and I was forced to put it through.

So I think the best plan is to turn up with films that are above 800 ISO and tell them you have very high speed film and need a hand search. I think that might just work.

If you can, buy the film locally at your destination and perhaps see if you can find somewhere to process it for you and post to to your home address.

Tone Paintings

“We are mostly light seekers
”We use subjects only to support the light that we have found

I was looking at these images recently and received the comment that they are ‘tone paintings’. It got me thinking about whether they are. I know for sure that I am more interested in tone and gradation rather than subject matter. For instance, I prefer to work with weather conditions which give atmosphere to the imagery. When you use rain to obliterate backgrounds, things become less literal, and more subjective. It seems that I am seldom drawn to a scene these days as a ‘subject’, but more for it’s hue / colour and luminosity properties.

When I enquired and looked back at some of my other portfolios I became aware that this form of photography - of creating ‘tone paintings’ is something that I have gravitated towards over some years now. I am less and less inclined to be drawn to a place because it is a strong literal subject, but more because of the hue / colour and luminosity properties.

If I reach further back, it seems that I have always been interested in this the most, but I had tried to think of hue / colour and luminosity as properties of the subjects I was shooting, and not perhaps the main point of the reason why I made the photos.

Lençóis Maranhenses below is a good example of that. I do not think these images are of sand dunes (well, they are), but that is not the purpose for shooting them. I use dunes (as most of us do) to convey tonal gradation, colour gradation, and perhaps as a relief to study these properties alone, rather than get confused by trying to attach them to a particular subject. In a way, the hues, luminosities are the subjects of these images.

So I suppose what I am really trying to say is that although we are often looking for good subjects to photograph, we wrongly make the assumption that the light is what helps make the image more interesting. When in fact I would say that it is the other way round: we use subjects to support the qualities of light we find. We are mostly light seekers, and subject seekers only to support the light that we have found.

Free to compose more anonymous, less obvious shots

It’s taken me a while to realise that since I started to focus more on portfolio sets (as they convey, or help push you towards a style), that I’ve found myself including images that are more anonymous, or perhaps less obvious as contenders to help support the portfolio set.

Portfolios in a way, although they may stipulate constraints so that the images conform to a look or a feel, have in a way allowed me to go looking for compositions in the landscape that might not feel immediately apparent as a strong contender as an individual image, but instead, help or be a supporting image in a set.

I think there is a danger in always looking for the Alpha shot, and discarding the Beta shots as a result. We’re so intent on looking for those images that have a strong composition etc, that they are perhaps too powerful to be included in a set, because they would compete, rather than work with the others.

I got told a while ago that my imagery had moved away from the less iconic shots to a more abstract view. I think this is true, but it wasn’t a conscious decision: it just happened, and I think it mostly came about by my fascination on working on sets of images.

Make the landscape your own

“For me, the ultimate goal is to be able to find myself in the images I make.”

“I just think that even if I tried to get as far away from myself as possible,
I would still be there in my own work.”

There are two ways you can look at photography. One is to think that when you photograph something, you are recording it for posterity. Bundled into this is the belief that the photograph is a realistic impression of reality. Then there is the other way you can look at photography: as a personal expression where you are trying to show others what you saw and felt. I don’t think both can coexist as I think they are mutually exclusive or at the very least, contradictory from each other.

I have this old friend of mine, Steven Feinstein, whom is probably nearing his late 90’s now. He came on a few trips with me about 8 years ago, and said something which I thought could be taken one of two ways. He said ‘Bruce you seem to go anywhere in the world, and make the same photo’. The context of him saying this was that he was being friendly and supportive. It did not come over as a criticism, but more an observation. I said to him ‘well, I think I will take that as a compliment’, because what I saw in his statement was that he was saying ‘wherever you go, your photos look like you’.

Well, whether that is what he meant or not, it gave me pause to consider that I think this is what I am most interested in. I do not wish to record something the way it was, I wish to find my own view. I am sure some (but not all) of you are like this also. You wish to find your own take on something, or to show others what you saw or felt.

For me, the ultimate goal is to be able to find myself in the images I make.

Reviewing the set of portfolios of images below, perhaps Steven was right; wherever I go, I make the same photo. I really don’t mind if this is true. I’d actually find it quite a compliment. Because I think we all want our images to be instantly recognised as ours.

I’ve had time to let my style surface, to be more apparent to myself. I am of the mind that I’m extremely lucky. Not everyone figures out if they have a style, or may even have one.

I’m at a point now that my style is so far established that even if I tried to get as far away from myself as possible, I would still be there in my own work.

But for most of us, we don’t know if we have a style, and the problem is, being able to find yourself in what you produce. That is the million dollar quest. Because I am convinced it is not so easy for ourselves to be objective about what we do. I believe the biggest blind spot we have, is in seeing ourselves. This is because it is incredibly difficult to recognise our own strengths and weaknesses. We do not know ourselves, and in a way, photography is the process of working through that.

I believe the only way to find ourselves in our own work, is to continually review, continually create collections of our work, and to continually think about how they relate to each other.

Sets of images below:

  • Puna de Atacama, Argentina

  • Lençóis Maranhenses, Brazil,

  • Bolivian Altiplano, Bolivia,

  • Hokkaido, Japan,

  • Central Highlands of Iceland

All different countries, all different landscapes, but somehow they all look stylistically similar. That is where I find ‘me’ in my own work. How about you?