I think this photo of Kultur Shock in Mostar, BiH the morning after an amazing show and an ever more amazing after show adventure sums up this post nicely.
1991-1992 was my sophomore year in college at UC Santa Cruz.
I was a double major in political theory and art with an emphasis in photography. Photography wasn't a major of its own yet. Had I gone through with completing this major, I would have taken 2 more illustration classes and 1 more painting class than photography classes. Hardly a photography major.
Also, the classes were pretty sad. Of the 4 classes I took in photography in my three years there, I only had two professors. Susan and Norman. I forget their last names.
I was shooting lots of bands, portraits and landscape stuff at the time. I was attracted to a super high contrast style of printing. Super high ISO film, pushed 1-2 stops in a developing solution 2-4 degrees warmer than normal. It produced BLACK AND WHITE negatives. Tonal range be damned! I would then print it these photos using the highest contrast developer I could and the highest contrast paper I could find.
It became my thing.
The classes themselves focused very little on the technique of capturing a good image and developing a competent print. We spent most of our time talking about the ideas behind our photos and getting into discussions about patriarchy, misogyny, class inequality, and other social issues that seem to only have gotten worse in the last 26 years. Welcome to every course at UCSC! I really kinda dug it for a while.
I try to be a good progressive and was a political theory major at the time, so these discussions were great. We'd put our assignments for the week up on the big board, give a short speech about the intent of our work and then the political discussions began. We'd talk about the intent and meaning of our photos ad nauseum and never talk about technique. This could get really brutal, really fast and I usually ended up sitting down feeling terrible about my work and even worse about myself.
In my junior year I was in an advanced B&W class. Our first class would be a sampling of our work from the previous quarter. Something was different with this class though. The transfer students from Cabrillo college were now UCSC students. Those of us who had taken the UCSC courses with Norm and Susan over the last two years put up raggedy prints with dust spots, uneven tonality, but rife with "meaning". We would then present our thesis on our pet social cause, be berated by our fellow students for not being ideologically pure enough, get pissed off and then sit down, furious.
The Cabrillo students all came to the front of the class with exquisite prints, expertly mounted for framed and talked about why they chose their subject and the technical details of the development and printing. Then they'd wait for critique. They never stated their intent or what they hoped people would take away from the prints. Those of us who came up through the UCSC program were kind of stunned into silence.
Not only did we not know how to develop or print well, or take any pride in presentation, none of us knew how to critique a print without being presented with the artist's intent in advance. It was at this point that I realized, I was not going to learn how to be a photographer at UCSC.
I was only a couple of classes away from my oral arguments for my political theory degree, but still very far away from completing the maze of art history, illustration, visual theory, and painting classes to get my degree in "photography".
This was unacceptable. I started researching where I could really study photography. The Academy of Art College in San Francisco seemed like the best situation for me as all I would basically do while there was take a bunch of photography classes, some business development and management courses and really dig into developing a professional portfolio.
So, in the ongoing endeavor to make my father's brain explode by bizarre academic choices, I presented my case to my parents. It was a looooooooong talk. I won them over by detailing the focus on career management and business development courses that were mandatory at the AAC.
In the spring of 1993 I would go to the AAC for my portfolio review and placement assessment. I bring a stack of about 150 prints with me that I had made between senior year and high school and the current academic quarter at UCSC.
The head of the photography department and I have a great discussion about my aspirations and goals. Photojournalism, performance, and travel photography. He reassured me that there were stable and lucrative careers and business opportunities in these fields and that the college was very proud of their business development curriculum and internship programs. Good. Good. This really felt like where I needed to be.
Now he dives into my portfolio. Some photos he gives a cursory glance. Others he scrutinizes more carefully. I sit there silently for what seemed like a at least a week.
He drops the last photo onto the sizable stack. Collects his thoughts. I'm fucking terrified at this point. No one had ever given so much careful consideration to my work before.
"How do I put this?"
Pause.
"Thematically and compositionally, I should put you in the advanced classes. However, and pardon my French, your printing sucks. I'm going to put you in the intermediate B&W track for now so you can learn the fundamentals of negative and print development. Get you up to speed with the others. You're pretty far behind in terms of technique."
Damn! That was a gut punch. No one had ever been that forthright and honest about the quality of my work. Prior to this, the critiques were always about the message and intent of the work and never how proper technique could play into that to enhance the work. Now I KNOW I'm at the right place.
I move to San Francisco in the summer of 1993. A room in a house near the corner of Haight and Filmore. I would ride my bike to school 5 days a week for 6 weeks of a summer semester.
Theory and critique in the morning and technique in the afternoon. The first two weeks are easy. All stuff I had already studied extensively in the previous four years. Exposure. Basic chemistry. Depth of field. Perspective. Easy stuff.
My professor was Gordon Hammer. Greatest name ever! He did mostly architectural and aerial work at the time, but was a press photographer in Vietnam in the late 60s and early 70s! He taught us how to process a roll of black and white film using laundry detergent, orange juice and red wine... like he did in the field while dodging bullets! I loved this guy!
Weeks 3-6 were brutal in the morning. Once we got out of the basics, we got into the nitty gritty of optics and chemistry. No wonder this class counted as both a science and a math credit toward the major! I really had to study hard because I had gotten soft in my study habits in the photo program at UCSC. This was also the first time I was confronted with the idea of grades since high school. I got As in both classes ultimately.
In the afternoon technique class, Gordon would teach me sooooooooooo much about how I could improve my negative development and printing process. He taught me how to make a full tonal range print while embracing the high contrast aesthetic I enjoyed. It was a convoluted process involving mid-contrast paper, 3 developer baths; a low contrast developer, a high contrast developer and a water bath followed by traditional stop and fix baths and a slight selenium toner. Most of my peers could develop and fix 3 prints in the time that it took me to do one!
It worked! I had learned how to tame and control the contrasty nature of my prints! YES! In two or three classes I had learned more technique than I had in the previous four years combined!
In the morning, we would put our work up on the wall for critique and it went like this. Most assignments required preliminary prints. No spotting. No mounting. Put the work up and go to the back of the class and be quiet while the class broke it all down. When the class had run out of things to say, you could say a few words, but rarely did anyone say anything other than thank you for the detailed and sometimes hard to listen to critiques. At the end of the semester, we would do the same process only with finished, spotted, mounted prints... and much more intense scrutiny.
I learned so much from this process. The biggest lesson... that your work will be judged by an audience in your absence most of the time. It will be interpreted in ways you never intended. You don't get to walk your audience through the experience and what they get from it. If you want your point to be clear.... you really have to work on it very seriously so that it stands on its own and says what you want it to say.
This all happened over the course of 6 weeks and what would equate to 60 class sessions. What I learned in that time was absolutely fucking invaluable.
Toward the end of the class, I got the bad news that my funding had dried up due to a change in the family financial situation. I was going to have to drop out. I was 21 and anxious to get to work without going massively into debt. I was planning on going into a field that was far more dependent on your portfolio and work ethic than it was on a degree, so I set out into the world to become a photographer.
I never did become a professional photographer. Now, I run a large, long running film competition/festival, lobby for increased statewide film incentives, and edit cooking videos for the most part. A far cry from my young ambition of being a band photographer and photojournalist. Sometimes I lament that I never put in the time and effort to make the dream of becoming a photographer and photo journalist happen, but then I see a group of 9-10 year olds make a film for the 48 Hour Film Project and that lament promptly dissipates. My career choices have always been head scratchers for my family, but I really kinda like where the journey has taken me.
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