Part II (LONG) of What to Shoot Today

[P3D swarren <swarren@xxxxxxx>]

I better send this up quickly before the "Post-length Filter" switch is
thrown. I can't imagine this making much sense if I had to break it down
into a serial article, so here goes.

The following article is a continuation of my earlier ramblings as an
amateur 3D photojournalist, where I challenge myself and others to study
19th century stereoviews as we seek to "document the significant."

Part II: HOW 19TH CENTURY STEREOVIEWS HELP US TO DOCUMENT THE SIGNIFICANT

Knowing how rabid this 3D "affliction" is, I doubt that anyone among us is
having trouble finding worthy subjects. A while back we discussed what to
keep or edit in our collections, but we stopped short of determining what
makes a significant image. Of course, the wonderful part of this is how we
each go after subjects which we find personally interesting, so whatever
survives will be from all corners of the earth and representative of many
ideas.

For my tastes, there are peculiarities of the medium which make it
especially wonderful for documentary images, and being a collector of
stereoviews has had a profound influence on my current shot selection. How
I came to understand this is not so easy to explain, but it has something
to do with a new attitude that I'm just starting to articulate. I'd like to
know if others are similarly affected (afflicted?:))

To be specific, my "eye" for shots has more to do with "documenting the
significant" than with worrying over F-Stops and interoccular rules. Maybe
that's due to getting a lot of my mistakes out of the way, and accepting
the rules and admitting that I'll certainly make more blunders. Now I can
direct my attention to the subjects, not the techniques.

In talking with a fellow 3D enthusiast, I found myself trying to explain
why I go about town capturing the mundane, yet with confidence that these
scenes are going to hold their own 100 years from now. How do I know this?
It was hard to convey this new attitude in words, until I found out that
Stan White had already expressed it when he wrote of the surreal quality of
stereo photography in "Beyond the Third Dimension:"

"How else can we explain the dreamlike experience when viewing the stereo
image? - an experience that was absent when the reality itself was
observed."

I read Stan's comments for the first time just a few months ago. Perhaps if
I read them earlier they wouldn't have made as much sense. While his work
and mine are poles apart in style and content, his element of truth about
the medium made me feel comfortable with what I was sensing in my images.

My better documentary shots have that surreal state that "was absent" when
I observed the subjects in their natural state. As more and more of my
images started exhibiting the clean, sharp technical proficiency that I was
looking for, I noticed also that more of my images were enjoyable for their
surreal quality. This explained why a picture of a city garbage truck
offered more interest in my 3D viewer than it actually had in real life.

But why a garbage truck, of all things? The answer lies somewhere with my
collecting "eye" becoming connected to my shooting "eye."  Let me explain,
lest someone accuse me of overstating the obvious. There is a magical thing
happening and I've never heard anyone discussing their own experience with
this, so I'll call it....

THE FAST FORWARD BUTTON:

Why is a garbage truck exciting to look at in the viewer? It probably
isn't, by any stretch of the imagination. But being appreciative of the
best 19th century images, and having developed an "eye" for good views over
the past ten years, I'm also developing an eye that is  capable of "fast
forward" as I look for things to admire in my "keeper" slide file.

After spending so much time under the hooded stereoscope traveling
_backward_ in time, I'm happy to report that it's not any more difficult to
zoom ahead to 2096 and look at this garbage truck with the same fascination
one might get from looking at an Anthony view of New York City in 1872.

What was it about the garbage truck? Perhaps I had a good angle on it, the
contrast was good, it spoke to me of the times and it had a surreal look of
"importance" because the photographer bothered to "waste a pair of film
chips" on that subject. But this isn't a very strenuous list of criteria,
and meeting these qualities isn't enough to make the garbage truck
"significant."

No, what sets this scene apart from others is its contribution in telling a
story, a larger story of how we lived. It helped tell me something about
life in my town in 1996. Perhaps I should mention that this garbage truck
fits into a sequence of shots taken of tractors, bulldozers, cranes and
snow plows that are used by the city maintenance crews to keep our city
operational.

Maybe there's not a lot to a garbage truck. I only use it as a generic
metaphor for the mundane, and how we can Document the Significant if we
seek to use ordinary objects as part of a larger story. Looking at older
stereoviews, I am beginning to understand how mundane subjects of the past
have turned into significant objects of our desire today. Let me use just a
few examples.

THE PHOTOGRAPHER'S STUDIO AND THE BLUFF OVERLOOKING COLFAX STATION:

How do we use the best images of the 19th century to help us create
equally-significant documentary images today? Do we measure the surreal
qualities, or the physical aspects such as tone and contrast? How do we
know whether we are capturing scenes today that will be worth keeping for a
hundred years?

One way is to look at the most significant stereoviews of the past 150
years. For example, interiors of 19th century photographic studios are some
of the most expensive cards you will find today. Photography in the 19th
century was a new technology that had never been available before, and
stereoviews related to this subject have tremendous historical value
because we now appreciate how photography affected our culture.

But imagine how mundane it must have appeared at the time when someone put
a card in the scope and said, "Look at this view of uncle Joe's photo
studio. There's a chair, and there's a mirror on the wall, and look out -
there's his camera!" For Pete's sake, why look at this scene in a hooded
scope when it was right there in front of them day after day?

Perhaps it goes back to Stan White's point: the photographer's studio
looked more magical through the stereoscope than it did in real life. Thank
goodness someone bothered to capture this mundane subject in 1868 to give
us a vital document for understanding the technology of the era.

Another significant stereoview genre is transportation. Hot air balloons,
The Wright Brothers plane, The Great Eastern steamship, the Driving of the
Final Spike of the Intercontinental Railroad, etc. These images bring
several hundred dollars each. I have an "ordinary" A.A. Hart stereoview of
a railroad siding in Colfax Station, California, and it's worth upwards of
a hundred bucks. Does that mean a realist slide of your local train depot
will command equal value in 2096?

Not necessarily. We all recognize that, in Hart's day, California was an
enchanted place in the westward expansion of our country, so the card
speaks to us on that level. Secondly, railroads were the single most
important technology that allowed us to go west. They also linked our
manufacturing centers as the nation was swept up by industrialization.
These elements come together in a photograph which, on the surface, seems
like a mundane railroad siding, but is now helpful in telling the larger
story of our nation's history.


WHAT DOES THIS LOOK BACKWARD HAVE TO DO WITH GOING FORWARD?:

As an amateur photographer, I'll go for a good depot shot because it's cute
and I like trains. But for "documenting the significant," I have to stop
and ask myself "What is the current revolution? What can I take a picture
of that will help me chronicle these times?"

The answer is not easy. The current revolution is all around us and it's
multi-national. There is a revolution in transportation when you consider
that we just docked up with the MIR space station. If I lived in Florida,
I'd get a view of the Space Shuttle.

There's a revolution in science and medicine. If I lived near a
pharmaceutical plant, I'd shoot a sequence on how life-saving drugs are
mass produced.

There's a revolution in communications and information technology. If I
lived in California, I'd to get scenes around Silicon Valley and other
high-tech centers.

Those of us living in humble little suberbs might look for subjects that
show how we use digital gadgets which are changing the way we live. We can
chronicle our use of computers, perhaps with a picture as mundane as a
self-portrait of yourself "surfing the net" while sitting in front of the
home PC.

If I could time-travel to 2096 and show off a stereoview of my daughter
putting a tape in the VCR versus a stereoview of some 1995 light-painting I
did with a flashlight, I can't help but think that the VCR scene does a
better job of documenting the times, which is my personal goal.

This is not to diminish the value of today's competition-winning slides, or
to shun new works that stem from innovative use of the medium. I enjoy
these works tremendously today, and am confident that the best of these
will bring equal enjoyment and value in 2096.

I am only suggesting that there are potent lessons to be learned from the
19th century photographers who had absolutely no preconception of how to
use the equipment. In their attempt to explore the new medium, they
captured the mundane, and "documented the significant," perhaps by
accident, but more likely by expression of the natural curiosity in things
that seems to be lacking in today's quest to compete and win.


AT LAST, THE ABSENT-MINDED PROFESSOR REACHES A SIMPLE CONCLUSION:

We live in cynical times, no doubt. We take for granted that all of these
marvelous inventions and buildings and people will be with us for several
weeks, years, generations. We acknowledge that we're in the front-end of a
new era of information and technology, yet we're not sure what to do about
it with our 3D cameras.

Not surprisingly, that was the exactly the case of A.A. Hart when he
"wasted a plate" on the bluff overlooking Colfax Station in 1860.

Rapid changes are occuring so fast that we don't know how to interpret
them, much less _document them_ in 3D. Yet, the time to capture these
ordinary events on film is _now_ while the paint is still fresh (or, as the
case may be, "while the motherboard is still warm.")

I'm really looking forward to seeing Expo2, especially to get a 100-year
"sneak preview" of what will be valuable in 2096.


Stephen Warren
Roanoke, VA




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