The Omniscope

THE OMNISCOPEMy four-month excursion into the

world of cameras and photography

Contents

Introduction12

November Charles and the Giant Mushroom

78

& Appendix

SeptemberCamera Innards

18

OctoberInterviews

36

DecemberThe Omniscope

100

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9NOVEMBER CHARLES AND THE GIANT MUSHROOM

Introduction

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My father was brave enough to videotape my birth. I consider videotaping my birth to be an act of bravery because if something went wrong, there

would be this record of a horrible thing. The idea of recording information from reality is unsettling to me. Cameras were a common household item right from the time I was born. Their design and operation didn’t dazzle or interest me. I just knew that there were these devices called cameras and you could make pictures with them if you liked. They only started to intimidate me when I became aware of the fact that there were things in my life I wouldn’t want to remember. Fear of retrospection was not something that occurred to me (or I suspect, anyone) as a child. It is a feature of adulthood. And photographs can be artifacts that recall old feelings and places in an oddly concrete way. There was also no way to know whether or not a moment was going to be hard to look back on at the time of taking the picture. Lounging on the beach with an old girlfriend, a house that I would move out of, a friend I would never see again. What seemed harmless at the moment to capture became meaningful in a very painful way over time. Taking a photograph these days isn’t a hard thing to do. Not compared the way it was say, two hundred years ago. Being a photographer then meant carrying around a huge tent with a tiny hole in it and handling all kinds of poisonous chemicals. Photographs can be made with such ease these days that I often forget the wounding effect

13INTRODUCTION

that they can have. There are thousands of photographs of me in existence, which is perfectly normal for someone in my social and generational realm. It isn’t a normal number for my grandparents, though (who always have the urge to frame a photograph when it is printed). In this age, there is a discord between the current ubiquity of cameras and the preciousness of the artifacts that come out of them. To think that each one of these thousands of images contains a story about me even though it may have been made in a casual way is overwhelming. My curiosity about the world of cameras and photography is born out of a state of anxiety. I decided to address this anxiety somehow. This book contains the things I found and made during a spell where I was following my curiosity about cameras around. It is a diary of my last four months (from September to December) studying cameras and photography. I am aware of the unmanageable breadth of ‘studying cameras and photography’ but I investigated the questions that appear in this book because they were the ones that interested me. My investigation didn’t have an end goal and this book doesn’t have a thesis.

Here are my notes, the people I met and the things I made.

SeptemberCamera Innards

A pinhole camera is a lightproof box with a tiny hole in it. The image is projected through this hole, into the box. A light-sensitive material is included to

capture the image projected through the hole. Pinhole cameras can theoretically be made out of any lightproof container and the images are always in focus. I used a pre-made, polished wooden pinhole camera called a ‘Zero Pinhole’. It took 120 mm film and was completely hand made. To expose the film, you manually slid a cover out of the way to reveal the pinhole. To close it, you manually slid it back. It was that simple. Since the hole was really small (it was a pinhole after all), the film had to be exposed for much longer than what I was used to. I took it to an indoor botanical garden to try it out. The exposure time indoors for the film I was using was around ten minutes per photograph. I left my camera with the pinhole open in front of a cactus. I walked around looking at the other plants while the camera took its time recording the cactus. When I was at the other end of the room, a little girl and her parents walked into the room. The girl was looking at the plants and skipping around really close to my camera. I stood at the other end of the room praying that she wouldn’t touch the camera and ruin the shot. She didn’t. But at that moment it became clear why cameras sometimes need to be more complicated than boxes with holes punched in them. Adding a lens on to a camera means that the hole the light passes through can be much bigger than a pinhole.


A bigger hole means that there is more light coming in, so the exposure time can be much shorter. I can take a picture of the same cactus in 1/60th of a second rather than ten minutes. I don’t need to worry about the little girl jumping around at the other end of the room. But if I need to close the shutter within 1/60th of a second, I need a more accurate, programmable mechanism than a manually operated sliding flap. Long story short, the technical considerations of camera design snowball as people’s expectations of them change and evolve. Shown over the next few pages are four examples of camera parts that I borrowed from my professor Steve Stadelmeier’s collection of old and broken camera parts. They were all innovations that changed the way people used cameras. They were elegant, functional devices that I wanted to understand the best I could. But more importantly, they were just beautiful objects that I felt the need to photograph. Mostly so I could look at them later after I returned them to Steve.

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Inter-lens shutters were

introduced in the mid 1880s

as the demand for a range of

programmable shutter speeds

grew. They are fitted into the

lens barrels of cameras. The five

leaves silently slide over each

other and overlap to let the light

through. The use of inter-lens

shutters rapidly declined in the

1960s with the rise in popularity

of Single Lens Reflex cameras

fitted with focal plane shutters.

However, they live on in many

medium format cameras.

Five-Leaf Inter-Lens Shutter (Made by Nikon)

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23

(Image collaged from cropped close-ups)

Focal-plane shutters are placed right in front of the film

plane or the sensor. The advantage of this placement is

that you don’t need an extra shutter fitted into every

lens barrel. The shutter shown in the picture has a pair of

aluminum curtains that are controlled by the pivoted arms.

Priming the shutter pushes both the curtains downwards.

When the shutter is released the two curtains move

back upwards, but with a delay between them. The delay

between the curtains determines the shutter speed.

Horizontal Focal-Plane Shutter (Made by Copal)

SEPTEMBER CAMERA INNARDS

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25

The pentaprism was developed by Zeiss in the 1950s. It

is used in single lens reflex cameras. It allows the person

to use the camera at eye-level rather than waist-level.

Pentaprisms also correct the lateral inversion of the viewing

image caused by the mirrors of Single Lens Reflex cameras.

Pentaprism


The diaphragm on

a camera controls

the size of the

passage that the

light travels through.

Pictured here is

a large diaphragm

with steel blades. It

is around the size

of a human palm.

One knob controls

the size of the hole,

and the other locks

the blades into

place. The blades in

this diaphragm are

strong enough to

shatter a glass bottle

placed inside it.

Diaphragm from a View Camera

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Photograph of an acquaintance taken with a Twin Lens Reflex camera. I forgot to correct for the parallax between the viewing lens and the taking lens. Since the subject was pretty close to my camera, the effects of my mistake are visible.


This picture was made with the Zero Pinhole Camera. I was careless and lost track of which parts of the film were being exposed. I ended up with overlapping images.

OctoberInterviews

The camera is a peculiar device because it has been employed extensively by various professionals. A few of these professionals include journalists, marine

biologists, the police, dentists, tennis coaches, surveyors and artists. I don’t know why, but for some reason artists strike me as the odd ones out in that list. I wanted to talk to artists about how they have used cameras as tools to create their bodies of work. I was curious to find out how aware they were of their cameras while they took pictures. I also wanted

Photo: Jamie Gruzska

to understand the extent to which their camera choices have defined their work. To explore these questions, I conducted three interviews. Jamie Gruzska (hereafter referred to as Jamie) and Dylan Vitone (hereafter referred to as Dylan) were both my teachers in college. They were both extremely effective teachers and hilarious people to be around. But like all good teachers, they didn’t overbear us with their own points of view and their personalities. As I result, I didn’t know much about their own work even though I had spent so much time with them. By conducting these interviews, I wanted to try and understand them as artists. Jamie introduced me to Mark Perrott (hereafter referred to as Mark). He told me it would be a good idea to talk to Mark. He told me that Mark was an expert at using medium and large format cameras and had a unique approach to taking photographs. Dylan seconded this reference and described Mark as ‘someone who was so sweet, it was almost fishy’. So Jamie, Dylan and Mark were the three photographers I interviewed during the month of October. I wanted to know what they were like as children and why they took up photography. I was curious to know if those reasons had changed since. I wanted to know if they took pictures of their friends and families. Did they take photographs that they never showed anyone? Where were those pictures? I asked them all of these questions, and this is what they said.

Note: All images shown in the interview section are the respective artists’ work unless otherwise specif ied

Jamie Gruzska recently exhibited a set of prints made from negatives that were decades old. In this interview he tells me about how making these prints of old negatives gave him a way ofdealing with the sense of loss that comes with growing up and moving on. He also talks about a lot of other things, like how he’s stopped using cameras to make photographs.

Jamie Gruzska

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Could you talk about your earliest photographic experiences?When I started photography back in the seventies I was eleven or twelve. My interest stemmed from one of my relatives who visited me. He was three or four years older than me and he brought over a camera. I had never seen one like it. It was a 35mm Single Lens Reflex, silver, with all these numbers and dials and buttons. And the only cameras that I knew of then were cheap Polaroids and those (at the time) common Brownies. This beautiful device that he brought over was very intriguing to me. And very quickly, I did some research and turned my bathroom into a darkroom. In the late seventies the cameras that were most popular were 35mm (keep in mind that for most commercial photography it was still medium and large formats that were being used). I bought an Olympus OM2. It was touted as

the smallest professional camera. I got it in black because it was inconspicuous. Funnily, I was very self-conscious of taking pictures. I was very shy. I did it almost surreptitiously. I wanted to take really serious pictures by the time I was fourteen or fifteen.

Which cameras have you used in your professional career?My choices of format have been largely accidental and also a product of my time. At some point I realized I was going to need a larger format but I still wanted to be inconspicuous. The tripod wasn’t helping with that, though. I didn’t have the money to buy a larger format and I didn’t want to ultimately be lugging around more equipment. So that’s what my choices were based on. I went to art school where I studied painting and printmaking. My photography stayed dormant for a few years.

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41OCTOBER INTERVIEWS: JAMIE GRUZSKA

I still maintained a darkroom but there was no real rush to maintain any equipment. It picked up again during the late 90s when I moved to Pittsburgh and bought a house. I knew I wanted a darkroom in it and I thought it was probably going to be the last darkroom in the world (built from scratch). At that point, my interest started to pick up. I had a used Mamiya Twin Lens Reflex that I sold later. I bought a Yashica-Mat Twin Lens Reflex too. Finally I realized I didn’t like the square format. I also found the 35 mm format too horizontal. It wasn’t square enough (laughs). The camera that I ultimately bought was a Pentax 67. It had the Pentaprism. It’s a massive camera but it suited me and I liked the fact that it was at eye level. I was used to, but not fond of looking down at the viewfinder. I know that I like my Olympus a lot and I like my Pentax a lot. In the middle I had a dalliance with the Holga because I wondered what sort of romantic atmospheres I could create or if it would change the way I do things. Largely it was not a terribly satisfying experience.

Why not?Because I made images the way I

always made them except with the Holga they were just blurry.

Have you used digital cameras?My first one was a really small Canon Powershot that I bought around ten years ago. I can’t say I really knew what I was doing with it because I didn’t know much about color photography. I have access to great equipment here at CMU. It seemed a little backward for me not to know what digital photography could do in a more serious way. I bought a Leica D-Lux 4, which is essentially a point and shoot but very good quality. It was inconspicuous and I could put it in my pocket. For this reason, I find that people take very good photographs using their phones simply because they have them around. Phone photographs are wonderful because they exist. The capturing of life is important and the format has a lot to do with whether or not you have the camera. It isn’t just about the image quality. If there’s too much ritual associated with taking the image then sometimes the images won’t occur at all. I’m not sure how I feel about the result versus the process of making the image. I do know that if I go somewhere with a camera, I carry a different attitude than if I go somewhere with my phone.

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Does the camera you use change your purpose as a photographer?I think the camera I have changes my approach. For example, look at this still life (Points to a still life on his computer screen). I’m in no hurry, I’m not looking at anyone and no one’s looking at me. I shot that with my Pentax mounted on a tripod. I tend to use larger formats when I shoot still lifes. But when I’m walking around the street then I don’t want to be too conspicuous. I’ve had instances when I’ve been interested in the qualities the camera brings to the photographs. When I’m after high definition I get it, but I’m not always after that. For me, the camera I use and what mood I’m in using it in affects the pictures I make. I rarely make large prints. When you take classes here at CMU we make you use a variety of cameras. It isn’t because we want you to make sharper prints, it’s because of those other psychological factors of different formats. Your subject matter will change, you have to use a tripod, break the process up, slow it down and think about composition. Those things are not the hallmarks of a 35mm camera. It’s an unusual case for a student using a 35mm camera to use it with the same care as they would a view camera. And to this day, I’m not sure what those different formats are about. They are like

different shirts, or different color shoes, you feel like using different ones on different days.

You described yourself earlier as a shy person. Could you talk about your experiences photographing people?You use a Twin-Lens Reflex camera mostly at waist level. Using it at that height changes your relationship to the subject because you’re not looking at them. They are not aware of what to look at. They are aware that the camera’s there but its down below in a weird place. Where they should look is more clear with cameras that go up to the eye. You can almost hold digital cameras anywhere and shoot. One of my favorite things to do is hold the camera off to the side of my eye and shoot looking at the subject. I know they’ll be in the frame well enough and I’ll deal with the composition later. It makes them look into your eye. It also gets rid of the blackout moment. People don’t expect you to be looking at them with both eyes when you’re taking a picture so sometimes it yields a more natural result. Roland Barthes (in his book Camera Lucida) talks about the subject being photographed creating an alternate view for the camera: the pose. The pose doesn’t exist any time other than when

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I find that people take very good photographs using their phones simply because they have them around. Phone photographs are wonderful because they exist. The capturing of life is important and the format has a lot to do with whether or not you have a camera around at the right time. It isn’t just about the image quality. If there’s too much ritual associated with taking the images then sometimes the images won’t occur at all.

Photo taken by Alie

Brown on an iPhone

OCTOBER INTERVIEWS: JAMIE GRUZSKA

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you’re being photographed. It’s like an alternative to what you really are. It’s something you’re coming up with at the moment. You want to look like someone other than yourself, so you do something. You do something with your face, you change your posture. Barthes talks about that very eloquently in his book.

What is that experience like for you as a photographer?My self-consciousness has never gone away. I guess part of it is that I don’t know what I’m looking for when I photograph people and I never have. I’m not trying to catch people in some natural moment when they’re revealing something about themselves that they wouldn’t otherwise. I don’t have an agenda like that. My needs are very simple. I just want a photograph that’s nice to look at. The composition is decent, the person looks in a way close to what their pose is. Our perceptions of people are often based on a single ‘photograph’ of them that in some ways is based on an impression of them that isn’t photographic. In other words, it is made from a bil lion little motions and movements. Ultimately the pictures that please me the most

are ones that indicate our frailty, our weaknesses, our bare or naked qualities emotionally and physically without drawing any attention to what the photographer had to do to reveal them.

In your most recent exhibit, you used old negatives as found objects and printed them. Many of the images had people in them. Who were those people?I had started to photograph people in the 70s. I was photographing women, mostly. For a teenage boy that was interesting. But the embarrassment of that teenage boy thing had me not being able to look at those pictures for many years. When I uncovered them much later, I found that some of the images were very poignant to me. I thought they were universal too because there was a sense of loss on the photographer’s part but also a sense of loss on the part of the subject. The sense of time defining an image and when we look at an image now that was made over thirty years ago fascinated me. Also, many of those images were never made or printed. There was this weird tension of facing the subject, especially if it was of a pretty girl back then. I was trying to imagine that feeling and cope with that again.

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Our perceptions of people are often based on a single ‘photograph’ of them that is based on an impression of them that isn’t photographic. In other words, this impression is made from a billion little motions and movements. Ultimately the pictures that please me the most are ones that indicate our frailty, our weaknesses, our bare or naked qualities emotionally and physically without drawing any attention to what the photographer had to do to reveal them.


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So you were trying to cope with that by printing the negatives so many years later?Yes, literally reliving to some extent that tension when I was taking the picture to when I was making the print. The process is ongoing. I’m still trying to figure them out and discover who that person was that took those images. It’s almost like there’s clues in there that can help you find out like little bugs embedded in amber. There’s a suspended quality. Almost like all the information is there in these negatives that are perfectly preserved. Like not a day has gone by in their life. Certainly many have gone by in my life and I can’t remember those days.

People use cameras for all kinds of things nowadays. Have the reasons for which you take pictures changed over time?I think as a child I took pictures to feel like I was part of the adult world. Maybe I did it to feel like I could do something seriously. It was like a ‘pre-career’ or something. I felt I could do it at a level that required discipline and skill. And I was always trying to make art. I was largely self–taught and the books I got from the library as a child weren’t about commercial photography, they were art books. So that’s what my sense of photography was. I was

inclined to be artistic. I got into photo-based printmaking in grad school. So I did use photo imagery pretty seriously for a while. Sort of like impure photography. I’m not a purist. At the same time I’m suspicious of all these things that make photography look too artistic. I think the most authentic photographic experiences are usually the more direct, simple ones so I think that this attitude of not wanting the photographs to be too distorted or ‘arted’ up too much is one I still subscribe to. Even my work looks a little messed with (negative images and so on). That was a strategy that I had to come up with to cope with the fact that so much time had passed with all of those photographs. I wanted to give them the right feeling addressing that gap of time and somehow looking through the various things available to me, I ended up instinctively going away from ‘straight’ photography especially in those photographs.

Could you talk more about your process?In this process of using old negatives, I stopped thinking about the camera because I wasn’t using one. A friend of mine said that I was using my negatives as found objects which some of the prints actually are.

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These found things interest me. I often don’t know why I’m photographing people. Obviously with family snapshots that question is already answered. You’re trying to record the event for the sake of remembering and sharing it. It’s a role that you feel is important as a parent, for example. You’re expected to take photos to remember something. The problem though with taking photographs to remember an event is that you can’t experience it. I sort of hate photography for that reason. Because it intrudes. And if you’re trying to make good photographs it intrudes even more. Because you’re more aware, you’re not innocent. With digital photography it’s much easier to not be as involved because you can make many images without that much impact. Digital photography is easier to deal with in that regard. It doesn’t intrude as much in the experiencing of a moment as a film camera.

What do you look for in a photograph?Roland Barthes (in his book Camera Lucida) talks about the role of ‘punctum’ in a photograph. This punctum is what gives you a pang when you look at image. I’m sympathetic to that idea because I think it’s important to know what makes a photograph

function. Not so much the technical achievement, or the clarity, the optical aspects of the picture which some people find very important. I just see photographs as an image, not that different from a painting. I’ve taken photographs of paintings. You can create a sense of the way reality is organized. Whether it’s a photograph of a flat thing, or a photograph of an actual space doesn’t matter. Whether the picture is a print, a photograph or a painting, from the artist’s point of view it doesn’t matter. There are some people who say that it’s all that matters but for me it’s irrelevant. Images that simply exist without any kinds of indications of who made them are always the most interesting ones to me. Vernacular photography (photos that are anonymous) are often the most powerful because we don’t know anything about the photographer. It can seem like the photographer wasn’t even needed for the picture to occur. It doesn’t even depend on the camera. Those are often the best photographs.


I’m still trying to discover who that person was that took those pictures. It’s almost as if there are clues in those negatives that can help me find out. Like little bugs embedded in amber. There’s a suspended quality. Almost all the information is there in those negatives. Like not a day has gone by in their life.

-Jamie Gruzska

Dylan Vitone

Dylan Vitone talks about how photography has been a way for him to explore aesthetics, people outside his social sphere, and in his most recent project, himself.

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How were you introduced to photography?My father was a photographer so I was around photography all my life. In my junior year of high school I had an Olympus point and shoot that my he gave me. It was a really basic one. I remember taking pictures and videos of people skateboarding. I took videos of myself skateboarding, too. I also remember photographing graffiti that I did. But it wasn’t idea driven stuff. It was more like me documenting crazy things, or stuff that I vandalized. But that wasn’t really photography for photography’s sake. I think the first time I did photography with any intention was my sophomore and junior year of college when I was getting my design degree.

When did you become aware that you were a photographer?I just know that I really love making images. I became

pretty obsessive about it almost immediately and started spending most of my time on it. For my first photography class I used my dad’s old-school manual Canon. Later, I started using a Canon EOS A2. It was a pretty advanced, and it had a good light meter. It was a decent camera for what I could afford at the time. I saved up my money and bought it. It was more automated so I had to learn how to control the automation so it would do what I wanted it to do instead of what it wanted to do.

Which cameras have you used for your professional work?My ‘serious’ cameras have been this one, the Mamiya 7, the Canon 5 series and Canon 5 series II. So there have been only four. The Mamiya gives me a much bigger negative. That’s the major point. I’ve never changed a camera because I was unhappy with the

19th of October, 2011

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camera for some reason. I’ve always changed it because of the image quality. The Canon 5D that I shoot with now is virtually identical ergonomically to my original Canon EOS A2. It has a really nice digital sensor on it so I can make high quality images without paying for the processing of the film. For my ‘serious’ work I try to keep the camera as small, portable and quick as possible so I’m not drawing attention to myself.

How do you distinguish your serious work from your non-serious work?I use my iPhone a lot to take pictures. I also have a dinky point and shoot that I use to photograph Elaine’s (Vitone’s wife) and my heads all around the world. I really love making pictures, that’s why I’m always shooting on my iPhone. The difference is that the pictures I shoot on my iPhone don’t have a conceptual underpinning to them. I’m not trying to get an idea across. I photograph a lot of my personal life but not the things you would think. I photograph a lot of stupid things like my food, or a place we’re at so I can remember I was there. So I’ll upload roughly twenty pictures a week from my iPhone. I just have hard drive after hard drive of both personal and ‘serious’ images that no one will probably ever see.

Is your attitude to these pictures different from when you are making pictures that end up on the walls of a gallery?I’m in a totally different headspace though when I take these kinds of photographs and my more ‘serious’ work. It’s like a night and day difference actually. I never use the same camera for both these things. I would love to have a little camera that I could carry around that would make pictures at higher resolutions. (To his students in the room) If you guys want to buy me a $1000 present sometime I want the new Fuji rangefinder. I would use it for a different kind of photography. It would be a more stream of consciousness journal kind of thing. With my ‘serious’ work (I’m going to keep using quote unquote every time I use the word ‘serious’) there’s a conceptual idea that I’m trying to get across. But with my Miami project actually, I wanted the pictures to have a ‘snapshotty’ quality, with crummy aesthetics. I wanted them to be a little less poetic, a little less seamless in space. I knew before I got on the plane to Miami that I wanted those pictures to feel like that.

Why did you choose this aesthetic for your Miami project?When you go to the zoo, you see people walking around the space taking videos not really paying

OCTOBER INTERVIEWS: DYLAN VITONE

If you look at a lot of newspapers and magazines the people that are documented are celebrities and I think we have an obligation to document humanity and the human experience as a whole. I’m interested in chronicling social groups and social phenomena.

-Dylan Vitone

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attention to their kids. When you go to a music concert, you see people not really listening to the music, just taking pictures to prove they were there and they’re trying to get their friends in all the shots. I think that sometimes we’re really distracted by our surroundings. The world is inundated with images because everyone has cameras and everyone’s taking pictures. There’s a real abundance of snapshot images that are not well composed, not well put together, not well lit and I really wanted this project to tie into that idea aesthetically. I used my Canon 5D for it. I don’t usually draw a lot of attention to myself. In fact, with that project, I intentionally used a crummy lens so I would be less conspicuous than all the ‘professional photographers’. I wanted to be taken less seriously; I wanted to be a tourist. I wanted to have people talk down to me like I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.

Most of your work features people that look like they are performing for your camera. How do you go about photographing people you don’t know?I talk to my subjects most of the time, but different people will get more or less of the story. For example, the Miami work was about how well we’re trained to

perform for the camera. There’s a certain amount of expectation that happens when you pull out a camera in front of someone. They feel like they’re supposed to smile and have a good time. I wanted to play up that expectation. I thought of it as them performing for my camera. I would say superficial things like ‘Hey! Look at the camera, smile, don’t smile, etc.’ Some people feel like you should build a level of trust and understanding between people before you can have the authority to document them. I don’t do it that way whatsoever. I approach my subjects with a camera in my hand, tell them who I am, what I’m about and what I’m going to try to do. I work out how many pictures of them I have to take and how long I have to spend with them before they feel comfortable with me. Ultimately, my ability to be in tune with another human being is important to me.

Is that the appeal of photography for you?Engaging with people is important for me and ultimately, why I do photography. I spend an awful lot of time with myself and people I am familiar with so being able to interact with people who are not part of my social group is very appealing. If you look at a lot of newspapers and magazines the people that are

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documented are celebrities and I think we have an obligation to document humanity and the human experience as a whole. I’m interested in chronicling social groups but also social phenomena.

Has your approach to making images changed over time?I mostly shoot digital these days. I take more pictures, take more chances and have more fun. When I first starting taking photographs, I did it because I enjoyed making images and talking to people. After my South Boston project in 2004 though, I found that I was taking myself a little too seriously. I started thinking that my images needed to be ‘good’ because I was a professional. This isn’t my attitude at all anymore. I just have fun making the pictures. For the Pittsburgh and South Boston projects, I did all my panoramas on a tripod. I wanted there to be a nice, smooth poetic space. I wanted the images to be beautiful. I wasn’t trying to do that with the Miami project. For the Miami project, it was really significant for there to be really jarring cuts in between all the scenes. I wanted there to be violent breaks in the images so I took my camera off the tripod. It also played into the idea of me not wanting to look like a professional. This has been my approach since. (Pointing to

one of his panoramas from the more recent Rutland project) Watching someone getting his private parts tattooed is an alarming experience so the image should be alarming compositionally.

You shoot mostly panoramas, but interestingly only your most recent project (the Yellowstone project) features predominantly natural landscapes. The Yellowstone work I did was definitely the hardest I’ve done and the one I’ll get the least mileage out of. I didn’t know how to make those pictures when I started. I really hate landscape photography; it bores the hell out of me so I owed it to myself to get into it without judging it or writing it off. It was really hard for me to understand the space. From a personal standpoint, it was important for me to make interesting pictures there in Yellowstone. I don’t mean to whine, but I was also away from Elaine and I don’t do well without seeing her. I have AT&T so obviously I couldn’t really call anyone. I was really isolated and it was taxing on me psychologically. But every photographic experience has made me grow and I think that’s a cool thing to be able to say about your work.

OCTOBER INTERVIEWS: DYLAN VITONE

Mark PerrottWhen Mark Perrott begins a photography project, he uses a notebook (not a camera). He makes meticulous notes about what he is going to take pictures of, what time the light is right and what equipment he’s going to use. In this interview, Mark Perrott explains why he swears by mounting his camera on a tripod and the value of meditating over a single shot long before it is even taken.

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Can you remember your earliest experiences with photography?I can remember the absolute beginning. When I was eleven or twelve my uncle died and in the things that he left behind, our family got a cardboard box. In that box was a camera called a Mercury half-frame. It was a solid metal rangefinder, beautifully put together. It made 72 half-frame exposures. I went on a Boy Scouts trip to Canada with eleven other people. I took that camera with me and took pictures galore as a sort of photojournalistic documentation of our seven days there. Those were the first pictures I made. I don’t have them anymore. Until I got to college, I was using rangefinder cameras that had built in meters with a little match circle. During my senior year, I was making elevated snapshots of my friends. I was kind of the ‘documentarian’ of our group. I would also go to car

shows, and I would photograph the hell out of the hot rods. We would go to motorcycle events, races and I’d photograph the hell out of those too. And to no end. I didn’t do anything with them I was just happy to make the pictures. I wasn’t trying to create artifacts. I’m not even sure I was interested in keeping records. When we would go to car shows, I was completely taken in by the surfaces, the paint and the beauty. I just wanted to capture it, I wanted to fix it in my life and to own it.

What were your college experiences like?When I got to college, I got a bit more serious about trying to make artful pictures. I started using a Crown 4x5 and I’d load film holders and make 4x5 images, which I liked doing a lot. I liked getting the camera settled down. I liked that it mostly had to live

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on a tripod (except you could handhold this camera if you wanted to). It was meant to be a quiet studio camera. I did a lot of studies of the night with that camera. I remember a whole series with the moon. I just opened the darkslide and exposed the same negative over and over for 20 seconds each time. So I got a series with the moon moving across the negative. I remember photographing out of focus icicles that turned light in those big circles that you get when things are out of focus. With that camera, there was a chance to look at a ground glass and be more critical about what an image looked like. Using the 35 mm format was like a being a photojournalist where you responded to what was going on. But I personally really liked the 4x5 format. It forced me to think about relationships inside that frame whereas with the 35mm format I found myself more connected to the event. I found myself timing it so that I would capture the peak of that event. With the 4x5 the event didn’t matter at all. For example, there were icicles that weren’t moving at all. You could spend hours. Or a still life that you had on a table. You could move the camera a half-inch this way, or a half-inch that way, raise the lens. It gave you control over the

nuances. With the 35mm you’re just lucky to get the damn thing at the right moment. With the 4x5, nothing’s moving, you could go to dinner, come back play with it some more, drink a beer; you had a lot of time. It was less urgent, there was less pressure. It slowed you down and made you look hard. And there was something wonderful about making a contact print out of a 4x5 negative.

Which other cameras have you used?For portraits I always used a Hasselblad 2 ¼ camera. For 99% of my pictures, I use my Hasselblad. I’ve had it since 1972. I am crazy about that camera. I found the square format very beautiful. It was also very ‘me’. I even designed a little mask that would turn the 35mm into a square format (I never used it though). I would probably be making more 35 mm images if I could shoot in squares. The Hasselblad lets me shoot both color and black and white (just change the backs) and it lets me shoot Polaroids so I can look at the pictures instantly. And it has an incredibly rich array of lenses that allows me to do a range of 500 mm to 16 mm. It’s just a great camera. From 1980 till today, I have been dedicated to using the 2 ¼. I make 4x5s occasionally.

OCTOBER INTERVIEWS: MARK PERROT

With the 4x5 format the event doesn’t matter at all. For example: the static icicles I was photographing. I could spend hours looking at them through the lens. I could move the camera a half-inch this way, or a half-inch that way, raise the lens. It gave me control over the nuances. Nothing was moving, I could go to dinner, come back, play with the composition some more, drink a beer. It was less urgent, there was less pressure. It slowed me down and made me look hard at what was in the frame.

-Mark Perrott

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Typically on the ground glass of the 4x5, I just tape it off so I’m looking at a square. When I started out being a photographer, I bought a Nikon F and a Hasselblad. Those were going to be the two cameras I was going to use to try and make a living. It was just that at the time, big film typically meant big quality. The 35mm was still relegated to journalism and it wasn’t good enough for advertising. I tended to have clients that were really interested in advertising so it had to be grainless. The 4x5 has a lot of other baggage but it is grainless, I have to give it that! I did some 35mm because there were some assignments that required me to be a journalist. The 2 ¼ was just too clunky for journalism. The 2 ¼ was the format I chose to make my more artful pictures. And then that was it. That was the camera I leaned on.

What were you taking pictures of at that point?I was taking pictures of landscapes. I was taking black and white film and trying to process it uniquely in relation to the contrast in my image. I spent a lot of time realizing what I wanted the negative to look like before I processed it. The Hasselblad allowed me to change the film backs so I could separate the

processing requirements per roll of film. I just wanted to make really beautiful negatives. It also gave me consistency. I used a number 2 filter every time I made my prints. I wasn’t jumping around between filters. In the last fifteen to twenty years I have made 99% of my pictures with my camera on a tripod. I had the camera settled down, I thought critically about what’s inside, or what’s on the edge of the frame and the where the camera was. And it wasn’t because of camera shake. It was about looking harder at what was in the frame and really examining it.

Why do you make pictures?I make pictures because I’m curious. I’m curious about life and the camera gives me access to situations that I would never have if I didn’t identify myself as a photographer. It allows people to be present to all sorts of places and events that without a camera, you’re just a busybody. The camera gives you credentials. I like that. I get credentials to get involved and be a part of things. The pictures I make professionally are all somewhat autobiographical. They interest me intensely otherwise I wouldn’t take them. So something about what’s there in the pictures is a mirror to what I’m engaged in. I don’t think I ever make pictures that I wouldn’t

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Even when nothing’s going right, it’s the best time of my life. I enjoy it when I’m alone, with my camera, with film, with my subject and I’m figuring out what’s going to happen next: the weather’s going to change, something’s going to go wrong, I’m going to have a revelation. The joy is when I’m physically and intellectually just out there, doing my work.


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exhibit. I don’t take pictures of my personal life. I don’t use the camera on my phone. I do have some work that I photographed intensely that’s never been seen. But I like the notion of trying to get my work on the walls. It’s important to feel like I’m done so I can move on.

Could you describe your process for making pictures?When I make pictures, I don’t ever begin with the camera. My first days or weeks are spent walking around with a notebook looking carefully at what’s around me, experiencing the light and experiencing the place so the camera becomes just a tool to record. I don’t walk around pointing the camera at things, wondering where I should go next. The camera is back in the car. The camera is not necessary until I say ‘oh, ok 8 o’clock the light is beautiful, this is where I want to be. Then at 11 o’clock I want to be there with a 50mm lens. And if it rains, I’m going to be at this other place.’ I make really tight notes about what I want to do. It’s like a film storyboard for me. The camera is a tool but it’s not part of the discovery. The day you’re making pictures, you’re just a guy with a camera working. My process is different from other people’s but that’s just how I do

it. And I’ve never had the urge to take the camera off the tripod. I’m stuck with that big, stinking box. I really love that big pain-in-the-ass camera. When I make pictures, I rarely do it casually. I block out big chunks of time that I have to protect by saying no to everything else. I’m not good at just taking out a few hours. I love projects where I go out of town, because no one can bug me.

Presumably taking pictures of people using larger formats is different from taking pictures of things that stay still. Is the process you use to take pictures of people different from the one you use for say, landscapes?The way I’ve always taken portraits of people is I’ve created a strategy for linking the subjects. I use this device as a concept that lets me make a lot of photographs. For example, I’ve taken pictures of poets. I got a list of all the poets who lived here in Pittsburgh. Then I encouraged them to send me their work. I read their poems and then they came to my studio and we made photographs. I did a project that lasted around twenty-five years of people who had just gotten their tattoos done. I started going to tattoo parlors. All I needed to do was be there and people would love to get their photograph taken. I spent a

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summer going to every Pittsburgh swimming pool. I set up my equipment and invited people to come and have their portrait taken. I did the same thing with Little League Baseball players one summer. So that’s been my strategy. Use a theme to help me organize my subjects, because I can’t just go out there and choose people at random. That’s not my thing. I like to bring them into a space that’s safe, comfortable and organized and then I make pictures from there. In every one of those situations, I built on-location studios. I brought my lights and a generator. I had an assistant who worked with me and we put a mark in the ground so my subjects knew where to stand. Early on, we used to take Polaroid backs along so we’d hand them a Polaroid before we shot the main pictures. So there was this great gift for them. It was beautiful. I like that big camera. It’s a little intimidating and it makes the moment seem important to the subject.

Could you talk about a photographic experience you really enjoyed?In the early 80s I was photographing steel mills at a high-tech park in Hazelwood. It was a place I knew well in Pittsburgh. The pictures were absolutely meant to be black and

white (which I loved). I took my 2 ¼ Hasselblad, a little strobe, a battery pack and two tripods. And I could go to work every day and make pictures successfully. I could be flexible; I wasn’t tied down to my equipment and I wasn’t stuck with the baggage of lights. It was just a real joy. As much as I end up with photographs (as all photographers do) the joy is being at work, making pictures. The process of exploration, the frustration is the good stuff. Even when it’s bad it’s good. Even when nothing’s going right, it’s the best time of my life. I enjoy it when I’m alone, with my camera, with film, with my subject and I’m figuring out what’s going to happen next. The weather’s going to change, something’s going to go wrong, I’m going to have a revelation. The joy is when I’m physically and intellectually just out there, doing my work. That’s what encourages me to do what I do.


Pages from Mark Perrott’s notebooks

Mark Perrott using himself as a stand-in for portraits

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November Charles and the Giant Mushroom

My friend Charles Doomany’s hair is outrageous. It’s so healthy and well coiffed that it looks like a visitor to our imperfect world from another

realm. Hairstyles are temporary because hair grows. They constantly call for maintenance and reassessment. Our faces and beliefs change shape over time so the hair must change to accommodate for this. Charles’ hair isn’t going to be around in this state forever. When I asked Mark why he took pictures at car shows, he explained that he was completely taken in by the surfaces of the hot rods and that he wanted to ‘fix’ them in time. The transient quality of Charles’ hair made it an appealing subject to photograph. I wanted to take pictures of it because I wanted there to be a record of it somewhere. One day when we were at a bar, I mentioned to Charles that his hair looked similar to the gills of a Portobello mushroom. I knew this because I had photographed a Portobello mushroom before. As I finished my Gin and Tonic it occurred to me that Charles’ hair and the gills of a Portobello mushroom might make for an interesting photographic juxtaposition. Portraits of him next to blown-up images of mushrooms. To get the comparison across, it made sense to treat the pictures like ‘product shots’ taken in a studio. I got my professor Dylan Vitone to give me a crash course in strobe lighting.

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Lesson 1I learnt how to connect my camera to an external strobe kit and make an external flash fire. Nothing glamorous.Here’s the gist of what Dylan told me: ‘Sumeet. Plug this wire in here and that one in there. Make sure you’ve distributed the watts correctly. Don’t touch the bulbs. Don’t electrocute yourself. Use a soft box to diffuse the light. Let me know when you can do this on your own.’

Lesson 2We went down to the photo studio in the basement and Dylan sat in a chair facing the camera. We were going to take pictures of him. I fired the flash (set at a high power) in his face a couple of times by mistake. I apologized. He looked like he just woke up from a weird dream. We put a variety of ‘modifiers’ over the bulb and I took a picture of him with each different modifier on the bulb. ‘Modifiers’ are attachments that redirect and diffuse the light. There was one called a ‘snoot’ that directed a circle of light into a specific area. Dylan described its use in the following way: ‘If you want to take a picture of a man holding a small cute bird in his hand (symbolizing hope), use a snoot to light up the bird.’

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Lesson 3I learnt how to use two lights: one dominant light and a second one to get rid of the chunks of shadows left by the first light. The result was like pictures taken on a (really bright) cloudy day where there are no harsh shadows. The pictures looked unnatural, but I wanted Charles to look unnatural in the final shoot. I took pictures of Dylan again but this time the permutations of possibilities started to show. It became clear that someone could spend their whole life fiddling around with these lights to achieve different results.


When I felt like I knew enough to not mistakenly blind Charles with the lights, I invited him over to the photo studio. I loaded some film into a rented Hasselblad 501cm. As he sat in the chair facing the camera we talked about things we were going to do over the weekend, our friends and where we were going to go for dinner afterwards. Somewhere during the course of that conversation, twenty-four pictures were taken. I used the same camera to take the pictures of the mushrooms. I should have used a shorter lens for the mushrooms though.

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I explored iterations of what to do with these raw materials (pictures of Charles and pictures of Portobello mushroom gills).

I started cropping the mushroom and leaving Charles intact.


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It became less important over time to depict the mushroom as a mushroom.

The mushroom started to become a visual ornament. It was meant to express the idea that these portraits were really just meant to be an homage to my friend Charles’ hair.


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It comforts me a little to know that it has now been documented.

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DecemberThe Omniscope

Photo of Schenley Park taken with

an Omniscope Pinhole Camera

There’s this funny little pinhole camera called an Omniscope that ignores the thing it’s pointed at and takes a 360-degree panorama of everything around

it. If this four-month investigation were a photograph, it would have been taken with an Omniscope. Everything that was investigated was treated as a way to find something else. It was a method of exploration that did not have a clearly defined goal. I operated under the belief that as long as I took careful notes along the way, I would learn some things that I could share with someone else. I’ve heard it being discussed that story plots should always be analyzed backwards: from the end of the story to the beginning. The cause and effect chain is apparent only through this backwards plotting. The month of December was spent reflecting on what I had found so I could communicate it to someone else. The result of my backtracking was this book called ‘The Omniscope’. I wanted to have a photograph of my journey, so I put together this diary. I was moved by Jamie’s thesis behind his prints from old negatives. When I interviewed him, he talked about how handling those old negatives of his gave him a way to address dormant feelings. Time was the device that brought the series to life. When I started my conversation with Dylan, I wanted to talk to him about how the cameras he’s used have affected his work. It became apparent almost immediately that the camera itself was the least interesting thing to talk to him about. It took him no longer than a minute to list all the

cameras he’s used and succinctly explain his choices. He went on to talk about the things that were actually important to him. For example, he talked at length about what it was like having people he didn’t know on the other side of his camera lens. Mark talked about taking pictures of things that really fascinated him. Hearing him talk about this made me look around for the things that fascinated me that I wanted to fix in time. I realized that my friend Charles’ hair was one of those things that I wanted to record. ‘Mono no aware’ is an 18th century Japanese principle of aesthetics that attributes our appreciation of things to their impermanence. The term was introduced by the philosopher Motoori Norinaga. The idea is that our appreciation for the beauty of something comes only when we realize that it isn’t going to be around forever. In a way, photographs are a celebration of this idea. They show us what things used to be like. They evoke pathos by making us face the impermanence of the events of life. I am scared of photographs but what causes my anxiety about them is precisely the thing that makes them wonderful to me.

Sumeet Banerji, 2011

& Appendix

A Timeline of Using Light to Create ImagesI created this timeline during the first two weeks of this project before I made or did anything else. It was meant to be a tool for me to historically contextualize all the devices and events I was about to come across.

2011

1920

1920

1900

1880

1880

1860

1840

1840

1820

1800

500 BCFirst tracing of an upside down image using camera obscura by Chinese philosopher Mo Ti

World’s �rst permanent photograph by Joseph Niepce

1940

1960

1980

1960

Stereo Camera invented by Sir David Brewster and Jules Duboscq

Daguerreotype method introduced. It was the �rst commercially viable process

Dry plate (Gelatin) processes introduced by Richard Maddox

“Birth” of photojournalism. Made possible largely by the 35 mm Leica camera

Roll �lm introducedby KodakFirst colored daguerrotype

created by Levi Hill who could never explain how he did it

Ives Kromskop Triple Camera: the �rst commercially viable color camera

First practical �ash methods

FishEye Nikkor lens introduced. Its purpose was mainly meteorological and astronomical research

First commercial disposable cameraby Fuji Photo Film Company

Nokia camera phone (7650) Polaroid goes bankrupt

Man Ray starts creating photograms

First Hasselblad medium format camera for sale

Camera Lucida patented

James Clerk Maxwell demon-strates a 3 �lter color process

Kodak introduces the Disk Camera

Canon EOS system introducedAdobe Photoshop released

First photographs of Earth from space

First commercial color �lm manufactured by the Lumiere brothers

Instant camera invented by Samuel Schlafrock

First Polaroid Land Camera

Nikon Founded (originally named Nippon Kogaku KK)

First digital sensor by Kodak

Apple Quicktake 100 camera released

Nikon F introduced

Canon Digital Rebel introduced

First Kodak Brownie camera

Henry Talbot introduces negatives created with paper soaked in Silver Bromide later called a “Calotype”

Dry plates being manufactured commercially

Fuji Photo Film founded

Zeiss develops the Pentaprism

C-41 color process introduced

Kodak stops making �lm cameras

Plenoptic cameras released

World War I

World War II

�e Great Depression

Yuri Gagarinin Space

�e Battleof Waterloo

French invasionof Spain

Victoria becomesempress of India

February RevolutionEnd of the

Orleans Monarchy

Yosemite NationalPark established

�e Gulf War

Occupation of Iraq by the US

Neil Armstrongon the Moon

NASA formed

Battle ofTrafalgar

First issue of Life magazine

2011

1920

1920

1900

1880

1880

1860

1840

1840

1820

1800



1940

1960

1980

1960

























Nikon F introduced










World War I

World War II







Orleans Monarchy


�e Gulf War



NASA formed

Battle ofTrafalgar


2011

1920

1920

1900

1880

1880

1860

1840

1840

1820

1800



1940

1960

1980

1960

























Nikon F introduced










World War I

World War II







Orleans Monarchy


�e Gulf War



NASA formed

Battle ofTrafalgar


List of typefaces used:

DidotAdobe Caslon ProMetaPro

The Omniscope:

All photographs (outside the Interviews section), text and research by Sumeet Banerji

Photographs in the Interviews section are property of the artists represented

Book design by Sumeet Banerji

I would like to thank:

The people in my studio (I’m going to miss you all very much)

My friend Charles Doomany

Mark Perrott for offering his time and wisdom to a stranger

Jamie Gruzska for being Jamie Gruzska

Dylan Vitone for always being there

& Steve Stadelmeier for always having the right questions to my answers

Documents

The Omniscope